Meet the new time machines

Reclaim your most valuable resource

 In today’s Diary:

• How to spend more time with your kids

• A mini Tesla Powerwall for your countertop

• Steve Jobs would love this vacuum

• Your very own “Alfred” personal butler

• The new brain-healthy computer

Dear Rational Optimist,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I spend with my kids.

They’re six, four, and six months old. Still little. Still wonderfully chaotic. But I can already feel the clock speeding up. “The days are long but the years are short” as they say.

Did you know by the time your child turns 18, you’ve already used up about 90% of the in-person time you’ll ever have with them?

I have 12 years left with my daughter before she leaves the nest. Loads of time, right? But that’s only a dozen summer vacations. And even less time until I become the uncool dad.

That realization induced a sense of urgency and inspired this diary. How can I spend more time with them today?

The average American spends two hours a day on housework and shopping. That adds up to an entire month each year! I know I’ll look back and wish I’d spent more time eating breakfast with my kids instead of washing dishes.

This is where everyday innovations can help us reclaim our most important non-renewable resource: time.

As Rational Optimists we love a grand vision. Supersonic jets streaking across continents, nuclear reactors humming with clean energy, humanoid robots ready to lend a hand. These big innovations inspire us.

But little breakthroughs matter too. Today I’ll introduce you to 3 companies and their founders turning mundane chores into family time.

A time machine disguised as a stove

When my kids ask for boiled eggs for breakfast, I wince. The water takes five minutes to boil and another five to cook. What if water boiled almost instantly?

Impulse Labs is building a battery-powered, precision-controlled, outrageously fast stove that’s radically better than anything in your kitchen today.

I visited Impulse’s headquarters in San Francisco and got a hands-on live demo. They ran me through a cool experiment. We put a pot of cold water on a “high powered” gas stove, and it took 10 minutes to boil.

Impulse’s stove boiled the same amount of water in under 40 seconds. It reminded me of watching a Tesla Cybertruck towing another Cybertruck race past a Lamborghini. It’s the moment you realize the game has changed.

Along with being the most powerful stove ever, it’s beautiful. With a glass-ceramic top that stays cool to the touch, so your kids don’t burn their hands, and magnetic knobs that pop off for easy cleaning.

It’s basically a giant iPad that cooks.

The stove tracks your pan’s temperature, adjusting it in real time, like cruise control for cooking. You can fry an egg just the way you like, temper chocolate, and even sous-vide a steak in a pan – and never burn a thing.

Rational Optimists, this is the best-designed appliance I’ve ever used. When I flew home and made lunch on my old stove, it felt primitive. Like reverting from an iPhone back to a Nokia brick.

It’s also Part 1 of a grander vision.

Impulse wants to build a decentralized energy grid.

That’s their ultimate goal.

Inside each stove is a powerful lithium battery. That battery doesn’t just cook – it stores energy, continuing to work during blackouts. And it can discharge that energy back into your home. Like a mini Tesla Powerwall, embedded in your countertop.

Most of us will never buy a home battery. But we will buy a new stove. And once Impulse is in millions of kitchens, it could quietly transform how we power our homes.

Bill Gates’ vision was “a computer in every home.” Impulse Labs want to put a battery in every appliance. Next time I remodel my kitchen, I’m  getting one.

What’s your least favorite chore?

For me, it’s vacuuming. My wife might point out that’s because it’s the only chore I do.

But vacuuming is the kind of time-sucking task a robot should have taken over by now. And technically, it has... if you’re okay with a Roomba that bumps into walls, gets stuck on rugs and needs constant rescuing. That’s why I’m pumped about the new vacuum from Matic Robotics.

Just like the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, Matic isn’t the first robot vacuum. But it’s the first that works the way you want it to.

Matic is a fully autonomous robot that sees and cleans your home like a human. It uses five cameras and onboard AI to create a 3D Google Street View-style map of your home, complete with furniture, floor types and elevations.

Matic knows the breakfast table gets dirtier than the guest bedroom. It learns your home like a butler would and prioritizes where to clean.

Unlike most smart devices (which are often dumb), Matic also recognizes the difference between spilled juice and dry crumbs, and seamlessly switches between vacuuming and mopping on different surfaces.

It also looks like something Steve Jobs would be proud of.

