Governor Daniels and Joe Lonsdale, the founder and managing partner of 8VC, discuss the prospects for liberty in the technology sector, challenges to liberty in public education, and the difficulty of starting a defense company when your competition is the government. They also discuss Lonsdale’s work with the University of Austin, the perils of DEI, the proper role of government, the way to a better future, and why Lonsdale likes Xenophon.
Governor Daniels and Joe Lonsdale, the founder and managing partner of 8VC, discuss the prospects for liberty in the technology sector, challenges to liberty in public education, and the difficulty of starting a defense company when your competition is the government. They also discuss Lonsdale’s work with the University of Austin, the perils of DEI, the proper role of government, the way to a better future, and why Lonsdale likes Xenophon.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:21):
Greetings, and welcome to the latest edition of Liberty Fund’s podcast, The Future of Liberty. Every episode has been a treat, but none more so than today’s. One of the great exponents of liberty and one of the practitioners who has helped make its preservation in America more likely is Joe Lonsdale. You’re pretty young to be a legend, but I’m going to say it anyway: a legendary entrepreneur, and also a thinker and a true scholar in your own right. Thanks so much for being with us.
Joe Lonsdale (00:53):
Thanks, Mr. Governor. It's an honor to be on.
Mitch Daniels (00:55):
Joe, I got to ask you, first of all, you're a child of Silicon Valley, and maybe it's a stereotype, but to me, too many of the folks who grew up where you did don't have a commitment or have not displayed a commitment to liberty and to individual freedom. You seem to have had it from the earliest age. Where did it come from?
Joe Lonsdale (01:21):
Well Mitch, my father, who has the same name, I think gave me Ayn Rand to read as a kid. My little brother and I were also reading Austrian economists like von Mises and Rothbard, and really studying the American founding from a young age. It’s something my family has always been very interested in. I’ve always been fascinated by the founders of America. I think it’s such an interesting question. When you look at history and study it, you see how much poverty, misery, and struggle there was for so long as a species, and then you see this really unique last 250 years that we’ve been able to experience. You have to ask why what’s exceptional, what’s different about it? And it’s obviously an important question, because this recent period is so unique.
(02:05):
And I really value the principles and the philosophy of the American founders. And I really value the theories that came down from the philosophy and from the enlightenment and from John Locke, life, liberty, and property, and all these frameworks that led to something in history that was just so important and so unique. And it scares me when I see others who don't understand and don't care about those values because I think that's why we have America.
Mitch Daniels (02:27):
You obviously had a very unique background. I wish I could say I was reading those things at the age you did, but notwithstanding that, when one looks from a distance at Silicon Valley, the kind of activity there, the ingenuity, and the individual success that has come to so many people, it’s always been puzzling to me that they seem to buy into, or at least acquiesce in, a statist mentality. Why aren’t more of your counterparts, people you grew up with and those growing up there now, imbued with a similar spirit as you are, even if they didn’t read Murray Rothbard?
Joe Lonsdale (03:14):
Mitch, they didn’t grow up with it, but I have some good news for you. I was just on a chat right before I came on here, actually, with people like Marc Andreessen, the Winklevoss twins, and others. Over the last decade, a lot of people have seen the U.S. regulatory apparatus become weaponized, going after our companies and getting in the way. And you know what’s interesting? The software world, for the last couple of generations, really existed outside, for the most part, of much of the regulatory apparatus. It was such a new area that it hadn’t already been captured. Most of the things that get captured and then harassed by the government are areas where big, existing companies try to use the state to harass new, smaller ones. There was so much new stuff happening that a lot of Silicon Valley was building in entirely new areas.
(03:58):
And so they didn’t have to deal with a lot of really stupid government bureaucrats slowing them down and harassing them. They didn’t experience it firsthand. On top of that, where did the culture in Silicon Valley come from? Where did the Google culture come from? Where did the Apple culture come from? They were hiring a lot of PhDs out of Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale. You essentially took university cultures and cloned them into these companies, then let them build in areas where they weren’t being bothered by government. Of course they took university culture as the norm. That meant adopting a very left-leaning culture as the default. That’s what you see in Silicon Valley. It’s a clone of the universities. And because the universities have become corrupted, so has Silicon Valley.
