What America can learn from the rebooting of Estonia

Danny Crichton:
All right, so let's dive in. So Joel, welcome to the show.

Joel Burke:
Well, thanks so much for having me.

Danny Crichton:
So you just wrote this book called Rebooting a Nation and you were the rebooter of sorts or led part of the rebooting of this nation. So let's just dive in. We're talking about Estonia, a country of a million people on the Baltic Sea. It generally comes into the news in the context of US-Russia, Russia-Ukraine, as this beacon of hope, democracy, but very much in a tough neighborhood, so to speak. Give us a little context. Why Estonia? Why were you there of all places, and what's going on?

Joel Burke:
It's a great question and a little bit long to answer all. So I'll try to give the Cliff notes version. So basically, I started my career. I was early at a YC/Andreessen backed startup and I had always wanted to live and work in Europe. So I ended up moving to Berlin to run a company for Rocket Internet, which is a venture builder/private equity.

Danny Crichton:
I remember them.

Joel Burke:
Yeah.

Danny Crichton:
That is an era of time.

Joel Burke:
Yes. Yes, it is. So I was there and I quickly decided that the German entrepreneurship was very different than Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and I wanted to do something more impactful and mission driven. And I came across a job ad for a startup within the government and I never heard of such a thing. And I was like, "Well, I know what startups are, but what is a startup within the government?" And it was for working in Estonia for the e-Residency project, which is flagship digital initiative. So they ended up hiring me, I assume, because I was the only person foolish enough to move to Estonia in mid-February in the dead of winter when it's dark for something like 22 hours a day.
But I had a front-row seat to basically the country's change from ... Well, I shouldn't say it changed. By the time I got there, it was already changed. Their digital government was already very well set up and going, but it was definitely part of the time when the rest of the world was learning about this and about their prowess when it came to digital. And I was just astounded by what I saw. And I thought that this place is really interesting. There's things that we could learn, well, especially coming from Germany, but the West more broadly, about digitalization and removing bureaucracy and making it easy to facilitate entrepreneurship.
And then fast forward a couple of years, I returned to the US and I did this program called TechCongress, which takes tech people and puts them in Congress. And I was frankly just a little bit shocked at the lack of tech policy knowledge and the lack of digital state capacity and all the things that I think many folks in Silicon Valley are discovering over the last months and years. And I decided to write this book about Estonia with the hopes that I could take some of Estonia's tangible lessons and try and share them for the US. So as we think about modernizing and building a better government system that's more operationally efficient and incorporates AI or whatever we need to do to make it actually work for people in a way that doesn't break the deficit that we learn from Estonia.
And so the only other thing I'd mention about Estonia that is often tied to the country is their early-stage tech scene and especially Skype. And unfortunately, as we're recording this, I think this is the last week of Skype's existence. It had a slow, sad spiral after it was initially bought by eBay, then spun out and bought by Microsoft, and then neglected for a decade plus after that. But the important thing for Estonia is that at its first acquisition, many of the initial employees were Estonian. That's where they had based most of their engineering talent. So it minted many wealthy Estonians in the early days of the internet ecosystem. And then those guys became the backers of the next generation of Estonian startups.
So there's a great map that Sten Tamkivi from Plural and maybe Niklas Zennström from Atomico and put together about where all the Skype people went and what they built. And it's just incredible the links from Skype to all these other startups, not just in Estonia but across Europe. Yeah, I think Estonia is a fascinating place on those two nexus.

Danny Crichton:
So Estonia was an independent nation, kind of survives the Bolshevik Revolution, does not survive Stalin, gets annexed for much of its history, regains its independence in '91. And so I was very curious, just at a very basic level, you have the title for your new book, Rebooting a Nation. The nation was booted in '91, so to speak, or rebooted, if you will, more historically accurate. So this is a little bit of a 3.0 situation. And just as technologists, I mean, why the change all of a sudden? Is that because of the institutions were fresh, new, and just weren't really impressed and therefore technology was able to diffuse across all these different republics? What took place there?

