The Rational Optimist Awards 2026 (with photos)

2 weeks … 20 bite-sized doses of optimism

In today’s Diary:

• Who was 2025’s top innovator?

• Crowning the #1 US drone maker

• The first-ever “photography” for smells

• Lizard spit created medical miracles

• Dishonorable mention: the anti-innovators

Dear Rational Optimist,

It’s the holidays, and you’re likely reading this on your phone between family gatherings, with a plate of leftovers nearby. So it’s time to have some fun!

Today we announce the winners of the inaugural “Rational Optimist Awards.” It’s the Oscars for optimists where we celebrate the most important breakthroughs of the year.

We’ll hand out 20 awards over the next two weeks. Each one is a bite-sized story you can share with family and friends who need relief from the corporate media doom loop.

Remember, ROS is a community. You will disagree with at least a few of my picks. So nominate alternative winners—or just tell me why I’m wrong—in the comments below.

If enough of you shout about the same topic, we’ll turn it into a full deep dive in 2026.

Time to hand out some trophies!

1. Rational optimist of the year…

Winner: Zipline

Rational optimism is believing the future can be better than the present, but only if you do the work to build it.

No company embodied that mindset in 2025 better than Zipline.

Zipline is an American company, but when it launched in 2016, regulators wouldn’t let it operate in America. The FAA’s “beyond visual line of sight” rule required operators to physically see their drones at all times.

Undeterred, Zipline went to Rwanda to prove itself, delivering blood and medical supplies to remote hospitals. Regulators won’t let us do business at home. No problem. We’ll do it in the African bush!

Zipline’s drone network now ships 70% of Rwanda’s national blood supply and has saved countless lives.

Recently a four-year-old girl in Ghana got bitten by a snake. Doctors had 45 minutes before paralysis set in. Zipline to the rescue. Minutes later its drone dropped the medicine by parachute to doctors. The girl lived.

Now Zipline is bringing its battle-tested tech back to America. After inking a deal with Walmart earlier this year, it announced a new partnership with Chipotle to deliver hot burritos through the air in Dallas.

We had the pleasure of visiting Zipline at its HQ in California last month. Very cool!

2. Innovator of the year…

Winner: Valar Atomics

Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs we met in 2025. He’s a high school dropout who basically taught himself nuclear physics, then actually went and built a reactor.

This year Valar turned a bold idea into a real company with steel in the ground. What it achieved in merely one year makes me question my own ambition.

February: Valar completed Ward Zero, a non-nuclear thermal prototype that validated the tech. And Isaiah’s team did it in just 10 months!

September: Valar broke ground on its first full-scale reactor in Orangeville, Utah, with criticality targeted for July 4, 2026.

November: Valar became the first startup in history to split the atom. This helped it raise $130 million in a Series A funding round.

This is what “0 to 100” looks like in an industry that usually moves in decades.

Congrats to Isaiah and the whole Valar team. I can’t wait to see them again in early 2026.

3. Breakout success of the year…

Winner: Neros

If you want to understand modern warfare in one sentence, it’s this…

A handful of $2,000 drones can now destroy a $10 million tank.

That’s the world Neros is building for.

The El Segundo-based startup was founded by two kids who learned to build flying robots through competitive drone racing.

Neros makes small, cheap, disposable strike drones. These are the quadcopters dominating Ukrainian battlefields. They’re flown with what looks like a PlayStation controller.

Neros went from cool startup to America’s #1 drone maker… in just 12 months! And now it’s winning major US defense contracts.

When we visited co-founder Olaf Hitchwa at Neros’s factory in November, his small team was pumping out roughly 1,000 drones a month, by hand. In the warehouse, Olaf showed us $20 million of inventory that sits waiting to be assembled:

Olaf gave us the heads-up they were about to raise $75 million from top VC firm Sequoia. Neros plans to scale up manufacturing so it can build 100,000 drones next year. That’ll make it America’s largest drone maker by an order of magnitude.

Next, our first “anti-award” ...

4. “Decel” of the year…

Winner (loser): Europe

“Decel” is short for decelerationist. It describes people who instinctively pull the handbrake on progress. They’re the natural enemy of rational optimism.

Europe is the undisrupted champion of this category.

I’m Irish. I’ve never voted in a political election. But this year I voted with my feet and moved my family (wife and three kids) out of Europe.

One of my core beliefs is where a child grows up shapes how they see the world. I don’t want my kids being poisoned by Europe’s anti-innovation mind virus.

