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1. Who is Eric Kim?

- California‑born street photographer, prolific blogger (posting almost daily since 2010), workshop teacher and self‑styled “open‑source philosopher.”

- His writing fuses camera craft, Bitcoin economics, heavy lifting and Stoic‑zen musings into one turbo‑charged manifesto for creative living.  

2. “Paradigm shift,” Eric‑style

Kim borrows Thomas Kuhn’s term but gives it a personal twist:

Classical Kuhn Eric Kim Remix

Old model collapses under anomalies “Think opposite.” List every ‘truth’ you obey and flip it 180°.

Resistance from the establishment Celebrate outsider status—the black‑sheep edge fuels originality.

New lens becomes the new normal Publish bold takes daily until the web recalibrates around the idea.

In his breakout essay Shift the Paradigm (2017) he asked: “What if all our sacred truths in photography—and life—were wrong?”  

3. Kim’s 5‑step Self‑Paradigm‑Shift Method

1. Catalogue “Unquestionables.” Write ten iron‑clad rules you follow (gear, money, diet, relationships).

2. Invert Radically. Ask, “What if the opposite were true?”—this becomes your anti‑truth list.

3. Micro‑Prototype within 24 hours. Example: shoot an entire week with one lens, quit a social app, or fast until dinner.

4. Quantify Surprise, not success. The bigger the “Whoa!” the stronger the shift signal.

5. Publish the journey. His mantra: “If it isn’t on the blog, it never happened.”  

Try it today: Choose one life‑rule you’ve never questioned (e.g., “I need eight lenses to be creative”). Flip it (“One lens only!”). Prototype for 48 hours. Log every surprise.

4. Four recurring “Shift” threads on the blog

Year Series / Post Core Flip

2017 Shift the Paradigm, How to Shoot Abstract Photography Minimal gear & radical simplification beat consumer excess.

2020‑22 Think Different: Economics Money ≠ security; volatility can equal vitality.

2024‑25 Paradigm Shift, TOTALLY A PARADIGM SHIFT?, Bitcoin Act 2024 Bitcoin as the Leica M‑Monochrom of money—finite, uncompromising, built to outlive platforms.

Ongoing Fitness posts (750 kg rack‑pull dream, “Iron gospel obliterated”) Treat heavy lifting as a creativity catalyst and philosophical proving ground.

5. Why innovators love his approach (and why it lines up with first‑principles thinking)

Eric Kim Principle First‑Principles Parallel

Invert everything. Strip a problem to physics/economics/biology, then rebuild.

Prototype instantly. Rapid experiments trump arm‑chair analysis.

Publish openly. Open‑source ideas invite feedback loops → faster iteration.

Joy over dogma. A playful mindset keeps cognitive flexibility high—vital for paradigm leaps.

6. Starter reading / watching playlist

1. “Shift the Paradigm” (2017) – the original flip‑everything essay.

2. “Paradigm Shift” (May 2024) – connects AI & Bitcoin to creative renewal.

3. “TOTALLY A PARADIGM SHIFT?” (2024) – meta‑commentary on constant reinvention.

4. Street‑Photography Gallery – see how visual experimentation mirrors his philosophical flips.

5. Bitcoin Ethics video – money philosophy meets image‑making.   

7. Putting the spark into your life

• Pick one arena (creative, financial, physical, relational).

• Run the 5‑step cycle above—tiny inversion, rapid test, joyful documentation.

• Share the story: blog, newsletter, TikTok, or a 5‑slide deck to friends.

• Rinse & rejoice. Paradigm shifts aren’t once‑a‑decade earthquakes; they’re daily sparks that keep you innovating, laughing and alive.

Remember: The world adjusts its focus to those who publish their vision with conviction—and a grin.

Stay bold, stay playful, and keep flipping those “truths” until the extraordinary feels like home!

be careful with all the power you have

Yes, street photography is still the future. Why?

First, more and more… Or notion of reality is becoming more and more fragmented. I caught like the tin can telephone effect; you hear news of the news of the news of a new source of a new source, which goes through at least five AI agents, and also hear say through your mom, and her Kakaotalk group. 