Joel Burke:
Yeah. I think there was some factors that came together in a perfect storm. So for one, definitely there was ... After five decades of Soviet occupation, you can imagine that people were ready for something radically different. So you had folks like Prime Minister Mart Laar, who was one of their earliest PMs. He was very much in the Thatcherite vein and ready to basically embrace the opposite of anything that the communists had done or how they thought about economic policy.
So he basically put the country through economic shock therapy. I mean, removing subsidies, helping find foreign investors to take over the ailing state-owned businesses, agricultural reform to remove the collectivization. And actually, this is one of the things that I think is important to mention that isn't true for some of the other formerly occupied Soviet territories. Estonia, in its first go-around at independence, had done significant land reform before. So that was, in my opinion, part of the reason why they were able to modernize somewhat more quickly in the agricultural sector and bounce back a little bit faster.
And then it was also getting your independence at '91. You're talking about the dawn of the modern web essentially, right? So former President Ilves, he's American ... Well, I shouldn't say he's American. I mean, he's an Estonian American, but I think he was educated at Columbia University and grew up in New Jersey, and had to learn programming. And he, very early in the country's independence, had been serving as the Estonian ambassador to the United States at DC. And he encountered Mosaic, the browser, and was just identified this as a place where Estonia could be competitive, where it was a new technology, a new frontier where there was a level playing field where anyone could access where maybe Silicon Valley.
And in the US, we're a little bit ahead, but compared to how ahead the US or Europe was on other parts of the industrial economy compared to Estonia, which had been basically decimated by five decades of Soviet neglect, it provided an opportunity for them to compete on this new frontier. So there was a broad recognition that this was an area that they could play in. And then I think the last thing I'd mention is the mentality, because as you can imagine, there's the Lara-esque approach, there's rejection of communist ideals, but Estonia looking on a map, it's quite close to Finland. And Finland was always held up as this benchmark for the country and this comparison between the two and Estonia considered itself a little bit more Nordic culturally than Baltic.
It feels that it got lumped in with the Baltics by other folks rather than really being part of that area. But right before World War II, the metrics were such that it was roughly around the same GDP quality of life between Estonia and Finland. You can imagine how much of a difference there was after five decades of Soviet occupation. So throughout occupation, because Tallinn was relatively close to Helsinki, they could catch radio waves and rebroadcast American TV shows. So Estonia had these repeated glimpses of what life was like in the West, and that once they finally gained re-independence, there's this feeling of, "Wow, there's such a huge gap here that we needed to jump over and we're not going to be able to do it by following the traditional development playbook," working your way from light manufacturing. So they were willing to do pretty bold and big things that they took big swings, they had a massive chip on their shoulder about where they thought they should be in a pecking order and quality of life, and were willing to take risks to try to get there.

Danny Crichton:
Josh Wolfe often says that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And so you can see that that clearly, the attitude worked for Estonia. When I think about Estonia, and I was thinking about your book, one thing that you show is that this wasn't just one decision, right? This wasn't just one moment where they say, "Oh, we're going to modernize," and it happens with this particular law. You have everything from the Tiger Leap initiative and then you are trying to get ID card rollouts more than a decade later. And then you have to deal with the Russian cyberattacks. I mean, this is a long journey that Estonia has been through. I'm wondering if you could talk about how at each one of those moments, they were able to keep going and double down, triple down on this digital initiative even though they were met with such resistance.

