Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself

Okay, here we go. Peter, take one. Mark

We're living in an extraordinary moment in history. We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic, game-changing technologies now starting to scale

Artificial intelligence, clean energy technologies, bioengineering, all here. We're at the cusp of a potentially a great era of progress

But America and the world itself are going through huge contortions. Old systems of the past are collapsing and new systems of the future are still to be born

I call this moment the great progression. I'm Pete Lydon. I've been here in San Francisco for 30 years

I've basically been following the story of technology and its evolution and looking ahead into how it's going to change the world over the next 25 years

and my current project right now is looking at the great progression

but I think it's going to be a great era of great progress from now until about the year 2050

So, Peter, let's start off with something nice and straightforward. Could you just describe for us what was the long boom

and maybe what pulled into this whole topic of human progress? Well, way back, way back in the 90s, when the very beginning of this digital revolution and the earliest days of the Internet

there was really only one place in the world that was really all over that, and that was Wired Magazine

The founders of Wired picked up on me as a kind of young journalist

as someone who kind of had the same kind of sensibility about the transformative nature of these technologies

And so they wooed me to work with them in the early days of Wired. Now, what's interesting about those days in the early part of that was people had no idea what was even going on with the Internet and literally what's email, what's the web and there was stuff like that

They had no idea how these goofball startups with names like Amazon were ever going to amount to anything

There was all these naysayers in the mainstream media and pundits in the government that were saying no one in their right mind is going to put their credit card on the Internet

I mean, we had all these myths from the Wired era of trying to explain what was really coming in the next 25 to 30 years

And so what was interesting is I was working with the founders there and we thought in the middle of the 90s

there was a point where someone had to breathe life into what is a digital economy

How is it different from previous economies? How could that scale and really make a big difference

How could it supersede the current conventional 20th century economy? And the other thing that was going on there beyond the digital revolution and the beginnings

of the internet was essentially the beginning of globalization. And so those two things that people at the time in the mid-90s had no idea what a big

deal that was. And so myself and a co-author, which was Peter Schwartz, who was probably the premier futurist

at the time, he and I worked for about a year it took us to really build out what was essentially

a famous, iconic cover story at Wired that was called The Long Boom

And it was a history of the future, the story from 1980, which is in our past, to 2020, which was in our future, written in the mid-90s there

But we told it like we were historians in the future, explaining this amazing era of essentially what we were going through at the time

Now, not all of it in the mid-90s. You can't predict everything right

And by the way, we weren't necessarily saying flat out it's a prediction. We were saying, hey, these technologies, these trends like globalization have the potential

to do many, many positive things. And so the long boom was really askewed towards the positive possibilities of these technologies

and this integration of the global economy. And so what we did lay out there, I would argue, is largely came to pass

And in fact, there's a lot of ways to measure that. And once we passed 2020, there was all kinds of stories that people kind of checking back

on our work. There were many things that were completely nailed. We were saying, hey, the doubling of computer chips was going to continue under Moore's

law for 25 more years. And it did. When we wrote this, there were 25 million Americans in the mid-90s on the internet

And by 2020, we had 60% of the world. It's 4 billion people on it

So anyhow, a lot of the through lines of what we were saying happened. There were some minor things that didn't happen

We actually thought humans would get to Mars by 2020. We thought there was enough energy towards that

We thought there'd be more progress, honestly, on climate change than we ended up in the end

But we didn't understand the backlash to that the way we've actually been struggling for the last 20 years

But in general, it was very much a kind of vision that actually people could really see

And it really clicked with people. And it actually energized both the entrepreneurial generation that was building it, like they were inspiring them to fill it out

And then it also kind of helped people outside Silicon Valley and outside the Bay Area and outside California to understand, oh, my God, this is possible

And if it's possible, maybe we need to get on the on the get with the program and come along

This isn't a new story in America and globally. And tell us how often these epoch resets happen

Now, to really understand where we are and where we're going, you have to kind of pull back a little bit and understand, at least from my perspective, how the world works

And I think one of the things that I think people can really underestimate is how foundational

new technologies are to kind of creating essentially the context for a new world

Now, those of us who are in technology and those of us who have been immersed in it

which I have been for most of my career now, can see clearly these kind of incremental

stages of these new technologies, that all successful new technologies go through a technology

adoption curve that essentially starts out with very few innovators trying it and then some early

adopters who kind of use it. Then there's a kind of early majority of people that start to think

oh my God, this is an interesting thing. And then the late majority think, oh my God

my neighbor's doing this way. I'm going to take on with that. And they grab on. And then you eventually get to the point where you even get the laggards. Everybody in society has to take on

let's say, a color TV set because you can't even buy a black and white TV set. All technologies

have gone through this. So those of us have kind of are in the technology world, have seen this

over and over and over again with technology. And the key piece of this is tipping points

When do you go from the slow, slow build of a thing that's kind of clunky and not really working

and these cell phones don't really work to you all of a sudden get an iPhone that goes, holy shit

this is the most amazing thing in the world and then everybody needs it. And what I'm trying to

tell you now is we are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes

that are happening around us today. And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial

intelligence. Literally, this is the biggest technological story I have ever lived through

It's going to go through the roof of exponential growth and it's going to hit all fields at some

level. Because anything people do with intelligence, you're going to have to rethink, is the machine

going to do this or is a human going to do this? And then the other thing about it is if the machines

do enough of it, the humans are going to take the machines to augment themselves and go to the next

level of problems, the next level of jobs, a whole nother thing. Anyhow, that's one tipping point

