Creating Media
Reinvent Futures has a third line of business Creating media that is more public facing. Much of what we do in our Convening work is exclusive by nature. There’s only so many people that can fit in a room. Most of our Advising work is private too.
Our mission is to help accelerate the many system changes that are necessary in the 2020s to move us all toward a better world and help solve our many challenges like climate change.
So we are committed to capturing much of what we are learning and then creating three kinds of media: written essays of what we are learning, extended quotes from the remarkable people speaking at our events, and videos of some of the best short presentations.
All can be found through our Substack series, or through our YouTube channel. Learn more below.
Written Essays about What We Learn
We launched a free Substack series that is based on what we are learning together in all our convenings, particularly The Great Progression series.
Each major event is written up by our host and curator Peter Leyden in an essay that synthesizes the most important ideas that emerged and what they all appear to mean.
Some written material in the Substack series may come from what we are learning in other more private engagements as long as that material is OK to be shared.
Go right to the landing page of The Great Progression on Substack to sample all the material or check out three of the most popular essays that were published in 2023:
The Real Implications of Gen AI: On the real tech capabilities of Gen AI in the near term, and then what are the actual business opportunities through the 2020s.
The Positive Potential of Gen AI: On the many positive developments that could blossom throughout society in the long term, like over the next 25 years.
The Actual Risks of Gen AI : On the top 10 risks that seem to be most pressing and some initial thoughts on how they might be solved.
Video Clips of Our Event Talks
We try to record the programs from as many of our convenings as we can. We almost always capture audio of the key speakers at our large gatherings of 250 people but some of our smaller, more private roundtable conversations might need to go off the record.
The larger convenings like in The Great Progression series often are videoed as well and we then produce short videos of the 5-minute presentations of the best ones. You can see all of them at the Reinvent Futures YouTube channel.
You can see the entire playlist of a dozen speakers in the adjacent video on the positive possibilities of Generative AI. Or you can jump right to the individual videos of some of the best minds in the world who know about AI right now like:
Google Brain cofounder Greg Corrado, Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller, Salesforce’s Chief Futures Officer Peter Schwartz, Former Director of the Patent Office Michelle Lee, Chroma cofounder Anton Troynikov, UC Berkeley Economic Historian Brad DeLong, Generally Intelligent cofounder Kanjun Qui, among many others.
Extended Quotes from Our Network
We also use our Substack publication to publish articles comprised of extended quotes from some of the most remarkable innovators in our network who are invited to speak at our various gatherings, particularly in The Great Progression Series.
We try to always capture at least an audio recording of all our convenings and then work up transcripts of what was said. We then comb through the transcripts for the best passages that warrant sharing more broadly.
Sometimes these written quotes will go on for several paragraphs so readers can study the ideas closely and in-depth. Since we have the actual words of these remarkable innovators we try to give readers the option to hear from them directly rather than through paraphrase.
We always make sure the speakers know what conversations might be publicly shared, and have options to keep confidential or controversial discussions off the record. Some of our conversations are totally private too.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050
The Great Progression Series of events put on by Reinvent Futures is rooted in a magazine article that Peter Leyden wrote in 2022 called The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
The Great Progression article makes the case that America and the world are heading into a decade of many fundamental system changes that will lay the foundation for a new era of great progress that will go a long way towards solving the many challenges of our time like climate change.
The article has received a lot of attention because of its positive reframe of the actual story of our times and the near future that counters the conventional wisdom of gloom and doom from the mainstream media and public at large.
The article also is an unusually comprehensive analysis of progress happening in a wide variety of fields in technology and science, business and economics, politics and geopolitics.