The American Revolution was won with two things: a bold claim to self-determination and a fighting spirit. These two ideas, in essence, became the First and Second Amendments—the one-two punch that showed the world we don’t play around. “The First Amendment is what we stand for,” writes Katherine Boyle. “The Second is how we enforce it.”

For this month’s installment of America at 250, our yearlong celebration of America’s milestone birthday, we toasted to America’s technological revolution. Boyle’s essay traces the genesis of America’s love affair with technology back to the Second Amendment and urges us to recall how “FAFO is ingrained in our national ethos.”

We published two not-to-be missed essays on this theme: one by by Noah Smith on the rise of the new American Luddites—and how we came to take lifesaving technology for granted—and another by Marc Levinson on an American innovation as essential as it is overlooked—the big metal box that made the modern world possible.

We also ran a reader poll on the greatest invention in American history, and we can officially announce that the winner is the transistor (with air-conditioning a close second). In the Comments section, readers urged us to include these honorable mentions: the airplane, the chocolate chip cookie, and the .45 Colt.

Now, for the final part of this installment, we’re bringing you a conversation with a great American tech revolutionary: Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. The 33-year-old defense-tech wunderkind sat down with Bari Weiss in Washington, D.C., earlier this month for a wide-ranging conversation about why the U.S. built the wrong military, how to manufacture weapons like iPhones, and why America needs to become—as he puts it—“the world’s gun store.”

Watch their conversation below, and raise a glass with us to American innovation.

—The Editors