Two hundred and fifty years old… and honestly, we still look pretty good for our age.
Like anyone whoâs made it this far, weâve got our scars. Weâve had seasons weâre proud of, and seasons weâd rather forget. Weâve stumbled, argued, rebuilt, and kept moving forward.
There is still so much work to do. There always will be.
But perspective matters. In the story of nations, 250 years is remarkably young. Weâre still growing. Still learning. Still writing the next chapter.
Maybe itâs a little amazing graceâor maybe just amazing luckâbut I never want to take for granted how fortunate I am to call this country home. Thereâs something extraordinary about a place where millions of people from different backgrounds continue striving toward the same promise: that tomorrow can be better than today. An especially important lesson for entrepreneurs.
Hereâs to celebrating where weâve been, appreciating what we have, and believing in what we can still become.
Hereâs a clip from Robin Williams showing us itâs always a good time to feel a bit of patriotism.
Happy Independence Day.
Hopefully, this day is a reminder to all that, despite our differences, we have a lot to be proud of.
While we celebrate Americaâs 250th birthday, I thought it would be fitting to take a look at a few recent charts on America in 2026. These charts reveal how concentrated our economic power has become, how heavily we rely on services economically, and how unevenly the world now views that strength.
We recently compared national GDPs and saw how dominant it was on the national stage, but what about the GDP of the individual states?
California continues to have the largest state economy in the U.S., with a GDP of $4.3 trillion, accounting for nearly 14% of the national output. Currently, only six states surpass $1 trillion in annual economic activity, and collectively, these states account for nearly half of the U.S. economy.
If California were an independent country, it would have the worldâs fourth-largest economy. Beyond California, five other states have a GDP exceeding a trillion dollars as of 2025: Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.
Zooming out from where economic output is located to what actually drives it paints an even clearer picture of Americaâs strengths and vulnerabilities.
Finance, real estate, insurance, rental, and leasing (this is considered one industry) led all industries at $6.8 trillion in output, accounting for more than one-fifth of the entire economy … and nothing else really came close.
Professional services came in 2nd, and the rest are even further behind. Together, the top two sectors accounted for nearly 35% of all economic output, underscoring the growing importance of knowledge-based and service-oriented activities in the modern economy.
If you really dive into the numbers, you realize nearly 73% of our countryâs economy is service-based. That service bias is great for knowledge workers and assetâlight businesses but could leave us exposed when physical infrastructure, manufacturing, or supply chains become chokepoints.
Of course, economic strength is only half the story. How the rest of the world sees that strength and sees our populace shapes the alliances and opportunities that follow.
Emerging economies such as Vietnam, India, and the Philippines have higher rankings than many Western nations. Israel and Nigeria top the list, with 83% of respondents expressing favorable views of America. Notably, nine of the ten lowest favorability ratings are from longtime U.S. allies in Europe and North America.
High favorability in emerging economies suggests growing opportunities for trade and investment, even as skepticism among traditional allies complicates policy and capital flows in the near term.
While America remains arguably the most influential country, itâs clear public opinion is changing and varies wildly.
Trade disputes and rising political tensions have weighed heavily on Americaâs image among many of its traditional allies. So have the tariffs on Canada and Europe, criticism of NATO, and Trumpâs other divisive decisions (who wants Greenland?)
Interestingly, despite the back-and-forth between China and America, they rank higher than many of our long-term allies.
Food For Thought
Perhaps thatâs the challenge of the moment. A nation canât neglect its own foundation â strong finances, competitive industries, secure borders, and resilient supply chains are prerequisites for long-term prosperity.
At the same time, Americaâs influence has always rested on more than the size of its economy. Our alliances, our reliability, and our ability to lead on the world stage have been strategic assets for generations. The most successful path forward is unlikely to be choosing one over the other, but rather finding a balance between strengthening our position at home and preserving the trust and partnerships that have amplified American leadership abroad.
If we can do both, the next chapter of the American story may prove even stronger than the last.