There's another tipping point, which I won't go into the same detail, but around clean energy technologies. That solar, which has been this incremental thing, just like the internet or just

like AI, going through these stages of still expensive, kind of clunky, not really taking off

has taken off big time in the last 10 years And that thing is hitting tipping points around the world and is going to exponential growth And there some other ways we can talk about later about bioengineering and synthetic biology

which is more complicated and a little bit later than that. But it is getting to the point now

where we can see in the next 25 years, we're gonna be able to engineer all living things

And so these are huge shifts in our technology. And so getting back to the bigger picture

what we're talking about is once you give essentially a society, an economy, a society, a people, those kind of technological powers, it starts to

essentially force a transformation of the economy, society, and just how things work

And so the old system, how we did it all through the 20th century, and how it had worked really

well, and how all these people were kind of tied into that, are essentially invested in that thing

But that thing is getting dysfunctional. It's getting long in the tooth

And this goes everything from carbon energy technologies, which is causing climate change

to essentially government bureaucracies that can't work like they did, you know

over the last 80 years, getting increasingly difficult to work. So you're watching an old system being essentially dismantled or having to come down

At the same time, as we're taking off on these new technologies to build the next systems

we're in the middle of that. Right now is smack in the middle of that in our era

But we've also seen this in American history before. There's been other areas where this exact thing has happened

and we can kind of learn from them if we look back. There's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place

Now, that's not to say it's common. You know, this is 80 years ago, the last time we saw this

and they tend to come in these 80-year cycles. Many people might think, why 80 years

What happens every 80 years? Now, there's a lot of things going on here

One is there's usually a set of new technologies that are ready to take off that are essentially

not under development, but are essentially about to scale up. And you can go back in history and show how that happened at every one of these eight

year junctures. There's also a kind of economic reason of how essentially economies boom into long booms

of technological booms, but also economic booms, and then they die out

but the one of the main reasons is essentially that comes up to a essentially changing the guard

of generations and so there are some lessons you can learn some patterns you can see there

and some lessons we could learn that'll help us kind of understand what's really going around

today and what we need to do going forward the last big one was coming off world war ii 1945

it is exactly 80 years ago from 2025 where we are here 80 years ago america was on a very

similar parallels. And there's a bunch of parallels around this. One, we basically were watching

the essentially dismantling of the old world that had been working pretty well, the economy

and societies of the West. There'd been a wave of new technologies. There had been a boom around

that. And then there'd been a crash in the great crash of 29. And you run into the Great Depression

of the 1930s. Now, what that was, was the old system of running the economy just wasn't working

huge inequalities, all these kind of problems around that. So you were watching essentially the need to fundamentally reinvent the economy

But before we get to the new system, you get to the other pattern of all these junctures

You get extremely high, passionate politics. And so what happens is you watch these junctures in American society, we get super polarized

around two visions of essentially the way we go forward. One is let's hang on to what we did or go back and make America great again the way we

did. There's another crew that says, no, we got to move forward and innovate and be more progressive

and kind of drive another progressive era. And those junctures happen at these times. And it

gets extremely conflictual. And to be fair, in the 1930s in America, people forget this part of

America, but there was an America First movement that really took over the Republican Party. There

were essentially American level fascists in the 30s. And we were on the verge of kind of violent

conflict in America. And then you had this kind of FDR and the kind of New Deal coalition that

was kind of came out of the depression that was pointing towards a kind of different way to run

the economy and the society post-war. And they started to get traction. But anyhow, we had to

resolve this political tension in America. And frankly, it had to do it in the world because

the world also is going through this juncture. And after the war, though, we watched the updraft

of the next system. And this is important to know. Yes, there's conflict. Yes, there's this kind of

collapse of the old system. But what's amazing about these things is they have bursts

of unbelievably widespread innovation that lasts for, what do you know, 25 years

And so from 1945 to 1970, we watched the great post-war boom

Many people call it the kind of high point of global capitalism

And you built this crazy economy where you did many things that were completely different

than the previous era. Tax the rich at 90%. You watch incredible investment in public infrastructure

like the interstate highway system and building suburbs. You basically watch the GI Bill and

education, building higher institutions for higher education, expanding it for the boomers

all that kind of stuff. That all happened in 25 years. The Great Society, the whole thing

25 years. And then we ran in the 70s. It started kind of getting along in the tooth. And it wasn't

kind of the boom started running out, stagflation, oil shocks. But here's the point. That was a good

example within recent memory of let's say my mother who is in that gen that that older generation

where we watched a very similar thing all three of those pieces old system had to come down and

got wasn't working super conflict around it and ultimately the building of a thing that was

dramatically different than before we've been through that before and funny enough like I say

if you go another 80 years back we did it once time before that too

so from 1945 you go back exactly 80 years and it's 1865 what is 1865 it's the end of the American

Civil War now this is a good example of how passions run very high and political conflict

is extreme at these junctures and the Civil War was the most extreme I mean we literally had to

have 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War. I mean, you talk about, you know, you think

hey, it's a little edgy now and we're a little worried about political violence breaking out. Yeah, we've been there. I mean, we've seen how that happens. Now, what was going on there

This is probably the most easiest way to understand the old systems failing, because

