The Sovereign Individual

So these guys are really, they've worked incredibly hard over a number of years to bring what, like you say, were fringe ideas of a bunch of capitalists.

Californian hippies essentially imagining, you know, it's the sovereign individual.

It's actually a book called The Sovereign Individual, which informs so much of Thiel's ideas.

But I think that really helps you understand where this thinking comes from, this libertarian aspect of the mindset of it all.

It's a kind of sense of... heroism of the individual, the one person that controls everything.

Echoes of it come from Ayn Rand as well.

So that sense of the sovereign individual is really key to understanding, I think, where this all comes from.

A lot of this is motivated by an absolute hatred of government and a kind of sense of the one individual self rising up and being the techno king.

I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and obviously...

It's like one of the sacred books of Bitcoin lore, but like the sovereign individual sees this just getting stronger and stronger by the day, whether it's what we're talking about on the entitlement side, getting out of hand.

I mean, Trump was not, they didn't say Trump's going to be president, but they said some populist, some populist outsider will emerge, will run on immigration reform and and tax reform and that's happened.

And then like what you're seeing in your neck of the world, like asymmetric drone warfare was productive as well.

This is happening.

And I don't think people in the West appreciate it, unless you're terminally online.

And it's, again, going back to the sovereign individual thesis, that's one of the things they predicted.

It's...

Not a single one.

I saw somebody mention that they had the kids reading The Sovereign Individual, which is Peter Thiel's favorite book he wrote the foreword for.

Yes.

Yes.

But that's very much the idea that Peter Thiel's been spelling out in public for years, this idea that democracy is an outdated software system that is not gonna make it out of the 21st century.

And specifically, he's inspired by a prophecy from this 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicted that in the 21st century, technology would render nation states like the United States and democracy itself obsolete.

Specifically, the two technologies it named were something called cyber currency, a new kind of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow wealthy people to sneak their money around the world, and advanced automation with this new software computer systems that would replace most jobs and suck all the wealth to a handful of lucky people at the top.

That's the conversation we're having about AI now.

I mean, it just came to mind given that some pe- Bitcoiners would probably kinda push back on your first statement given that nobody saw this coming.

I mean, you probably know that book as well, The Sovereign Individual, and a lot of Bitcoiners are, are pointing this for, for people like having already before the millennium change, having this foresight in, in potentially how an economy, what it could look like.

I guess some of the concepts were already fantasized about it in the book, but to the extent that we know it today, even they probably didn't see it coming, which is obvious.

It's-- But yeah, just interesting that this struck a chord with so many people, that book, just because maybe they had some potential foresight.

Right.

The journalist brings up Peter Thiel again here, connecting him to a highly influential book in these circles called The Sovereign Individual.

Oh, this book is fascinating.

It is crucial to understanding the mechanics of the billionaire bunker phenomenon.

Citizenship, security, economics, law.

It all becomes commercialized and privatized.

So in the worldview of the sovereign individual, the ultra-rich don't just hide from the collapse.

They precipitate it, and then they become their own sovereign entities.

It's like, it's just so perfect to describe them.

Okay, I wanna ask you about The Sovereign Individual, this weird little book that Peter Thiel seems to, to really love.

[laughs] Talk about how, how you came across it, and, and what exactly this book is.

In researching the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires, it's hard not to come across The Sovereign Individual.

It's this 1997 business doom book, I think-

[laughs]

So it comes up a lot, and it's name-checked as this brilliant tome that predicted Bitcoin, which is not true.

Yeah.

Uh, so we've got George Cooper with us, author of...

Well, I read the book, uh, when it first came out, George, uh, Money, Blood, and Revolution, and then, uh, got updated as Fixing Economics.

So that's gonna be our primary topic, I'm guessing, for the week.

But, uh, who knows with these discussions.

[laughs]

[laughs] I'm sure there's lots of them about.

It was, it was a great book.

Um, so, so tell me about the, um, the update in Fixing Economics.