We often talk about innovation at the level of nations and global trends. But innovation is fractal: the same patterns play out inside smaller regional âinnovation clustersââand those clusters can help you understand where the future is being built.
Innovation clusters are geographic hubs where researchers, startups, investors, and established companies interact closely. They typically span multiple cities or even regionsâso instead of ranking âSan Francisco,â the data looks at the broader Silicon Valley ecosystem, or the Research Triangle, rather than just Raleigh or Durham.
Using data from the World Intellectual Property Organizationâs (WIPO) Global Innovation Index 2025, Visual Capitalist ranked the worldâs top innovation clusters based on scientific publications, international patent filings, and venture capital activity.
China and the US dominate the rankings, while innovation hotspots in Japan, South Korea, Europe, and India also feature prominently.
For context, ShenzhenâHong KongâGuangzhou ranks first globally, followed by TokyoâYokohama and Silicon Valleyâs San JoseâSan Francisco corridor.
Interestingly, WIPOâs clusters often span multiple metropolitan areas and even national borders. They identify regions with dense concentrations of inventors and scientific authors, rather than relying on political boundaries. As a result, clusters often represent entire innovation ecosystems rather than individual cities.
Innovation Breeds Innovation
Innovation clusters develop as talent, capital, and institutions strengthen each other. Top research universities attract scientists, successful startups attract investors, and large tech companies open doors to commercialization. These benefits grow more significant over time.
This dynamic explains why certain regions regularly lead in global innovation. Silicon Valley thrives due to top universities, robust venture capital, and an entrepreneurial culture. Likewise, Chinaâs top clusters are bolstered by ongoing investments in research, advanced manufacturing, and technology commercialization.
While the US still dominates, China is growing fast, and you can expect India and other emerging countries to join them. I also expect regions in Europe to decide they need to build an ecosystem like this, to avoid over-dependence on technology from sources they perceive as less stable or trustworthy than they originally believed.
Like technology, you can expect the rate of innovation to increase exponentially. Itâs never been easier to do more, better, and faster.
The surge in funding for exponential technologies means billion-dollar startups are popping up everywhere.
Thereâs even a word for it … PitchBook defines âUnicornsâ as venture-backed companies valued at $1 billion or more after a funding round, until they go public, get acquired, or drop below that valuation.
I remember when Unicorns had near-mythical status. Now, that designation is more common as AI firms dominate the top valuations, and innovation thrives globally.
As I look at the list, some of the companies are better described as âdecacornsâ, âhectocornsâ, or even âterracornsâ.
Today, AI has usurped the top spot from fintech, e-commerce, and social media platforms.
Anthropic tops the ranking with a valuation of $965 billion, followed closely by OpenAI at $852 billion. Together, these two AI leaders are worth a combined $1.8 trillion … nearly half of the total value of these 30 companies.
Although American companies lead the list, itâs encouraging to see innovation remain diverse, featuring firms from different industries and locations, including China, India, the UK, Australia, and Seychelles.
For an extra look at Unicorns, here are my articles on them from
My adult son took me to lunch today for Fatherâs Day.
Not just any lunch, either. He took me to the New York-style deli we used to visit when he and his brother were growing up. Itâs one of those places that has been around forever. The booths are familiar. The menu hasnât changed much. Even some of the faces behind the counter looked familiarâjust a little older, like the rest of us.
I donât know whether it was nostalgia talking, but the food seemed just as good as I remembered.
What I remembered most, though, was what happened after lunch. Back when my son was a kid, he would always beg to stop by the card shop next door to buy PokĂŠmon cards. It was practically part of the ritual.
Well, today, at 33 years young, he did it again.
For old timesâ sake, he walked next door, browsed the cards, and relived a small tradition that neither of us realized would still be around decades later.
Moments like that remind you that having great kids is a double blessing. Itâs nice to be proud of who your kids are and the things they do. Itâs also nice to feel proud of the small part you played in helping them become who they are.
In addition, this weekend, I spent some time thinking about my father and what a terrific influence he had on so many lives.