Three examples:

1. Europe now rakes in more tax dollars fining US tech companies than it does collecting tax from its own tech firms.

2. Ireland’s state-owned energy company plans to decommission its own wind farms. All because it failed to file an environmental impact assessment back in 2003. Wait for the punchline…

The project might be saved because tearing down wind turbines also requires an environmental report. You can’t make this stuff up.

3. Regulators forced the UK’s newest nuclear power plant to build multiple systems to prevent fish from getting into water intakes.

Price tag £700 million. Forecasts expect the system to save 0.083 adult salmon per year. If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.

The smartest people I meet from Ireland, the UK, Italy and Germany have already left. That’s what brain drain looks like in real time.

Speaking of where I escaped to…

5. Overachiever of the year…

Winner: UAE

I moved my family to Abu Dhabi earlier this year.

In Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger writes about riding into Abu Dhabi on a camel circa 1948. It was a backwater with 2,000 people. A desolate desert landscape, unchanged for thousands of years.

To read that book and then stand in modern Abu Dhabi with gleaming glass skyscrapers and an airport so clean you could eat off the floor is to witness one of the most astonishing transformations in human history.

People in Abu Dhabi embrace innovation because they’ve experienced the benefits of radical transformation firsthand. For a people that watched a city rise from the desert, the idea of robotaxis, flying cars and nuclear power isn’t frightening.

It’s a society surging with optimism. I’m glad my children breathe that air.

While EU bureaucrats argue over paperwork for windmills, the UAE is:

• Building the world’s largest AI data center

• The first country to give free ChatGPT subscriptions to every citizen

• Launching the world’s first AI university

• Gene sequencing almost one million Emiratis

• Building the world’s first 24/7 solar farm

• And constructing a 5.6-gigawatt nuclear plant, on time and under budget.

In the UAE, Uber is rolling out robotaxis. Joby Aviation is launching flying cars. Elon Musk’s Boring Company is building a series of underground tunnels to solve traffic. And Neuralink just launched the first regional trial for its “brain chips.”

In Silicon Valley speak the UAE is still in “founder mode.”

6. Craziest (real) tech of the year…

Winner: Osmo Labs

First we digitized sight (photos). Then we digitized sound (music).

Now Osmo Labs is giving computers a sense of smell. Sounds like sci-fi until you see it in person.

We visited Osmo’s lab in midtown Manhattan last month. As you walk through the rooms your nostrils awaken. One room smells like a whiskey distillery, another like a florist shop.

Osmo’s founder Alex Wiltschko has been obsessed with smell since he was a kid. When I asked him his favorite smell, he said his daughter’s hair.

He’s already “bottled” that smell to keep forever. I’d pay good money to remember the smell of my little kids when they’re grown. Would you?

This year Osmo Labs achieved “teleported” a scent for the first time in human history. It analyzed a fresh summer plum on one side of a room, turned its scent into code, and printed the same scent on the other side. Like a fax, but for smell.

One way this changes the world: everyone becomes a perfumer, the same way the iPhone turned everyone into a photographer. Imagine sending smells the way you send photos today.

Osmo built a platform called Generation that lets you create a custom fragrance. You describe what you want, and a scent gets produced and shipped to you. We even created a “Rational Optimist” scent on the spot.

This category deserves a runner-up. Second place goes to AstroForge, a startup building satellites to go mine asteroids for platinum-group metals. ROS cofounder Dan Steinhart and I were lucky enough to see a half-scale replica of these new satellites:

Read our essay on AstroForge here.

7. Favorite factory tour of the year…

Winner: The Boring Company

Dan and I toured dozens of factories in 2025. We saw everything from nuclear reactors to kamikaze drones to microchips with 1 trillion transistors to supersonic jets.

The one that’ll stay etched in our brains is Elon Musk’s Boring Company in Austin.

How we dig tunnels today is borderline insane. A traditional tunnel-boring machine costs hundreds of millions of dollars. And after it finishes digging operators steer it into a side chamber and bury it forever.

Imagine building a half-billion-dollar machine, using it once, and leaving it underground like a disposable coffee cup?

The Boring Co is doing for tunnels what SpaceX did for rockets: make them reusable so the cost falls and learning curves kick in.

