Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank he launched in 2022 with Caleb Watney to turn progress studies into concrete policy. He works at the intersection of metascience, high-skilled immigration, biosecurity, and infrastructure permitting, arguing that America's biggest obstacle to progress is not a shortage of ideas but a surplus of veto points. A George Mason economist by training, he became one of the most-followed voices of the abundance movement, translating dense regulatory questions into widely shared arguments for building more.
Brink Lindsey is a writer and policy thinker who spent decades inside Washington's free-market establishment - vice president for research at the Cato Institute, a leading free-trade voice - before publicly reinventing himself as a 'recovering libertarian.' Now senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, he argues that capable government and robust social insurance are not enemies of markets but their necessary complement. His writing, including The Captured Economy (with Steven Teles) and The Permanent Problem, wrestles with a single paradox: rich countries have never had more material plenty, and people have never felt less satisfied. He explores it weekly from a base in northeastern Thailand on his Substack, The Permanent Problem.
Derek Thompson is an American journalist, author, and podcaster best known for co-writing the #1 New York Times bestseller Abundance with Ezra Klein and hosting the Plain English podcast on The Ringer. After 17 years as a staff writer at The Atlantic, he left in 2025 to write independently on Substack, focusing on housing, energy, technology, and the decline of in-person social life.
Eli Dourado is an economist and head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute, where he deploys capital to push frontier technologies in energy, aerospace, and other capital-intensive, heavily regulated sectors. He describes his work as a 'sacred quest to increase the pace of American economic growth,' which he argues has stagnated since around 1973. A former regulatory hacker at Boom Supersonic and director of the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center, he is known for influential essays on geothermal energy, supersonic flight, cargo airships, and ending the Great Stagnation.
Eric Levitz is a senior correspondent at Vox who covers American politics, economics and the future of the Democratic Party, most visibly through his newsletter and column 'The Rebuild.' A former creative-writing student turned wonk, he spent roughly eight years at New York Magazine's Intelligencer before joining Vox, earning a reputation for data-driven, argument-forward pieces that frequently irritate both the online left and the right - sometimes in the same week.
Anish Acharya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who led the firm's consumer fintech and consumer AI investing for five-plus years before announcing his departure in 2025/2026 to build again. A University of Waterloo computer engineering grad, he co-founded SocialDeck (acquired by Google in 2010) and Snowball (acquired by Credit Karma in 2015), where he then rose to GM overseeing a platform of 100M+ members. Known for coining the 'Era of Abundance' consumer AI thesis, writing 'Disposable Software,' and spending weekends spinning deep house records under his DJ alias 'illscience,' Acharya occupies a rare space where operator intuition, engineering rigor, and cultural ear collide.
Peter H. Diamandis is a Greek-American entrepreneur, physician, and futurist who has founded or co-founded 25+ companies and is best known as the creator of the XPRIZE Foundation - which has launched over $600 million in incentive competitions catalyzing $10+ billion in R&D. A data-driven optimist, he co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, runs the Metatrends newsletter (157,000+ subscribers), and is a 4x New York Times bestselling author. His current mission centers on longevity - he launched the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan in 2024 and published the Longevity Guidebook in January 2025.