America, since the founding, had been in tension with these two economic systems

One was essentially a system of the early manufacturing economy where you needed free

labor in the North, essentially to create an economy that's reminiscent of what we still have

now. But in the old South, we basically had slavery. And yes, there was a human rights aspect

to that, but really it was an economic thing, which is the powers that be, political people

and economic powers of the South were absolutely dependent on slavery. They could not survive

together. We had to bring down finally and fully essentially an economy that was essentially based

on slave labor. There was the moral reasons for that, but it was an economic reason for it. We

had to stop that And when we decided to do that which is in the 1850s it started getting clear that we going to have to do this One side the South side essentially seceded They said no we not going there We not going to give it up We not going to let go of this old system We going to fight to the death on the thing And they wanted to secede And then when

we wouldn't let them secede, they basically had the Civil War. And so this is a good example

There's a similar system that has to go down in our era, I'll just say, and let's just call it

carbon energy. We cannot keep carbon energy going the way we have for the last 250 years of the

Industrial Revolution without destroying the planet. And so what you're seeing through the

lens of that same kind of system that must be dismantled, you're watching the similar resistance

of anyone rooted in the oil economy, whether it's oil petro states, whether it's regions of the

country that are rooted in that in some of the red states in the United States, whether it's

you know, political platforms of like, you know, trying to kind of deny climate change

The same thing is it's a similar kind of thing. It isn't quite to civil war doubt

But you can see how old systems that have to be dismantled, there's a lot of people invested in that are very resistant to shifting

And so that we saw it in the Civil War. Now, the thing that people do not know about the Civil War, I don't really remember as much about the Civil War

is the Civil War after 1865 had an unbelievable explosion of progress

That lasted for, what do you know, 25 years. What they called the Republican Party, which was the progressive kind of side of that conflict

not the conservative hold the old thing, but move forward. they passed some just unbelievable landmark legislation

For example, the Homestead Act, which is you gave anybody who went out west

150 acres for free. If you just went out there and basically helped tame the west

There was also land-grant universities where they essentially, all these little states

started building institutes of higher education to educate average people beyond the kind of Harvards of the East Coast

but also to be pushing scientific understanding of agriculture going. So there was a lot of governmental driven, but also economic kind of progress in that

But here's the other progress that was going on. It was technology. The technology of that time was essentially, think of it, one of them is trains

Before the Civil War, we had trains, just like, you know, had computers before the internet, boom

There are these beginnings of these technologies. But it was only in the Civil War when we started to realize, holy shit, we could really scale these things

It was only after the war that America blew out like 175,000 miles of rail and essentially stitched the entire continent together across the whole continent and stitched every town and everything together with this steel-based rails

And essentially, we rebuilt America. We reinvented America in the net 25 years

And here's the even crazier thing, though. You go back another 80 years, we did it again

So you go from 1865. It's just the end of the Civil War

And you go back 80 years. The late 1780s, we essentially started a 25-year boom

And when you say boom, it's like a technological boom. It's an economic boom. It's essentially upward swing of a lot of widespread innovation that America went through

coming off the Revolutionary War to create the world that by the end of the Founders era

after Thomas Jefferson had already been a two-term president and all that kind of stuff

by the kind of, you know, 1810, 1815, we had created what is America

which kind of was then rolling until the Civil War period. So there was this kind of creation at that side

And then there's another thing about it that people forget, is there were loyalists in the fight around the Revolutionary War

There was a significant amount of Americans who were loyalists, who were fighting for the crown, who were fighting for the British, and that had a lot to lose

because they benefited from the colonial situation that essentially had been the system

the old system of that time, and that it was the revolutionary side of the Americans who were

trying, essentially the progressive side, that had to fight in the war. I mean, we had Americans on

the British side. I mean, we had real debates on this thing on a fundamental level. And that

political debate got settled in the war, and then we basically started the building of America

So it was really one way to understand what was happening in America at that time was it was part

of a bigger part of Western Europe, and particularly an extension of Britain, which was going through

the Enlightenment at the time. That essentially has global implications. It was a fundamental

system change from a feudal society kind of dominated by the Catholic Church and all that

kind of stuff, into essentially what we would now consider the modern world

And they invented six huge things that we still are working with in today

One was they invented mechanical engines. I mean, that was essentially, we essentially could amplify human physical power like never

before by essentially harnessing steam engines to kind of scale up our powers

That was huge. The second thing we did is we essentially invented large-scale carbon energies, mining

coal to actually create giant furnaces to kind of create an industrial production

That was a breakthrough. And we've gone on to coal and natural gas since then

Third thing is industrial production. For the first time, we were able to scale at unbelievable scale, essentially the production

of industrial goods, which has essentially created the prosperity and wealth of the world

that we know now. We also invented financial capitalism. Before that time, people couldn't take money, their little gold pieces, and they couldn't

trust, sending it into somebody in another country that would protect that thing. There was no

financial capitalism until essentially Great Britain invented it and had a trustworthy system

that investors could actually put their money to to scale the Industrial Revolution. The final two

things were the nation state. Before that, we had empires and colonial things, but we didn't

colonies. We didn't have the nation state system, which they created. And the final one was

representative democracy, which we've mentioned how the United States did that. Now, the reason

I'm kind of saying that is that had world historic kind of implications. That was a building of a

civilization. That was an integrated civilization that the world had never seen before, that we

essentially invented, we humans, but we Western Europe, in basically a space of 120 years

