“The photograph is merely a reflection of your soul, of your inner voice, of your inner spirit.”
“You cannot make the same photograph twice.”
“This is where the imperfection in our compositions can sing.”
“When I click the shutter, it’s this feeling of life affirmation.”
“What we can control as a photographer is very simple: where you position your physical body in the world in relationship to the subject and the background, and when you press the shutter.”
“Ultimately, when I’m photographing things, I’m simply asking a simple question: what will reality manifest to be in a photograph today?”
“Maybe you can’t live forever, but at least you can make a photograph.”
Walking along the river in Philadelphia on a crisp October morning, I’m struck by how clear the reflection is, how the sunlight hits my face. Fall is here, and so is today’s thought: the snapshot is the ultimate form of street photography.
Spontaneity is the Name of the Game
Street photography thrives on spontaneity.
Walking into a new place
Meeting a new face
Chasing fleeting light
The candid snapshot is an instinctive endeavor. When I shoot, I’m not analyzing leading lines or perfect geometry. I’m simply reacting with my gut. Each photograph becomes a reflection of my inner fire — my thumos — rather than a diagram of the external world.
Stop Thinking, Just Shoot
Using a compact camera like the Ricoh liberates me from overthinking. Shooting from the LCD, from the hip, even without looking — it’s all play.
“I don’t really have anything to say, but it’ll be said in my photographs.”
Imperfection in composition is part of the music. Life is imperfect, and the snapshot lets those imperfections sing.
Control and Surrender
Here’s the paradox:
I can’t control whether an incredible scene appears today.
I can control where I place my body, how I move, and when I press the shutter.
That’s it. That’s the craft. The rest is surrender — to flux, to chance, to the unknown.
Flow State and Affirmation
Clicking the shutter is a kind of life-affirmation. It’s bliss, euphoria, a reminder that everything is fleeting. Seasons shift, light changes, and no photograph can ever be repeated.
You cannot make the same photograph twice.
By treating the day like a visual diary, the snapshot approach makes me a witness to impermanence — and to my own mortality. Maybe we don’t live forever. But the photograph? That remains.
Play Over Perfection
To shoot snapshots is to embrace play:
Throwing the camera around
Shooting lots of frames of the same thing
Letting intuition guide the process
It’s not about control. It’s about curiosity. The unknown. The joy of seeing what reality manifests in the frame today.
Closing
Street photography, at its best, is freedom. It’s instinct, gut, spontaneity. It’s the joy of photographing without overthinking — because in the end, impermanence rules everything.
Maybe you can’t live forever. But you can make a photograph.
👉 If you want to dive deeper into my workflow, check out the Books tab on my site — I’ve got eBooks and lecture-style videos waiting for you.
Fiat Food investigates how inflation and fiat money corrupted global diets and human health.
Builds on themes from Saifedean Ammous’ The Fiat Standard, extending the analysis into nutrition, food policy, and health outcomes.
Matthew Lysiak, an investigative journalist, frames the book as a crime investigation into how government, industry, religious ideology, and fiat incentives reshaped what people eat.
Part I: Personal Origins
Lysiak grew up in the 1990s, eating according to the Food Pyramid (6–11 servings of grains, avoid fats, replace with seed oils).
At age 16, he was diagnosed with cancer, sparking a lifelong question: What caused this?
Doctors denied diet was a factor, but intuition suggested otherwise.
The experience, combined with loss of trust in institutions (especially post-COVID), led him to dig deeper into food and fiat money.
Part II: Fiat Money and Food
Nixon’s 1971 closure of the gold window untethered the dollar, enabling unrestricted money printing.
Inflation allowed governments to mask the true cost of war and social programs.
Food policy was reshaped to hide inflation’s effects:
Cheap industrial substitutes were promoted over nutrient-dense traditional foods.
Official dietary advice shifted repeatedly but always in the same direction: less meat, more grains and processed foods.
Part III: Religious Roots of Anti-Meat Ideology
The Seventh-day Adventist Church, founded by Ellen White (who claimed divine visions after brain trauma), played a central role.
White taught that meat caused lust and sin; abstinence from meat preserved purity.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (yes, of Corn Flakes) worked to design foods that suppressed libido and replaced meat.
The Adventist legacy still drives institutions:
The American Dietetic Association and major nutrition studies trace back to Adventist networks.
Loma Linda University, Adventist-run, has received over $160 million in government grants to produce vegetarian-leaning studies.
Part IV: The Rise of Ancel Keys
Ancel Keys’ “Seven Countries Study” (1950s–60s) falsely linked saturated fat to heart disease.
