America, you saved my life

A love letter from a Dublin kid

In today’s Diary:

• The president who died of a sore throat

• Drinking each other’s dirt

• The tyranny of geography

• 90 minutes from SF to Paris

• Home = the last frontier

Hey Rational Optimist,

The richest man in America died on the night of December 14, 1799.

George Washington, America’s founder, died of a sore throat. His doctors bled him and made him drink a tea of vinegar and honey to try to cure the infection.

His great-great-grandchildren would shake off the same infection with a single shot of penicillin, invented 130 years later.

We’re less than a week from America’s 250th birthday, and I want to write a love letter to the country that changed my life.

I grew up in inner-city Dublin with no dad, lots of drugs and the occasional murder. Some of my earliest memories: my neighbor being bludgeoned to death with a golf club on St. Patrick’s Day morning. A friend got a little too high, jumped into a canal, and drowned.

If I’d been born in any other century, I’d still be there, scratching out a lower-middle-class life at best.

America pulled me out of that hole.

It handed a poor Dublin kid the best education anyone could get: a laptop and an internet connection. And then gave me mentors who taught me how to make money.

I make my living today investing in the most exciting companies in the world. Almost every one of them is American.

I laugh every time someone tells me America is in decline.

The US has its fair share of problems. But America remains the undisputed champ when it comes to frontier innovation, the technology that pushes humanity forward.

To celebrate her 250th birthday let’s take a snapshot of America at its founding and compare it to the country I love today.

It’s like watching your kids grow up. Day to day, you don’t notice them changing. But pull out a picture from a year ago, and your jaw hits the floor.

We’re going to do that for America across 250 years.

I’ll walk you through the five frontiers I think matter most. In each I’ll introduce you to an American entrepreneur pushing that technology forward today. We’ve met almost all of them on our recent travels.

Every Founding Father lived his entire life chasing fire from room to room.

The average household burned 70 tons of firewood a year.

For almost all of human history energy was something you bought with your body’s physical labor. Today you tap your credit card, and all the energy you need shows up.

Take a gallon of gasoline. The gas in your tank contains the energy equivalent of a man laboring 10 hours a day, six days a week, for an entire month.

As our friends at Doomberg like to say: “Energy = Life.”

Cheap energy is the bedrock miracle. There is no civilization without abundant energy. And every great energy leap has been an American leap.

The Pennsylvania oil rush of 1859. The world’s first electric grid, lit by Thomas Edison at Pearl Street Station in 1882. The Manhattan Project, which split the atom. The shale revolution, which transformed America from energy beggar into the largest energy producer on the planet in less than a decade.

The next leap is electrons. And the man spearheading this energy revolution is Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics.

Valar is building nuclear microreactors the size of a shipping container. Cluster a thousand of these on a single site, and the heat alone is enough to manufacture clean gasoline and jet fuel out of nothing but uranium, water, and air.

Last November Valar became the first startup in history to achieve nuclear criticality. Isaiah told the US President their reactor will be running by July 4.

More than 20 other startups are racing to build microreactors. If American regulators keep clearing the runway like they have over the past 18 months, the next nuclear age will happen in the USA.

And if that happens, our kids could heat their homes with little more than the output of a sealed kernel of uranium.

America’s #1 killer used to be water.

Nobody knew what germs were. The water carried invisible diseases that took thousands of lives each year.

The Founding Fathers overcame this problem with alcohol. Brewing required boiling, which killed the bacteria that killed people.

John Adams began every morning with half a cup of cider and ended every night with three glasses of Madeira. The second US President was mildly intoxicated from breakfast to bedtime.

The average adult drank 34 gallons of beer and cider a year plus five gallons of hard spirits, roughly 15X the alcohol consumption of the average American today.

Then in 1908 a physician named John Leal added a tiny dose of chlorine to the water supply of Jersey City. The result was the largest public-health victory in history.

Chlorination and indoor plumbing saved more American lives than every antibiotic, vaccine and surgery combined. Most of the doubling of human life expectancy in the 20^th century came from the fact that we stopped drinking each other’s dirt.

Clean water is a solved problem in America. The same can’t be said for 2 billion people around the globe.

Vital Lyfe, founded by two SpaceX engineers, is fixing that.

Vital Lyfe is building a 25 lb. box that turns raw seawater into six gallons of clean drinking water every hour. It costs $749 and runs on batteries or a small solar panel.

I love desalination. It provides 99% of the drinking water here in Abu Dhabi. But today the tech is dominated by billion-dollar coastal plants and hundreds of miles of pipeline. Both are out of reach for the two billion people who need clean water most.

The good news is Vital Lyfe’s factory in Torrance, California, will “manufacture more desalination units in a single month than presently exist in the world.”

That’s “The Great Handoff” in a nutshell. I can’t wait to visit Vital Lyfe when I’m in LA in a few weeks.

Speedy travel is the most underrated innovation in history.

In 1776 the average person never traveled more than 30 miles from where they were born. They married whoever lived in their village and died of whatever disease arrived in it.

Back then the fastest mode of transport was a galloping horse. Few people ever beat the tyranny of geography.

This one is personal to me because I escaped the geographic lottery. If I had been born in Dublin 100 years ago I would’ve likely been trapped there my whole life.

Yet I’ve been lucky enough to live on five continents thanks to airplanes and cheap airfares. I’m writing you from Abu Dhabi. My kids’ classmates hail from dozens of different countries.

From canals to railroads to the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford, every leap in travel speed has been an American leap.