That cute little robot, powered by a NVIDIA Jetson Orin chip, has roughly a million times more computing power than the machine which put Apollo 11 on the moon. A spacecraft’s worth of power in a vacuum!

Matic’s founder and CEO Mehul Nariyawala is motivated by pure rational optimism. His mission is to give American families their time back. “Every minute Matic gives back is a minute I get to spend with my kids instead of cleaning spaghetti off the floor,” he told me.

I asked Mehul for his vision: “A future where Matic is your personal butler, like Alfred from Batman. You don’t have to worry about housework. It says I got this. I’ll ping you if I need help. It can make calls for you, like phoning the plumber if it notices a pipe loose.”

As Mehul passionately explained, “Once we get this right, our kids won’t believe chores used to be a thing.” That’s a future I want to live in!

A new computer that won’t hijack your brain

Smartphones are miracles. Instantly seeing a loved one across the globe would seem like literal magic to our great grandparents.

But smartphones are also addictive black holes. Instead of giving you your time back, they can swallow entire evenings.

I feel awful and stressed for no good reason when I spend too much time on my phone. I now leave it at home when I go out with my family. Otherwise, it’s like a little demon tempting me from my pocket. “Hey, just take a quick look.”

When I met Daylight Computer founder Anjan Katta, it was clear he was a man on a mission: building a less addictive computer that’s good for your brain.

Anjan started Daylight because screens were exhausting him: “I was getting screen headaches, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I hated how little time I spent actually doing focused work. I needed a computer that makes me better.”

His baby, the Daylight DC-1, is unlike any other computer I’ve ever used. Its “screen” is a Live Paper display that looks and feels like book pages, but it’s basically an iPad.

I remember watching a YouTube video called “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work.” It showed toddlers trying to scroll through magazines like they were iPads. (Funny, but sad.)

Daylight is the total opposite. It feels like reading a newspaper or book, but it’s a computer. You can write, browse the web, take notes, or read PDFs without the usual barrage of distractions. It reminds me of when I used to flick through the newspaper with my grandad.

My friend and famed economist Tyler Cowen called it "the best general reading device humans ever have invented.” Try one and you’ll see why.

Daylight’s tagline is "the computer, de-invented." I think that undersells it. This isn’t about going backward. It’s about making your computer work for you.

Most screens strain our eyes, disrupt our sleep and force our brains into an always-on state. Daylight solves that puzzle. Anjan rethought the entire device around how our brains and eyes work. For example, at night, it emits a gentle, pure amber glow, eliminating the harsh blue light that can ruin your sleep.

One “coming soon” feature I’m excited for is a built-in AI reading assistant that lets you query passages without leaving the page. Your own personal AI tutor. My fellow sci-fi nerds, this is Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s illustrated primer brought to life.

I hope Daylight wins. In an age dominated by digital distractions, a device that allows you to focus and think clearly could become a new superpower. Maybe Daylight will give us our attention spans back.

I’m jealous of the future my kids will experience.

Thanks to entrepreneurs like Sam (CEO of Impulse Labs), Mehul, and Anjan they’ll know a watched pot always boils, rely on Jetsons-style “Rosey the Robots” to clean, and learn efficiently from AI tutors without computers usurping their brains.

And yes they’ll also ride in robotaxis, fly supersonic and maybe even visit space or own a personal-sized nuclear reactor.

But as Rational Optimists, we must support everyday innovation. It’s proof of our core philosophy. Human ingenuity consistently makes life better.

Progress is a million small wins compounded over decades. It’s the reason we don’t break our backs carrying buckets of water from the well. It’s why a newborn in 2025 is 100 times more likely to survive than one born in 1825. It’s why you can access the sum of all human knowledge on a glowing slab in your pocket.

What to do next?

Be an early adopter.

Hardware is hard. These founders toiled for years to build something real. Support them. Try their products. If you love them, tell your friends. These things spread by word of mouth.

In the end, the best innovations give you back one more bedtime story. One more family dinner. One more moment with someone you love.

I bet you have a lot of friends who’ve never heard of these time-saving technologies. Forward them this email.

Help us free more minds to create more Rational Optimists!

—Stephen McBride

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Stephen McBride is a co-founder of the Rational Optimist Society.

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