America took the mantle at the end of that, the late 18th century, 1776 and 1780, 17

kind of rolling into the 19th century. The forward motion of innovation

essentially from the West, was coming with those crazy ass Americans who had this wide open continent to spread it to

and had this crazy opportunity to just do whatever the hell they wanted to do

They didn't have an aristocracy. They didn't have the whole place owned by the old rich

that have been in for centuries. They had a lot of open space to just create

and innovate and create new things. And that is what America's role has been

vis-a-vis the West in every one of those epics that Europe followed and kind of emulated and had

their own welfare states and various things. And they did, you know, enough innovation. I don't want to say it was all America, but America was the 800 pound gorilla in driving innovation going

forward. I'm arguing we have one more crank of that wheel. And I think the place to look right

now for this next big innovation, this next reinvention, not just of America, but potentially

civilizational scale invention is going to basically come out of America again Not 100 true There a lot of trauma and difficulty right now But I would say if you had to compare us to China or others

I think what you're going to see is America going through one more level of that scale of change

That actually drives us right into this next sort of second part

Let's get into the future that we are sort of currently living in, whether everyone realizes it or not

Let's start with the one that we are seeing and hearing about constantly, which is AI

We are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes that are happening around us today

And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence. The arrival of generative AI with the arrival of chat GBT 3.5 in November of 2022

I think we're going to see that as a world historic moment. I think people will look back on that is the starting gun of what will be understood as

the age of AI. And I use age in a very, you know, explicit way, which is when you talk about a different

age that humans enter, like, oh, the humans, you know, entered the Bronze Age or the Iron Age

I mean, you're talking about essentially a fundamental game-changing technology, a breakthrough, a step change in our abilities that once you cross that threshold, you don't go back

We're always going to incorporate and always going to use these technologies, and it's going to essentially fundamentally change the world

AI is essentially the culmination, I would argue, of the entire digital revolution that goes back to mainframe computers in World War II, actually

It's really the start of computing, mainframe computing. AI is now the cherry on the top

It's like the last thing we really needed to do was to harness all that technology, harness

all the digitization, everything, harness the cloud, harness all the things we did over

those years, laying fiber optic cables and wireless networks and everything to kind of

come to the point where now the computers can actually think, they can interact with

us via voice, and they can do things that we could never do on our own

So anyhow, that is a big deal. I just want to say, and I think if you once you kind of grok that or really get it, you

realize, oh, my God, we could start applying intelligence to everything. And we're going to start this crazy sorting process between humans and machines now, that

boring stuff or things that are essentially humans are, you know, really don't want to

do are going to be done by machines. And we're going to take it and invent new jobs that are going to use that capability

to augment us, to kind of do new things that we didn't think we could do. and scientific breakthroughs we never thought we'd see

Anyhow, there's a bunch of sorting going on here. I don't want to go into those details, but the point is it's a huge deal that we're crossing here

And I think because of that, we have to be thinking extremely expansively

of what's possible now. And one of the things I think that we're going to talk about

in a recurring fashion is this idea of abundance. One thing you can say about AI is it is a technology

with the potential to create incredible abundance. And I can explain why in many respects

but let's just, I'll give you one example. Every knowledge worker, and basically every person

is essentially gonna have a digital assistant, essentially like an executive assistant

who's virtual, essentially AI. Now, you could say, well, rich people or wealthy people

or CEOs have always had executive assistants. In fact, I've had three startups myself

the first person I hire as an executive assistant to kind of solve all the stuff I don't want to do

and scheduling and all the stuff you have to solve. But you give it to everybody. And you say

oh my God, we're all going to do this. It'll cost you 20 bucks a month or something like that

But here's the thing that's interesting about that. It's like, that's allowing average people

everybody to get the same thing that the people at the top, the kind of elite, scarce kind of

commodity, essentially used to be a human executive assistant. You had to come up with, you know

about 150 grand or 100 grand essentially to get someone to do that every year as opposed to 20

bucks a month so it's essentially creating an abundant system of executive assistants same

thing with tutoring you know those same executive assistants are going to be essentially tutors for

everybody everybody every kid now you say well you know um human you know rich people have always

had you know tutors for their kids you know you need extra help on sat scores where you get a

a tutor. What you're paying them through the nose, but you know, if you have money, you have money. If you get a digital tutor for every kid starting from scratch, even if it costs 20 bucks a month

essentially you've opened up tutoring to everybody. I mean, there are so many positive things about AI

potentially happening. Let me just give one of them that's already happening is simultaneous

language translation. American English has become essentially the lingua franca of the 20th century

in the modern world, but still you needed a business class, college-educated strata from

all these different societies to actually learn the language and be able to talk that language of

kind of English that connect around the kind of global economy. But that leaves off an unbelievable

amount of people who can't learn English or don't learn English or aren't educated or can't go to

college or whatever it is. Until now, because now, as you've seen, everybody, you know, the AI is

talking to you in English if you're speaking English, but it's talking, you know, Chinese to