Joel Burke:
I think this is a really important point that the idea of sustained political will and across different administrations and varying political parties, where they decided this is the direction that we're going to go. And I do think this is critical and something that I hope the US figures out because there's a couple different buckets here. There's the Tiger Leap campaign, which, for context, is basically this idea of connecting all the schools in the country to the web, and then an additional educational campaign that went along with it. So one, you give kids access to the web so they can learn digital skills.
And then two, you also provide supplemental digital skills also, but also at the same time, you're training the teachers and that helps filter out digital skills across the rest of society. And that was critically important for basically building a workforce that was ready for the future. And just a couple weeks ago, there was a deal that Estonia signed with OpenAI to roll out OpenAI services across its schools again. So they're doing this repeatedly for new technology. So it is something that has continued and there has been basically a long consensus to continue to invest in digital in recent years. But I think that was built up over basically elite-driven pushes to get this done.
I mean, if you have Prime Minister Laar who basically delegated to Linnar Viik a huge amount of authority to push through digitalization, you had many people who decided to prioritize the Tiger Leap campaign, which, in retrospect, it sounds obvious. Of course, we should connect school to the web and teach kids digital literacy, but at the time, you're in the late '90s and you might be taking that money away from paying teachers' pensions. I mean, it was economically pretty desperate until semi recently. And so certainly, there was fighting. I do think that part of the reason why Estonia has seemed like it's so stable and so willing to push forward is because many of these fights happen in local media in the Estonian language that many outsiders don't really see or pay attention to, and one of the perks of being a small country. I mean, the US, every single thing that the US does is litigated and talked about across the world. Whereas in Estonia, you hear the end result once it starts getting pushed out through an English language once there's big product announcement.
And so I think there were many more debates than were on the surface, but indeed it has been quite something to see the, basically, first elite consensus and then general population consensus to invest in digitalization. And I think eventually, the elites pushed it through to a point where the rest of the people saw the value of it. So let's take the example of digital identity, where there used to be a joke that the only thing this thing is good for is scraping the ice off the windshield because you couldn't actually use it for anything. But because the politicians at the time had made it mandatory, which was politically unpopular, but they decided this was important for it to do.
And I think one of the main differentiators from other countries in the EU who have similar digital identity schemes is because they did that and because it became so mass adopted across the population, if you were a local grocery store chain or the local train company or bus company, you would then build services that reference the API. So when someone ... For instance, when I was living in Tallinn, you could tap your ID card on the bus station terminal and it registered that you were living in Tallinn and gave you free public transport. But the only reason someone would invest in that is because there's enough adoption. So I think once those things started snowballing and became useful for folks, then society was like, "Oh, of course, this makes sense." And then frankly, it's just become integral to Estonia's international brand and reputation. And so I think there also is a sense of this is who we are in a way.

Danny Crichton:
Let me ask you ... I mean, a couple of thoughts. One is, we're literally implementing real ID at American airports after 20 years. First announced in '05, it's here. I think, as we're recording this, we're three days away from people being turned away at the gates. I think we're going to do it.

Laurence Pevsner:
Well, right now, they've been giving people little handouts that say, "Sorry, your ID is not real. You can still come in, but please do get one."

Joel Burke:
Yes.

Danny Crichton:
There are long lines at the DMV. And I'm curious about this, I mean, look, you were taken over by a totalitarian power under Stalin throughout the Soviet Union. Estonia gets its freedom in '91. You spent time in Berlin, you know what it was like. And obviously, from its own history, there's a lot of concern around privacy, individual protections, France, you can't collect aggregate data around all kinds of different factors. There's a lot of focus on protecting yourself from the government. And when I look at Estonia, I feel like similar situation.
You had secret police, you had secret intelligence, informants all across the world. Why did it go such a different direction where people are willing to say, "Look, I trust my government to have a digital ID. I can go on the bus." Clearly, this data could be used against me, so to speak. Why did it go on such a different pattern when much of Western Europe went a different direction and the US, which doesn't have as much of this history, also has been trying to avoid any integration of technology, both federal, down to state, local?