Despite flawed and cherry-picked data, his charisma and lobbying made his diet-heart hypothesis official policy.
By 1980, U.S. dietary guidelines formally demonized meat and saturated fat, while elevating grains and seed oils.
The 1992 Food Pyramid institutionalized this with a disastrous prescription:
Base diet on grains.
Lump natural animal fats together with sugar as “foods to limit.”
Results: an explosion of obesity, diabetes, infertility, and chronic disease.
Part V: Industry and Fiat Incentives
Agribusiness and Big Food companies profited enormously from subsidized grain and processed food production.
Seed oils (soy, corn, canola) became central dietary staples because they are cheap to mass-produce.
Fiat inflation enabled:
Corn subsidies and grain overproduction.
Rigged science and PR campaigns to normalize fake food.
Shaming and guilt campaigns against traditional diets (e.g., eggs, red meat).
Part VI: Science or Pseudoscience?
Modern nutrition science mirrors climate science:
Funded to justify policies that hide inflation.
Promotes austerity in food/energy consumption while preserving fiat power.
Observational studies dominate (correlation without causation).
Data often comes from Adventist vegetarians or industry-funded research, ensuring predetermined conclusions.
“Everything in moderation” becomes the mantra, ignoring addiction and engineered hyper-palatable junk.
Part VII: Consequences of Fiat Food
Metabolic health collapse: skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and infertility.
Cognitive decline: processed diets impair clear thinking, creating a docile population easier to control.
Loss of autonomy: individuals outsource judgment to “experts” credentialed by fiat-funded institutions.
Cultural degradation: even family recipes, once based on ghee, tallow, butter, and meat, were replaced by industrial substitutes.
Part VIII: Resistance and Renewal
A growing counter-movement (doctors like Shawn Baker, Nina Teicholz, and independent thinkers) is breaking the illusion.
Results-based “bro science” often outperforms credentialed “nutrition experts.”
Carnivore and low-carb diets demonstrate cognitive clarity, health restoration, and improved performance.
Bitcoin offers an economic parallel:
Just as Bitcoin restores sound money, rejecting fiat food restores sound nutrition.
Fix the money, fix the food. Fix the food, fix the mind.
Key Takeaways
Inflation drives dietary destruction – cheap substitutes are promoted to mask rising costs of real food.
Religious zeal + industry profit = anti-meat dogma – Adventist ideology and Ancel Keys shaped policy for generations.
Credentialism is weaponized – “experts” justify policies serving state and corporate interests, not public health.
Fiat food makes people weaker, sicker, and easier to control – it is a slow war on autonomy and vitality.
Bitcoin and real food are aligned – both restore natural order and human flourishing.
Discussion Questions
How does fiat money directly incentivize the promotion of fake food?
The word spirit comes from the Latin spīritus, meaning “breath, breeze, air, life, soul.”
At its core, it derives from the Latin verb spīrāre, “to breathe.”
In early usage, breath and life were inseparable—breath was seen as the animating force of living beings.
From there, spīritus developed a broader sense: not just literal breath, but also life-force, vitality, courage, soul, or consciousness.
When the word entered Old French as espirit and later Middle English as spirit, it carried these same dual meanings—both the literal breath of life and the immaterial essence of a person.
So the etymology shows a progression:
Breath / breathing →
Vital principle (life itself) →
Soul, mind, disposition, supernatural being.
That’s why today “spirit” can mean anything from someone’s mood (“in high spirits”) to the immortal soul or even a ghostly being.
Dr. Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard, returns with his most ambitious work yet: Principles of Economics. Rather than focusing narrowly on money, this book lays out the entire Austrian framework of economics from first principles.
Here, Ammous builds from human action, value, and time, and moves outward into labor, property, capital, technology, trade, money, and ultimately civilization itself. The goal is simple yet profound: to show that economics is not about equations or government statistics, but about how human beings act to solve the problem of scarcity across time.
Links to lecture notes that I made on the different chapters covered @ saifedean.com
Money: The solution to barter’s limits. Good money must be scarce, durable, divisible, and trusted. Fiat fails this test; sound money succeeds.
Markets: Prices are signals, not arbitrary numbers. They guide entrepreneurs, allocate resources, and punish inefficiency.
Capitalism: Private property + free exchange = moral and practical order. Cooperation without coercion.
Here, Ammous emphasizes that markets are not chaos — they are emergent order.
Part IV: Time Preference, Credit, and Cycles
Time preference governs civilization.
