Closing: A Culture of Progress

Episode Overview

• This episode features the closing remarks from the Progress Conference 2025 by Jason Crawford, founder of the Roots of Progress Institute, where he outlines the core themes of his upcoming book, "The Techno-Humanist Manifesto."
• The discussion centers on the "Progress Agenda," specifically arguing that cultural narratives are not merely downstream of economics but are actually the primary drivers of scientific and technological advancement.
• Crawford presents a compelling vision for a new "talent pipeline" designed to steer ambitious young people away from performative activism and legacy industries, and toward solving frontier problems like biosecurity, clean energy, and longevity.

Key Concepts

• The Three Pillars of the Progress Agenda: Crawford argues that advancing humanity requires focus in three specific cause areas:

  1. Abundance (Legal/Regulatory): Dismantling "vetocracy" and removing obstructions to physical building and growth.
  2. Metascience (Institutional): Reforming how scientific research is organized, managed, and funded to break stagnation.
  3. Culture: Cultivating a philosophy that views science, engineering, and business as noble quests to improve the human condition.

• Culture Drives Talent Allocation: Contrary to the materialist view that technology unfolds automatically based on economic resources (e.g., cheap coal driving the Industrial Revolution), Crawford posits that culture determines what a society's "best and brightest" choose to work on. If a culture values theological debate over mechanics, smart people will become priests, not engineers; if it values activism over building, they will become protesters rather than founders.

• The Gap in Frontier Awareness: Young talent often defaults to "safe" or socially approved paths (e.g., working for big pharma or advocating for standard solar power) because they are never exposed to frontier solutions. They lack awareness of high-leverage but stigmatized or "weird" fields like solar radiation management, curing aging, or nuclear energy, simply because their educational and social environments do not present these as viable or high-status career paths.

• Industrial Literacy: A proposed foundational educational requirement where students learn the history and mechanics of how industrial civilization functions—from supply chains to energy grids. Understanding the "hockey stick" charts of GDP growth and poverty reduction provides the context necessary for students to see themselves as potential contributors to that continuity, rather than just critics of the system.

Quotes

• At 4:12 - "What matters clearly is culture and institutions. Culture determines preferences and priorities... cultural factors determined whether the best and brightest in each society will tinker with machines and chemicals, or whether they will perfect their swordplay or study the Talmud." - Illustrating, via economic historian Joel Mokyr, that intelligence alone does not create progress; societal incentives determine where that intelligence is applied.
• At 6:06 - "If you are interested in health, you are much more likely to hear about something like curing cancer... you are much less likely to hear about curing aging. ... You probably, if you're the average teenager, haven't heard about opportunities in nanotechnology, or in far-UVC light for biosecurity." - Explaining how social norms filter the career options young people perceive, often blinding them to the most transformative but unconventional opportunities.
• At 10:10 - "Tech news covers what people are doing in tech... I think there should be a publication that covers what people ought to be doing. Map out the frontier, talk about what the biggest opportunities are... and if nobody's doing it, call it out as a neglected area." - Proposing a shift in media from passive reporting to active agenda-setting to guide human agency toward neglected problems.

Takeaways

• Build "Industrial Literacy" curriculums: Educators and parents should actively teach young people the history of economic growth and the operational realities of modern civilization to counter cynicism and inspire a desire to build.
• Signal boost neglected problems: When mentoring or advising talent, explicitly direct attention toward "weird" or frontier fields (like longevity research or geoengineering) that lack social reinforcement but offer high leverage for humanity.
• Reframe career choices as moral imperatives: Shift the cultural conversation to view engineering, business, and scientific research not just as jobs, but as noble moral obligations required to maintain and improve human living standards.