More Recent Writing
Peter Leyden has been writing his entire life and began his career as a journalist working for newspapers, weekly magazines like Newsweek, and monthly magazines like Wired. He’s since written two books on the future that have gone into multiple languages as well. He continues to write most recently for online publications like Big Think and Medium where you can drive ongoing conversations with readers.
The Great Progression
This brand new magazine article lays out Leyden’s 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. This piece counters the pervasive gloom and doom out there in the media and the general public.
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, which commissioned and published this new piece, hired the same artist who did the art for Wired back then.
The Transformation
The Transformation is a recent series of six stories in Medium that tells the future history of America and the world from 2020 to 2050. This lays out the very positive yet plausible story of how America can solve the many challenges of climate change, economic inequality, racial inequities and political polarization. The story is told from the perspective of a member of Generation Z at the end of his life in 2100 as he explains not only how we solved those challenges but helped lay the foundations for a different kind of civilization that evolved through the entire 21st century.
This series is based on deep interviews with 25 world-class innovators and explains how a dozen driving forces are inexorably progressing towards a better future that few see today. What Leyden calls The Inexorables encompass three world-historical technological transitions in infotech, biotech and energy tech that could bring about a technology and economic boom that arguably could dwarf ones we have seen in the past.
Massive demographic changes and other mega-trends could come together with these technological developments in unexpected ways to help bring about a much more positive future. This series counters today’s pervasive despair and fear of the future and makes a compelling case for hope that better days lie just ahead.
California is the Future
Leyden wrote a previous series in Medium that made the controversial case that the changing politics of California over the last 15 years - from paralyzed stalemate to progressively blue - prefigured the politics of America that we’re in now. This four-part series from 2017 proved very prescient as well as popular and is still worth the read.
Working on his Next Book?
Leyden has written two books that have gone into multiple languages and he knows what it takes to do them well. He likes to use his talks and his written stories to work out the big ideas in early form and then test them out with audiences or readers. Over time those ideas get stress-tested and can then create the architecture to fill out a book. He expects his current work will evolve in that direction too.