Remember The Jetsons?
George Jetson commuted to work in his flying car, which folded neatly into a briefcase. Robot maids took care of the housework. A three-hour workday left plenty of time to relax.
The cartoon reflected America's boundless technological optimism of the early 1960s. Unfortunately, that was the peak. Something derailed American innovation, and optimism, in the 1970s. That something still lingers today, suppressing our potential.
In this Diary, we’ll explore this phenomenon. And I’ll make the case that we’re currently living through the most transformative moment since the 1970s.
If I’m right, America’s next chapter will be its best. The next 50 years will look radically different than the last 50. And you'll want to rethink how you invest for 2025 and beyond.
Wtfhappenedin1971.com is a website worth visiting. It’s a collection of dozens of charts showing how the early 70s was a pivot point for America, in a bad way. Three examples:
1: Wages stopped rising in lockstep with productivity. While our economy kept growing, workers received less of the benefit:

Source: Economic Policy Institute
2: Prices began to skyrocket. For 70 years, a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup cost a dime. In the early 70s, the price started to go parabolic:

Source: Political Calculations
3: Incomes diverged. Income gains accelerated for richer folks but slowed down for the middle class.

Source: CBPP.org
Before 1971, America turned innovation into shared prosperity. A factory worker could support a family, own a home, and send kids to college on a single income. Then something changed. The rich started getting a lot richer, while gains for everyone else slowed down.
So WTF happened in 1971? The conventional explanation: President Nixon took America off the gold standard, giving politicians carte blanche to borrow and create new money.
For a full explanation of how this decision warped the American economy, I recommend Lyn Alden’s book, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better.
But that, I think, is only half the story. The real earthquake hit in 1973 when the OPEC oil cartel imposed an embargo.
Oil prices tripled in months. Americans found themselves waiting in long lines for gas. The economy plunged into recession. The 1973 oil shock ended the era of reliably cheap energy:

Source: FRED
America faced a choice at this moment. The country was sitting on plenty of its own oil. We could have pumped more. Instead, our oil output fell 40% over the next 35 years.
Better yet, we should’ve built out our nuclear generation capacity. Instead, we chose to use less energy. In 1973, for the first time since America’s founding, energy use per person turned down. It has never recovered:

Source: Our World in Data
Conservationists who see this as a win are missing the big picture. America’s energy use per person rose by about 2% annually for nearly two centuries—from its founding in 1776 to 1973.
More energy let us do more work, more efficiently, dramatically transforming the physical world.
When energy was cheap and abundant, Detroit built muscle cars with roaring V8 engines.
Boeing's jets conquered the Atlantic. NASA's rockets reached the moon. An endless stream of power-hungry inventions like washing machines and dishwashers made life easier.
The early '70s was peak “Made in USA.” Our largest companies built cars, drilled oil, and made stuff. One in four Americans worked in factories, earning solid middle-class wages.
The 1973 oil crisis shattered this world. Manufacturer profits plunged. Mass layoffs followed. Economist William Nordhaus found America's economic slowdown was "primarily centered in those sectors that were most energy intensive." Read: industries that used the most energy.
My friend Matt Ridley, honorary founder of The Rational Optimist Society, wrote:
It is commonplace today to say that innovation is speeding up, but like much conventional wisdom, it is wrong. With the exception of the digital industry, the West is experiencing an innovation famine.
Rational Optimist Society honoree Peter Thiel agrees, saying: “We wanted flying cars, but all we got was 140 characters?” (a reference to Twitter).
When cheap energy disappeared, American innovation turned away from the physical world and toward the digital realm. Innovators shifted their focus to creations that didn’t need much energy.
Look at the most valuable US companies then versus now. In 1970, the giants were General Motors, ExxonMobil, Texaco, and General Electric—companies that made stuff.
Today, Apple, Microsoft, and Google dominate. These companies mostly move bits around the internet.

Not only do their business models require little energy. They require far less manpower. IBM was the largest company in 1970. Apple is the largest today. Apple makes 10X more revenue per employee!

