Trade is an “action”, more like “sharing” or “stealing”. This action is made by humans. Acted by humans. The action itself can be called a “behavior” (James trades his data to Google to access Google’s services). So it is Jame’s behavior at play here. What makes James do that? Mostly it is the structure of our world-wide society where people are forced to trade in order to “obtain”. Obtain goods and services. This environment gives people little to no choice so they have to trade. Like having a job in order to get food and accommodation, and so on. We are living in a trade-based-society where everyone has to trade their skills, energy, time and so forth in order to be part of this system. So, in this regards, we focus on this trade-based environment that forces people to trade and thus creating an imbalance of power that gives rise to harmful behaviors, which in turn create most of the problems that we see in the world today. If we are to eliminate this environment that forces people to trade, then people won’t have to trade anymore, and thus that behavioral trait will disappear. We explain in detail how this trade-based society (environment) shapes people’s behavior, turning them into charlatans, thieves, or abusers – see our The Origin of Most Problems book.

You can access all of the translated books that were published on tromsite.com, here. As for the videos please contact us if you don’t have them.

We plan to create a trade-free directory soon, and there we will add many such services. But, for now we would recommend Criptext.

Although you can, of course, argue that scarcity gave rise to trades. the truth is that in today’s world we already have an abundance of pretty much everything (cars, boats, houses, food, clothes, media, etc.). The only reason we don’t have access to this abundance is because we have to trade for them. So, we would argue, trade should be the main focus in this abundant present and it can be seen as the root of most problems. We describe how trade came into existence in the Money Game and Beyond book, and we detail why trade is the source of most problems in the Origin of Most Problems book. We’ve also made 2 TROM-Casts “debating” these subjects (25 and 26). Additionally you can read a short blog post by Tio, Why trade and not scarcity?. If you disagree with this idea, after you’ve gone through the above materials, feel free to get in contact with us and challenge these views.

It shouldn’t be me answering the question, but experts in the field of  genetics. I can only point to the research that I am aware of. Anyone can use our TROM Curated Search engine that can sort searches by Scientific Papers. Some papers I found seem to be a bit contradictory, yet they are not. This 2018 paper seems more geared towards “there is a biology of intelligence”, this 2013 say it is not, and this big 2019 study says “meh” – full here. Finally this paper looks at the controversies surrounding the topic – full here (I did not read this one).

However they all talk about correlation, else they will prove causation by tweaking some genes to obtain results or see causation in people with mental disabilities – first is almost impossible right now, and second is not really proven with certainty. As far as I am aware it is only correlation at best. Regardless, I see several issues with this approach:

1. No one can define intelligence. Maybe Hitler was good at chess and spacial orientation since he managed to invade so many tribes. But he was a very destructive human being killing millions. On the other hand even people with the Down Syndrome, which is seen as mentally impairing, can achieve a lot in terms of “intelligence” – and that’s done through their environment (how they are raised). But trying to define intelligence is tricky if not impossible. So then, what are they looking for more exactly?

2. Correlation does not equal causation. People who wear dresses are (statistically) a lot more likely to develop breast cancer. But that’s not because of dresses, but because in our culture women wear dresses,
and women are more predisposed to breast cancer. Even in medicine they can’t tell you if you will develop cancer or not based on biology (genetics), because it depends if you smoke, exercise, what you eat, etc.. They can, at best, work with statistics and even those are a bad predictor in many cases. Imagine predicting intelligence when you can’t even define intelligence properly.

3. Poor predictor for anything relevant. Speaking of predictions, the best predictor for someone’s ability to solve problems and so forth (what we may call as intelligence) is still the environment. Take a
human with the best “intelligence genes” who grows up in a normal environment in a poor country, and one without those genes who is trained to be a scientists. See who is “smarter”. Sure, maybe (maybe) if
you put both in the same environment the one with the “intelligence genes” may perform better, but we don’t know that and to what degree. So, again, environment is still the best predictor of “intelligence”.

4. Useless information. Say we discover these “intelligence genes” and there is no doubt about their influence and they do make a big difference between individuals. Now what? Genetically engineer humans? You can’t even do that for simple diseases since it is too complex and you cannot know the results after you do it. And, in the end, it will still be about the environment of those humans.

All in all, what we know for sure is that the environment is so powerful in creating behaviors that it can tweak any human into any kind of behavior. See “feral children” for an extreme example. Also, we made a book https://www.tromsite.com/books/#dflip-df_6560/1 and a  video https://www.tromsite.com/videos/books/ (Behaving: From Genes to Gender) about the subject.

