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
Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels
Greetings and welcome to the latest edition of Liberty Fund’s Podcast, the Future of Liberty. Every one of these has been a treat, but none greater than today. One of the great exponents of liberty and one of the practitioners who has made its preservation in America more likely as Joe Lonsdale. By now, you're pretty young to be a legend, but I'm going to say legendary entrepreneur, but also a thinker and really scholar in your own right. Thanks a lot for being with us.
Joe Lonsdale
Thanks, Mr. Governor. It's an honor to be on.
Mitch Daniels
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 (1.21)
Well, Mitch, my father of the same name, I think he gave me Ayn Rand to read as a kid and my little brother and I were reading Austrian economists like [Ludwig] von Mises and [Murray] Rothbard and the rest of them, and really studying a lot about the American Founding from a young age. And so it's something my family's always been very interested in. I've always been fascinated by the founders of America. I think it's such an interesting question. You look at history and you study it and you see how much poverty and misery and how many struggles we have as a species for so long and then see this really unique last 250 years that we've got to experience. And I think you have to ask why and what's exceptional, what's different about it. And it is obviously such an important question because the last recent period is so unique 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, so unique.
And it scares me when I see others don't understand those and don't care about those values. I think that's why we have America.
Mitch Daniels (2.27)
You obviously had a very unique background. I wish I could say I was reading those things at the age you did, but that notwithstanding, when someone looks from a distance at Silicon Valley and the kind of activity, the ingenuity, the individual success that has come to so many people there, it's always been puzzling to me that they seem to buy in or even acquiesce or at least into status a mentality. Why aren't more of your counterparts, people you grew up with and are growing up there now imbued with a similar spirit as you are? Even if they didn't read Murray Rothbard,
Joe Lonsdale (3.14)
You know Mitch, they didn't grow up with it, but I have some good news for you. I'm on a chat. I was just perusing right before I came on here actually with guys like Marc Andreessen and the Winklevoss twins and all sorts of others and a lot of people the last decade have seen the US regulatory apparatus become weaponized, go after our companies, get in the way. And what's interesting, the software world for the last couple generations really existed outside for the most part of a lot of the regulatory apparatus. It was such a new area that it wasn't already captured. And most of the things that get captured, the government harasses just because the big companies that already exist kind of try to use the government to harass new small companies. And there was so much new stuff happening that I think a lot of Silicon Valley was building in new areas.
And so it didn't have to deal with a lot of really stupid government bureaucrats slowing 'em down and harassing them. They didn't really experience it firsthand. And then on top of that, where did the cultures come from in Silicon Valley? Where did this Google culture come from? Where did the Apple culture come from? Well, they were hiring a lot of PhDs out of Stanford, out of Berkeley, out of Harvard, out of Yale. So you basically took the university cultures and you clone them within all these other areas and then you let them build in areas where they weren't bothered by government. So of course they're going to take the university culture as the norm. They're going to take a very, very left leaning culture as a norm, and that's what you have in Silicon Valley. You have a clone of the universities and because the universities have become corrupted, so has Silicon Valley. Now what you're seeing is you're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs and you're seeing a lot of companies that were built in the last 10 or 15 years where many people who are realizing, wow, wait a second, this is really broken. We're going to have to fix this stuff. We're going to have to stop the government from abusing his power. So you are seeing a lot of people really excited about the Supreme Court rulings last week, really excited to go after and fix the regulatory state, get rid of Chevron deference, all of this stuff, which you really hadn't seen before. So I'm quite optimistic for the innovation world to come out and be fighters on our side.
Mitch Daniels (5.05)
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 and by its overseers really as awful as one reads?
Joe Lonsdale (5.32)
You know iIt'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 cool 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 a lot of the new things is to get promoted, to become a teacher, to become a principal, to become a superintendent, you have to go through these master's degrees.
That'll become a lot more woke, a lot more left, a lot more focused on ideology. And so things are getting a lot worse and it is actually so crazy, Mitch, they're actually turning off a lot of the advanced math. They're turning off a lot of the things that it is this theory of just disparate impact, which is breaking our government and breaking our schools, but just because on average different groups don't do as well, they don't even want the things to exist and that's just so anti, so bad for our civilization and you're seeing that lead in California when my wife and I started having kids, we have four little girls now. We're expecting a son soon. When we started having kids, we decided to leave in part because the schools, both the public schools and the private schools had been so conquered by just crazy ideological forces that we thought we really don't want to expose our kids to that nonsense anymore.