Joel Burke:
It's a fascinating question. And one ... So when I was working for the e-Residency program in Estonia, I mean, I was one of the outspoken American guys. So when foreign delegations from the US or from Germany would come in, often they'd roll me out to the Estonia briefing center and talk to the American delegations about why Estonia and what was special about the country. And indeed, that was almost always one of the questions like, "Well, Estonia's interesting, but we have different cultural values and think differently about privacy." And I guess I would reframe the question and push back a little bit. So let's take the example of what's happening now with ... Actually not even [inaudible 00:13:20], let's go six months ago pre-dose.
I, for instance ... The government has information at the IRS, it probably has some healthcare information because I worked in Congress, I'm sure it has some security information and background checks information on me. I don't actually know what the government has. I don't actually know concretely what information it has. It's probably spread out on paper files across a bunch of different government agencies. I don't know when someone goes and accesses them. So, yeah, maybe we have a security through obscurity thing, but I actually think any motivated actor within the US government really could get that data if they wanted to, and I would have no idea whether they did or what information they had access to.
Not to mention the fact that they can just go on private markets and go to a data broker and probably buy it anyways. Whereas in Estonia, they built up basically a legal system that puts the citizen or the resident in the driver's seat. So when I go to my dashboard and the e-Estonia side, and look at all the digital services and I can see in a unified view the information that the government has, so I know what information they have. I can also see who has viewed my data and why.
So, for instance, if I go to a new doctor's appointment, I decide I get a blood test or a CAT scan or something and the doctor pulls up my medical record from my e-health profile, it's tagged and logged. And so later I can go back and look at it and say, "Okay, that makes sense. This doctor with this digital identity looked at my profile. That makes sense to me." But if I see something that doesn't make sense or that I'm like, "I don't remember giving access," I can basically trigger a demand response from the ... I mean, I guess the equivalent of a FOIA. FOIA has actually worked well and happened in a couple of days instead of months and lawsuits later and basically say, "Why was this accessed?"
And so they have both the technical tools and the legal regime that basically gives you more control over the data. So you can not only have this unified view of what does the government have, but why have they accessed it and how, and demand these responses. So it is a different frame. And how they got there, I think, was in part because of the push for independence. So indeed, you could imagine ... And I actually felt this way about iVoting because they had online voting and I was like, "Imagine coming from a Soviet system where for five decades you've had" ... I mean, any election is just a sham, basically. But I think there was initially so much trust in the independence leaders who, I mean, helped shepherd the country out of Soviet occupation and into re-independence that there was a willingness from the people to trust, but also, they built in these safeguards on legislatively and on the tech side.
So I think that's what's allowed this adoption in Estonia. So in the US, I think that's something that we can learn from. I don't think we can and should adopt Estonia solutions wholesale. I think much more likely, if we ever do something like digital identity, we'll probably partner with Apple and Google because they've got biometric scans on my face that I used to open my iPhone anyways. I trust Apple to verify my identity far more than I do the DMV, right? I'm pretty sure. Or even Facebook probably knows me better, unfortunately.
And so I think we'll do it a different way, but I think this mentality of doing these hard things, having sustained investment, and building in these safeguards is really important.

Laurence Pevsner:
So you arrive in Estonia and you're there to work within a startup within the state as part of the EU residency. You know going in in advance that this is going to be a technologically advanced country. You're already arriving, it's already been doing some of this work. What still surprised you anyway when you arrived? And then how did the country continue to change while you were there?

Joel Burke:
So I think what surprised me is how blase it was to Estonian citizens. I got there in 2018, and many of these systems had been around for 10, 15 years already. And so for Estonians, it was just like, of course, you could vote online and over the phone. Of course, when I file my taxes, it's pretty filled and I just look at it and I press Click. And I think it's a 99% use of online or e-taxes, and it takes on average three to five minutes. I mean, when I did it, it took me five minutes. So for them, it was just so natural that it would happen. And usually, what you saw is that people in Estonia were not that impressed until they went abroad and had experience. Maybe they went to Silicon Valley because there's a lot of crossover in the tech communities. Sten Tamkivi, for instance, was an EIR at Andreessen Horowitz and the folks from a Veriff went through Y Combinator. So there's a lot of crossover there. And then a lot of crossover with Germany, which had once been an occupying power way back in the day.
And so then those folks, when they came back, were like, "Oh, I get it. I don't have to have my lawyer read out my incorporation documents to me physically in person for three hours, and instead I could just click accept on a digital form." That was surprising to me. I think the other thing was just how far the government went to try and make itself accessible and change proactively. So they have this program, Accelerate Estonia, which is like ... I think the tagline is make illegal things legal, and the government actively works to basically support the private sector and try to create innovations.
And so even the e-Residency program that I work for, it was initially pitched at a ideathon, hackathon style thing. And then what happened is that everyone got enthusiastic about it. The parliament basically voted to create legal changes that would allow the program to exist, and then the program was able to get going in the matter of a couple of months, which is just ... I mean, compare that to, I'm sitting at Stanford in California, I can't imagine Governor Newsom saying, "Yeah, we're going to make illegal things legal. We're going to proactively work with the private sector to make it easier for you to build houses, let alone defense or something."
And so I think this wholesale mindset shift of trying to work proactively with the private sector is really important, and they also just make themselves accessible. One thing that also shocked me, I remember being in a meeting with someone who is the equivalent of an undersecretary, so relatively senior in the government, and the way folks were talking to him was like he was just some guy who had just strolled into our office. I asked one of my Estonian colleagues afterwards, I was like, "You talked to a minister equivalent like this." And like, "Oh, yeah, well, he went to school with my mom. And so we know him." And so I think this is one of the benefits of a small, very egalitarian society. There isn't that much status and hierarchy. And so people are pretty widely accessible and try to make themselves so.

