American Dynamism: Progress begins at home

Talks and writing from Progress Conference 2025

Innovations in aerospace, defense, supply chain, industrials, manufacturing, and other deep-tech industries are changing the status quo of what is built in the United States.

Founders, builders, and investors speaking at Progress Conference 2025 talked about how to close the gap in progress between software and the physical world, new regulatory paradigms, unlocking the grid from bottlenecking energy growth, and how manufacturing revolutions really work. Here are some selected talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Physical dynamism and the immigrant’s edge by Afra Wang

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow Afra Wang (afra) explores how immigrant founders are driving America’s new era of “physical dynamism.”

The founders building most aggressively come from places that followed radically different development paths than America — some spectacularly successful, others failed. They watched Mumbai expand and Shenzhen materialize from fishing villages. They internalized different baselines for what’s possible, and different nightmares of what could go wrong.

That wisdom matters. Immigrants not only bring non-American-centric mindsets and building speed. They carry lived experiences of both progress and collapse, which breeds a particular kind of vigilance. They see not only what America could become, but what it risks losing. Many arrived believing in promises America made to the world, and now they’re trying to hold the country accountable to those promises, to push it to live up to the dream that brought them here.

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This optimism is rare in today’s America, where apocalyptic thinking dominates both left and right, where every technological advance gets framed primarily through its dangers. This is a simple yet encouraging belief that progress is good, necessary, and achievable.

Talk videos

Blake Scholl in conversation with Tyler Cowen

I think Concorde never should have been done and Apollo never should have been done.

Blake Scholl and Tyler Cowen talked about the future of supersonic flight, the history of “moonshots” in aerospace, how to design a better airport, and much more.

Samuel Hammond (FAI) said “This was my Progress Conference highlight by far, from an otherwise stacked line-up. Information dense, fun, thought-provoking, inspiring even.”

American Dynamism & The Case for Hardtech

Erin Price-Wright (General Partner at a16z) talks about the hardtech infrastructure that underpins the American Dynamism movement, and what is still required to bridge the gap between the rapid progress in developing software versus building in the physical world.

Anti-fragile Regulation and the Infinite Frontier

Isaiah Taylor (founder and CEO of Valar Atomics) describes progress this way: “Progress is composed of smart people taking risks together. If you want to know where the frontier will form, ask yourself two questions: where are the smart people? Where are people taking risk? Wealthy nations tend to get disrupted not by losing the smart people, but by losing their risk-taking. America’s Founding Fathers built a solution to this problem into the US Constitution: Anti-fragile regulation. It’s time to use it.”

The grid is the bottleneck to the energy revolution

In this talk, Justin Lopas (co-founder and COO of Base Power), covers a history of the grid, how it works, and what’s needed to upgrade it for the 21st century’s power demand. He highlights how the grid is ultimately the bottleneck to realizing AI and electrification as generation rapidly catches up to load growth.

The art of industrial leapfrogging

How do manufacturing revolutions really happen? Ben Reinhardt (Speculative Technologies) unpacks a new paradigm: “Throughout history, new manufacturing paradigms have rewritten the global economic map. Mechanized weaving in Britain, systematized chemistry in Germany, and interchangeable parts in America didn’t just create new industries—they shifted the center of manufacturing gravity. Today, as America seeks to rebuild its manufacturing strength, we’re ignoring this historical lesson. Instead of pioneering the next breakthrough, we’re playing catch-up with tariffs, defense tech, and bottled 1950s vibes. This talk will unpack how manufacturing revolutions really work, why new manufacturing processes matter beyond jobs and geopolitics, and sketch out the paradigm shifts could unlock manufacturing abundance on Earth and beyond.”

Here’s a written version of the talk on the Spectech newsletter.

Future-Proof: How Regulators Can (And Must) Avoid Overfitting to Today’s New Tech

Christian Keil (VP at Astranis) explores new regulatory approaches to encourage innovation: “Despite the strawmen set up by today’s innovators, most regulators are not captured by yesterday’s incumbents—but focusing too narrowly on present-day tech can be just as dangerous. This talk explores how regulators can design rules that are robust to an unpredictable future, and avoid overfitting too narrowly on today’s Current Things.”

Out-Innovating Through Dual Use: The New Blueprint for U.S. Shipbuilding

Sampriti Bhattacharyya (founder & CEO, Navier) talks about maritime innovation: “America once led the world in shipbuilding, but today ranks 11th, producing less than 1% of oceangoing vessels as of 2025. This is not just a matter of national security, but of immense geopolitical and economic importance. The challenge is clear - and solvable. By leveraging dual-use technology and adopting a mindset of out-innovating rather than merely out-producing, the U.S. has a real opportunity to reclaim leadership in maritime innovation.”

Other writing

Were Concorde and Apollo good for the future of aerospace? by Blake Scholl

Blake also wrote an op-ed arguing that government-led “glory projects” ultimately hurt the aerospace industry they were meant to advance and proposing a path forward.

When private founders, not committees, set the vision, constraints become creative fuel. SpaceX succeeded where NASA stagnated, not because it had more money, but because it had far less and had to make every dollar count. Iteration replaced bureaucracy. The result wasn’t just a cheaper rocket; it was the rebirth of orbital progress after 50 years of stasis.

The same dynamic is playing out in supersonic flight. Boom is doing what Concorde couldn’t precisely because we’re doing it differently. We’re building for a market, not a political mandate. The goal isn’t to prove what’s possible once, but to make it possible for everyone — affordably, sustainably, and at scale.

When innovation is reborn under entrepreneurial leadership, progress becomes self-sustaining again. Space is opening. Supersonic is returning. And for the first time in decades, the future is accelerating.

Future-friendly regulation has a blind spot: the future by Christian Keil

In this op-ed, Christian explores the main strategies officials use when regulating new technologies and how they affect progress, and argues for regulators to consider the “Next Thing” instead of just the “Current Thing.”

Imagine if the people regulating computer hardware in the 1990s had, inspired by fears of youth video game addiction, decided to create rules that halted the development of GPUs the same way NRC rules did nuclear reactors or that only allowed incumbents to develop them. This could have delayed advancements that ultimately allowed us to use GPUs for artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency mining, and so much more.

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I support regulators who focus on the future and who care about growth, about business, and about startups. But I believe it would be incredibly shortsighted for them to only consider technologies of which they are personally aware when thinking about tech neutrality. I also believe that even regulators who do a great job at promoting the technologies of today run a serious risk of stymieing — even if inadvertently — the technologies of the future.

If we are truly committed to modernizing our regulatory regimes and optimizing for the future, we need to do it the right way, considering not just the Current Thing but also the Next Thing — even if there’s no way to actually know what it’ll be.

Why wait for flying cars? Flying boats are already here by Sampriti Bhattacharyya

Sampriti also wrote a piece exploring recent progress in autonomy, hydrofoiling, nad and robotics.

The most extraordinary asset for our coastal cities is the one we have spent a century ignoring: the water itself. We have long treated it as a barrier to overcome, even as our cities grew more congested and housing was pushed ever farther from opportunity. This new generation of water transit can reverse that trend, collapsing commute times, unlocking new economic corridors, and reconnecting communities without the immense cost and consequence of new land-based infrastructure.

This is not a distant vision. The convergence of electric hydrofoils, autonomy, and robotics is happening at a pace unthinkable even a decade ago. And America, as the global leader in software, autonomy, and advanced manufacturing, is uniquely positioned to spearhead this transformation. If the 20th century was defined by the highway, the 21st will be defined by the cities that reclaim their waterways. They are not relics of our past. They are the highways of our future.

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We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.