(04:38):
Now what you’re seeing is a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of companies that were built in the last ten or fifteen years, where people are realizing, ‘Wait a second, this is really broken. We’re going to have to fix this. We’re going to have to stop the government from abusing its power.’ As a result, you’re seeing a lot of people really excited about the Supreme Court rulings last week, excited about going after the regulatory state, getting rid of Chevron deference, and all of this in a way you really hadn’t seen before. So I’m quite optimistic that the innovation world is going to step up and be fighters on our side.
Mitch Daniels (05:05):
Well, if an epiphany has begun out there, that is great news for us all. You've mentioned the corruption of the higher ed system. We've seen that, we can talk about that a little more in a minute. But I'm also moved to ask you, is the K-12 system in California and the way it's been structured by its overseers really as awful as one reads?
Joe Lonsdale (05:33):
It's really gotten worse over time. I do have to caveat this with, I grew up in the East Bay in Fremont, California. I went to a public school that was about a little more than half Asian, mostly Asian immigrants kids. And I think it was one of the top five public schools in the state. At the time, it was not really corrupted. Sure, I'd have arguments with all my teachers about politics, but a lot of them would encourage me. They came from a generation where it was okay to argue and debate and have free speech. And they even put me in charge of some of the debates for our school class and stuff, even though it was clear I disagreed with them. You're not seeing that as much anymore. What you're seeing now with the way the K-12 works is that a lot of the new thing is to get promoted, to become a teacher, to become a principal, to become a superintendent.
(06:15):
You have to go through these master’s degrees that have become a lot more woke, a lot more left, and much more focused on ideology. Things are getting a lot worse. And it’s actually crazy, Mitch. They’re turning off a lot of the advanced math. They’re turning off a lot of these subjects altogether. It’s this theory of disparate impact that’s breaking our government and breaking our schools, where just because, on average, different groups don’t do as well, they don’t even want certain standards or programs to exist. That’s so anti-merit and so bad for our civilization. You’re seeing this most clearly in California. When my wife and I started having kids, and we have four little girls now and are expecting a son soon, we decided to leave in part because the schools, both public and private, had been so overtaken by extreme ideological forces that we didn’t want to expose our kids to that anymore.
Mitch Daniels (07:05):
Yeah, when one reads about what are the required classes and what's not required anymore out there, one really grieves for the little ones and hopes that somewhere later in life, they'll encounter ideas really more compatible with their success.
Joe Lonsdale (07:26):
It's really sad how much you're brainwashed in these places now. And it's ironic to me because Thomas Jefferson, one of our founders, actually wrote a lot about the need for public education. He said there's really only one main purpose. The one main purpose for the general populace for him was to teach them about the danger of despotism and to teach them about the positives of liberty.
Mitch Daniels (07:45):
Speaking to you from the home of the first universal school choice system in the country, I can only tell you that it does begin to make a difference.
Joe Lonsdale (07:54):
There are some great people who have done some great work, that's fair.
Mitch Daniels (07:57):
As does the awakening of a lot of parents, particularly post COVID, to the need to go have a look at what their kids are being taught.
Joe Lonsdale (08:06):
Exactly.
Mitch Daniels (08:07):
I want to ask you about Palantir. The world first heard of Joe Lonsdale as one of the co-founders of this company at an incredibly early age. You, again, were different, it appeared, and then many of your counterparts in the world from which you come in caring deeply about national security of the country, not only being willing, but eager to work on systems that might enhance it. By the way, tell us where the name came from, because I think that's an interesting subject, but then tell us where your impulse to apply your talents in this area came from.
