Reflections on Progress Conference 2025
Dates for next year: October 8th-11th 2026, at Lighthaven
TL;DR
The second annual progress conference was a great success. Progress Conference 2026 will be October 8th-11th in Berkeley. More info early next year!
Check out videos of the conference talks, articles from well known writers, and a new Big Think special issue on progress.
This is the best conference I have ever been to. The attendees quality, the venue and the operations details are top notch. Will be a forever attendee from now on!
You will meet more excellent people and get to think about more challenging ideas in 48 hours than in any other environment/event.
If building a great culture is the really hard part, Progress Conference gives us a solid foundation to build on. The quality of ideas is extremely high and overflowing, but it’s the openness, honest discussions, and friendliness that makes it so energizing.
We’re about a month past the second annual Progress Conference. The 2025 conference was bigger than 2024: more days and more people, bringing together over 350 builders, academics, policy makers, investors, and writers who care about progress. Many attendees said it was yet again one of the best (or the best!) conference they had ever attended.
Attendees are extremely likely to recommend the conference to a friend or colleague, with an average rating of 9.3/10 and an excellent net promoter score of +83. We also received dozens of pages of feedback, even more than last year, giving us lots of ideas on how to keep improving the event.
It costs a lot of people’s time and money to get together. Why have an in-person conference in the age of video meetings, chatbots, and endless social media? In-person gatherings are necessary to build community and grow a movement. Here are the goals we had for the conference, and what people had to say about them:
Meet great people
It’s 2 days of living in the future. You meet people who are at the frontier of emerging fields and fill up on inspiration and ideas.
I really liked meeting the other attendees + spending time with them; very useful. A very orthogonal slice of people to those with whom I typically interact professionally, which makes it thought-provoking and high marginal value.
It was the best blend of academics/policy oriented folks/investors/entrepreneurs of all the conferences I’ve been to this year.
Catalyze new projects
Really really impressive work putting on such a great event. I came away with dozens of ideas, memories and contacts that I suspect will be paying dividends for many years!
Thanks for building this movement. The ideas and connections from these conferences have fueled my organization over the last year.
Be energized and inspired
THE BUZZ! Gosh I had so many wonderful conversations. It was amazing to be in a space filled with the greatest minds, working on such critical problems, without ugly ego. Still grinning from the experience.
If building a great culture is the really hard part, Progress Conference gives us a solid foundation to build on. The quality of ideas is extremely high and overflowing, but it’s the openness, honest discussions, and friendliness that makes it so energizing.
All I can say about the progress conference is that I always felt both welcome & certain I was the dumbest person in the room, which is an incredibly fortunate situation to be in. The conference sets the tone of my personal year: will I have done something meaningful enough to share next year?
Sharing ideas
Our other core goal for the event is to share ideas. You can watch videos of the talks, read articles and blog posts from the event, and browse the latest Big Think special issue on progress (just published yesterday!)
Videos of conference talks will be published over the next several weeks. We’ll post on the RPI YouTube channel (2025 specific playlist here) and on social media. Two plenary interviews are already available:
Sam Altman in conversation with Tyler Cowen. Sam and Tyler talked about when GPT-6 will be released; what might happen to margins on food, healthcare, and housing; conspiracy theories; and much more.
Blake Scholl in conversation with Tyler Cowen. Blake and Tyler cover the future of supersonic flight; whether the Apollo and Concord programs were good for the aerospace industry; how to design airports for the future; and more.
The buzz continued after the event, with many writers sharing ideas inspired by the conference. We’ve collected essays, blog posts, and social media commentary here. A few highlights:
- on A Culture of Progress: “Mokyr would be a great speaker for the Progress Conference. Still, the agenda that brings together frontier entrepreneurs, science and tech policy leaders, and authors is more future-oriented and action-oriented than disinterested historical analysis. In that sense, the Progress Conference is not the annual meeting of Industrial Revolution scholars, rather it is a modern form of the ‘culture of growth’ that **Mokyr studied as part of the Industrial Revolution. Lighthaven is kind of an ‘enlightenment salon’ of the singularity. Loose networks of substacks are a modern take on the ‘Republic of Letters’.”
- on Democrats Could Learn a Lot from the Progress Movement: “Here are my impressions: 1. There was more political diversity than among abundance advocates who tend to lean a bit left and mostly aspire to be a faction within the Democratic Party. The progress movement/studies umbrella includes such people but also many who lean right and/or libertarian and don’t have much use for the Democrats. 2. There was an entrepreneurial, as opposed to technocratic, feel to the crowd and many of the discussions, not least because there were quite a few startup founders and VCs present. That’s not to say there weren’t quite a few policy wonks too, but the entrepreneurial vibe helped give a sense of people creating progress, rather than twisting policy dials to help it along. 3. There was a fierce and generalized techno-optimism to the crowd that far surpassed what you see in Democratic-oriented abundance circles where it tends to be focused on favored goals like clean energy. These are people who deeply believe in the potential of technological advance and the process of scientific discovery that leads to such advance—‘the endless frontier’ if you will.”
Zvi Mowshowitz on Dan Rothschild’s thread about our conference badges: “There’s basically no reason for everyone not to outright copy this format, forever.”
Big Think just published The Engine of Progress, exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward. This special issue features original reporting and essays from conference speakers, attendees, and RPI fellows, interviews, and much more. Here are just a few of the pieces:
The common thread of progress by
The grim truth about the “good old days” by
The hidden legal engine of progress — from railroads to AI by
Were Concorde and Apollo good for the future of aerospace? by
Physical dynamism and the immigrant’s edge by
A new progressive era may be emerging by
Building a culture of progress
At the Roots of Progress Institute, our programs are dedicated to building the progress community and movement.
The annual progress conference is becoming a must-attend, central event for the progress community. But there is clearly much more room to grow: the conference sold out in June, five months before the event, and there were hundreds of interested, qualified people that we wish we’d had space to include.
As we plan out more events for 2026, we are thinking about how to include many more people in our RPI events, and how to gather smaller groups at functional events aimed at solving specific questions or kickstarting projects.
A personal reflection: I joined RPI this year to organize the second annual conference (and more events to come). It’s energizing to be around so many people who believe that progress is possible and worthwhile, and that the work can be done with taste, craft, and thoughtfulness. I became a father just a few weeks before this conference, and now I feel like I have a lot more skin in the game. We can build a future that we want our grandchildren to live in!
Save the date for Progress Conference 2026: October 8th-11th at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA.
It was a wonderful event that still triggers new thoughts as I ruminate on the conversations I had. The ability to leap into a fairly deep debate on something most people have never heard of was thrilling, and I have a new bevy of people to bounce my understanding off of before I publish something silly.