Chinese, talking Hindi to the Indians. I mean, it's basically doing it all, and it's doing it

about 90, 95 percent accuracy now. We'll be able to have earbuds. You go traveling with earbuds

you're just going to have an earbud on, and whatever that person in the street vendor says

you're going to understand it. You're going to be asked to talk to them about their family. You're going to go home with them, see their kids. I mean, that's the level of integration in the world

here. So instead of a power of Babel, we're going to have this cross-connection of all those cultures

all those kind of societies. And it's just going to be a wild time. Now, it's also going to throw a

lot of unintended consequences and who knows what. Yeah, I know for a lot of people, particularly

Americans, are scared of AI. In fact, weirdly, Americans are more scared of AI than other

countries. Like Chinese, for example, have huge majorities, like 60 percent or more are very

positive about AI. In the United States, the positive people of AI are something like 35 percent

it's about a third of Americans think it's a good thing. A third of Americans think it's a horrible thing

And about a third in the middle just don't really know yet. But the point being is there is a lot of fear and there's a lot

And partly, I think it's around a misunderstanding of what's going on. The second thing why is this happening is the media, I think, is very reactive

It's very fear-mongering. It's, you know, freaking people out by these distortions of these risks

and things that essentially are solvable but essentially make them unsolvable. So there's a lot of fear and worry about what's going on here

But I think one of the things that needs to happen, and I'm trying to do, but there's a lot of people increasingly are going to do, is show the unbelievable positive potential of this stuff

And I will say, every introduction of every world-changing general-purpose technology and fire, you know, electricity, all of them come with risk

I mean, when we first invented electricity, you know, wow, it lit up a house, it lit up the street

And, you know, it's like, wow, power is this thing called a radio. It's like, this is awesome. But if you touch the wire, you're dead

And so there were people like, oh, can't do electricity. That's going to screw us up

And so there's always been these risks, but we always kind of figure out how to innovate

to contain the risk and then institutionalize it to the point where like every room on the planet now

has electricity and we don't even think about it. It's not even thought of as dangerous because we have codes

All kinds of ways we do that. Let me just create another parallel here, which is, why do we call it the enlightenment

When you go back in the past there, that enlightenment. The enlightenment is essentially, was an opening up of the lens of what we understood about the world

Because we had an array of new tools, everything from microscopes to telescopes

and all kinds of things that opened up the world. So we said, oh my God, we actually, you know, are kind of, this is how blood cells work

I mean, there was all that kind of level of fundamental expansion and enlightenment of what do we understand about the world, which kind of drove this crazy explosion of innovation and enlightenment

So here we are in our era, and you got AI. I mean, AI is going to not just supercharge innovation

It is going to dramatically expand what we understand about the world

It's already happening. In fact, you can kind of see these various examples of how just in the last year, essentially, we applied AI to one of the most difficult scientific problems of how do we understand the protein folding from a genetic code

How does it get expressed in three-dimensional proteins? Humans have been trying to wrap their head around that for 50 years and been completely stumped

And we put an AI on the task and essentially blew open. It took every gene and explained every dimension of every protein that's possible

There's like 250,000 of them that just overnight. I mean, so that's just one scientific advance that just has already happened in this early crude form of AI

It essentially is just a taste of things to come. We are going to understand our world in ways that we absolutely were just we will be boggled by like, holy shit, how did we not know that

Or all the kind of things that's going to happen. And so there is a sense of essentially creating a new kind of enlightenment

Maybe our new enlightenment is one way to think about it. And I think AI is going to be one of the players of that

But there'll be other examples of this. But essentially, we're going to watch an explosion of amplification

The amplification of our mental powers with digital computers and now AI are going to be very similar to the amplification of our physical powers that mechanical engines initially by steam essentially amplified our physical powers

We're now amplifying our mental powers. And that's going to create another one of these enlightenment situations where we're

just going to say, holy shit, we had no idea this is the world we're in. So there's another world historic breakthrough in technology that we're in right now

And I think I want to just drive home how world historic this is and is tipping point time

And that's clean energy technology. And I think what people underestimate, they hear of clean energy technology and they hear

of renewable energy and they hear kind of solar and they kind of understand electric cars and they

kind of they kind of get the gist of what that is. But I don't think they understand how

revolutionary this is. This is the first time we have an energy source that is a technology

100 percent a technology, not a commodity. We don't have to dig it up as coal. We don't have

to tap into it as oil. We don't have to get plutonium and put it in a kind of thing to kind

to create nuclear energy, those are using commodities that you have to keep shoveling

in for the whole life of these kind of plants. And that also has, and we've seen it, particularly around carbon energy, has a lot of secondary consequences

It basically kind of releases carbon and is changing the climate of the planet, which

is unambiguous now. It's happening. But now we've got solar, which is 100% a technology

It doesn't need anything else once you create it. and it becomes and you can create energy for the lifetime of that solar panel, which is at least 30 years, sometimes up to 50 years

Why is that important? Because once it's a technology, you can consistently drive down the cost

And there's a kind of a rule of thumb in manufacturing, which if you double the number of essentially anything, really

but let's just take it in terms of solar panels, if you double the number of producing solar panels

you will come up with about 20% of a drop in cost because you'll understand through that

manufacturing process and the level of scaling and the kind of incremental kind of improvements

you essentially can keep driving the cost down. And so what we've watched is over the last 40 years

basically since the 70s, we've watched essentially this initially was dramatic drops and it's just

consistently going down. Here's the point. It's not stopping. It's going to keep getting cheaper

and cheaper and cheaper. It is already by far, if you create right now an electric power station

on solar compared to coal, the solar is half as expensive, half as expensive now, which is why

nobody in their right mind in the United States is building a coal plant or in the entire developed

world, frankly, is because it's cheaper now to produce solar. It's just surpassed getting cheaper

than natural gas, particularly in certain parts of the country, particularly California, Texas

all kind of with a lot of sunshine. And this is the point. It's not, it's going to keep getting cheaper