Laurence Pevsner:
Remember one of the lines from your book that I really enjoyed is when you said that anyone from Estonia can become the best at anything if they really want to because it's such a small country. But that leads me to thinking about the United States because we're not a small country. We are 330 times the size of Estonia. You write in your introduction about how America is facing what you call our Macy's moment. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about what you think that moment is and where the Estonia example does and doesn't translate to our American problem.

Joel Burke:
I think we're at the dawn of another technological revolution and a change in the way the world and society works and operates. So when I think about the US and how our government especially was architected, it was architected for a pre-digital age. I mean, right now, maybe we've digitized some things like you fax things or you email forms instead of writing them out on paper, nailing them. But by and large, the way that our systems actually operate are still made for this industrial era before digital. So when I thought about the comparisons to the Macy's moment was at the start of eCommerce, and whether big box stores still had a role, and Macy's is still around, but it's not the heyday of the Macy's parade and being the iconic American brand.
And so when I think about Estonia and the lessons that it can give for the US, certainly I don't think we should copy almost anything whole cloth. I think what I want people to take away from is the mindset, the mentality, and the culture that we need to build together and work together towards. So it's politicians willing to do really politically hard things that will matter for the long term for the country. It's about having a long-term strategy for whether it's education, things that are going to pay off in 10 or 20 years that requires sustained investment.
So for Estonia, this was digitalization broadly. If we keep having this situation where every four years someone comes and kicks down at what the glass guy built before, I think we're never really going to build the digital systems and the kind of society and efficient government that we want. So I think we need to basically come to some consensus of what kind of government and society we want to run. And maybe it's more Doge-esque, maybe it's more on the Ezra, Klein, Derek, Thompson Abundance side. Maybe it's more ... As you can see in the book, I referenced Jen Polka's work quite often who is a former deputy CTO, but she's also someone who pulls no punches on the left and the right for basically the failure to increase state capacity.
And so I think we need to come together at a consensus point for society and think of how we want to face the next generation. And I really think it's going to be AI. It seems quite likely that that's going to be the next technological frontier that really shifts things. But I think we need to have a conscious strategy about how we're going to adopt that. And I also am very excited. I think AI and digitalization more broadly open up huge avenues for America to ... I guess there's incremental change where you can do to systems or you can just wholesale leapfrog, which is what Estonia did, because basically they have been held back for five decades and then, of course, you have to leapfrog, right?
And I think the US has ... Unfortunately, because we have failed to modernize over and over, I think we should be looking at the leapfrog stage of things. And so I'm excited about the opportunity. I mean, it's going to be hard, but I'm excited about the opportunities that the US has. We just need to get together and figure out that we're going to do this thing and do it sustain for probably several different administrations and terms.

Danny Crichton:
Let me ask you on this front. We recently had an episode with Kelvin Yu, who is a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, published a playbook, a bunch of proposals to improve really on industrial policy, less about governance and digital IDs and all the stuff that we're talking about. But one of the key parts that he made in the episode was a focus on details, a focus on small, that instead of trying to do the big cut "rebooting a nation", the idea here is small tiny patches to the code base all over the place. If you do hundreds of those over a period of time, you aggregate to something that is much larger and substantial. I'm curious when you think about the Estonia case and then also when you're reflecting on the US, is that total bottoms-up fix the right approach, particularly when it comes to digital technology, digitalization, this movement from paperwork to AI systems? Where do you stand on that spectrum?

Joel Burke:
Well, first off, Kelvin's great. And I actually have the playbook that FAI has put out on a different tab, and I haven't actually dug into it yet, so I'm not going to get into it because I don't want to get over my skis here. But I think that both are true in a way, and this is a bit of a cop out. But when I was working in Congress, there was a talk of secret Congress, which sounds much more like nefarious and cool than it is, but it's basically this idea of doing the things that aren't sexy, that don't appear on primetime television. And that is where things are most tractable to deal with, because if you can just get a small bill done and it doesn't have to get litigated on CNN, and Fox, and MSNBC and become highly politicized, it's much easier to get something done. There is something true here.
However, I guess where I feel that we're at as a society is we need to find consensus again. When I think back in ... And maybe I'm romanticizing or whatever for the days of the Cold War, I think about our foreign policy, for instance, and it feels like we were very aligned over several decades about how we were going to manage the threat of communism. And maybe there were obviously some big bumps in the road in that, but I feel like broadly, we were aligned as a society.
And so I think the wholesale change from technology is going to be so important that it is going to affect society on such a massive scale. No doubt we need to fix the potholes in the road, too, and we need to make these thousand small changes, whether it's changing a definition from NEPA or making it easier to let supersonic aircraft fly in the United States. But I think we also just need to get our stuff together as a society and figure out what the pathway is for America that we want to go down and what we want our government to look like in the no digital or AI age.

