Palmer Luckey

And without us, that is over.

China's pursuing a similar strategy.

They're going to African nations and saying, hey, we're going to help

build out this infrastructure in your ports, on your roads, in your police force, in your military.

We're gonna build AI camera systems that track dissidents for you, that track where they're shopping, where they're going, where they're riding trains.

We're gonna allow you to monitor all their communications on the telecommunications side.

So let us sell you telecommunications gear and you get all these back doors that allow you to control people who are trying to come after you.

But the bargain with the devil that they're making is, oh, and by the way, if you ever do anything that's counter to Chinese interests, we're gonna pull all of this.

and you're going to lose all your tools for controlling your population, and you're going to be dead inside of a week.

It's a sense time is on the autocratic, authoritarian side of that scale, because it has almost no application in preserving freedom or in deterring an invasion.

It's only for controlling your own people.

I think we've had two really good outcomes from a few decades in the Middle East.

One of them has been that we need to be very, very strategic about which things we're going to get involved in at a large level.

And I think that's very productive development.

I think it's led to a lot of real politic thinking that is good.

For example, I personally support democracy in Taiwan.

I like the idea that Taiwan is able to self-determine and self-govern, but let's be real.

The reason that the United States is interested in Taiwan is because they are critical to our economy and they are critical to the economy of all of our allies.

If it were not for their semiconductor industry and if it were not for a few other aligned industries, I think the United States would probably not be nearly as inclined to spend a lot of money to take on the risk of going to war with a nuclear superpower.

That's a very productive thing.