Source: Stock Analysis
The digital revolution reshaped the American Dream and transformed our screens. But it left our physical world frozen in time. Buildings, bridges, and highways all look the same as in 1970. In some places, they look worse than 50 years ago because maintenance has barely kept up.
Physical innovation hasn’t just stalled. It’s gone backward:
We’ve closed more nuclear power plants than we’ve opened this century.
America hasn't built a major airport in 30 years.
Airplanes fly no faster than they did in the 1950s.
But it’s all changing now.
1973 marked the beginning of America's innovation famine. 2024 marked its end.
It's morning in America
When our grandkids pull up the charts 50 years from now, they'll ask: "WTF happened in 2024?" But unlike 1973, they'll be asking why things suddenly started getting better.
After 50 years of rust and decline, American manufacturing is roaring back to life. Spending on new factories hit $1.4 trillion last year… easily a record.

Source: FRED
Most of that $1.4 trillion is being used to build computer chip, electric vehicle, and battery factories. These are the building blocks of tomorrow's economy.
Meanwhile, our best and brightest are focused on producing cheap, abundant energy again. Big tech is investing in next-gen nuclear. Fracking has already lifted American energy production to new records… and just might give us cheap geothermal next.
This resurgence of real-world innovation can usher in a new era of widespread prosperity. The digital revolution helped coders get rich but eliminated a lot of other jobs. Building real, physical stuff gives opportunities to many more people. You can already see glimmers in the statistics.
According to the Federal Reserve, the bottom half of Americans now own $3.9 trillion in wealth—a record.
And data from Bank of America shows wages for lower-income earners are growing at a faster clip than for high-income households.
For the first time in half a century, America is building again. The spirit of innovation that gave us the transcontinental railroad, the Apollo program, and the Empire State Building is waking up from its 50-year slumber.
Below, we’ll explore how this “innovation feast” is washing across the entire economy.
The Five Frontiers
Five specific innovations are driving America’s transformation.
I call them “The Five Frontiers."
We’ll walk through each of the frontiers in detail, so we can see clearly what we’re accelerating toward in 2025.
Frontier 1: The energy enlightenment that enables all other innovation
Human civilization is like a rocket ship. Each time we discover and embrace a more powerful fuel source, we blast to new heights.
In the 1800s, we switched from wood to coal, and the Industrial Revolution roared to life. In the early 1900s, we upgraded to oil. Cars replaced horses, planes took flight, and modern life as we know it took shape.
Nuclear power should have been the next great leap, but we turned our backs on it in the 1970s. 2024 marked the beginning of the second atomic age and the next giant leap in human progress.
Nuclear has been reawakened by an unexpected force: Big tech companies have gone “all in” on atomic energy. These companies need clean, safe, abundant energy for their ambitious AI plans. They know nuclear is their best option by far.
Microsoft announced it would help revive Three Mile Island—yes, that Three Mile Island. Amazon is pouring $500 million into pocket-sized nuclear reactors to power its data centers. Google and Meta are also racing to split atoms to feed their AI beasts.
For decades, nuclear's biggest challenge (aside from regulators) wasn't technology. It was finding customers willing to sign long-term agreements. Now, it has the backing of the richest, most successful companies on Earth.
Big tech’s deep pockets and connections in Washington will accelerate the nuclear renaissance by at least a decade. You can already see glimmers:
Bill Gates's TerraPower broke ground on America's first “mini reactor” in Wyoming. Think IKEA for nuclear power, with standardized parts made in factories and assembled on site.
In Austin, I visited Aalo Atomics, which is building reactors small enough to fit in a New York City apartment but powerful enough to power a neighborhood. Its goal is to churn out 100 mini reactors per year by the end of the decade.
Radiant Nuclear is developing reactors so compact and safe, you can transport them on the back of a truck.
Nuclear is just the start of our energy acceleration. Last year, more solar power was installed worldwide than between 1956 and 2017. Solar is the fastest-growing power source in human history:

Source: Dr. Robert Rohde on X
In 2004, it took a whole year to install 1 gigawatt of solar power. Now, we’re deploying that much every 12 hours!
Solar has a big drawback: It only works when the sun shines. We are on our way to solving this problem with batteries. In 2024, America added more battery capacity than the previous six years combined:

Source: EIA
Imagine driving an electric car from New York to Miami on a single charge. Or every appliance in your home being cordless. That’s the future that smaller, cheaper, more powerful batteries can give us.
Rapidly improving batteries are also the key enabler of humanoid household robots. It’s not like you can run a gas-powered robot housekeeper in your home. But a battery-powered one? No problem.
And don’t forget geothermal energy’s untapped potential. If we drill deep enough, we could power the planet for millennia using the Earth’s natural heat.
And I haven’t even mentioned fracking, which gets my vote for the most underappreciated innovation of the past decade.
It took America from being dependent on Middle Eastern oil to the world’s biggest-ever producer of oil and gas!

America is entering a new age of energy abundance. This isn't just about cheaper electric bills. As I explained earlier, a lack of energy is what’s been holding back physical innovation.
Energy abundance will give us robot helpers in every home. It will automate factories. It could revive America’s manufacturing might.
And yes, it will also be a critical component in creating the flying cars we've been promised for decades. Here’s Joby Aviation’s prototype. It aims to take you from downtown Manhattan to JFK Airport in seven minutes:

Source: AmNewYork
Clean, abundant energy unlocks the other four frontiers.
Frontier 2: The transformation of transportation
Railroads first united America. Cars transformed our cities and gave us suburbs. Airplanes shrank the globe and created the modern business world.
Now, we're in the early days of the next great transportation revolution.
I had my first robotaxi experience in San Francisco in October. A white Jaguar Waymo pulled up with a spinning sensor on its roof that looked like a high-tech crown.
I sat down and the screen welcomed me by name: “Good afternoon, Stephen. Heading to The Interval at Long Now… This experience may feel futuristic… We’ll do all the driving.” One press of the “start ride” button, and we were off.
It’s a surreal experience to see the steering wheel turn itself. The strangest part was the silence. No chitchat. Just the soft hum of the electric engine and the distinct feeling that I had arrived in the future. Riding in a regular Uber to the airport afterward felt like backtracking from an iPhone to a flip phone.
Robotaxis had their coming-out moment in 2024. In 2023, Waymo was doing 10,000 paid rides a week. Now, it’s completing more than 175,000 trips/week across Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Next stop: Miami.