Danny Crichton:
It is a little bit of a cop out, I get what you're saying. I think one of the big questions to me is ... I wrote a piece two, three years ago called Consensus Functions, and it was about democracy is about blockchain, it was trying to get at this challenge in a lot of fields, which is, look, even the process of science is a mechanism to try to create institutions, to create consensus on the frontiers of knowledge where there's massive debates sometimes. And sometimes such shrill debates that you basically have to have people go to their funerals in order to move the debates forward. But this challenge of, is there ever a consensus and where is the right place in any layer or hierarchy to find it? And I came to this conclusion that it's not likely to happen. We're not going to come to an agreement because we're not just talking about, do we want a chip or not a chip in our real IDs. We're talking fundamentals around privacy, how we have a relationship with government, et cetera.
In the past, we were able to mostly get past this, to your point about the Cold War, not through, I think, elite debates and democracy, but it was like if you lived in North Dakota in 1950s, you had the kind of government you wanted, which was it was far away, it was not going to bother you. There were no tools by which the government could control your motions and movements. Technology has cut that distance across the board. Everyone gets the same relationship because we're all tracked whether from private companies. I know that's what you work on today or the government, but to me, there's this challenge of this uniformity that's come on top of folks, and we don't have the ability to make those selections before.
So I do think it's interesting because I look into Estonia and I think, "Isn't it amazing if you're 1.3 million people?" I did look up the proper statistic because I said over one, but 1.3 million, major difference for them, less difference over here at 340, but you can imagine a consensus around this. You can imagine how the country came to a seat to the European Union, join NATO as part of the expansions and 04 for both, and you can do that in a small village, small town feel. But when your country is 340 million people covering everything from the plains to the coasts to island nations to Alaska, to me, that just seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream that is never going to take place.

Joel Burke:
Well, I hope not. I sympathize with your view. And I do think ... I mean, when I think of more the politics side, it used to be all politics is local, but increasingly, it feels like all politics is national. I do totally get where you're coming from. However, I do think that in part ... Something I want to clarify for Estonia is that there was a policy of Russification during the days of the Soviet Union, and this happened all across the occupied territories. And so there's a large portion of the population that is still Russian-speaking and, especially in the early days, was not necessarily aligned with the broader Estonian societal vision. So certainly, it wasn't just a unified block that everyone was moving towards the same goal. There had to be some consensus and not everybody is going to move together in the same way. But I guess getting 100% of society versus 51% of society versus 75% of society is technically a matter of degree. But it matters quite a lot how many people you can bring along.
So do I think we're going to get everybody to change and everybody to get aligned? No. Do I hope that we can get 60%, 75% of people aligned? And I look at some issues, like Pew puts out these polls every year or so on things Americans agree with. And I think there are these 70%, 80% issues that people broadly agree with and are often somewhat more intractable on the political side for a variety of reasons. But certainly, yes, someone in Nebraska or I worked for a member from South Dakota when I was in Congress, they have differences from folks on the coast. But I do think there are quite a lot of things that unite us as Americans and that we hold it as fundamental values. Right now, I work for a tech company that's focused on privacy first, and many of our users are from places like Silicon Valley and big cities, but also from small town.
And so I think there are pretty universal American values and I do hope that we can come to a consensus, but I think that this is one of the things about democracy. It's like big changes are really hard, take a long time, and sometimes are frustratingly slow in a place like Congress. But I have to remind myself sometimes that Congress, it's meant to be intentionally slow sometimes because you have to grind out a consensus with all these warring factions. And eventually you come to ... I mean, it's like a negotiation, right? At the end, everybody's unhappy, but move forward. And so I think in the end, we'll end up moving towards something like that. It just takes much longer. So that was a long way of saying that I'm hopeful-

