Friedberg's Drone Conspiracy Theory: A Psyop by China to Crush America's Drone Economy?
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This is my conspiracy theory. It could be considered a
a scion. Right now, the US has a significant regulatory burden on drone utilization in a commercial setting. Meanwhile, you've got countries like China rocketing ahead. The drone delivery business in China is already $30 billion a year. And they're also launching a pretty significant fleet of what we would call kind of the eVTOLs or flying cars. The expectation is that by 2030, there'll be 100,000 flying cars
moving people around in China. And these are huge efficiency gains. In fact, with Meituan, you can now order food while you're on the Great Wall at one of the ramparts. The drone will bring the food to you while you're walking the Great Wall as a tourist. And in the US, the reason that these things haven't taken off and the reason we don't have a large kind of drone industry, which is clearly emerging, it's going to be a huge economic driver
for China and others around the world is simply the regulatory restrictions. If you were going to try and mess with the US's ability to move forward with the drone economy, you would probably try and wreak some havoc, stoke some fear, and get people to say, "Hey, this doesn't seem cool. What's going on? I don't like that there's all these drones in the sky. I'm freaking out." And try and get the regulators to come in and say, "Hey, we're banning drones." And
Set up everyone, including the people in the government to say, we should take a beat. We should think a little bit before we deregulate. Oh, you're saying this could be China doing this to try to slow down our economy? Think about it. If you're going to pass a bill in Congress to make drones more freely roamable in the skies,
You're going to reference back to this crazy story in New Jersey. Everyone's freaking out about it. And you're going to say, hey, wait, what about all that stuff that happened in New Jersey? People are kind of scared about it. We shouldn't rush. We shouldn't rush. We shouldn't rush. That would be my psyop theory. That's my conspiracy theory tinfoil hat.