My Waymo drove flawlessly… like it was trying to make a driving instructor proud. The technology only gets better from here. I bet there will be more robotaxis than human-driven taxis in San Francisco five years from now. Parents in the city are already using Waymo to ferry their kids to soccer practice.
Over 40,000 Americans die on the roads each year. Self-driving cars can slash that by 90%+. They have literal electronic eyes in the back of their heads, never break the speed limit, never drink and drive, and never type a text message while going 100 mph.
A new study of 25 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymos found they “reduced injury claims” by 92% compared to human drivers. Within my lifetime, it’ll become socially unacceptable in some cities to take the wheel, like smoking indoors. Too dangerous.
One day, I’ll tell my grandkids about my first ride in a self-driving car. They might look at me funny and say, “People used to drive cars?”
You used to be able to fly from NYC to London in three hours on Concorde’s supersonic jet. Today, that same trip takes seven hours. We’re flying slower than we did in 2003.
The Concorde was a marvel that died from its own excesses. It devoured 5,600 gallons of fuel every hour. Its sonic boom was so powerful, it could shatter windows—forcing it to fly only over oceans.
Boom Supersonic is making America supersonic again.
The startup completed 10 successful test flights this year. Its jet streaked across California’s Mojave Desert at 730 mph, faster than any Boeing or Airbus in the sky. Its commercial jet will cruise at 1,300 mph, cutting the time it takes to cross the Atlantic by more than half.
Boom is solving the problem that killed the Concorde: noise. Its engine purrs quietly at low speeds over land, then roars to supersonic speeds over oceans. This turns that earth-shattering roar into a soft thump, letting its supersonic jets fly anywhere. And they'll do it by burning a fraction of the fuel, making tickets affordable.
Breakfast in New York, lunch in London, home for dinner with your family. Supersonic travel gives us a world where no two major cities are more than a few hours apart. We’re reviving the spirit of aviation innovation America lost 50 years ago.
In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes. He predicted drones would soon crisscross the sky carrying Amazon parcels. But delivery guys are still dropping cardboard boxes at my door. What happened?
US government red tape essentially made drone deliveries illegal. The rules said drones had to always be within sight of the remote pilot. This made it impossible to launch a service that could deliver thousands of parcels daily.
The dam broke in 2024. Washington handed Amazon, Zipline, and Google’s Wing permission to make deliveries without someone watching from the ground. This is the game-changer we’ve been waiting for!
Zipline already made its millionth autonomous delivery. It’s delivering medications for 4,500+ hospitals, including the Cleveland Clinic. And it’s flying Sweetgreen’s salads to customers.
In parts of Texas and California, drones gently drop Amazon orders at customers' doorsteps in less than 30 minutes. Amazon’s goal is to deliver 500 million packages by drone per year by 2029.
Google’s Wing delivered more than 30,000 parcels this year for Walmart in Dallas.
Even police departments are joining the revolution. In Scottsdale, when you call 911, a drone launches automatically and reaches the scene within 85 seconds. In Santa Monica, $13,000 police drones help track fleeing suspects.
If you want to see how future wars will be fought, look at Ukraine. Drones, not missiles or artillery, have destroyed two-thirds of Russia's tanks in the past year. Drones are now responsible for most battlefield losses.
There's something powerful and inspiring about seeing innovation take physical form. When a robot car drives you across town or a flying drone lands at your doorstep, you “feel” the future.
Frontier 3: Biotech breakthroughs
HIV cured. Cancer vaccines cut death rate in half. Special eyedrops give kid sight for the first time.
Imagine reading these headlines 20 years ago. You'd think they were cruel jokes. But in 2024, these headlines were a reality. Innovators are transforming medicine from a game of whack-a-mole symptoms into precision engineering of the body.
Scientists have retooled mRNA to create cancer-killing jabs. In trials for the deadliest form of skin cancer, personalized treatments halved death rates.
Each patient received a custom-made therapeutic tailored to their specific tumor. The jab teaches their immune system to recognize and destroy their unique cancer cells, essentially creating “a most-wanted poster” for the immune system.
Similar trials for pancreatic, lung, colorectal, and other deadly cancers are showing promising early results.
Instead of bluntly carpet-bombing tumors with radiation, which makes patients violently ill, doctors can now design precision cancer-killing shots. It’s possible these personalized therapeutics could turn cancer from a death sentence into a curable disease.
Antonio was born blind. Multiple surgeries failed to restore his sight. As a last hope, doctors in Miami gave the 14-year-old kid a special kind of gene-editing eyedrops.
He took them once a month for about a year. He can now see for the first time ever!
CRISPR (gene editing) technology will allow more and more kids who’ve stared at darkness their whole lives to enjoy movies and play tag. It lets scientists edit DNA as easily as you edit a Word document—like fixing typos in your body's instruction manual.
2024 was the year CRISPR moved from the lab to the clinic, with the FDA approving 20 new genetic therapies.
Harvard doctors gave five kids born deaf a single gene-editing injection in their ears. Within weeks, they were dancing to music and hearing their parents’ voices for the first time.
CRISPR allows us to rewrite the code of life and cure all kinds of rare disorders.
In the 1990s, scientists studying the Gila monster discovered it can survive on one meal per month. They created a synthetic version of this lizard’s spit and turned it into the most important drug of the 21st century: semaglutide.
You likely know it as Ozempic or Wegovy. Semaglutide was originally invented as a diabetes treatment. But it’s morphed into a medical Swiss Army knife tackling every modern health nightmare.
First, we discovered semaglutide melts fat off waistlines. When future historians write about 2024, they might mark it as the year humanity first gained control over obesity.
A recent survey found 6% of Americans are taking semaglutide. 2023 was the first year in recorded history that the US obesity rate fell. Coincidence?