The Boeing 707 took to the skies in 1958, crossed the Atlantic in seven hours and turned global travel from a privilege into a habit. But travel speeds stagnated since then:

The next leap is being built down a grimy lane in downtown San Francisco, in a warehouse with no name above the door, by a high-school dropout named Ian Brooke.

Ian’s company Astro Mechanica is building a supersonic jet that will take you from San Francisco to Paris in about 90 minutes. Target ticket price: $5,000. Read all about Astro Mechanica and why I think it’s going to win.

The first day I visited, Pratt & Whitney executives had flown in from Connecticut. They were wearing suits. Ian’s engineers were in t-shirts and jeans.

America’s most established aircraft engine company, founded in 1925, had flown west to learn what a self-taught dropout was building in a back alley. Only in America.

40% of kids…

Didn’t live to see their fifth birthday at America’s founding.

Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. And yet back then a mother could expect to bury two of her five children.

Thank God for all the medical innovators who’ve made this tragedy increasingly rare. From vaccines to antibiotics to organ transplants and now gene editing.

Last year a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia diagnosed a one-week-old baby named KJ Muldoon with a one-in-a-million metabolic disorder. His parents were offered “comfort care,” the gentle clinical phrase for let him go.

But doctors read KJ’s genome and found the one-letter “typo” in his DNA that was killing him. They designed a gene-editing tool to “delete” the typo and paste in the correct letter.

KJ is a year and a half old now. He is taking his first steps. He is the first human being in history to be treated with a drug designed for him personally. He won’t be the last.

What made it possible for doctors to read KJ’s genome… find a single broken letter… make a drug targeted at that exact letter… and infuse it into him in? Cheap DNA reading.

It took thousands of scientists 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome. Today in California, a startup called Ultima Genomics can read your DNA for $100.

Without getting into the weeds, Ultima’s breakthrough was etching the chemistry needed for genomics onto silicon wafers, the same ones Intel uses to make computer chips.

The result is the $100 full genome, something that seemed crazy even to the best scientists 20 years ago. There is no other technology in history with a price collapse that dramatic.

America built the largest scientific research program in the world and married it to a finance ecosystem willing to fund moonshots.

America is the only place in the world where a doctor with a crazy idea can get $100 million to see if it works.

The last frontier for crazy ideas is the roof above your head.

A drafty wooden box…

Is how you could describe the average American house in 1776.

There was no glass in most of the windows, so they were either shuttered closed against the cold or thrown open to the flies.

There was one fireplace, usually in the largest room of the house. Everyone slept in the same room as that fire and often in the same bed. The youngest baby slept with the parents as cold rooms killed infants in those days.

Indoor plumbing did not reach the White House until 1825. Until then every President used a chamber pot a servant hauled out the back door every morning. George Washington never took a hot shower. Life was cold, dark and short.

Nowadays our walls are insulated. Our windows are double-paned glass. The water comes out of the tap hot, clean, and instantly. Even small homes have multiple toilets.

Thanks to air-con we separated the temperature inside our homes from the temperature outside. That would seem like literal magic to someone living in 1776.

The problem with homes these days isn’t keeping them warm or cool. It’s they cost too damn much.

Aleksandr Gampel is trying to solve that. His company Cuby Technologies is one of my favorite innovators.

Cuby’s strategy is to take everything you need to build 200 houses and pack it into 122 shipping containers… then drive those containers to a lot near you and set them up under a pressurized inflatable dome.

The dome is now your factory. It can churn out every piece a home needs. A crew of four people can assemble a finished kit on a concrete slab in 45 to 60 days.

Cuby’s first US Mobile Micro-Factory goes live in New Mexico in the first quarter of next year, tied to a 3,300-home pipeline.

If Cuby works, and I think it will, we will be able to build homes fast, cheap and at scale. And that will solve so many of the problems America faces today. Remember…

Innovation is America’s greatest export.

In the past hour I awoke in a bedroom cooled to 72 degrees by an American air conditioner… showered in water desalinated by technology invented at UCLA… and drove in an electric car invented in California.

In 1776 the richest man in the world couldn’t have bought one of those things at any price.

Over the past 250 years we transformed a country whose first president died of a sore throat into a place where a one-week-old baby gets a drug made for his specific genome.

We achieved this through a billion small acts of invention by ordinary Americans in garages, basements and back alleys.

250 years from now our great-great-grandkids will catalogue our miseries the way we just catalogued 1776’s. The only thing they will recognize is the sight of Americans tinkering at things no one yet believes are possible.

Pessimists will tell you America is in decline. That its best days are behind it.

Don’t believe them. Tell your kids the stories of the Isaiah Taylors and the Ian Brookes inventing the future.

Be the optimist in the room. Because the optimists, in America, have always won.

Happy birthday, America. Your best is still ahead of you.

Thanks for being a member of the Rational Optimist Society.

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—Stephen McBride

P.S.: Are we on the cusp of a cure for aging?

In our Deep Dive on the quest to reverse human aging, we discussed Life Biosciences’ proposed human trials to effectively cure glaucoma by reversing the cellular age of the patient’s eyes.

That human trial has now begun—a landmark moment in the quest to “cure” human aging. Simply put, safely reversing the cellular age of the human eye will kick off a new wave of research into doing the same for other organs.

More on the trial can be found in an article from Nature here. You can read all about the very serious and well-financed efforts to reverse human aging now underway by Life Biosciences and other research labs in our Deep Dive.