And the same thing, flipping around to the same thing with electric cars. People think, well, electric cars

are still a little expensive and whatever. You're not thinking this through

because battery technology is the same thing. It's essentially a technology. And we have watched, in the last 30 years

we've watched 100% of the cost of batteries go down in the last 30 years from the 90s

It basically, it's 100% down and it's going cheaper. And that's in lithium batteries

We're now getting whole other generations of batteries, like solid-shaped batteries, that essentially will be a next-generation battery

One last little point about this electric thing. The reason we have these tariffs on Chinese cars right now

is Chinese cars, electric cars, you can get them kick-ass cars for like $20,000 now

They're already cheaper than internal combustion engines. 50% of new cars in China are being sold right now

are fully electric. In California, we got about 25% fully electric statewide

And in San Francisco and places like that, it's about 50%. There are parts of America that are trying to play the game that China is

But the rest of America is laggard. And now you got Trump and others are kind of dismantling the whole thing

It's just kind of nutty. But the point is, the market, the forward motion of costs coming down on clean energy is just beginning

And when that happens, you're going to have what? abundant, clean energy

And so we are entering the next 25 years we will be able to create energy at scales we couldn expect before with no impact on the environment or very little certainly on carbon energy

And we will be able to do things like desalinate ocean water, which is extremely energy heavy

And up until now, the tradeoff of like doing that with carbon energy was not useful

It was it was too big a tradeoff. But if you had a lot of cheap, abundant energy, those kind of tradeoffs are kind of different

And with climate change and others, you know, maybe if we start running out of, you know, California is running out of water from the rains coming off the Sierras

Maybe we actually just shift to desalination using this kind of new clean energy technology

So anyhow, there's a different way of thinking about the next 25 years. Abundant clean energy

So those are two big abundances there. So the average person's earliest exposure to what you would call bioengineering essentially has come through initially GMOs, genetically modified foods

And there was a big backlash to that for a while in the United States and particularly in Europe, honestly, because we were we could understand how to deliberately engineer, manipulate the genomes of crops to get more nutrition in them or to make them more resistant to drought and things like that

But there was essentially a backlash, an initial backlash by the environmental movement, which I would say was misplaced

And that essentially is we're going to be overridden as the problems of climate change mount

But essentially, people have already seen a version of this that we could do

But I think what's going to happen very shortly is the pressures of climate change are going to be such that it is going to be imperative

that we rely on genetic engineering for our crops. It is going to need to withstand

way different kind of changes in temperature. We're going to have to shift all kinds of climate changes

things that react to it. It's going to have to be more robust. It's going to have to be, maybe we won't be able to scale as much farmland

You're going to have to have things much more nutritious or more packed with more vitamins

or all kinds of things that you could do. And we can do. Let's go back to what I mentioned in the Enlightenment

that there were six big meta inventions that we're still living within today

One of them was industrial production. And many, many positive things came out of that

That essentially is the reason we have the modern world we have today in many respects is dependent

on industrial production at scale. But the problem with industrial production, just like the problem with cleaning

you know, carbon energies screw up the climate. Industrial production screws up the environment

And you just take one example, you know, plastics. You know, plastics are an industrial production

And it's basically rooted in petrochemicals, too. But essentially, the creation of plastic bottles

Well, you know, anyone who's got even mildly open to watching the news is talking

We're just overrun by plastic bottles. You know, the rivers in the third world are chock full of them

The oceans are full of them. We've got microplastics now breaking down and, you know, kind of, you know, our food and all kinds of stuff

It's like that is a freaking disaster. Industrial production. That's just plastics

I mean, there's a million other industrial productions that essentially create incredible

toxic waste and all kinds of stuff over the planet. So industrial production is going to be generally superseded by biological production

And this is the kind of shift here. So industrial production was essentially based on engineering inert, dead materials

We dug up materials, various ways that we essentially manipulated, designed, and engineered products

Biological engineering is essentially engineering living things. We essentially grow materials

We grow new products. We essentially have a bottle. Instead of a plastic bottle, you design and you essentially create a bottle that is biologic

which is based on living processes of biodegradable materials. So you create a material that can hold your Pepsi-Cola or something for the, you know, sitting in the store

But if that thing gets thrown in the ocean and is exposed to salt water, it essentially will dissolve within two weeks

Or if it's exposed, thrown out of a window of a car, you know, going through the desert and it's exposed to UV light for two weeks straight, it'll essentially start to decompose

I mean, this is the way nature works. This is where, you know, this is how the planet works

And we are on the verge now of understanding those processes deeply to the point where we can

humans can, engineer these processes and that scale. Second thing is a good example that people have already heard a little bit maybe about

is what they call cultured meat. Because of our understanding of biology and because of essentially synthetic biology of

how do we artificially do things that nature does, we now know how to take a cell out of

a cow or a pig or a fish or whatever living animal we want to eat, you can take that cell

and you can put it in a vat and you can give it the same amount, the same amino acids and

the same kind of nutrients and the same things that a cow roaming around a field for like

years, chewing on grass for, you know, ever, would get those same nutrients, those same

amino acids and essentially would produce in their muscles, the meat, that same thing

can happen in a vat with just energy and those same materials at a much more efficient, dramatically

more efficient, like 70% more efficient way of doing this to actually grow the same cow cell

into actual meat. Not like kind of meat, not like plant-based meat that's kind of like meat