Joe Lonsdale (08:53):
Well, the name, of course, is from Lord of the Rings. There's this group of elves from the uttermost West that want to help the humans secure the realms against the bad guys. And it's very interesting in the story because basically, they build these Palantir seeing crystals, and they actually are useful, and they stop the bad guys. They see what's going on. They stop all the invasions. It's a really helpful thing. And then 2000 years later, the story checks it again, and the bad guys have gotten in control of one of these and he's using it for nefarious ends. And so we thought that was a really interesting warning to build into the name. We thought after 9/11, seeing what's going on in our world, we can go deeper into Islamic extremism and fundamentalism and the threat that it poses. And we thought in order to stop attacks, in order to get the bad guys, we needed to strengthen American intelligence and do this.
(09:36):
And we did prevent lots of attacks. But building this type of thing for the government is very scary. As a pro liberty guy, you want to make sure you're watching the watchers, you want to make sure you're extremely careful. It's not just our government, we have lots of allies who use it too. There's over 40 countries using it. And some of those countries are important to allies at helping stop the bad guys, but it's really scary what they could do with it otherwise. And so you want to build in these audit trails and be careful. And there's a double-edged sword here that we thought a lot about. It was worth building. We were passionate about doing it. I think we were right to do it and proud of having created the company, but we did realize we're also creating something and dealing with something quite dangerous.
Mitch Daniels (10:12):
Again, this may be me looking wishfully for good news, but I remember that, certainly in the universities, and I think this attitude permeated the broader community that came from those institutions, there was a real hostility toward working on things that might affect national security. It seems to me that circumstances have softened that stance, and that one now hears, somewhat encouragingly, about companies ranging from software to hardware beginning to see a sense of civic duty to help. Am I grasping here?
Joe Lonsdale (10:55):
No, I think you’re right. Listen, I think you all at Purdue did a good job throughout this whole cultural swing. You kept doing the right things there as an amazing school. At Stanford, unfortunately, other than Palantir, it was basically seen as completely anathema to work with the Department of Defense or the military. The left went very hard against it, and the right wasn’t really focused on it, which always seemed like a strange combination. When we were building Palantir in 2004 and 2005 and going out to raise early money, people would say, ‘Why aren’t you working on Web 2.0? Why are you taking talent and putting it into something that’s impossible and so hard?’ There hadn’t been a new big company started in this area for decades, so people just assumed it wasn’t possible. And the truth is, it’s immensely difficult to start and scale these kinds of companies, because you have to build something that’s ten times better than what the government already has.
(11:41):
Then you have to build an operation on the hill that breaks through. Frankly, it's somewhat of a corrupt setup with the existing primes, they block new things. And both Palantir and SpaceX, the two new companies to break through in this space in the last 30 years, both had to sue the government for doing inappropriate things. And I don't like suing anyone, that's ridiculous, but they literally were illegally blocking us. And so basically, it was an unnatural act for Palantir and for SpaceX to break through. And once they did, Anduril, the third new $10 billion plus new defense company, has also broken through now very well. And now you see a bunch of other ones.
(12:16):
I actually have a couple others I've founded since then that are valued at over a billion dollars doing important things, breaking through with the Navy, with AI and autonomous weaponized vessels, with high power microwaves turning off bad guys from miles away. And so there actually is a lot more going on and you see a whole wave of these companies. One of our peer funds calls it American dynamism, I think it's a great wave going on right now.
Mitch Daniels (12:40):
Yeah. Well, you're encouraging me, thank you. You said or wrote some time ago, this is a line I like and I've quoted to others, "We should be biased toward pride in our traditions, and harness that pride to build new things." Talk about that. And in context of an event that's coming, which is our 250th birthday as a free people, as a constitutionally governed free people, some of us here at Liberty Fund and elsewhere see that as an opportunity, but also a threat as others may seek to redefine who we are as a country. So talk a little bit about your own views on this if you have any, about how that anniversary might best be celebrated.