Mitch Daniels (7.05)
Yeah. When reads about what is being 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 (7.26)
It's really sad how much you're brainwashed in these places now. And it is ironic to me because Thomas Jefferson, one of our founders, he 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 despotism and to teach them about the positives of liberty.
Mitch Daniels (7.45)
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, as does…
Joe Lonsdale
There are some great people who've done some great work. That's fair,
Mitch Daniels (7.57)
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. I want to ask you about Palantir, the word. I 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, 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, first, tell us where the name came from because I think it's an interesting subject, but then tell us where your impulse to apply your talents first in this area came from.
Joe Lonsdale (8.53)
Well, the name of course is from Lord 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, the Palantir, 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.
And we did prevent lots of attacks, but building this type of thing for government's 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 allies at helping stop the bad guys, but it's really scary what they could do with it otherwise. And so you want to kind of build in these [inaudible] and be careful. And there's a double-edged sword here that we think, we thought a lot about it. It was worth building. We were passionate about doing it, and 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 permeated the community, as you say, that came from those universities out there. There was an act of hostility to working on things that might affect national security. It seems to me that circumstances have softened that and that there's one hears a little bit more encouragingly about companies ranging from software to hardware who are now beginning to see some citizens' duty to help. Am I grasping here?
Joe Lonsdale (10.55)
No, I think you're right. I mean, listen, I think you guys at Purdue did a good job throughout this whole cultural swing where I think Purdue 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 DOD [Department of Defense] and work with the military. And the left has gone so hard against it and the right wasn't really focused on it. It seemed like a strange thing to do. I mean, when we were building Palantir in 2004, 2005, going out to raise early money, people said, why aren't you guys working on Web 2.0? Why are you taking talent on this thing that's impossible. And it's so hard. There hadn't been a new big company started in this area for decades. So people [inaudible] is not possible and it actually is immensely difficult to start these things properly to grow them large.
You have to build something that's 10 times better than what the government has. Then you have to build an operation on the hill. That outcome.. get breaks through the, frankly, it's somewhat of a corrupt setup with existing primes. They kind of block new things. Both Palentir 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. It's ridiculous. But they literally were legally 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 also broken through now very well. And now you see a bunch of other ones, actually a couple others I've founded since then that are valued over a billion dollars doing important things, breaking through with the Navy, with AI and autonomous weaponized vessels with high power microwave, 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 (12.39)
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 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 and if you have any about how that anniversary might best be celebrated.
Joe Lonsdale (13.40)
Well, I hope it's celebrated Mitch in a rebirth of liberty. I think we have everything set up to do so if things swing the right way here. So for me, there's really two things that I'm focused on overall at a high level, it's building things. It's building, whether it's for-profit or nonprofit institutions. You have to rebuild a lot of new institutions in our society because a lot of the old ones have been broken down and frankly conquered by forces that are going to be too hard to dislodge. And so I think building things and then on top of building things, it's going in and it's fixing government, it's passing legislation. It's frankly, probably with the recent stuff going on, I think the next four years, if we get the right set of people in charge, I think we could basically sue all of these agencies that are abusing their power and we can lock down that they're no longer able to abuse the power in all sorts of ways they're doing right now and really, really kind of force things back into a smaller, more competent, more efficient government.
I think for me, one of the most important things we could do in the next four years is we could do civil service reform. We could put back in accountability, we could basically start eliminating, if you look at the jobs created the last three or four years, a lot of them are on government. It's a lot of unaccountable nonsense. It's a lot of wasteful spending. It's really dangerous for our country. I think we can get growth back up by shrinking the regulatory state, shrinking unaccountable, wasteful jobs and really have a 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. Our first class is coming in the fall. We have our first class at University of Austin starting in the fall. It'll be probably just under a hundred or so, keeping this standards really, really high. It's amazingly difficult to start a new university. There's thousands of pages of regulation. They try to block you at every turn. It's like 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, you have to figure out some partnerships for that.
It's just like a litany of these things that are set up to block these things. And you really haven't had a top new university in maybe almost a hundred years. So I say it is 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.
