Rational Optimists take America

30 innovators in 2 weeks

I’m on my way to LA kicking off a two-week sprint across America with my ROS co-founders Matt Ridley and Dan Steinhart. We’re meeting more than 30 of the boldest builders and thinkers in labs, hangars, and factories from San Francisco to Washington, DC.

Matt wrote The Rational Optimist 15 years ago to prove that — despite what the corporate media tells you — the world keeps getting better.

He’s now writing a follow-up with a twist: The future is still bright, but only if we stop getting in our own way.

In other words, we must defeat The Blight.

The Blight is the ever-growing tangle of rules and layers of bureaucracy strangling innovation. The Blight is why you wince when you open your power bill, why health insurance costs a second mortgage, and why America can’t seem to build anything on time or on budget.

After half a century of letting The Blight win, a new generation of innovators is fighting back and winning.

Over the next two weeks we’ll be on the road in Austin, SF, LA, DC, NYC and Denver, meeting with innovators to see how they’re rebuilding the American frontier one breakthrough at a time.

We’ll have plenty to share from our “Rational Optimists Take America” tour in the weeks ahead.

One of the meetings I’m most excited about is with Boom Supersonic, a leading company bringing back supersonic flight.

Look at this chart of flight speeds over time:

The yellow line is the reality of airliner speeds stagnating for 70 years. The blue X shows how fast we could go, and how fast the Concorde did go, in the 70s.

I have to spend nearly 24 hours trekking from Abu Dhabi to LA. What a waste. Instead of being crammed in a seat for 20 hours, I could’ve been home with my kids, reading one more bedtime story. I want supersonic flight, and I want it now!

Unfortunately, supersonic flight was an early victim of The Blight. For the full backstory, including why the government banned it, read our Deep Dive.

Thankfully, we’re finally righting that wrong. In June the President signed an executive order overturning America’s ban on supersonic flight.

Now it’s on innovators to deliver.

Boom Supersonic’s founder and CEO Blake Scholl will show me around Boom’s Denver HQ, where they designed the XB1 — a demo jet that broke the sound barrier six times without making a single sonic boom.

Boom's North Carolina Superfactory can make 33 of these “boomless” jets a year, with future expansion set to double capacity.

Blake’s team has already solved one of the biggest problems with supersonic flight — noise. I’m interested to see how they’re solving others, like cost and fuel efficiency.

Let me know if you have any questions for Blake.

Then we have Astro Mechanica, whose founder Ian Brooke is laser-focused on revamping the supersonic jet engine. Astro’s breakthrough is the turboelectric adaptive engine, which is part jet, part electric fan, part rocket. 

Ian plans to blow up the entire 1950s airline model and reimagine how we fly. His vision is basically Uber for the skies:

• On-Demand Flights. Forget fixed schedules. Book flights when you need them like you’d hail a ride.
  

• Smaller Airports. Utilize thousands of underused regional and private airfields, bypassing the cattle-call congestion of major hubs.
  

• More Jets. Small, private jet-sized supersonic aircraft dispatched dynamically based on demand.

Supersonic flight might be the most underrated innovation of our time. In the 1960s, jets transformed Hawaii from a distant paradise to a vacation hotspot, cutting travel times in half versus old propeller planes. Tourism multiplied sixfold.

Soon, you could board a supersonic flight in New York at 10 am and land in Los Angeles at 9 am.

A literal time machine.

That’s the near future… as long as we get out of our own way.

Nuclear power is another area where the Blight was winning for decades.

Can you guess how many new reactor designs America’s nuclear police, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), have greenlit since it took control of atomic energy half a century ago?

Zero!

Only two reactors started commercial operation on the NRC’s watch, compared to 133 before it.

The NRC didn’t exactly ban new nuclear plants, but it may as well have. It takes roughly seven years to review the application for a new reactor.

It’s no wonder why we’ve closed more nuclear power plants than we’ve opened this century.

We’re entering a new bull market for atomic energy.

In March, the President signed four executive orders to free nuclear energy from The Blight.

The Department of Energy followed, launching its Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. It selected ten startups to build America’s first wave of small microreactors (SMRs). These are compact, school-bus-sized reactors that you can drop anywhere…and they can generate enough energy to power a data center or remote town for decades.

The Program’s goal is to get three SMRs up and running by July 4, 2026 — America’s 250th birthday.

For the first time in half a century, private teams are being allowed to build and operate test reactors!

To be clear, the NRC is still a mess. As mentioned in our recent Deep Dive, the first US SMRs to turn on will be under the DOE or DOD “loopholes.” Weirdly enough, the fastest path to building SMRs is through Washington, which has been nuclear’s worst enemy for half a century.

Atomic innovation has been dead so long it’s a “I’ll believe it when I see it” story for many people.

Well, drive across America right now and you’ll see founders in hard hats, digging dirt for their test reactors.

Valar Atomics just broke ground in Utah on its first test reactor, aiming for initial criticality in 2026.

