What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about a book that predicted the future. You heard that

right. Let's hop into it. I am reading a book right now that absolutely blew my mind.

It feels like the Gray Sports Almanac in back to the future. If you haven't seen the movie,

Biff, who is the villain of the series, gets hold of an Almanac from the future that tells the

results of every major sporting event for the next 50 years. And this is exactly how I feel,

reading a book called The Sovereign Individual. It's my first founder book club book,

which if you want to know how I put together a book club and everything that I learned from it,

check out that past episode in the show notes. And I first heard about this book from two

amazing entrepreneurs, Naval Ravikant and Balaji Shrinivasan. It was written in 1997 by James

Dale Davidson and Lord William Reese Mogg, the first and investor and the second a journalist.

Now here's what I'm talking about. The book feels as though it has predicted what seems like

every major societal shift since the millennium. It predicted a viral pandemic,

the rise of e-commerce, the rise of remote work, the increased value of content curation,

the rise of virtual culture, the rise of mobile banking. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Now I want to share a few passages from the book that will probably sound familiar to you.

Here's the first. As cyber commerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cyber money.

A crucial part of this change will come about because of the effect of information technology

in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation.

Unique, anonymous and verifiable this money will accommodate the largest transactions.

...