2025 in review
What RPI and I were up to in the ninth year of this project
Everyone loves writing annual letters these days. It’s the thing. (I blame Dan Wang.)
So here’s mine. At least I can say I’ve been doing it for as long as Dan: nine years running (proof: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). As usual, this is more of a personal essay/reflection, and not so much of an organizational annual report, although I will start with some comments on…
RPI
Over the last three years, the Roots of Progress Institute has gone from “a guy and his blog” to a full-fledged cultural institute. This year we:
Held our second annual Progress Conference, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Blake Scholl, Tyler Cowen, and Michael Kratsios (Director, OSTP). The conference has become the central, must-attend event for the progress community: it is sold out each year, with hundreds on the waitlist, and some attendees report it is literally the best conference they have ever attended.
Inducted the third cohort of our progress writers fellowship, bringing the total to 74 fellows. Our fellows are having impact: Dean Ball helped draft the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, Madeline Hart has co-authored a book with the CTO of Palantir on revitalizing the American defense industry, Ryan Puzycki helped legalize single-stair buildings in Austin (a key YIMBY reform), and three other fellows have recently had opinion pieces in the NYT or WSJ.
Announced our first education initiative: Progress in Medicine, a high school summer career exploration program. I’ve previewed the content for this course and I’m jealous of these kids—I wish I had had something like this when I was a teenager!
And the best part about all of these programs is that I don’t have to run any of them! I have a fantastic staff at RPI who deserves credit for all of these, from design to execution: Emma McAleavy, Ben Thomas, Yel Alonzo, and especially Heike Larson—thanks to them for making our programs a success every year.
We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, supported mostly by donations. There’s still time to get in a last-minute end-of-year contribution! The simplest way to support us is to upgrade to a paid (or founding!) subscription:
Or see here for other ways to support us:
Huge thanks to all those who have already given this year!
My writing
Most of my writing effort this year was devoted to finishing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, an essay-series-cum-book laying out my philosophy of progress. In 2025 I published the last 14 (out of 21) essays in the series, you can read them all here. Also, as just announced, I’ve signed with MIT Press to publish a revised version of the series in book form. The manuscript is out for comment now, and (given typical publishing schedules) I expect the book to launch in early 2027.
I also wrote eight other essays, and ten links digests. I put the links digest on hold after May in order to focus on finishing the book, but I’m working on bringing it back. All subscribers get the announcements and opportunities at the top, but the rest of the digest is paywalled, so subscribe now to get the full version.
The most-liked posts here on Substack were:
The most-commented posts were:
My longest post, at over 8,400 words, was:
I now have well over 55,000 subscribers on Substack, up over 68% YOY.
Social media
Here are some of my most-liked posts and threads of the year:
One model for Elon is that he is perpetually operating in wartime mode: Move as fast as possible, bring overwhelming force, extract superhuman effort, accept collateral damage. A thread. For some reason many people seemed to think I was praising or defending this: I wasn’t, just observing.
Grocery stores have price transparency and open competition, which health services don’t (replying to a wrong-headed comment by Rep. Jake Auchincloss)
“Daddy, why is a hundred a big number?”, and other difficult questions from my 3yo
“On paper, titanium should be the world’s #1 structural metal”
A great moment from a legendary interview with Morris Chang of TSMC, on the Acquired podcast
Waymo achieves 80–90% reduction across all crash/injury metrics. If there were some intervention that achieved this, safety advocates would be demanding its wholesale adoption immediately, even if it were costly or inconvenient
You can join well over 40,000 people who follow me on Twitter, or find me on your favorite social network; I’m on pretty much all of them.
Speaking and events
Like last year, I tried to mostly say no to events and speaking gigs this year, but there were a few I couldn’t refuse. Some highlights of the year:
I spoke at “d/acc Day” alongside Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others. My talk was “d/acc: The first 150 years”: a whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half
I gave a short talk at Social Science Foo Camp titled “The Fourth Age of Humanity?”, based on ideas that I later wrote up in The Flywheel
I did a fun Interintellect salon with Virginia Postrel based on her essay “The World of Tomorrow”
I hosted a discussion series at Edge Esmeralda with the aim of envisioning the future. Each day there was a ~90-minutes session with a theme like AI, health & bio, or energy
I went to Mojave to watch the first supersonic flight of the Boom XB-1 test plane. Here’s some video I took of the plane taxiing down the runway, and then the pilot getting out after landing and shaking hands with Boom founder Blake Scholl
In 2026 I hope to do more travel, events and speaking. But maybe I’ll just hole up and write some more.
Reading
I put my monthly “what I’ve been reading” updates on hold at the end of 2023 (!) in order to focus on the book. I’d like to bring these back, too. For now, here are some the highlights from my reading this year (that is, things I thought were interesting and valuable to read, not necessarily things I “liked” or agreed with).
The first few book recommendations are free, paid subscribers get the (much longer) full reading update and (below) some thoughts on what’s next for my writing:
Books and other book-length things I read
Or read at least most of:
Max Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence. A history of the evolution of the brain, from the first animals through humans. It is organized into five major evolutionary steps—to oversimplify: the worm brain, the fish brain, the mouse brain, the monkey brain, and the human brain. This answered some key questions I had on the topic, very well-written, probably my favorite of the year. Hat-tip to @eshear.
Charles Mann, How the System Works, an essay series in The New Atlantis. It covers four of the major systems that form the foundation of industrial civilization and help deliver our modern standard of living: agriculture, water sanitation, electricity, and public health. Mann thinks of these pieces as the start of a curriculum that should be taught in schools—inspired by a group of “smart, well-educated twenty-somethings” who “wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well,” but “knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.” Enjoyed this, recommended.
Brian Potter, The Origins of Efficiency, from Stripe Press, a history of manufacturing efficiency. Light bulbs used to cost ~$50 (adjusted for inflation), now they cost 50 cents; how did that happen? This is a comprehensive and very readable overview of the answer to that question and others like it.