Danny Crichton:
You're hopeful and I'm cynical [inaudible 00:29:49]. You're hopeful and I'm cynical, which ironically, you were more cynical about these negotiations. I always joke with our risk gaming scenarios, we have a slide that we do with the briefing for all of our scenarios, and we hope that you have one of two emotions. You're either have full elation and you had an amazing time or you're so effing pissed off at everyone else and how they screwed you over in the middle of the game. I don't want you in the middle. I don't want any neutrality. I don't want anyone to be like, "Oh, that was a okay experience. I learned a lot." I want people to come with some emotion out of that experience, that crucible, and have a good time.

Laurence Pevsner:
I do think the question of why a country unifies is not just about internally, can they agree, but actually often facing an external threat. So in the case of Estonia, right, you talked about how it had this crucible moment that it was recently freed from the Soviet shackles, but it had to do or die in order to survive as a country. You can see why was the United States united on foreign policy. Well, we had a foreign threat. We were going through the Cold War and that's why we were able to agree on at least that set of issues. And then I think about countries like ... In India, for example, they do have the Aadhaar. It's a copying of the Estonian physical ID. Ukraine has the Diia app. These are places that are becoming more nationalistic or are defending themselves in some ways. And so they do it because they have to. And so the big question, I think, for the United States is, are we going to face a moment where we feel like we do it because we have to?

Danny Crichton:
Well, those tariffs are coming in, so we're going to have to do something very, very soon. But let me close out the conversation here real quick. I mean, you have a couple parts of the book, Rebooting a Nation. The third and final part is really about the future, the future of the East State, future of Estonia. You even describe ... I mean, we're joking about a fairly small country, but you even have a chapter focused on growing Estonia from 1.3 million up to 10 million, which I took a little bit like Matthew Yglesias's book about one billion Americans and tripling down. But this idea that life is not stagnant, that you can make changes, both of the governments to a country, to a culture, that growth is good, that you can really go the distance. Give us a little bit of depiction of where you see all this heading over the next 10 years.

Joel Burke:
There's two cases, right? One is ... And this might be my hot take, but I think NATO is basically irrelevant at this point. I think that there's such a massive loss of trust in it. If I'm Putin, do I really believe President Trump is going to order an aggressive kinetic response if I do some minor incursion somewhere on the eastern flank of NATO? I'm quite skeptical that ... Maybe we would, but I'm skeptical that Putin believes that the odds are high enough that we would.
So if I'm Estonia, I'm probably thinking about pretty aggressive moves to think about how to manage my territory and my infrastructure. And I'm actually still ... Despite what I just said, I'm actually still bullish on Estonia and on small cohesive societies pretty long term. And ditto Ukraine. Unfortunately, because of Russia's invasion, it has basically galvanized the entire society and created a cohesive identity that I don't think that they've had since maybe even before World War II.
I'm not a Ukrainian historian, but when I was back there last year and used to go many more times before the full-scale invasion, I think the sense of national identity is much stronger today because of the war. So for Estonia, I think that maybe Estonia, and maybe this is my futuristic libertarian tech bro coming out and speaking here, but maybe Estonia isn't physically in the same space as it is. Maybe it is, maybe it has part of the same territory, but maybe Estonia buys up a good portion of land outside one of these freedom cities in Wyoming or somewhere in California and turns that into a new Estonian city, Tallinn 2, and a third or fourth reboot of the nation as somewhere else in a different territory. And we have these enclaves.
And so I do think there's many paths that we can potentially go down for what Estonia's future looks like. I'm pretty bullish on the country and the culture long term just because it is a society where people look out for each other, where the entrepreneurs ... I mean, they have group chats for Estonian founders, and that's part of what's propelled the ecosystem to be so strong and mint so many unicorns and founders. I'm definitely bullish. Now, whether I'm bullish on the exact territorial integrity and the exact lines that we see today, I'm less bullish, but I also think that the physical land we occupy is less important than people think.

Danny Crichton:
Well, Joel, thank you so much for joining us. And for everyone listening, obviously, take a copy of Rebooting a Nation, a book on Estonia's e-government, its East State and the future of Estonia, Europe, and the world, and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

Joel Burke:
Great. Thank you so much for having me.

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