It's meat. It's the same cell. It tastes exactly the same. And we are, it's actually the breakthroughs

have already happened, it's still quite expensive, like many technologies. But it's happening

particularly around chicken now. You can actually get, even in the United States now, there's

actually a few places you can start to get these kind of cultured meat. Now, one of the reasons

this is important is this also has a big climate component. Because cows are horrible. Beef is

really bad for the environment. They kind of release an incredible amount of methane. It's

an incredibly inefficient way to create meat to scale meat up It takes a lot of time It ruins a lot of environment I mean there people that you can kind of get in the weeds on that kind of thing

But the point being is, as we see climate change mount, and as we see, by the way

the wealth of the global population build, people are going to want to eat meat. And so the

projections I've seen that by 2040, you could see a good section, maybe 30% of the world's meat will

be cultured meat. And it doesn't mean you're going to get, you know, there'll still be a way to get

the elite to get a nice slice of beef from a cow, a real cow, but essentially it'll be all

McDonald's hamburgers will be that. Any of the kind of just day-to-day meat that goes into

spaghetti sauce or something is going to be cultured meat. It'll taste the same. So this

is a huge breakthrough. And again, this is based on the technology. You got to get grounded in

technology. And what's happened, we've only 25 years ago, it's like 2003 was the first time

humans had ever cracked or understood the human genome. Took $3 billion and it took 15 years to do it

But it happened by, I think it was 2003 when it finally happened. The cost of doing that from $3 billion have now, by 2020, had been driven down so far

it was $1,000. It is now at about, this is 2020. It's now at the point where it's about $100

bucks. And eventually it's going to keep driving down to 50 bucks or nothing. That drop in price

from $3 billion to $1,000 to $100 to today essentially is twice as fast as the cost

reductions that came from Moore's Law in terms of the drops of the price of computer chips

which drove the digital revolution that we went through, the long boom. And that is essentially

what's happening now. It's dramatically faster. There's a bunch of reasons for that, but just know

it's not just the same level. It is twice as fast. Here's the other thing that's going on

Basically, right around the time that we essentially had our earliest breakthroughs

on this most recent AI, essentially generative AI, which is about 15 years ago

we also had the big breakthrough in what they call CRISPR, which is essentially genetic engineering

which is we figured out a way to cheaply and easily edit the genome of any living thing

And here we are, that now it's being used all the time to kind of edit and change the

genomes of plants, of animals. And if we wanted to, it could be humans

So there is essentially, we're on the cusp of a situation where we can now design living things

Now, there's a lot of moral issues around that. You know, it freaks people out. And there's a lot of people are going to have a hard time with this

but we we have the ability to do that now we have the tools we have the knowledge we understand how

to do this this is where the word synthetic biology comes in synthetic meaning humans create

a fake essentially a human driven biology we're now because we know that how the genes work we

understand not just that but we understand proteins we understand all kinds of things about the cell we didn't know just decades back we can now essentially design these things for outcomes

that we want to happen to, let's say, make a tree that is super strong and could replace steel in

certain buildings or to kind of, you know, a super fire resistant, essentially, so that, you know

we don't have to worry about wildfires around cities or something. You can engineer viruses

or bacteria to kind of create new kinds of synthetic fuels to kind of power planes. I mean

that would not be carbon and wouldn't actually have the same kind of release of carbon into the

atmosphere. Anyhow, there's a bunch of new frontiers in what they call synthetic biology

or just I call in general bioengineering, that essentially are now opening up in this century

here. In the next 25 years, we're going to watch a plethora of these things expand. Now, here's the one thing about it. It's a little bit slower than these other two

AI is here and going fast. Clean energy has already had a great decade of starting to scale

and it's just unstoppable now. And this one is a little bit later, but I think in the space

is 25 years, it's worth really wrapping your head around. What could we do with that? How could we reinvent healthcare? How could we do all kinds of things that would be, again, a more abundant

future? If you knew everyone's genome and you had AI that can monitor every individual all time

you could potentially dramatically drop the cost of healthcare. And so everybody in real time

essentially, would be monitored and have a daily doctor check in a way that as opposed to once a

year, you can do there. And when you do, it costs you an arm and a leg. So we are on the verge of

These technologies could bring a society and an economy of abundance, and it's just really underappreciated by the general people out there

All right. So final question on the topic here. And this really, I think, you could think of as your kind of conclusion statement

which is, you know, what are people from the future going to say looking back at this era

So the technology story of today, 2025, that I laid out to you about AI, clean energies, even bioengineering is kind of familiar at some level

You can kind of get that whether you fully understand the forward motion or not

It's understandable. The next several iterations here, though, I think is putting a bigger lens on what's going on today

And it gets us back to what we were describing as what's happening in America is a once in

80 year reinvention. And in fact, it's even possible that what's going on here is essentially the early days

of building a 21st century civilization. And so when you think about that, you go beyond the technology

That's like the foundation. That's the groundwork. That's like, OK, that's the tools we have to work with

And so the next thing up, I think, from the technologies, you start thinking, OK, well

what could you build with those technologies? What kind of an economy would you want to build