We have this intellectual foundations 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 of the kids. We have so many people, my friends for example, who have built SpaceX and [inaudible] 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 for the industry world as well. So things are set up really well. But things are hard to do. I mean, you ran a university 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 predict that you'll have great continued great success attracting top teachers. You're right to emphasize that it was once said by the president of the University of Chicago, this would be a great institution. This was a hundred years ago. This would be a great institution if it met an attempt, meaning that it's the intellectual capacity of the faculty that matters most. And right now there must be some refugees happy to flee from let's say, places of oppression, intellectual oppression to a place like yours.
Joe Lonsdale (18.00)
You should see Mitch, there's like hundreds of these notes I've read people begging to come under attack where they are right now. It's like, what a dystopian world. 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, so-called 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 and mandates that permeated too much of business America?
Joe Lonsdale (18.55)
Yeah, I think DEI is even more pernicious. ESG is interesting because ESG stands for environment, social and governance. And I think you and I probably both, if we're running something, no one wants to hurt the environment. I want clean air and clean water and reasonable standards. And when you already have a lot of money, why would I want to have my daughters living in a dirty world? And obviously I want to be socially responsible. I spent a lot of my time on doing philanthropy and trying to help fix things. And of course, good governance is critical. One of the things that you learn in the startup world is that they'll have entrepreneurs underestimate governance because they're too busy and that actually creates all sorts of problems. So I think people get confused. I think there's the first order view, which is yes, these are all good things, 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 they have, 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 E and S and G impact and profit impact. And when you have an ESG framework that's top down, it's fundamentally authoritarian. It's not being weighted, it's not there's, 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 where 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 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 appropriation of these terms. Environment doesn't mean climate restrictions with no regard to collateral costs and so forth. The one that bothers me most is social justice. I mean, 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 [inaudible] them. Even progressive I'm sad just means far less. Yes,
Mitch Daniels (21:50):
Exactly.
Joe Lonsdale (21:51):
I'm for progress, but I'm for actual progress, not for your weird definition of it.
Mitch Daniels (21:58):
You just mentioned that China, and I certainly want to get your views about this, a lot of very current debate and concern about whether who wins wins in the world from which you come, who wins the artificial intelligence or the technology competition, which is very likely to decide even larger questions of national success. How do you feel about that right now? And to the extent there are dangers, what should we do?
Joe Lonsdale (22:34):
Well, China is definitely a geopolitical arrival. It's definitely acting in all sorts of terrible ways. I think you might have heard, I had a good friend Ed back there, 2010, 2011, we kind of thought China was going to become more free. I'm guilty of being naive about that and I, along with many others, was trying to do things there. There is just extraordinarily talent, there's extraordinary talent amongst Chinese people. I think even though China has this extraordinarily talent base, and even though they were forcing a lot of their top tech people to work in defense, they at the very least have really slowed down their tech sector with these kind of internal dissensions and fights and killings the last few years. That said, I mean they are serious adversary. They have a lot more top engineers than we do these days. They actually do innovate in ways that if you asked me 20 years ago, I'd be telling you all sorts of examples of how they only copy stuff. But there are lots of new things we're seeing from them that are innovative. And I mean, listen, you see innovative Chinese people here, of course they can innovate over in China. And so I think their society is very unstable. It has huge challenges with debt, has huge challenges with demographics, has probably huge lack of internal support even though people try to hide it, they pretend that they're all for the government. I think a lot of them are not at all, but they just can't say it
Mitch Daniels (23:43):
Right? Hear and read about the damage they have done to their once very promising entrepreneurial sector. And yet as Stalin said about tanks quantity is 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 into state or 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 mean, 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 do have some family that was here since Revolutionary War and my wife's family originally came from Jamestown, so we have some really going far back. But most of my family and my dad's side came during the potato famines in the mid 19th century and from Ireland. And most of my family on my mom's side came about 105 years ago as Jews fleeing Europe. And thank goodness they were allowed out of Europe then because most of their relatives stay behind, were killed in the Holocaust. And so just my history is one of where we are immigrants, and I think it's important we let in great immigrants both morally, but also I think we've contributed a lot 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 are likely to talk to on this podcast bridges the three aspects of this question, I want to ask you better than you do, and let me frame it this way, which should worry us the most as a threat to both our individual freedoms and liberties and our national security foreign threats, threat of foreign domination or the internal rot of the kind that we have touched on two or three times in this talk or what I'll call runaway technology. There are those who even many of those who like you are pioneers and leaders here who do worry that we will lose control of the fantastic machinery that we build. Which of those should trouble us the most and least?