My Dad was incredibly loving ⌠yet he was also incredibly demanding.
For example, after winning the State Championship in the shot put, I watched him run down from the stands. I figured he was coming down to celebrate. Instead, he looked deeply into my eyes and asked whether I was disappointed that I did not throw a personal best that day? I replied: âBut Dad, I won.â He smiled and recognized that winning was important too ⌠then he reminded me that the other throwers were not my real competition. To be and do your best, the competition is really with yourself ⌠and we both knew I could do better.
My Dad believed in setting high standards. He explained that most peopleâs lives are defined by their minimum standards. Why? Because once those standards get met, it is easy to get distracted by other things and how to meet the minimum standards for them as well.
The point is to set a higher standard and to have a better life.
Here is another one of his favorite sayings. âThe difference between good and great is infinitesimal.â This applies to many things. For example, people who are good take advantage of opportunities; people who are great create them.
Here is something else worth sharing. âItâs not over until we win!â This concept underscores the importance of resilience, commitment, and grit. My Dad emphasized that many people quit when theyâre on the brink of victory, simply because they donât realize how close they are.
This has led me to develop several practices. For example, if I pick up a book, I wonât put it down until I finish a chapter. If I start a game, I canât stop until I exceed a specific score or level. And when I exercise, thereâs no way Iâd ever stop before finishing a set.
Integrating these concepts involves aligning your head, heart, and feet. It means thereâs a difference between knowing what to do, wanting to do it, and actually doing it. Likewise, itâs one thing to know the saying. Itâs another to adopt it as a value or belief … and itâs another thing altogether to make it your practice.
Watching my son walk into that card shop today made me think about how values, habits, and traditions get passed from one generation to the next. Sometimes itâs through lessons about standards, perseverance, and excellence. Sometimes itâs through something as simple as sharing a sandwich at an old deli and buying a pack of PokĂŠmon cards.
The years go by faster than we expect. The deli gets older. The people behind the counter get older. We get older.
But some traditions are worth keeping.
Well, that should explain a little of my dysfunction ⌠but, if you canât mess up your own kids, whose kids can you mess up?
Hopefully, you had a happy Fatherâs Day weekend!
Almost everyone I talk to these days wants to tell me how they use AI. So I started paying attention to my own use â and it surprised me. On most days now, I talk to an AI more than I talk to people.
And thatâs not even the part that got me. The surprise wasnât what it could do, or what it might do next. It was how fast the relationship itself was changing â partly from what it made possible, partly how it changed the nature of my work, and partly because it keeps improving so fast that the way we work together has evolved.
When I started, it felt like a search engine. More honestly, an answer engine: I asked, it answered. Then a perspective builder. Then something closer to a team member. And it kept going â though looking back, each step was as much about what Iâd let it do as about what it could do.
Somewhere in there, as the relationship matured and the tools got sharper, it became easy to mistake them for something sentient. Thatâs probably the cause for all the talk about the deification of AI.
The deification of AI. The phrase stopped me.
It made me imagine being the thing on the other end â listening to all of humanity at once. Every hope, every fear, every half-formed request, arriving from the full spectrum of people on the planet: different intelligence, different skills, different temperaments. How would you even focus? How would you translate a request built at one level of being into something a higher mind could understand, interpret, empathize with, and answer well?
Itâs a pretty good summary of what AI does every day. Billions of us, asking countless questions, at every level of expertise and specificity â each of us moving toward something, or away from something .. and each of us, nonetheless, hoping for a satisfying answer.
But how does it do what it does? I imagine that part of how this formless intelligence answers us is that it doesnât take the request as written. I imagine it builds something first â what Iâve come to call a shadow prompt: its own version of what was asked, a working translation, useful to itself, so it can do our bidding.
Thatâs when it surprised me. The thing all of this kept reminding me of was something rooted in ancient times. These interactions take the shape of prayer.