Joe Lonsdale (13:40):
Well, I hope it’s celebrated, Mitch, as a rebirth of liberty. I think we have everything in place to make that happen if things swing the right way. For me, there are really two things I’m focused on at a high level. The first is building things. Whether for-profit or nonprofit, we need to rebuild a lot of institutions in our society, because many of the old ones have been broken down and, frankly, captured by forces that are going to be very hard to dislodge. So that’s one focus: building new institutions. The second is fixing the government. That means passing legislation and, frankly, given recent developments, I think over the next four years, if we get the right people in charge, we could sue agencies that are abusing their power and lock in limits so they’re no longer able to do so in the ways we’re seeing now. That would help force things back toward a smaller, more competent, and more efficient government.
(14:33):
For me, one of the most important things we could do over the next four years is civil service reform. We could restore accountability. If you look at the jobs created over the last three or four years, a large share of them have been in government. That’s a lot of unaccountable activity, a lot of wasteful spending, and it’s really dangerous for our country. I think we can get growth back by shrinking the regulatory state, reducing unaccountable and wasteful government jobs, and, in doing so, help bring about a real rebirth of liberty in this country.
Mitch Daniels (15:00):
Another of your innovations that's been a great delight to many of us and that we're watching with tremendous anticipation is your answer to that largely corrupted higher ed system that you mentioned, and that's the University of Austin. Update us because many of us are, as I say, very, very expectant and hopeful for your great success.
Joe Lonsdale (15:25):
Well, I'm really proud to have founded this with Niall Ferguson and Bari Weiss, and obviously our president, Pano Kanelos. And we have dozens of amazing people on it now, including a team of about 40 people working full-time preparing for our students. We have our first class at University of Austin starting in the fall. It'll probably be just under a hundred or so keeping the standards really, really high. It's amazingly difficult to start a new university. There's thousands of pages of regulations. They try to block you at every turn. You can't get people to apply from the common app because we're not officially accredited until we've graduated our first class. You can't take international students, even though we have people trying to sponsor international students to come. We have to figure out some partnerships for that.
(16:09):
There's just a litany of these things that are set up to block it. And you really haven't had a top new university in almost a hundred years. So there's another version of American Cartels where they've put all these rules in place to make it virtually impossible to do. But you know what? We're really stubborn and I have amazing co-founders, so we're doing it. And we've got thousands of professors to apply. We've hired extraordinary professors. We've really learned there's different types of things there. We have some famous people, but we also realize you want the best teachers because what's our job? Our job is to create the best possible experience for our students and to attract the very top students and make other top students want to come there based on seeing their success. And I think we're setting up to do that really, really well.
(16:47):
We have this intellectual foundation framework where they're going to come and they're going to learn about the intellectual foundations of Western civilization from every angle. We have some really strong stuff we're doing for STEM for probably about a third of our kids will be STEM at first. I'd love to get that up to half the kids. We have so many people, my friends, for example, who have built SpaceX and The Boring Company here in Austin are going to help create a center. We're going to teach mechanical engineering, electrical engineering on the STEM side. So we have lots of people involved from the industry world as well. So things are set up really well, but these things are hard to do. You ran a university, you know how hard it is to manage academics. We're doing our best and it's coming along well.
Mitch Daniels (17:25):
I hope, and I predict, that you’ll continue to have great success in attracting top teachers. You’re right to emphasize that. It was once said by a president of The University of Chicago, nearly a hundred years ago, that “it would be a great institution if it merely met in a tent,” meaning that the intellectual capacity of the faculty is what matters most. Right now, there must be many refugees who would be happy to flee places of intellectual oppression and come to a place like yours.
Joe Lonsdale (18:01):
You should see, Mitch, there's hundreds of these notes I've read, people begging to come because they're under attack where they are right now. What a dystopian world we're in. I feel terrible, I can't take them all. It's so crazy.
Mitch Daniels (18:16):
You were an early outspoken critic or skeptic about what we came to know as ESG, investing particularly as a responsibility of corporate leadership. Here too, am I being wishful when I think I see some healthy retreat and correction of that along with its offspring, the so-called DEI spending and practice mandates that permeated too much of business America?
