A couple weeks back I published a major, 7,000 word feature on America’s nuclear fuel insecurity, as (I discovered to my great horror while working on the piece) we no longer have the capacity to enrich our own uranium. I profiled General Matter, an American startup that just signed a lease with the Department of Energy to enrich uranium out in Paducah, Kentucky, at the very site of our nation’s last enrichment facility, and told the story of General Matter’s founder Scott Nolan. I also shared a ton of fascinating history I learned along the way, from the story of our gutted capacity to the inspiring, untold story of Paducah, which has somehow played a pivotal role in every major technology shift in our country, from literally steam through rail, aerospace, and finally nuclear power. I was just there last month, and as much of the country struggles with the corrosive effects of globalism, the town is still thriving — an inspiring bi-partisan success story not only worth celebrating, but understanding.

I’m proud of the entire feature, which took me months of travel and research to put together, and if you haven’t read it yet I recommend you just start here and take your time, as I believe the subject really is important, not only for the technology industry but the country:

(READ THE FULL STORY HERE)

Then, after you’re done doing me the solid of liking and commenting on the original piece (seriously please go do this), I want to focus on a sub theme.

The story was a beast, and one of my favorite elements was lost to the broader conversation it understandably inspired on uranium. For millennials looking to reshore manufacturing, or even just to work in a wide range of industrial endeavors we’ve shipped to China, breaking in is not so easy as flipping a light switch on from off. In the case of some parts or processes, our country hasn’t just lost the capacity to build, we’ve lost the knowledge required to build. A skills handoff was severed, and we’re almost starting from scratch. In short, it feels like we’re missing a generation. And I think this applies quite broadly.

The missing generation is something I’ve thought about on and off for a decade in the familial sense, as I imagine Vietnam was actually traumatizing for an entire generation of American men, and kind of arrested their development. But I didn’t realize how broadly it affected us until I went down to El Segundo and met with a couple of companies. First General Matter, and then a company called Rangeview. There, a small team is building parts we not only lost the capacity to build, but in some cases forgot how to build.

There, it clicked. I realized I’d been seeing this, in almost every context, for years:

A week or so ago, thick in the hold of an evening doom scroll, I stumbled on some self-important British comedian sharing his perspective on inheritance: “my son hasn’t done anything other than be born, to me, to earn that money.” So, the comedian explained, he left him nothing in his will. And while he framed this as controversial, or unusual, it occurred to me that it was actually a trend, and has been a trend throughout my entire adult life.

Daniel Craig, Jeff Goldblum, Simon Cowell, Anderson Cooper (a trust fund boy himself, fyi) — all of these men have shared a similar perspective. But probably no one has done more than Bill Gates, architect of the giving pledge, to mainstream the philosophy of cutting off the younger generation’s inheritance “for their own good.” Almost always, this is couched in sanctimonious language about fairness, and celebrated by the public, which has always hated the concept of rich kids — which, look, I get it. And while I am certainly not trying to take up the cause of nepo babies, as I think I’ve reached my lifetime quota of random ass hills to die on, it really is a strange impulse.

Human history is very much a story of parents doing everything in their power to push their children forward in as “unfair” a manner as possible, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of their lineage. Families, nations, the Catholic Church have all built on what they’ve built for hundreds of generations, a journey that brought us here, to this very moment, as the Western World shrugs.

How different is a check from mom and dad than trade? Or energy?

Our public land is an inheritance. Our legal system and culture are forms of inheritance. While some specific factory may be the actual inheritance of some specific nepo baby, America’s manufacturing base is an inheritance for every young American — or, it was. And there’s never been a more precious inheritance than knowledge.

As Cameron, and then his CTO Aeden Gasser-Brennan showed me around, my mind drifted back to nuclear.

Early in my career at Founders Fund I became interested in nuclear myself, and the few young founders working in it at the time. Again and again they told me the same strange story. There was a bit of a renaissance in physics, as young people slowly rediscovered nuclear, a field that had been “uncool” since Three Mile Island. But most of the great teachers were close to retiring, or retired. Many had simply never handed down their knowledge.

A missing generation.

It’s hard to look at the decisions made by our Boomer elite as they stewarded our country’s critical infrastructure throughout their adulthood and come to any other conclusion but they wanted to hurt us. The choices they made were just so ludicrously bad. So unbelievably destructive. But they couldn’t have actually wanted to hurt us, right?

Was it optimism, maybe? By the 1980s, did they really just believe conflict was over? Had the Cold War already concluded, in a sense, by the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or did it feel that way? And when the wall finally did fall, did the future just seem… global?

It’s possible our older generation really believed the stories they were telling themselves, and then all of us in school. It’s possible after they let China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the Chinese government compulsively violated trade agreements for twenty years as it set — obviously, in a well-documented and regular manner — to thieving our IP, artificially inflating the supply of almost every critical resource manufactured in our country at a loss, and cornering the market on literally everything essential to our life that Boomers just thought, whatever, it’s fine. We’re fine. In this new world order, China needs trade more than we need trade with China, and anyway that’s basically our backyard. That’s our manufacturing, in a way. When you really think about it. Right?

For all of its obvious importance, the missing generation in technology is a little easier to grasp. But that boomers in politics, in writing, in business, in academia and on have not only failed to hand down critical knowledge to their children, but seem to somewhat reject their role here, and to reject their duty to a younger generation that is distinctly “theirs,” is I think greatly under-discussed.

And I’d like to discuss it further. This is a theme I’d love to learn a little more about, and will likely be revisiting in the months to come. I would love to hear your thoughts on this below. Do you agree, or disagree? Where else have you seen this all play out? What do you think has caused, or is causing it? And how do we fix it?

-Solana