Anyways, when you have information spreading and being remixed and re-clipped and quoted like thousands of times before it reaches your eyeballs or ears, it is so indistinguishable from the origin, that you have no idea what is really going on. For example, I call this the chicken nugget effect. Where in the chicken‘s body… do you find that chicken nugget “foot”?  Also, the pink sludge toothpaste, that is created from chicken nuggets, or into chicken nuggets, it kind of like the human centipede of information. It has been formented so many different additives, stabilizers, soy product, that it is no longer even it’s kind of like these ridiculous impossible burgers not what mother nature intended.

Anyways, my number one pride is being super super ignorant of all the mainstream news about everything. Why? Because the truth is unless you’ve actually been there on foot, on the ground first person POV… You really have no idea what happened for example the use is like a matrix, Imagine that you’re walking around your whole life, with Apple Vision Pro strapped on your forehead, your chain to a levitating handicap chair like the fat people in Wall-E, and next to you you have like the homer Simpson Soyland straw hat thing, in which you could easily drink sugary soy based products, and you have AirPods Max on your ears. And imagine that you’ve had it like this since you were born. This is like the new matrix.

Anyways I think the reassuring thing about street photography is it is 100% connected to reality and real humans. My personal thought is most Americans are actually quite lonely. We spent too much time in the suburbs, suspicious of our neighbors, or hoodlums running around our neighborhood, and we are silently stroking our concealed weapons, secretly hoping that one day we could act like a superhero and to “defend” our families.

Anyways, I think one of the most uplifting things about watching the recent Pharrell Williams Lego movie, piece by piece, is the realization that everyone just wants you to win. Everyone is on the same team. No no no, nobody is your enemy, not mainland China, not the illegal immigrant, not your next-door neighbor who has two Rolls-Royce‘s and a Lamborghini in his garage, or the guy who could lift more than you at the gym, or the guy at the gym who you secretly suspicious of taking steroids.

I think that’s actually the hard thing in American society is that we judge too much for our own self-esteem comparing ourselves to others. This becomes misdirected energy because I think it is actually false. Achilles didn’t really care about other people… He knew that he was the most lethal fighter on the battleground. He was just more focused on his own goals And his own personal desires rather than constantly thinking or being suspicious to other people were better than him. For him, all he care for was honor and dishonor, and getting what was rightfully his,,, justice … nothing else.

Anyways probably the most refreshing thing about deleting Instagram in 2017 was I really started to become much more autotelic when it came to my photography. Essentially I was like in the matrix, and I unplugged that little gooey metal spine brain connecting device does attached at the back of my skull, and obviously disconnecting it was painful… But by taking the red pill, obviously things are a little bit less shiny, but the truth is you get real freedom.

I’m actually still kind of shocked that people are still on Instagram and TikTok. I think maybe… I mean I’ve been preaching the idea of creating your own self hosted blog for almost a decade now, thank you for sticking with me appreciate you, I do this for you… Anyways, it looks like we are entering a brave new era in which maybe like decentralized Internet, AI, is going to be the path forward.

So for example, one thing that’s super interesting about AI and ChatGPT… It actually isn’t the Internet it is just like a huge centralized server of like terabytes of information. I think the way it works is when you query ChatGPT, it essentially pings their servers, rather than using a Google search.

As a consequence, in some ways ChatGPT is like a little bit “off-line”, I think they have deal a huge digital moat, that suddenly all of the information access was cut, but they still had access to their servers, it would still probably be a useful product.

Reality

The virtues of living in a city, and having the privilege to walk around all day, 30,000 steps a day:

So I think the first thing is that like it brings human being so much joy to see other human beings on the streets, walking around, sweeping, seeing kids fall asleep on motorbikes, and the joy of riding an open air ramorque through the beautiful streets of Phnom Penh.

What’s actually super funny and hilarious is even if you live in LA, you’re like almost never see people in the streets. Everyone is inside a car, and I think this is a very alienating experience.