And again, it's not obvious or inevitable that these technologies end up with any particular economy

The economy is built by human beings coming together and fashioning essentially a system

that works for the largest number of people, if that's your kind of values or works for kind of driving more kind of progress

Anyhow, that's a value-laden kind of system-building exercise. And I think what going on now in the world if you look around us is we in one of those reinventions now And let just keep the lens on America for right now The system the economic system that the United

States has been based on, neoliberal or however you want to frame it, that has worked for essentially

the top 10% for sure, and certainly for the top 1%, has not been working for 80% of the Americans

And it's gotten to the point where they just have had it. And the thing is, this isn't just America

It's happening in the West. You got right wing kind of movements in every one of the major countries

There is at least at 40 percent and push it towards majority sometimes. And so something has to change

I think we have to reinvent. But I mean, I guess you could call something like sustainable capitalism, sustainable

not just in the externalities of climate change and pollution, which I've talked about how

Our technology is going to do that. But essentially, the externality, a sustainable system where the average people feel invested

in the system, that it's working for them, that they're not going to scream bloody murder

and kind of revolt at the first sign of kind of agony

And it's a system that works well for everybody over the long haul

And so as crazy as it sounds, we could be at a point in the world right now, in 2025

where we are watching the beginnings of a shift from financial capitalism

born and raised out of the Enlightenment more than 250, 300 years ago

to essentially some version of a sustainable capitalism. I kind of did the rough outline there

We're going from a world of representative democracy, which was a brilliant move forward from a civilizational perspective

from a human being section 250 years ago, to essentially a different kind of what I would term probably something called digital democracy

or something along those lines, which I can explain later. What I would say we're facing now is that system is so out of whack

is so un-up to the scale of kind of the challenges that our country faces at this time

that it is actually going to increasingly dawn on people that essentially we're going to have to invent

or reinvent at an even more fundamental level than most people are thinking

And I put it this way. If the founders were coming today and sitting in 2025

and they basically were looking around at the tools they had at that time, including AI

do you think they would have come up with a system that they did 250 years ago

where they didn't understand even what electricity was? I mean, you know, Ben Franklin's out there with a kind of kite trying to figure out

is lightning, you know, what is it? It's electricity. They had no idea what electricity was, let alone electronics, let alone computers, let alone AI, let alone kind of an interconnected planet of Internet

I mean, essentially, you'd be insane not to take advantage of those tools if you are really trying to build a democracy that kind of taps into the will of the majority and protects the minority, keeps a pluralistic society, makes sure a tyrant can't take control of it

That's the same agenda. That's the same building blocks. OK, how do we do that now

I think that's actually going to be something that people are going to increasingly have to think about

And I think what's happening now with Trump and what's happening in the country right now is we're getting a constitutional crisis

Oh, those guys didn't really think through what happens if a president won't kind of

listen to the, you know, courts or what happened, you know, the courts don't have any leverage

to kind of push back. What happens if you get a kind of a Congress captured by these interests that, you know

don't seem to be listening to what average people need? Anyhow, there's a bunch of ways you can talk about it

I don't want to get into partisan politics, but the point is our system is so gummed up now

that essentially it's going to increasingly show that we need some kind of invention

And so when I say digital democracy, this isn't some 90s version of digital democracy

I'm just saying there will probably be some way to figure this out and tap into the will

of majority and execute efficiently and effectively for governance going forward. That'll be rooted in some kind of digital technology because it is just such a game

changing, which means essentially AI is going to involve this. Now, there are dangers and issues

and limits, and we're going to figure that out. A long conversation, but I'm saying we're at that

stage. The same thing I would just say about governance, global governance. Again, if you

would have talked about this 50 years ago, people would think of, oh, United Nations is going to run

the world. No, this is a different way to think about it. But here's the problem, is you're in a

planet of 10 billion people, which, by the way, is dramatically more numbers of people that we had

at post-World War II. Second, dramatically more people were in climate change. There is incredible

pressures. We're going to see mass migrations almost inevitably. You might see sea levels rising

Stuff is going to happen this century that is going to really require coordination at a global

place. You can't just crapshoot with, oh, maybe 200 different nations will come somewhat aligned

and maybe we can strong arm here and there. I think that's just not going to happen. And so I

think what you're going to see coming is some kind of break. It's not going to mean we're all going to turn over government to five people at the top of the planet, but it means some kind of

sophisticated coordination between all these entities, maybe between cities, between different layers of government, between different peoples, between different population centers, whatever

it's going to be. I don't know the beginnings of exactly how that would work, but if I had to guess

it's going to be leveraging these new technologies, particularly AI, and that it'll be something that

it'll be better than the system we have now, which, by the way, our international system that basically

created the climate accords is a complete fail. You know, it's at the point now where Trump has

pulled out a second time. And, you know, we're kind of at this place where we're back to square

one of coordinating all these crazy ass nation states. So I'm just saying that's the level of

change I think we're actually heading into. That's the level of change I think your kids are going to

be wrestling with and that's the level of change I think America is going through now and the

quicker we start to wrap our heads around that challenge and the kind of scale of the

invention we're up to the better off we're all going to be. All right fantastic that is the end. Landed the plane a very big plane

It is a big plane. in turbulent conditions not an easy plane to fly and land

so thank you so much Peter I really appreciate that