- What do you think is crazy?
- Trying to do the same old thing and thinking
it won't just keep falling apart.
Hi, I'm Patri Friedman, and I'm a Heretic because
I think we should be able to start new countries,
as easily as we start companies today.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like.
But, what if they're right?
- I think some people have strong reactions to the idea that
groups of people should be able to go out
and start new cities and new countries with different laws,
because there's a sense in which it threatens,
at least philosophically, the entire system.
When people start to think about government
changing more often, being more flexible,
they imagine it coming to their own country—
and, you know, government change is associated with
chaos and bloodshed, you know, for good reason.
Somehow in our minds, people tend to think about government
not as a business but government as a product,
and it has a price.
And if you look at what we pay and what we get,
it's terrible.
Think about the quality of service, say from
Apple versus the DMV.
How wildly different the speed of evolution
of consumer products is compared to governance.
We get new cell phones every few years,
but we're still using a constitution from 250 years ago.
I mean, if you drove a car from 250 years ago,
it would be a horse.
I think people's, like, mental design space is minuscule
compared to the number of possible governments.
We know about monarchy and fascism and totalitarianism
and communism and constitutional democracy,
and people just, they don't even think that the space
of possible coordinating mechanisms and institutions is
so much bigger than that.
I have this metaphor that the way that laws are today,
it's sort of as if in every country,
they wrote their own operating system
that all their computers ran on.
There was no Windows, there was no Mac OS,
there was no Linux.
And what we're saying is shouldn't countries
get the option to choose,
"Oh, let me take the best of what exists
instead of having to write it from scratch, and then
I can customize it and modify it
to work for my particular country."
But, just as we see in tech startups,
the really breakthrough stuff, that's much, much better,
has to get done by small groups, trying out
really new experimental things that will probably fail,
and without the right to exit and build your own government,
we don't get those experiments.
- One of the things you were saying earlier is that,
our consumer devices change so rapidly,
our governance doesn't.
In a way, isn't that a safety mechanism?
- Yeah, I totally agree that there's a safety
in having governance change more slowly.
We wouldn't want our laws or the structure
of our police forces to change, you know,
in three month software updates.
But that doesn't mean that the current speed is right.
So I spent 10 years at Google,
and the way that you make it safe to roll out software
that a billion people use,
is first you muck around with it on your own.
And then, you get a thousand people to test it.
And then eventually you put it out to, you know,
1 in 10,000 Google users or something,
and you find the problems, and you fix them
and you scale it up, and eventually,
you're at 100%.
I'm not saying that we should be
frequently and massively rewriting the rules,
and I'm definitely not saying we should rewrite the rules
for people who don't want it.
What I am saying is, if there's certain zones that say,
"Hey, here we're gonna try a rewrite.
Only with the people who want it."
We get a startup sector and we're learning,
we're seeing what works and what doesn't work,
while most people are living in, like,
the stable release, right?
Most people are using the Apple product
not the brand new bleeding-edge startup.
So that's kind of the world I imagine.
My name is Patri, which means "father" in Latin,
and I've got three children, so I'm a father that way.
In essence, my work is trying to, I don't know, father
or enable the fathering of many new countries.
So I'm just a father trying
to help people father fatherlands.