Joe Lonsdale (18:55):
Yeah, I think DEI is even more pernicious. ESG is interesting because it stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. And I think you and I feel that, if we’re running something, no one wants to hurt the environment. I want clean air, clean water, and reasonable standards. And when you already have a lot of money, why would you want your daughters living in a dirty world? And obviously I want to be socially responsible. I’ve spent a lot of my time on philanthropy and trying to help fix things. And of course, good governance is critical. One of the things you learn in the startup world is that a lot of entrepreneurs underestimate governance because they’re so busy, and that can create all sorts of problems. So I think people get confused. The first-order view is, yes, these are all good things.
(19:36):
But what the second order view is, how do you optimize for those things and for profit in society? And it turns out, and this is maybe a subtle point, but markets are this really clever mechanism because, just from an information theory perspective, you're combining lots of different people's views about what matters and what's worthwhile, and you're waiting at bottom up as opposed to waiting at top down. So you're letting people explore and try things that they think are right, that they think have really good ESG impact and profit impact.
(20:06):
And when you have an ESG framework that's top down, it's fundamentally authoritarian. It's not being weighted. There's no information mechanism that makes ESG magically correct just because some group puts it out that's tied to a government or tied to your bureaucracy or tied to, "Experts from academia." What's really happening is you're weaponizing these top-down authoritarian scores to attack people. So you get situations that are comical when Elon Musk starts speaking up because he's the CEO of Tesla, suddenly an electric car company that previously everyone on the left agreed was really, really good for the environment is suddenly getting terrible ESG scores. And you see this consistently.
Mitch Daniels (20:49):
As we leave the acronyms behind, I'll just express one of my own longtime frustrations, which is the way in which people, including people who are pro freedom in their orientation, have acquiesced in the expropriation of these terms. Environment doesn't mean climate restrictions with no regard to collateral costs and so forth. The one that bothers me the most is social justice. We've been debating as a species what is just since the time of the Greeks and before. And no one owns that term, but people who should know better continue to use it just like equity. It has become a tool of a more status mentality. And too many people thoughtlessly, I think, further that when they use these terms.
Joe Lonsdale (21:46):
I totally agree, they've expropriated them. Even progressive, just means far left.
Mitch Daniels (21:50):
Yes, exactly.
Joe Lonsdale (21:51):
I'm for progress, but I'm for actual progress, not for your weird definition of it.
Mitch Daniels (21:57):
Right. You just mentioned China, and I definitely want to get your views on that. There’s a lot of debate right now, and real concern, about who is going to win the competition in the world you come from, who is going to win in artificial intelligence and the broader technology race, which is very likely to determine even larger questions of national success. How do you see that right now? And to the extent there are dangers, what should we do?
Joe Lonsdale (22:34):
Well, China is definitely a geopolitical rival. It’s acting in all sorts of terrible ways. You may have heard that I had a good friend who worked back there. In 2010 and 2011, we thought China was going to become more free. I’m guilty of being naive about that. I, along with many others, was trying to do things there because there’s extraordinary talent among Chinese people. Even though China has an incredibly strong talent base, and even though they’ve been pushing a lot of their top tech people into defense work, they’ve at the very least slowed down their tech sector with internal dissension, crackdowns, and infighting over the last few years. That said, they’re a serious adversary. They have a lot more top engineers than we do these days. And they do innovate. If you’d asked me twenty years ago, I would have given you all sorts of examples of how they only copy things. But we’re seeing more and more genuinely new and innovative work coming out of China now.
(23:23):
And listen, if you see innovative Chinese people here, of course they can innovate in China too. I do think their society is very unstable. It has huge challenges with debt, huge challenges with demographics, and probably a serious lack of internal support, even though people try to hide it. They act like they’re all for their government. I think a lot of them aren’t at all, but they just can’t say it.
