Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization by Saifedean Ammous.

This is hands down the most revealing thing I have ever read about money—and I mean real money, not just paper bills and digits in a bank account. This book goes far beyond just the Federal Reserve or inflation or “money printer go brrr.” It digs into how fiat isn’t just a monetary issue—it’s in everything: science, education, food, medicine. The rot runs deep, and this book lays it bare.

Before Ammous trashes fiat, he does something most critics don’t—he explains why it was created in the first place. He starts with a simple but powerful parable:

A man wants to tear down a wall. Another stops him and says, “You don’t even know why that wall was put there. Figure that out before you go ripping it down.”

And that’s what this book does. It tells you why fiat exists. The key issue it solved? Salability across space. Gold was great, but it sucked at being moved. Fiat was a solution to that—but like all shortcuts, it came at a price.

The author is also the guy behind The Bitcoin Standard, which is often recommended as the one book you should read if you want to understand Bitcoin. But I’ll tell you straight: The Fiat Standard should be read first. Why? Because you can’t understand what Bitcoin is meant to fix until you fully grasp what’s broken. And fiat is very broken.

This book lays out, in painful clarity, what happened when the dollar went fully fiat in 1971 as the world’s reserve currency. It’s not just about money printing. It’s about how a debt-based system infects everything it touches. It rewards consumption over savings. Centralization over independence. Short-term gain over long-term thinking.

One of the most important things you will read in this book is as follows, “the most important trades you will make in your life, are trades with your future self”.  If you don’t instantly understand that, trust me, you NEED to read this book.

If you’ve ever struggled to explain to someone why things feel so off—why food is fake, education is broken, why doctors push pills instead of health—this book gives you the language and the lens to connect the dots. It won’t just confirm what you’ve already suspected; it will sharpen your understanding to a razor’s edge.

No, it won’t fix the system. But it’ll help you stop being a pawn in it. And if you want to understand money—which is arguably the most important thing to understand in the modern world—this is where you start.

Buy it. Read it. Mark it up. Pass it on. Hell, read it again.  Seriously if you are only going to read one book about money this year, make it The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization by Saifedean Ammous, but in the next two days I will bring you two more books to read after you read this one.