Boring Co’s giant digger, Prufrock, chews forward and builds the tunnel behind it, laying five-foot concrete rings as it goes. Look at the photo below, and you can literally see the rings snapped together like giant LEGO bricks:

Prufrock can dig for roughly $12 million to $15 million per mile, versus traditional tunnel borers that can cost over $1 billion per mile. It can also bore holes in months—work that used to take years.

And unlike a lot of moonshots, you can test this one out yourself.

Boring has tunnels operating under Las Vegas’s Convention Center. You walk up, hail a ride, and a Tesla glides into a one-way tunnel. It already carries tens of thousands of passengers per day with near-zero wait times.

The Boring Co will transform transportation. I can’t wait until it opens the Dubai Loop!

8. Most personally useful innovation of the year…

Winner: AI

I love supersonic jets, nuclear reactors and skyscraper-sized rockets more than a grown man should.

But AI takes this trophy because it’s something you can and should use every day. It gives anyone with an internet connection the ability to “just do things.”

For the price of a nice lunch, you get an army of tireless interns: researcher, editor, analyst, translator, tutor, brainstorming partner and project manager, all in one.

We’ve never had a technology this powerful, this cheap, and this available.

Computers and the internet made it possible to build a $10 million business with only a handful of employees. It’s only a matter of time until AI enables the first one-person, $1 billion company.

This year AI became part of my workflow the way Google did in the 2000s. And as we like to say, this is the worst it will ever be.

We wrote several “how to use AI” guides. I encourage you to read them and more importantly, start using these tools if you haven’t already.

• How to use AI daily.

• How to gain agency through AI.

• How to learn faster with AI.

• How to use AI like a super-doctor.

AI fluency is the most important skill to learn and teach your kids and grandkids in 2026.

9. Most transformative tech of the year…

Winner: GLP-1s

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: GLP-1s, aka Ozempic or Wegovy.

GLP-1s were originally invented as a diabetes treatment. But they’ve morphed into a medical Swiss Army Knife tackling every modern health nightmare.

First we discovered they melt fat off waistlines. When future historians write about 2025 they might mark it as the year humanity gained control over obesity.

A recent Gallup study found the US obesity rate fell in 2025. Even that small tick down represents roughly 7.5 million fewer obese adults. Coincidence? I think not.

That alone would qualify GLP-1s for “breakthrough of the decade.” But in a slew of recent trials doctors discovered they also:

• Treat Alzheimer’s

• Stave off arthritis

• Lower dementia risk

• Reduce heart attacks and strokes

• Curb addiction

• And lower the risk of developing kidney, pancreatic, ovarian, liver and colorectal cancers

Along with slashing obesity it looks like GLP-1s contributed to the unprecedented 27% drop in overdose deaths last year.

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 could be solved with a pill?

We may well find out.

10. Most groundbreaking innovation of the year

Winner: Alpha School’s two-hour school day

This award goes to an innovation that was proven in 2025 but whose full impact probably won’t be felt for years.

Ask your kid: “Would you rather go to school… or go on vacation?” For me that would’ve been the easiest question of all time.

But at Alpha School in Austin six out of 10 kids say they’d rather go to school than vacation. After visiting Alpha last month and meeting founder MacKenzie Price and the school’s billionaire backer and principal, Joe Liemandt, I can see why.

Alpha pioneered the two-hour school day. Academics get squeezed into four 25-minute “Pomodoro” sprints in the morning. All with an AI tutor on an iPad.

Then the afternoon is freed up for the things school claims to teach but doesn’t: public speaking, entrepreneurship, leadership, teamwork, creativity and grit.

At Alpha you have teens running Airbnbs and food trucks. Some even flew to Poland to help teach Ukrainian refugee kids math. They spend their afternoons becoming the kind of person AI can’t replace.

The students we chatted with at Alpha were the most impressive teens I’ve ever met. One helped create the first all-teen Broadway musical. Another 16-year-old submitted a paper to top science journal Nature. Another launched what’s basically a startup accelerator for teen influencers.

As a dad I asked the only question that matters: “Does it work?” Oh boy does it work…

K–8 students score in the top 1% nationally. Average SAT scores are around 1535 for 11th graders and 1410 for 9th graders.

Once you “see” the two-hour school day, it’s hard to send your kids back to the old model. You realize there’s no second-best way to teach children.

Have a great holiday weekend, my fellow rational optimists. I’ll be back next Sunday to hand out 10 more trophies, including comeback, miracle and robot of the year.

Remember to click “like” and “restack” below… then nominate your own Rational Optimist Award winners in the comments!

—Stephen McBride