Source: Financial Times
In a slew of recent trials, doctors discovered semaglutide also:
Treats Alzheimer's, staves off Arthritis, reduces heart attacks and strokes, suppresses addiction, and lowers the risk of developing kidney, pancreatic, ovarian, liver, and colorectal cancers.
Semaglutide is proving to be a reset button for human health, helping people drink less alcohol and reduce drug addictions too. It's rewiring the brain’s reward system, helping people find less pleasure in harmful substances and behaviors.
This “miracle in a syringe” will reshape entire societies. Imagine what America would look like if it were thinner and less diabetic. How might communities change if addiction became more treatable?
All from a curious investigation into the saliva of a desert lizard!
Noland Arbaugh was paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a freak spinal cord injury. He couldn’t hold a book or get a job. Using the internet involved awkwardly poking an iPad with a mouth stick.
In early 2024, Noland became the first human to get a Neuralink chip implant. About the size of a quarter, the chip slid in under his skull and now nestles against his brain. Neuralink can read his thoughts and translate them into action, which allows him to control a computer with his mind.
Neuralink completely transformed Noland’s life. Not only can he play games and use the internet just like you and me, but he can also work! Neuralink gave him the ability to find purpose, provide for his family, and live a life that was never before possible for a paralyzed person.
We haven’t even touched on what may be 2024’s most headline-worthy breakthrough. After four decades and 40 million deaths, we finally have HIV beat.
A new drug called lenacapavir showed 100% protection in trials with 5,000 women. The shots worked so well, the study was stopped early so everyone could get the treatment.
In a single year, we've given sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, movement to the paralyzed, and hope to cancer patients. We’re showing human ingenuity can conquer almost any disease, whether it takes lizard spit, engineered viruses, or chips in our brains.
These breakthroughs mean more birthdays celebrated, more graduations attended, and more time spent with our kids. Innovation is our superpower against human suffering. Remember, nothing—absolutely nothing—matters more than our health.
Frontier 4: Physical AI—robots that learn
There’s a long-running joke that AI can easily beat the world’s best chess player but can’t fold a crumpled t-shirt. It’s funny because it’s true. Simple physical tasks have been incredibly hard for robots to master.
Startup Physical Intelligence is one of many companies using AI to solve this problem. Its “AI brain” allows robots to perform almost any task.
In November, it showed off its robot performing a wide range of household chores, from folding laundry to cleaning up a messy table. It’s The Jetsons Rosey the Robot in real life.
We’re on the cusp of a future where you can simply tell a robot what you want done, and it’ll figure out how to do it—even if it's never done that task before.
This is already taking shape in Amazon warehouses. Meet “Digit,” a two-legged robot that can “see” and handle objects like a human, thanks to new AI upgrades:

Source: Scott Hansen on Medium
Amazon’s robots can now identify and store inventory 75% faster. How many billions of dollars is that worth?
Robots have been in factories for decades. But they were mostly one-trick ponies. They’d endlessly repeat the same task based on preprogrammed rules in carefully controlled settings.
AI changes this because it lets robots learn new things. Soon, the same robot that unloads trucks in the morning could help assemble products in the afternoon and organize inventory at night. We’re moving from single-purpose machines to versatile helpers that can understand and follow instructions.
Imagine a handful of people overseeing thousands of robots running a factory. Now, imagine if America were full of these factories. We could produce 1,000X more stuff for a fraction of today’s cost. When THAT happens (it’s already started), it could create trillions of dollars in wealth.
All kinds of weird and wonderful new robots are already here. Monks in Wyoming are using robots to carve intricate Gothic details in their new monastery in days instead of weeks. And in Tyson Foods’ new meat plants, robots process 30% more chicken with 250 fewer human workers.
It’s no exaggeration to say that self-learning robots can reinvent American manufacturing. This will be one of the biggest investment opportunities in the next decade. And it’s only the start.
Physical AI is sweeping across industries, transforming long-established ways of doing things.
Self-driving cars: Tesla’s self-driving tech used to be like a student memorizing a massive rulebook. Yellow light, slow down. Spot a cyclist? Give them space. It memorized 300,000+ rules, which made the system brittle.
Tesla threw out the rulebook and replaced all that human code with an AI system. Instead of following rules, the car now makes decisions based on what it sees.
Tesla’s self-driving tech improved 100X in 2024, measured by how often humans needed to take over the wheel:

Source: Freda Duan on X
Robot surgeons: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford created a robot surgeon that works 30% faster than human surgeons while maintaining precision. The robot learned to handle surgical needles, lift and manipulate tissue carefully, sew stitches, and perform new surgeries all by simply watching videos.
In The Matrix, Neo learns kung fu by “downloading” it into his brain. That’s now real for robots.
A decade from now, the best neuro, plastic, and orthopedic surgeons might all be the same robot. Notice the thread: All these robots are ditching preprogrammed rules to instead learn with AI.
Bionic limbs: Startup Atom Limbs is building AI-powered bionic arms that read electrical signals from your body. I mentioned Noland Arbaugh, who is paralyzed from the neck down. Neuralink’s brain chip lets him control a computer with his mind. Soon, he’ll be able to control bionic body parts with his mind.
Eventually, we could create complete exoskeletons that allow paralyzed people to move around freely.
AI robots don’t just learn… they can teach! We’ve known exactly how to give all kids a world-class education since 1984. It comes down to personal attention. Give almost any kid a one-on-one tutor tuned into their strengths and learning style, and they’ll excel. But we couldn't afford to give every child their own one-on-one teacher. Until now.
Khanmigo is an AI tutor built by Khan Academy and OpenAI. It tailors lessons to each student’s unique needs. It’s already being used in 266 schools across America, including 20,000 kids in Indiana.
For $15/student/year, kids get unlimited access to a tutor that never tires, never loses patience, and constantly learns how to teach each child better. Khanmigo is the first AI tool I’m excited for my kids to try.
Picture a third grader. He’s a visual learner who loves Star Wars and struggles with math. His AI tutor can design lessons to explain multiplication through lightsaber battles. It's like having a teacher who has known your child since kindergarten and understands exactly how they learn best.
Think back to your own schooling. Remember that one amazing teacher who believed in you, who explained things in a way that just clicked? Now imagine every student having that experience, every day, in every subject.
Traditional schooling with rigid schedules and standardized tests is a curiosity killer. I hated school but rediscovered the joy of learning when I was free to learn my own way. AI tutors ensure our children never lose that spark.
They let us realize the dream of “no kid left behind” AND allow every child to soar as high as their curiosity can take them. Slower learners will get the one-on-one help they need. And if your kid’s a genius, AI will help her explore Newtonian physics in third grade.
A world-class, personally tailored education for every kid, regardless of zip code. What a time to be a parent!
A hedge fund manager I know uses AI to homeschool his three kids. He told ChatGPT about their strengths and weaknesses, the values he wanted to instill in them, and what textbooks they owned. ChatGPT drew up full weekly learning schedules and even graded their work. None of this was possible even a year ago.
Harvard’s most popular class, Computer Science 50, now uses an AI teaching assistant. Students using the AI tutor learned more than twice as much in less time.
Austin’s AI-focused Alpha School gives us a glimpse of how we can combine AI with regular schools to achieve outstanding results. Using AI has helped kids who were two years behind in school catch up in under six months.
And remember, this is the worst AI tutoring will ever be. The revolution in human potential is just beginning.
Frontier 5: The final frontier—space
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It’s 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, weighs 11 million pounds, and is powered by 33 raptor engines. Just one of these engines produces twice the thrust of an entire Boeing 747.
In 2024, SpaceX caught this monster rocket with a pair of giant mechanical arms as it fell from the sky. Full-grown men look like ants walking on these arms:

Source: Marcus House on X
Every 2.3 days in 2024, a SpaceX rocket blasted off somewhere in America. This year, it’ll complete more missions than NASA’s Space Shuttle program did in its entire 30-year history.
Imagine if every time you flew, the airline had to build a new plane. That’s how space travel used to work. Every rocket flew once, then crashed into the ocean. SpaceX changed the game with reusable rockets.
In 2000, putting a pound of cargo into orbit cost at least $30,000. Today, SpaceX routinely does it for $1,200—a 96% cost reduction!