Radiant announced its first reactor manufacturing site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the spiritual home of American nuclear.

Aalo Atomics broke ground on Aalo-X, its demo reactor at Idaho National Lab.

Second Atomic Age: Day 1.

I’m convinced Aalo Atomics, Valar Atomics and Radiant will hit the July 4, 2026, deadline. I’m excited to visit Aalo and Valar next week and see the progress they’re making.

Rational optimists know energy is the master resource, the bedrock of every other innovation.

How much energy we use is our “speedometer’ for civilizational progress. We stalled out in the 70s when we made building nuclear reactors effectively illegal…just like supersonic flight.

Now we’re entering America’s second atomic age, and it’s going to be better than you could imagine.

Crank the power up and the innovation flywheel starts to spin…

Cheap energy → cheaper manufacturing → automated factories → abundant desalination → green deserts → everyday life that’s cleaner, cheaper, faster.

When you combine fast travel and cheap energy…

You get drones.

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and predicted drones would soon crisscross the sky, carrying Amazon parcels. 

But delivery guys are still dropping cardboard boxes at my door.

The Blight strikes again!

The FAA's “beyond visual line of sight” rule required operators to physically see their drones at all times. This made it impossible to launch a service that could deliver thousands, never mind millions, of parcels daily.

But the dam broke in 2024. The FAA handed Amazon, Zipline, UPS and Google’s Wing permission to make deliveries without someone watching from the ground.

Now the agency is drafting one nationwide rulebook for drones, so innovators can launch without begging for permission every time they take off.

As I wrote in a recent Diary:

Drones are electricity with wings.

And unlike nuclear power or supersonic flight, you don’t need a billion-dollar test site or a mountain of permits to start flying.

Zipline and Google’s Wing already drop off thousands of packages to Americans every week. While drone delivery gets all the hype now, I think the most important innovations will happen elsewhere:

• Catching bad guys. Since launching in 2017, Atlanta startup Flock Safety quietly built one of America’s largest crime-fighting networks. It claims its 80,000 AI-powered cameras help solve over a million crimes a year.

  Now those same eyes are taking flight. Flock’s new “made in the USA” drones sit in rooftop docks, waiting for the next 911 call. When it comes in, the drone launches in seconds, streams live video to officers on the ground, and tracks suspects.

• Spotting sharks. The University of California recently launched drones that patrol the surf at Padar Beach. When the drone spots a Great White, it alerts 80 local lifeguards, surf shop owners and parents of kids taking lessons. Hello, digital lifeguard that doesn’t blink.

• Saving kids. A four-year-old in Ghana was fading fast from a snakebite. The clinic had 45 minutes before her heart would fail…but no antivenom. Within five minutes, Zipline had a drone flying at over 100 kilometers per hour, parachuting down a vial of antivenom just in time.

Before the FAA changed its “beyond visual sight” rules in 2024, this life-saving drone flight would have been… 

Illegal in the US.

We’re in a rare moment when the future is up for grabs. We’re freeing technologies that have been stuck on the naughty list for half a century.

The breakthroughs are real. The momentum is real.

But The Blight still has a death grip on crucial parts of the economy:

• Housing. In New York City about 40% of all existing buildings couldn’t legally be built today. They’re either too tall, too small, or have too many apartments. The city that stood up the Empire State Building in a year has made most building illegal!

  I think US startup Cuby has the best shot at breaking housing’s Blight. Watch my interview with Cuby co-founder and COO Aleksandr Gampel here and let me know what you think in the comments. We have much more to come.

• Healthcare. Getting a new drug on pharmacy shelves now takes 10 to 15 years and costs around $2.5 billion. That’s roughly 60X more than it did in the 1950s. These delays create a graveyard of patients who could have been saved if we had moved faster.

Ultimately the battle against The Blight boils down to just that: moving faster.

I love this old British WWI poster:

I imagine my six-year-old Aubrey asking: “Dad, what did you do when everyone said the world was doomed?”

I want Aubrey, and your kids and grandkids, to know the truth: The world is bursting with opportunities. With grit and innovation, we can tackle almost any problem. That’s why we started ROS.

Stories decide what innovations become reality.

We let a scary story about “radioactive goo” beat the facts, and take away nuclear energy — our cleanest, safest, most reliable source of power.

We banned supersonic flights because a vocal minority didn’t like the noise.

Steve Jobs said it best: "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation to come".

As Rational Optimists, our job is to tell better stories about the “doers” changing the world for the better.

Imagine talking to your kids or grandkids years from now. “Pull over a chair kid and let me tell you about the world when we took 10 years to approve a nuclear plant, $2.5 billion to get a new drug and five hours to fly coast to coast.”

 “And what did you do grandpa?” 

You smile, take a sip of coffee, and say: “We fought The Blight, and we won.”

Comment below on how you’ve experienced The Blight in your life.

—Stephen McBride