Name: Why 2025 is the single most pivotal year in our lifetime | Peter Leyden
Uploaded: 2025-10-21T18:26:13.000Z
Duration: 15 min 9 s
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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.

Reflexive pronouns

But America and the world itself are going through huge contortions.

And there's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place.

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, do you all of a sudden get an iPhone that goes, holy shit, this is the most amazing thing in the world, and

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.

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 foreign s and the earliest days of the Internet.

There was really only one place in the world that was really all over that, and

And it was in those early days that the founders of Wired picked up on me as someone who 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, people had no idea what was even going on with the Internet and literally what's email, what's the web?

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

And the other thing that was going on there, beyond this digital revolution, was essentially the beginning of globalization.

And so myself and my co author, which was Peter Schwartz, wrote a famous iconic cover story at Wired that was called the Long Boom.

The story from 1980, which is in our past, to 2020, which was in our future, trying to explain what was really coming.

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 adoption curve, let's say, like Uber.

The idea like, oh my God, instead of a taxi, it's all in your phone.

And then all of a sudden, when enough people show how amazing it is, boom.

The entire crew moves over and the old system of the taxi system is gone.

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.

Is smack in the middle of that in our era.

But we've also seen this in American history before.

There's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place.

You know, this is 80 years ago, last time we saw this.

And they tend to come in these 80 year cycles.

But what's amazing about these things is they have bursts of unbelievably widespread innovation that lasts for 25 years.

Last big one was coming off World War II, 1945, 80 years ago, America was on a very similar parallel.

We had basically were watching the essentially dismantling of the old world that had been working pretty well, the economy and societies of the West.

And then there had been a crash 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.

And so what happens is you watch these junctures in American society.

For example, there was an America first movement in the 30s.

We were on the verge of violent conflict in America.

And then you had the FDR and the kind of New Deal coalition that came out of the Depression 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 was going through, through this juncture.

And so from 1945 to 1970, we watched the great post war boom, many people call it the high point of global capitalism.

And you built this crazy economy where you did many things that were completely different than the previous year.

You watched incredible investment in public infrastructure like the interstate highway system and building suburbs.

You basically watched the GI Bill and education, building institutions for higher education, export, expanding it for the boomers.

And then we ran in the 70s, it started kind of getting along in the tooth.

Old system had to come down, super conflict around it and ultimately the building of a thing that was dramatically different than before.

And funny enough, like I say, if you go another 80 years back, we did it again.

Now this is a good example of how passions run very high and political conflict is extreme at these junctures.

In the Civil War, it was the most extreme.

I mean, we literally had to have 750,000Americans die in the Civil War.

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, but

in the old south we basically had slavery.

And they said, no, we're not going there, we're not going to give it up.

We're not going to let go of this old system.

We're going to fight to the death on the thing.

Anyone rooted in the old systems that are going down are passionately want to defend that at all costs.

Now the thing that people do not know about the Civil War or don't really remember as much about the Civil War, Civil War is the Civil War after 1865 had an unbelievable explosion of progress that lasted for, what do you know, 25 years.

For example, the Homestead act, which is you gave anybody who went out west 150 acres for free.

All these little states started building institutes of higher education to educate average people, but

also to be pushing scientific understanding of agriculture.

But here's the other progress that was going on, it was technology.

It was only after the war that America blew out like 175,000 miles of rail and essentially stitched the entire continent together with this steel based rail.

And essentially we reinvented America in 25 years.

And here's the even crazier thing though you go back another 80 years.

We did it again, 1787 to about 1810, 1815.

One way to understand what was happening in America at that time was it was part of a bigger part of Western Europe, in particular an extension of Britain, which was going through the Enlightenment at the time.

The Enlightenment is essentially a fundamental system change from a feudal society kind of dominated by the Catholic Church and all kind of stuff, into essentially what we would now consider the modern world.

And they invented six huge things that we still are working within today.

Now the reason I'm kind of saying that is that had world historic implications.

That was a building of a civilization that we essentially invented, we humans, but we Western Europe.

In basically space of 120 years, 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 that is what America's role has been vis a vis the West.

I'm arguing we have one more crank at that wheel with the arrival of three world historic changes that are happening around us today.

And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence.

If you haven't, then get ready because this promises to be the viral sensation that could completely reset how we do things.

The arrival of generative AI with the arrival of ChatGPT 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 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 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 created the prosperity and wealth of the world that we know now where we're just going to say holy shit, we had no idea.