The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 Book Project
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 will be a new book published by HarperCollins, the second largest consumer book publisher in the world, and they also bought all the foreign rights.
The book will create a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and create a much better world.
The contract was finalized in July 2025 with nine months to write the book and a scheduled release in January 2027, the start of the next American presidential political cycle heading to the critical election of 2028. (Note that the image above was quickly generated by AI and the actual cover will be designed by a human and be much better.)
The contract came with a significant advance that will allow Leyden to travel to China and other parts of the world in the fall for more reporting on the positive possibilities of what the next 25 years could bring.
A better way to understand the book as of now is that The Great Progression is a book project that I am in the process of creating through the various pieces explained below.
The New Book as Seen in this Graphic
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is attempting to rough out a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and create a much better world.
The book will be a positive reframe of many seemingly negative things happening around us today that may be necessary for this transition and ultimately will be seen as part of a more positive story that will play out in the near future.
The adjacent graphic (a version of which heads this whole page) visualizes one of the key themes of the book: one of the reasons people are so disoriented and distraught is that we all are living smack in the middle of a rare moment in history where the old systems that defined much of the 20th century are dying and the new systems of the 21st century are struggling to be born.
Those new systems are still nascent but getting clearer and people need to better understand what’s now possible in the decades ahead in order for us to make this huge transition. This project is one attempt to figure out that grand narrative that connects many of the dots of what probably lies ahead.
Leyden will be doing deep interviews with his network of remarkable innovators pioneering these new fields to help make sense of the historic transition taking place around us today.
The Fourth Reinvention of America
The adjacent documentary-style video interview of Leyden lays out another core theme of the book project: that America has entered its fourth great reinvention that will bring an explosive era of great progress for the next 25 years.
America has gone through very similar patterns of reinvention three times in the past and they occur in an uncanny cycle every 80 years. The last time we saw a reinvention of this scale was in 1945 and the beginning of the post-war boom that lasted for 25 years. But we saw it again in 1865 and the end of the Civil War, and then again at founding of the country.
These explosions of innovation are partly driven by the arrival of transformational general purpose technologies that start to scale. We have three of them today in the form of artificial intelligence, clean energies, and bioengineering.
This viral video is the best way to quickly understand this compelling argument. The video racked up more than 800,000 view, 30,000 likes, and 3,000 comments in its first two weeks on Youtube. People love this big idea. You might too.
The Civilization-Scale Change Ahead
Another big theme of the book project is that these new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, are such game-changing technologies that they probably will bring civilization-scale changes.
There are strong parallels between what is happening around us today and what happened during The Enlightenment from about 1680 to 1800 when Europe essentially created the modern world with six world-historic inventions: mechanical engines, carbon energies, industrial production, financial capitalism, representative democracy and nation states.
In the adjacent video Leyden more fully explains the parallels in all six fields and roughs out what we may see emerging in the decades ahead.
The video also is a great way to get an overview of all the key pieces of the book as of now in less than 30 minutes with many terrific info-graphics and slides woven in.
Leyden gave that talk to a packed audience of 250 innovators in San Francisco to kick off The Great Progression event series (more on that below).
The Great Progression Substack Series
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is a Substack series of essays and interviews that Leyden launched in the spring of 2025 as the first stage of this book project.
In the first three months he wrote a long 2500-word essay each week that laid out many of the nascent ideas the will make up the book. These dozen essays proved to be very popular in Substack and his audience tripled to 13,000 subscribers in three months.
The essays were also syndicated by Freethink Media on their two main online hubs on Freethink and Big Think, the website that has been interviewing many of the world’s leading thinkers since 2008. Freethink will continue to syndicate the essays through the book project.
Leyden will be publishing at least one essay a month through the next nine months of the book project until the final manuscript is delivered in April 2026. He will also publish posts on some of the interviews that he conducts for the book beyond the monthly essay.
Go directly to Substack to subscribe for free to all the written material and consider joining the network as a paid subscriber to attend monthly gatherings with him over zoom.
These monthly gatherings are designed to leverage the burgeoning intellectual network of Substack by virtually convening those interested in this framework to contribute their insights too.
The Great Progression Event Series
The final piece of this book project is a physical event series that Leyden hosts, curates and helps convene at ground zero for all things tech in San Francisco.
This quarterly series brings together an invite-only group of about 250 innovators from a wide range of fields from throughout the region to the Shack15 club in the iconic Ferry Building.
The short adjacent video explains the format that includes Leyden interviewing three prominent thought leaders of tech entrepreneurs and then rolling into a group conversation involving all those who gathered.
The event then transitions to more like a party where everyone can cross-connect and discuss the ideas more in-depth.
Those selected to be interviews on stage are partly chosen for how their insights can fill out the themes of the book. The event series, like the book, is also called The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
The Original Magazine Piece
This long magazine article started the ball rolling by being published in Big Think magazine two months before Generative AI burst on the scene with the Arrival of ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022.
Big Think, the pioneering online magazine that has conducted interviews with 2000 of the world’s biggest thinkers since 2008, commissioned the piece to anchor its Progress Issue.
Leyden used it to lay out his latest thinking on the real story of progress that will take place in the next 25 years. It's a positive reframe of what's really going on in America and the world right now, and what's actually going to happen in the near future.
The Great Progression is jammed with world-class art and info-graphics like his original highly prescient piece in Wired magazine called The Long Boom from 25 years ago. In fact, Big Think hired the same artist who did the art for Wired back then.