Time Preference: Preference for present goods vs. future goods. Lower time preference encourages saving, planning, and building.
Interest: The natural price of time. When distorted, chaos follows.
Banking: Proper banking matches savings to investment. But fiat credit expansion breaks this link.
Business Cycles: Artificially low interest rates fuel unsustainable booms and inevitable busts. Malinvestments are liquidated in recession.
This is Ammous’s Austrian cycle theory in action: fiat systems can’t escape their own distortions.
Part V: Violence, Defense, and Civilization
Finally, Ammous expands the lens to society itself.
Violence: Coercion undermines markets and property.
Defense: Security is necessary, but a monopoly on force (the state) breeds abuse. Competitive or decentralized defense is less dangerous to liberty.
Civilization: At its core, civilization depends on voluntary exchange, respect for property, and limited coercion. When these erode, so does the fabric of society.
Economics, in this view, is not just about wealth — it’s about sustaining the very conditions of human flourishing.
Key Themes
Economics is grounded in human action, not equations.
Subjective value drives exchange, not labor or cost theories.
Time shapes all economic calculation; interest rates are its reflection.
Sound money is essential; fiat distortions breed cycles and chaos.
Civilization itself rests on voluntary markets, secure property, and defense against coercion.
Conclusion
Principles of Economics is a return to the roots of economic thought. By grounding the science in human action, property, time, and sound money, Ammous provides a framework not only for understanding markets, but for understanding civilization itself.
Just as The Bitcoin Standard made the case for sound money, and The Fiat Standard exposed fiat’s decay, this book offers the positive vision: the economic principles that allow humanity to thrive.
Dr. Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, expands his analysis of money by examining the fiat system. He argues that fiat money is not a neutral tool but a system of centralized debt, coercion, and control. While The Bitcoin Standard looked at the rise of sound money, this book critiques the century-long experiment with fiat currency.
Links to lecture notes that I made on the different chapters covered @ https://saifedean.com
Definition: Fiat money is government-issued currency not backed by a physical commodity (like gold). Its value rests solely on trust in government decree and legal tender laws.
Mechanism: Central banks create fiat by issuing liabilities (debt) that circulate as currency. New money enters circulation primarily through lending, leading to systemic indebtedness.
Contrast with Bitcoin/Gold:
Gold and Bitcoin have hard supply limits.
Fiat is infinitely expandable, constrained only by political will and inflationary tolerance.
Part II: The Economic Consequences of Fiat
Inflation and Debt
Inflation acts as a hidden tax, transferring wealth from savers to debtors (primarily governments and banks).
Encourages borrowing and spending rather than saving and investing.
Leads to time preference distortion: people think short-term rather than long-term.
Cantillon Effect
Those closest to money creation (banks, governments, elites) benefit first.
Ordinary citizens receive depreciated money later, after inflation spreads.
Malinvestment
Cheap credit fuels unproductive projects and bubbles.
Creates artificial demand and distorted capital structures.
Part III: Cultural and Social Impacts
Family and Society
Fiat incentivizes consumerism and materialism.
Undermines savings, family stability, and intergenerational wealth building.
Food Industry
Ammous devotes significant space to food, nutrition, and health:
Fiat subsidizes industrial agriculture and cheap processed foods.
Leads to unhealthy diets high in carbs, sugar, and seed oils.
Contrast with hard money systems where people prioritized quality, durable food.
Education and Science
Universities are funded through government debt, leading to bureaucratization and declining standards.
Fiat fosters groupthink and state-aligned ideologies rather than truth-seeking.
Part IV: Fiat Politics
Governments expand endlessly under fiat:
Permanent wars funded through debt.
Welfare states and bloated bureaucracies.
Surveillance and authoritarian control.
Fiat severs the connection between taxation and spending accountability.
Part V: Bitcoin as the Alternative
Hard Money Properties
Fixed supply (21 million).
Decentralized and censorship-resistant.
Restores low time preference, encouraging saving and long-term planning.
Transition
Fiat collapse is inevitable due to unsustainable debt growth.
Bitcoin represents a voluntary, bottom-up monetary revolution.
Individuals who adopt Bitcoin can exit fiat’s cycle of inflation, debt, and dependence.
Fiat corrupts culture, nutrition, science, and politics.
Bitcoin offers hope for a return to honest money and human flourishing.
Conclusion
The Fiat Standard positions fiat currency as a system of control that undermines civilization by distorting incentives, values, and institutions. In contrast, Bitcoin offers a way out: a decentralized, incorruptible, and sound monetary standard for the digital age.