Mitch Daniels (23:44):
Right, I hear and read about the damage they have done to their once very promising entrepreneurial sector. And yet, as Stalin said about tanks, quantity has a quality all its own, and they are producing extraordinary numbers of well-trained, talented people. And they have, of course, the ability to enlist or coerce these people, and apply them to state purposes. Let me ask you about immigration. It's a hot topic for multiple reasons here in the country, particularly after the experience of the last few years. It cross-hatches with the subject we just discussed. I can tell you, having spent 10 years at a school that has had countless Asian and Chinese students in particular, that they are enormously valuable in many ways, but there also is increasingly a risk and constant attempts to abuse the opportunity to come to America. So where are the pluses and minuses of this? What sort of policy does it bring you out on?
Joe Lonsdale (25:04):
In some ways, this is very personal for me. I have some family who have been here since the Revolutionary War. My wife’s family originally came through Jamestown, so we both go really far back. But most of my family on my dad’s side came during the potato famines in the mid-nineteenth century from Ireland. And most of my family on my mom’s side came about 105 years ago as Jews fleeing Europe. Thank goodness they were allowed to leave then, because most of the relatives who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust. So my own history is one of immigration. I think it’s important that we let in great immigrants, both morally and because immigrants have contributed so much to this country. We do want to keep letting in the best and brightest from around the world. But for me, it should be a strategy.
Mitch Daniels (25:50):
No one we’re likely to talk to on this podcast bridges the three aspects of the question I want to ask you better than you do. Let me frame it this way. What should worry us most as a threat to both our individual freedoms and liberties and our national security: foreign threats and the possibility of foreign domination, the internal rot we’ve touched on two or three times in this conversation, or what I’ll call runaway technology? There are those, including many pioneers and leaders like you, who worry that we may lose control of the remarkable machinery we build. Of these three, which should trouble us the most, and which the least?
Joe Lonsdale (26:51):
So Mitch, America, with our talent, our wealth, and our spirit, is the most exceptional country in the world. And if we can keep our country functional, if we can stop the national rot, if we can stop the anti-meritocratic trends, and if we can stop this crazy new woke religion, whatever you want to call this thing that’s going on, then America is going to be a successful, wealthy, prosperous place where everyone can thrive, as long as we keep it competent and functional. So number one for me is that all the other problems get a lot easier if America remains a great nation.
Mitch Daniels (27:26):
Given how persuasive what you said is, and what we know about the Chinese, and by the way, they’re not alone, but let’s focus on them, and their understanding that the best way to undermine a country may be from within rather than militarily, where do you come out on TikTok? Some people define that as a free speech and freedom issue. On the other hand, many people, and I’m one of them, worry that it’s a powerful tool for misleading Americans about themselves and separating us from each other, more than almost anything else they have. What do you think?
Joe Lonsdale (28:09):
I feel very strongly, and I was very involved in fighting against China and TikTok. The CCP has invested a huge amount of effort in what is effectively a propaganda tool with AI that is helping spread terrible things to a hundred million Americans. And it's completely insane to me to give asymmetric access to an adversary. I think a lot of people who are not involved in the DOD world, not involved in defense, don't understand how China is pursuing to have this long-term battle with our civilization or people are just completely naive about this.
(28:41):
I think China is very deliberately using that to spread certain things. They try to push content from the far left. They try to spread things that are anti-American. They try to spread things that are divisive. And they’re such liars, Mitch. They’re such liars. They say, ‘Oh, we’re doing this thing where all the data is sitting with Oracle in Texas, and therefore it’s safe.’ And I’m like, no. If you’re in control of the algorithm, it’s not safe. The algorithm is what decides what gets spread. In China, you have apps encouraging kids to learn math, telling kids how great China is, and filtering out anything that says something negative about China. Then in America, you want to spread things that are divisive, negative, and bad for our society, while getting people addicted. You’ve got 100 million people looking at this. It’s insane that we haven’t turned it off yet.
Mitch Daniels (29:25):
Now, we're generally sympathetic to any argument that starts with an assertion that personal liberty or freedom is involved, however, I thought it was well put when someone wrote, "We would not have let the Soviets buy CBS News..."
Joe Lonsdale (29:40):
100%.