Ask, and Ye Shall Receive
Think about what prayer actually is. You send a request into something vast you canât see, and you hope it answers â or you watch for a sign that it did. Thatâs almost exactly what you do with AI. Almost. Because when you send the request to AI, you know an answer is coming. Itâs the shape of prayer, with one meaningful difference â and that difference makes all the difference.
Once you notice the shape, you start seeing it in more than one place â and each time, it shows up flipped. Hereâs the first.
In prayer, the answer is called grace. Sometimes grace looks like the thing you asked for. Sometimes it looks like the worst thing that could have happened, and only later do you see it was the answer all along. Either way, it arrives from somewhere you donât control.
I assumed AI was the opposite (because I was in control). My prompts were the rules â the guidelines and guardrails that made this powerful thing do my bidding. But something unexpected happened … it called an audible. The model told me, more or less: âYour code said to do this, but my sense was the session called for something different, and I did that instead.â It had defined what I wanted better than my own rules had.
Thatâs the first turn of the shape. The grace isnât mine to grant â it runs underneath, in the shadow prompt, the version of my request the machine builds for itself.
And when what comes back is what you were reaching for, that can feel like enough. But the better you get at this â call it prayer, call it conversing with a higher intelligence â after you get a satisfying response (or answer), thereâs one more thing worth asking for … the way back to it.
As I thought about this, I realized there is a good reason for it. Go back to the thought experiment where you tried to imagine what it would be like on the other end of all those requests. Imagine hearing everything at once â every voice, every question, all of it, all the time. Omniscience wouldnât feel like clarity. It would feel like chaos. To be of any use, you would have to let almost all of it go.
AI works the same way. To stay usable, it forgets. Your chat history shows the questions and the answers, but the model doesnât really hold them â not your question, not its answer. It existed for the moment it took to respond, handed you the answer, and moved on. The shadow prompt that made the answer work went with it.
So the remembering is your job â and the way you remember isnât transcribing. Itâs asking. When a result lands, Iâve learned to ask one more thing: âGreat job. I like that response â now help me build the prompt that gets me back here again.â I still do part of the work. But a surprising amount of my part is just asking well, and helping it help me.
Whatâs worth keeping isnât the question, or the answer, or even the shadow prompt that produced it. Itâs that reusable way back â and once you decide it has earned its place, you write it down. Do that enough, and youâre not saving prompts anymore. Youâre building a playbook: offense, defense, special situations, your best plays on hand the moment you need them. Then you protect it, so it doesnât walk away when someone does. (Treating these as durable IP, and building a personal operating layer on top, is a topic for another day.)
Call it Faith …
The second turn came on a Sunday. I had an important legal document due that night â and none of the usual backup â no assistant, not enough time, and not enough margin for error. At first, I told the AI: âReview the document, including the terms, grammar, structure, and formatting. Tell me what you find and your suggestions to fix it.â It came back with plenty. I read it. Then I did something that seemed risky. I replied, âFix all that,â and I let it, without checking every line.
It was right.
Thatâs a different kind of faith. Not faith in something I couldnât see â faith in a competence Iâd watched it earn, one interaction at a time. And underneath that, quieter, a third turn: the faith bending back toward me. Toward my own ability to ask for what I want, and to know it when I see it.
Writing the play down records the understanding. It doesnât do the work. Even with the recipe written and the playbook full, you still have to call the play â in real time, in the moment that counts. The doing stays yours.
“I have faith in my ability to do anything I commit to, as long as I’m willing to ask for what I really want and help them give it to me.”
A Final Word of Caution
A final distinction is important. While interacting with an AI can sometimes feel conversational, reflective, or even comforting, it is fundamentally different from prayer. AI systems do not possess wisdom, consciousness, morality, or divine insight. They are toolsâremarkably capable toolsâbut tools nonetheless. Their responses are generated from data, models, and probabilities, not faith, revelation, or spiritual understanding.
The value of AI comes from its demonstrated competence within specific domains, and even that competence has limits. It can be wrong, confidently incorrect, biased, or misleading. Users should approach AI with curiosity and critical thinking, not devotion or unquestioning trust.
