Genes Are Switches
The human body is not a machine in the industrial sense, but it is a system - adaptive, responsive, and incredibly sensitive to its surroundings. At its most fundamental level, this system expresses itself through proteins. Proteins build tissue, regulate immunity, transmit signals, repair damage, and translate genetic instructions into lived reality. Change the conditions under which proteins are made, and you change the quality of the organism itself.
Dr. Joe Dispenza describes the body as a protein-producing factory, governed not primarily by fixed genetic destiny, but by environmental signals. In his work - particularly in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and Becoming Supernatural - he returns to a central claim: genes are not static blueprints. They are switches. And what flips those switches is not merely inheritance, but the internal and external environment in which a person lives.
Drawing on epigenetic research, Dispenza points out that only a small fraction of disease outcomes can be attributed to genetics alone. The majority arise from gene expression – from how genes are regulated in response to stress, nutrition, emotion, perception, and repeated experience. The body, he argues, is constantly asking a simple question: Is it safe to grow, or must I prepare to survive?
Cheap Proteins
In acute danger, survival mode is a gift. It mobilises energy, sharpens attention, and prioritises immediate function over long-term repair. But when that state becomes chronic – when threat is no longer episodic but ambient – the biology adapts downward. Dr. Joe uses the deliberately provocative phrase “cheap proteins” to describe this condition; proteins that are functional enough to keep the organism going, but inferior in quality, coherence, and regenerative capacity. A system under constant pressure economises (poorly). It cuts corners. It strives only to survive, but it does not flourish.
What is often missed is that this pressure is not only personal. It is structural.
We tend to think of stress as an individual failing; poor coping, poor mind-set, poor habits. Yet environments train nervous systems long before individuals consciously reflect on them. A society can be organised in such a way that it persistently signals uncertainty, scarcity, and competition, even in the absence of immediate physical danger. The body does not distinguish between an external predator and a future that feels unpayable. Both are read as threat.
This is where money quietly enters the body.
Money is Not Neutral
Money functions as an environmental signal and a psychosocial tool, mediating how individuals perceive the future, relate to uncertainty, and coordinate their efforts with others. It encodes time, value, and trust, shaping behaviour not by decree or ideology, but by atmosphere. Operating beneath conscious belief, money conditions action through lived pressure rather than argument. When distorted, its effects are not merely economic, but psychological and social – and, over time, biological. Under such conditions, unstable and depreciating money generates a persistent, low-grade stress field that quietly permeates daily life:
Debt obligations.
Bills that never quite stop arriving.
Inflation that quietly erodes savings, effort, and foresight.
Work undertaken not as vocation, but as necessity - often abstract, fragmented, and detached from meaning, performed simply to keep pace, to stay afloat, to get by.
Layered atop this are poor living environments, long commutes, depleted food, exhaustion from work, compounding family responsibilities, and the persistent sense that time, energy, and attention are always running short. Even when nothing is wrong, something is unresolved. The future feels tight and margins disappear.
This is not a crisis state. It is something more insidious; a permanent, low-grade emergency.
Fiat Everything, Everywhere
Author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous has argued that fiat monetary systems, by design, raise time preference. When money cannot reliably store value, the future becomes less tangible. Time horizons contract, planning shrinks, and behaviour shifts toward immediacy. Consumption today is rationalised against uncertainty tomorrow. This logic does not stop at finance; it spills outward into culture, health, and food.
In The Fiat Standard, particularly in chapter 8, entitled Fiat Food, Ammous traces how fiat incentives reshape the modern food system; in particular, how industrial agriculture, heavy subsidies, and nutritional guidelines privilege cheap calories over nutrient density. Traditional animal proteins and fats are displaced by refined carbohydrates and seed oils – foods optimised for scale, shelf-life, and profitability rather than nutritional value and nourishment.
These arguments have been expanded even further by investigative journalist Matthew Lysiak in his book Fiat Food, which documents how monetary distortion, corporate incentives, and regulatory capture converge to produce a population that is simultaneously overfed and undernourished. Food becomes abundant, yet bodies remain deprived. Quantity replaces quality. Calories replace nutrition.
This is not some niche dietary problem. Nutrition is informational. The quality of protein, the presence of micronutrients, the stability of blood sugar – all of these signal abundance or scarcity to the body. Chronic nutritional stress compounds psychological stress. Together, they influence gene regulation. Restoration and repair is deferred. Inflammation becomes constant, enduring… normalised. And metabolic dysfunction spreads quietly.
Seen through this lens, “cheap proteins” are no longer a metaphor – they are a biological expression of civilisation.
A fiat environment does not simply make food cheaper; it makes biology cheaper. It encourages systems – economic, agricultural, physiological, and psychological – that favour output over integrity, efficiency over coherence. Bodies adapt accordingly. Maintenance replaces growth and regeneration. Endurance replaces vitality. Spirit fades and survival becomes the benchmark.
Beyond the Benchmark
Dr. Joe’s work becomes especially relevant at this scale. In Becoming Supernatural, particularly in his discussion of Project Coherence, he shifts attention from individual transformation to collective environments. Groups, he argues, entrain shared emotional and physiological states. Fear propagates. So does coherence. Environments, sustained over time, shape biology.
Whether one accepts his more speculative claims or not, the underlying insight is difficult to dismiss – i.e. organisms adapt to the conditions they are immersed in. And civilisations are environments.
If that is true, then a monetary system that persistently signals instability, scarcity, and short-termism will inevitably entrain survival consciousness at scale. People may appear functional, even successful, while living in a chronic physiological state optimised for coping rather than creating. Stress becomes normal, even justified. Poor food, degraded art, flattened design, disposable production, and utilitarian architecture cease to appear merely deficient; rather, they become the expected outputs of a civilisation organised around survival. Deferred repair disappears altogether.
Against this backdrop, Bitcoin is best understood not as a solution, but as a counterfactual.
Environments Matter
Bitcoin introduces a hard monetary signal at scale, felt first in the body and in individual behaviour, then outward through households, communities, markets, and ultimately, civilisation itself; scarce, predictable, and resistant to debasement. It does not promise prosperity or eliminate struggle. Instead, Bitcoin alters the informational environment in which economic life unfolds. It allows savings to manifest then persist, it rewards patience, and it makes the future legible again. For those who adopt it seriously, Bitcoin reduces one of the deepest sources of ambient uncertainty – the quiet suspicion that effort today will not meaningfully carry forward to tomorrow.
Of course, the claim is not that Bitcoin produces health itself. Rather, the claim is that environments matter – and money is one of the deepest (yet invisible) environments we inhabit. Change the signal, and different (better) behaviours become possible. Over time, perhaps different biology.
Civilisations express their money through their food, their bodies, and their attention: Cheap money leads to cheap inputs. Cheap inputs lead to cheap outputs. And cheap outputs accumulate into a civilisation optimised not for flourishing, but for survival.
If we are serious about regeneration – be it biological, cultural, or spiritual – we need to look upstream. Not only to genes or habits or diets, but to the concealed monetary environments that quietly entrain us to expect less from the future, and therefore, to demand less from ourselves.