Source: Shyam Sankar on X
Elon Musk’s goal is to slash costs by another 99% to nearly $10/kg. I wouldn’t bet against him.
The plunge in the cost of space transit has opened a whole new space industry. First up: space-based drug factories. California startup Varda plans to make lifesaving pills in these 3-foot-wide space capsules:

Source: Bloomberg
Varda’s automated lab mixes chemicals in the microgravity of space, creating medicines impossible to make on Earth. When the crystals are ready, they are packed into a heat-shield capsule and dropped from space.
Varda launched the world’s first space drug factory in June. Its capsule hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket, made crystals of an antiviral drug while in orbit, and then parachuted back to Earth.
In February, America touched down on the moon after a 52-year hiatus. A spacecraft built and flown by Texas-based Intuitive Machines landed near the moon's south pole. This marked the first-ever lunar landing by a private company. Why didn’t we hear about this in the news?
Another startup, Reflect Orbital, is building satellites with giant mirrors to reflect sunlight at specific points on Earth, creating "on-demand daylight" for solar farms. If it works, this innovation could literally turn night into day in specific locations.
Don’t forget about SpaceX’s Starlink. It has built the world’s largest satellite network. Its 7,000 satellites beam down high-speed internet to the most remote corners of Earth. Starlink will make $10 billion in revenue from selling broadband this year.
Starlink recently inked a deal with T-Mobile, which means internet will be available almost anywhere. Lost in Death Valley? Middle of the Pacific? No problem. Simply plug in a Starlink dish and point it at the sky.
Nothing signals “physical innovation is back” like the resurgence in space travel. When NASA retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, America lost its ability to go to space. We had to hitch a ride on Russian rockets to send astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX singlehandedly revived the final frontier. Look at this chart showing the number of objects launched into space. It’s going vertical, and that’s without 2024’s record haul:

As my friend Matt Ridley correctly predicted in The Rational Optimist book back in 2010, entrepreneurs—not government agencies—now dominate space. SpaceX is so far ahead, I doubt the US government will build a rocket ever again. SpaceX is the new NASA.
There’s a video making the rounds online of a dad and son watching SpaceX rockets land side by side. The boy’s voice cracks with excitement when he spots the second rocket. Watch it and you’ll hear a child realizing humans can do “impossible” things.
Source: Elon Musk on X
How can you watch giant rockets descend from the sky, balanced on a pillar of fire, landing gracefully on their “tripods,” and not be inspired?
Each successful launch shows our kids the future isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you build. That kid watching rockets land might grow up to design the spaceships that take us to Mars.
SpaceX launches = the new father-son bonding trip.
Space isn’t just a place we visit anymore. It’s becoming a place where we work, travel, and manufacture. One day, future generations may live there.
Space is also one of the fastest-growing, most exciting industries. SpaceX is the world’s most valuable private company, worth $350 billion.
The final frontier is open for business.
The innovation feast and you
Now that we know there’s physical innovation happening all around us, what should we—the humans living through this rapid transformation—do?
How should we plan for our families, our careers, our retirements?
What should you encourage your kids to pursue?
In 2011, early Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher bemoaned: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads… that sucks.”
But 2024 marked the great pivot. There’s been a huge shift in what ambitious young entrepreneurs are building.
They're creating nuclear reactors that fit in shipping containers. Robots that dance through warehouses. Cancer-hunting pills. Planes that will streak across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. Self-landing rockets—taller than the Statue of Liberty. Microgravity drug factories that orbit Earth.
These aren’t little conveniences like being able to watch The Sopranos reruns on your iPhone. They’re life-changing transformations.
This is just a preview of the next 20 years. Change is happening like an avalanche, fast.
The last innovation feast in the mid-20th century gave us nuclear power, supersonic jets, and the Space Race. It also delivered the greatest middle-class boom ever. Could this burst in innovation shrink the wealth gap again? It already is.
FactSet data shows the net worth for the bottom half of Americans has grown 65% since 2020—more than double any other cohort. Never happened before.
New Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows low-wage workers have experienced the largest pay increase of any income group over the past five years (inflation adjusted).
It’s interesting that the two fastest-growing occupations in America today…
1: Wind turbine service technician
2: Solar photovoltaic installer
… don’t require a college degree.
The innovation avalanche is already creating lots of good jobs for people who work with their hands. Manufacturing employment is at its highest since 2008. Direct employment in data centers is growing 8X faster than overall employment.
The physical world is hiring.
The most beautiful thing about physical innovation is we all get to live in the better world we build. The interstate highways built in the 1950s made everyone's life better. The jet engine sped up travel for everyone. As we continue to crack the code of disease, we can all live longer.
Here’s what I’m telling members of my Rational Optimist Society in preparation for what comes next…
1: Investors. In 1980, businesses that made and sold physical stuff ruled. But today, the digital world dominates, as this table shows:

The pendulum is swinging back. Tomorrow's titans will build robots, rockets, reactors, and realities we can touch.
Kodak and Xerox won’t be resurrected. New innovators that make physical “stuff” will rise up to control the top 10 list. This shift has already begun, with Tesla and chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor in spots 8 and 9.
Here are real-world innovators that could crack the “top 10” list by 2030:
Anduril (drones)
ASML (chipmaking machines)
Boston Dynamics, KUKA (robotics)
BYD (world's top EV maker)
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (world's largest battery maker)
Eli Lily, Novo Nordisk (semaglutide)
Moderna (mRNA)
OpenAI, Anthropic (AI)
SpaceX (spaceships)
Waymo (robotaxis)
Even more exciting are the hundreds of under-the-radar startups working to achieve the impossible. The more I learn about and talk to these innovators, the more bullish I get about the future.
A sneak peek at one of The Rational Optimist Society’s big projects for 2025: building a database of all the innovative startups across America and the world, pushing boundaries. Rational Optimist Society members will know about the coolest companies doing the coolest stuff.
#2: Entrepreneurs. While working at SpaceX, Chris Hansen realized the only way to power humanity on Mars was with portable nuclear reactors. Now his startup, Radiant, is building microreactors to provide power on Mars, as well as Earth.
Charlie Munger said ideas worth billions hide in cheap books. Everyone should study the Five Frontiers of innovation. There are countless billion-dollar business ideas in there. Someone will act on them and build a self-made fortune. Why not you? Why not your kids?
Joining the right startup early can change your life. Since going public in 1986, Microsoft created at least eight billionaires and 12,000 millionaires. Most of these folks were simply early employees who benefitted from Microsoft’s stock option program.
#3: Parents and grandparents. In the 1980s, parents rushed their kids to Japanese language lessons, certain it was the future of business. Wrong.
Until recently, the #1 piece of advice to a young person starting out might have been, “Learn to code.” But AI chatbots now pump out clean code at the click of a button. Coding classes might be tomorrow's dusty Japanese dictionaries.
Help your kids understand that the opportunities of tomorrow won't look like those of the last few decades. Don't assume good jobs require coding skills or burying yourself in college debt. I’ll be telling my kids to seek opportunities in fast-growing industries like energy, manufacturing, robotics, construction, and AI.
Example: Aerospace and nuclear engineering have been dead-end career choices for 40 years. All of a sudden, they’re now some of the most sought-after skill sets in the world. Look at this Wall Street Journal headline:

Source: The Wall Street Journal
Another headline said: “America is trying to electrify. There aren’t enough electricians.”
The kids (and grandkids) of Rational Optimist Society members are in good hands. They know about the big changes underway, and they know the only good option is to lean in.
4. Lastly, spread rational optimism. Members of The Rational Optimist Society are “in the know” about the cutting-edge innovations reshaping our world. Now you know about them, too.
But your neighbors probably don’t. Change that!
Tell someone about robots performing microscopic surgery… nuclear reactors that fit in shipping containers… scientists making breakthrough medicines in orbital factories.
Share a story that makes their eyes light up with possibility. Do it tonight. And tomorrow night, too.
This matters. Everyone who understands this transformation is another person ready to seize its opportunities. Another voice ready to support bold innovation. Another builder of tomorrow.
Fifty years from now, children will see charts showing what happened in 2024. They might ask what role you played in America's great awakening. Will you be able to tell them you helped push it forward?
The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we build. And America is building again. The innovation avalanche is just beginning. Pull up a chair and invite your friends.