Joe Lonsdale (26:51):
So Mitch, America, with our talent and our wealth and our spirit is the most exceptional country in the world. And if we could keep our country functional, if we could stop the national rot, if we could stop the anti meritocratic stuff, if we could stop the crazy new woke religion, social gen, fundamentalist, whatever you want to call this crazy thing going on, then America is going to be a successful, wealthy, prosperous place where everyone in America prosperous if we can keep it competent and functional. So number one for me is all the other problems go away. If America remains a great nation…
Mitch Daniels (27:26):
Given the persuasiveness of what you said and what we know about the Chinese, by the way, they're not alone, but let's take them and their understanding that maybe the best way to undermine the country is from within as opposed to militarily. Where do you come out on TikTok? Some people define that as a free speech/freedom issue. On the other hand, many, and I'm one, worry that this is a more powerful tool for misleading Americans about themselves really and separating us from each other than any other they have. What did you think?
Joe Lonsdale (28:09):
I feel very strongly, and I was very involved in fighting against China and TikTok. The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] 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 the Feds, don't understand how China is pursuing to have this long term battle with our civilization or just completely naive about this. I think China's very thoughtfully using that to try to spread. They try to spread things from the far left. They try to spread things, they try to spread things. They're divisive.
They're such liars, Mitch, they're such liars. They're like, oh, well we're doing a thing where all the data is sitting with Oracle and Texas and therefore it's safe. I'm like, no, if you guys are in control of the algorithm, it's not safe because the algorithm that decides to spread when you do things in China, you have apps getting kids to want to learn math and getting kids to think how great China is and churning off anything they would say anything bad about China. And then you want to spread in America things that are divisive and things that are negative and things that are bad for our society. And then getting people addicted and a hundred million people looking at this, it's so 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 a hundred percent 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 it was 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. So I have a Substack where I write a lot of pieces and enjoy it, and I was fascinated to be talking to some Persian friends maybe a year ago. And what I've come to realize is that even though the Iranian government, I think is obviously extremely corrupt to totalitarian scary forces, a lot of the Iranian people actually not anti-American and frankly not anti-Jewish either, which was really surprising to find out. You had a lot of people who were fans of Jews and Cyrus of course in his life, I don't even mentioned it there, but was famous for helping bring in a lot of top Jews and learning about being a better merchant and wealth for a society from them and just his life in general was so extraordinary. It was so much wisdom about how to be a great leader.
Xenophon is one of the really famous writers in ancient Greece,, I think worked with his son and then heard all the stories about it and then ended up writing this piece. And what's really neat, Mitch, is this piece became a way to teach young princes about how to be a great leader and how to hold back your anger, how to hold back your desires, how to have discipline, how to think from the other person's perspective, how to build allies through being kind, how to be someone people admire and want to follow. And just so many really positive lessons. And that was really how we taught about leadership in the West for a couple of thousand years. And what's really interesting to me about this is you have [Niccolo] Machiavelli come out with The Prince about 400, 500 years ago, and that was a very opposite side of the dialectic, right?
I think there's lots of truths in the world where there's truths on both extremes. So one truth is about all these good ways to be as a leader and all the wisdom and then the Machiavelli side in some ways is opposite dialectic where it's all about trickery and abuse and bribery and how you get your way through schemes. And listen, I think you need to understand that as a leader because there's other people doing it and when war, you have to sometimes do these things. But I think it's a really sad state of reality in the West that this thing that was this new sideway of thinking about things became the way that a lot of people in our society think of leadership. They think of leadership as scheming. They think of leadership as playing dirty power games in the back rooms and ensure you need to understand that. But I think it's a much better thing for society to go back to how the West for 2000 years taught about leadership, which is the Cyrus the great framework of just a really admirable, really wise, really cool leader. And every teenage aristocrat basically used to read this book a thousand years ago. And it is sad that it's so lost. And so I thought it was fun to expose that to people about these kind of 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 years. I think sometimes libertarians need to remind themselves that freedom presupposed virtue presupposed a degree of self restraint. 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 that 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 thought, I looked ahead so expectantly to today that with my own obstinate optimism and America 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 (34:32):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.