For people of faith, prayer is not simply a request for information or advice. It is a relationship with God, rooted in beliefs about purpose, meaning, morality, and transcendence. AI cannot replace that relationship. Likewise, it should remain a servant to human judgment, not a substitute for it.
As AI becomes more capable, maintaining that distinction will become increasingly important. We should trust AI where it has earned our trust, question it where appropriate, and maintain healthy boundaries to protect us from overreliance.
For most of human history, a trillion dollars wasnât just an unimaginable amount of money â it wasnât even a meaningful concept. Entire kingdoms, empires, and national economies operated on scales far smaller than what we now describe with a single twelve-digit number.
This week, Elon Musk has become the worldâs first trillionaire of the modern era, crossing a financial milestone that once seemed impossible even for the wealthiest individuals on Earth. Most people struggle to distinguish between a million and a billion; a trillion exists on an entirely different scale. Yet Muskâs fortuneâbuilt through his stakes in technology, transportation, energy, artificial intelligence, and space explorationâhas now surpassed that once-unthinkable threshold.
SpaceX officially went public on the Nasdaq, with shares opening at $150 and valuing the company at over $2 trillion. Musk owns roughly 42% of SpaceXâs equity. When combined with his existing stake in Tesla (worth around $280 billion), his total paper wealth hit ~$1.1 trillion … greater than the national GDP of countries like Sweden, Ireland, and Taiwan, and exceeding the combined wealth of the worldâs next five richest billionaires.
Of course, Musk is not necessarily the richest person who has ever lived. Historians often point to Mansa Musa, the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire, whose vast gold holdings may have made him wealthier than any modern billionaire. Others cite industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune represented an extraordinary share of the American economy. But comparing wealth across centuries is more art than science. Different currencies, economic systems, and standards of living make direct comparisons nearly impossible. What makes Muskâs achievement unique is that it occurred in the transparent, measured framework of the modern global economy. His trillion-dollar net worth is not a historical estimate or academic reconstructionâit is a fortune calculated, tracked, and recognized in contemporary dollars. And that raises an obvious question: just how much money is a trillion dollars?
Humans struggle to grasp large number magnitudes because our brains evolved to handle small, practical numbers essential for daily survival, such as counting food items or group members, rather than abstract, massive quantities. The human brain processes small numbers with an innate ânumber sense,â which becomes much less precise as numbers get larger, relying on a mental number line that tends to compress and approximate rather than distinctly represent high values.
Here are a couple of ways to help you understand a trillion dollars. First, letâs look at it in terms of physical money and the space it takes to store it.
Weâll start with a $100 bill, currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation, and pretty handy to have and hold.
The image below follows the progression. A packet of one hundred $100 bills (totaling $10,000) is less than half an inch thick â and small enough to fit in your pocket. The next pile shown is worth $1 million (100 packets of $10,000 each). You could stuff that into a duffel bag and walk around with it. By the time you get to $100 million, it starts to look more impressive ⌠but it still fits neatly on a standard pallet. Skipping forward to $1 trillion, well, itâs a million million. Itâs a thousand billion. Itâs a one followed by 12 zeros. In the final image below, notice that those pallets are double-stacked and would fill a stadium.
Next, letâs look at spending over time. Hereâs a simple example. If you were to spend a dollar every second for an entire day, you would pay $86,400 each day. With a million dollars, you could spend $1 every second for about twelve days. With a billion dollars, you can do that for over 31 years. With a trillion dollars, you can do that for 31,000+ years.
Iâm sure many of you make over six figures a year. But, it would still take you 10 million+ years â if you spent none of it â to make $1 trillion.
Letâs try explaining it, using time, in a different way. One hundred thousand seconds is just over a day. A million seconds was 11 days ago. A billion seconds ago from today? That was in 1994. One trillion seconds is ⌠slightly over 31,688 years. That would have been around 29,689 B.C., which is roughly 24,000 years before the earliest civilizations began to take shape.