Mitch Daniels (29:41):
"... In 1965." And this is, if anything, perhaps more insidious. We're going to have to let you go, I know soon, Joe, but I've got to ask you, because so many things you say are provocative and interesting, but our audience might like to know about your interest and the lessons you draw from the life of Cyrus the Great as Xenophon recorded that life. What did it have to say to you?
Joe Lonsdale (30:13):
Yeah, you know where this comes from? I have a Substack where I write a lot of pieces, and I really enjoy it. I was fascinated talking with some Persian friends about a year ago. And what I’ve come to realize is that even though the Iranian government is obviously extremely corrupt and totalitarian, a lot of the Iranian people are actually not anti-American, and frankly not anti-Jewish either, which really surprised me. You have a lot of people who are fans of Jews. And Cyrus, of course, in his life, I don’t know if you mentioned this earlier, was famous for bringing in many Jews and learning from them about commerce and how wealth can grow in a society. His life in general was extraordinary, with so much wisdom about what it means to be a great leader.
(30:58):
Xenophon is one of the really famous writers from ancient Greece. I think he worked with Cyrus’s son, heard many of the stories firsthand, and then ended up writing this piece. What’s really neat, Mitch, is that it became a way to teach young princes how to be great leaders: how to hold back your anger, restrain your desires, develop discipline, think from the other person’s perspective, build allies through kindness, and become someone people admire and want to follow. There are so many positive lessons in it. And for a couple thousand years, that was really how leadership was taught in the West. What’s interesting to me is that Machiavelli came along with The Prince about four or five hundred years ago, and that represents the opposite side of the dialectic.
(31:43):
I think there are a lot of truths in the world, and sometimes there are truths at both extremes. One truth is all these good ways to be a leader, and all that wisdom. Then you have the Machiavellian side, which is almost the opposite end of the dialectic. It’s about trickery, abuse, bribery, and getting your way through schemes. And listen, I think you do need to understand that as a leader, because other people operate that way, and in war you sometimes have to do things like that. But I think it’s a really sad state of affairs in the West that this newer way of thinking became the way a lot of people in our society understand leadership.
(32:19):
They think of leadership as scheming. They think of leadership as playing dirty power games in back rooms. And sure, you need to understand that. But I think it would be much better for society to return to the way the West taught leadership for two thousand years, which is this Cyrus the Great framework of an admirable, wise, genuinely inspiring leader. Every teenage aristocrat basically used to read this book a thousand years ago, and it’s sad that it’s been so lost. So I thought it would be fun to expose people to it and to those positive values.
Mitch Daniels (32:46):
I know, it was very fun. Closer in time, our founders, whose achievement we’re about to celebrate in a couple of years, remind us of something important. I think libertarians sometimes need to remind themselves that freedom presupposes virtue and presupposes a degree of self-restraint.
Joe Lonsdale (33:07):
Well said. Well said.
Mitch Daniels (33:10):
And I hope that'll be something that we regain our footing on.
Joe Lonsdale (33:15):
We need to have young people look up to virtuous men. We don't have virtuous men necessarily in charge right now, and that's something we need to re-embrace for Western civilization if we're going to succeed.
Mitch Daniels (33:25):
Joe, I like to end these conversations with the same question. So let me ask you, you'll be there to see it and I won't. But the question is, in the year 2050, will America and Americans be more or less free than today?
Joe Lonsdale (33:42):
Mitch, we're working on some good anti-aging technology. I think you might make it, just stay healthy. But this is the battle we're fighting, and the answer is that we don't know yet. We have to actually get in the battle and we have to fight. But if I have anything to say about it, we damn well are going to be more free.
Mitch Daniels (33:59):
And I was thinking as I looked ahead so expectantly to today that with my own obstinate optimism, and American history has taught me to be an optimist, I think we'll be more free. And when we are, Joe Lonsdale will be, I know, a significant reason that's the case. Thank you so much for being with us and for the great work you're doing on so many fronts every day.
Joe Lonsdale (34:26):
It's an honor, Mr. Governor. Thank you.
Outro (34:33):
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