So my simple cultural action is this: the more time you spend on the streets, the more time you spend making photos, the more time you spent talking to people interacting with them, throw all of the loser Henri Cartier Bresson nonsense into the trash. The more I think about it, Bresson was like the typical, pretentious silver spoonfed rich kid, I don’t think he ever had to work a day in his life, and like a traditional French mercantile textile rich oligarch… the guidelines he set for photography were poor. Essentially he shaped almost like a century worth of dogma. Time for us to rewrite this.

ERIC

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Start Here >

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Lessons I’ve learned playing high school American football

Yes, street photography is still the future. Why?

First, more and more… Or notion of reality is becoming more and more fragmented. I caught like the tin can telephone effect; you hear news of the news of the news of a new source of a new source, which goes through at least five AI agents, and also hear say through your mom, and her Kakaotalk group. 

Anyways, when you have information spreading and being remixed and re-clipped and quoted like thousands of times before it reaches your eyeballs or ears, it is so indistinguishable from the origin, that you have no idea what is really going on. For example, I call this the chicken nugget effect. Where in the chicken‘s body… do you find that chicken nugget “foot”?  Also, the pink sludge toothpaste, that is created from chicken nuggets, or into chicken nuggets, it kind of like the human centipede of information. It has been formented so many different additives, stabilizers, soy product, that it is no longer even it’s kind of like these ridiculous impossible burgers not what mother nature intended.

Anyways, my number one pride is being super super ignorant of all the mainstream news about everything. Why? Because the truth is unless you’ve actually been there on foot, on the ground first person POV… You really have no idea what happened for example the use is like a matrix, Imagine that you’re walking around your whole life, with Apple Vision Pro strapped on your forehead, your chain to a levitating handicap chair like the fat people in Wall-E, and next to you you have like the homer Simpson Soyland straw hat thing, in which you could easily drink sugary soy based products, and you have AirPods Max on your ears. And imagine that you’ve had it like this since you were born. This is like the new matrix.

Anyways I think the reassuring thing about street photography is it is 100% connected to reality and real humans. My personal thought is most Americans are actually quite lonely. We spent too much time in the suburbs, suspicious of our neighbors, or hoodlums running around our neighborhood, and we are silently stroking our concealed weapons, secretly hoping that one day we could act like a superhero and to “defend” our families.

Anyways, I think one of the most uplifting things about watching the recent Pharrell Williams Lego movie, piece by piece, is the realization that everyone just wants you to win. Everyone is on the same team. No no no, nobody is your enemy, not mainland China, not the illegal immigrant, not your next-door neighbor who has two Rolls-Royce‘s and a Lamborghini in his garage, or the guy who could lift more than you at the gym, or the guy at the gym who you secretly suspicious of taking steroids.

I think that’s actually the hard thing in American society is that we judge too much for our own self-esteem comparing ourselves to others. This becomes misdirected energy because I think it is actually false. Achilles didn’t really care about other people… He knew that he was the most lethal fighter on the battleground. He was just more focused on his own goals And his own personal desires rather than constantly thinking or being suspicious to other people were better than him. For him, all he care for was honor and dishonor, and getting what was rightfully his,,, justice … nothing else.

Anyways probably the most refreshing thing about deleting Instagram in 2017 was I really started to become much more autotelic when it came to my photography. Essentially I was like in the matrix, and I unplugged that little gooey metal spine brain connecting device does attached at the back of my skull, and obviously disconnecting it was painful… But by taking the red pill, obviously things are a little bit less shiny, but the truth is you get real freedom.

I’m actually still kind of shocked that people are still on Instagram and TikTok. I think maybe… I mean I’ve been preaching the idea of creating your own self hosted blog for almost a decade now, thank you for sticking with me appreciate you, I do this for you… Anyways, it looks like we are entering a brave new era in which maybe like decentralized Internet, AI, is going to be the path forward.

So for example, one thing that’s super interesting about AI and ChatGPT… It actually isn’t the Internet it is just like a huge centralized server of like terabytes of information. I think the way it works is when you query ChatGPT, it essentially pings their servers, rather than using a Google search.

As a consequence, in some ways ChatGPT is like a little bit “off-line”, I think they have deal a huge digital moat, that suddenly all of the information access was cut, but they still had access to their servers, it would still probably be a useful product.