Today’s trade society is a global “thing”, spreading across cultures and regimes. A strategy to move from this trade-society to a non-trade-society, a post trade society, is thus nearly impossible to contemplate by any group of humans. Therefore we do not see any “on paper” solution to this. The solution is always understanding the problem. Cancer or the flu cannot be dealt with unless you understand them, and it requires thousands of people working to solve these problems, across many years, trying multiple solutions. The same way that there is no one cure for cancer or the flu, there is no one “cure” for our trade-based society. We need thousands of solutions to this. In order for this to be accomplished our only goal should be: trade is the origin of most problems, and thus we need to make trade obsolete. The “one enemy” plan (trade as the enemy) will keep any organization fighting “it” in a collaborative state, regardless if these organizations directly collaborate with each other or not. If 1.000 organizations fight to cure cancer, and 4 of them find 10 solutions to eradicate 50% of the all cancers, then their solution is a victory for all the 1.000 organizations, and very likely their solutions are a result of the research done by the other organizations as well.

And now, this is our plan with TROM in regards of getting rid of trade: education  + infrastructure. We need to focus on educating people about what trade is and why trade creates most of the world’s problems. On top of that we need to showcase what solutions there can be (like abundance, automation, decentralization, etc.). The second focus is infrastructure: create this post-trade world. Our finances are almost non existent so for now we are focusing on creating trade-free services like curating search engines, news, videos; trade-free educational books, a customized Linux operating system, recommending trade-free software, documentaries, and more. They will be soon added under a “tool” page on tromsite.com. We want to label our services as “trade-free” and hopefully this will spread like the open source idea did. Therefore we do two things in one shot: we create trade-free services (something that has a direct impact on people) and we promote the “trade-free” idea through them. Education + infrastructure!

The more financial support we get the more we can do in both aspects.

We have tons of materials on tromsite.com explaining the problem (trade) and solutions + trade-free tools.

This is unfortunate but let me explain. The Internet world is a very weird place and humans invented this thing called “copyright” – meaning, some thing they own 1s and 0s. We use many videos, images, or audio files from the Internet and we make no profits on the back of them and we credit them all. However these materials are found on all kinds of websites (like Youtube) and these places remove content all the time. To put it simply: when we use a video from Youtube and embed to our books, if that video is not popular or from a known source, it is going to be deleted from Youtube and thus from our book. To avoid this we rarely download some videos that are likely to be removed by Youtube and upload to our Vimeo account. Then embed them to our books. This way we make sure those videos are available for the years to come.

However, in order to avoid them getting deleted from Vimeo or to fill our own Vimeo channel with random videos, we made them “hidden from Vimeo”. This means they can only be seen on any other website but not Vimeo. So they are available on tromsite.com or any website that embeds them. We work to fix this by hosting them to our TROMcloud.

TROM is not about promoting “original” ideas nor it proclaims to do so. TROM’s core message is that trade is the source of most problems and we have to create a world where trade is unnecessary: based on open source, abundance, automation, volunteers, and the like. TROM is also about science and challenging today’s norms. I (Tio) am not familiar with the above, but if they talk about the same message then it is even better. Actually “money as the source of most problems” is an old idea dating thousands of years in the past, but what TROM does is to clarify it and say that “trade and not money” is the source of most problems. Today it is widely understood that money corrupts politicians, muddies the science, and creates a ton of issues. So there is nothing new under the Sun here. Again, the only thing TROM does is to explain in detail why trade and not money is the problem, and what solutions there can be to lead to a trade-free world. The more people are going to promote the message, the better for all of us, because TROM is about an idea, not about a project. Projects and people die, ideas survive ;).

Never. Period.

TROM will always remain trade free. Meaning we won’t ask you for anything in order to access the stuff TROM produces. Whatever TROM produces is, and always will be, available as trade free: for viewing, downloading, editing, redistributing and sharing. Even if we run out of funds, that can only have an impact on tromsite.com (domain and server), and a few of our accounts, plus producing new TROM content. But all of the past TROM content is already available online as peer to peer sharing. Meaning, the TROM content is already stored on multiple computers all around the world independent of or our control. So, past TROM materials are already into the wild ;). All of these materials can be downloaded by anyone, from here. On top of that, TROM is made by many volunteers who dedicate (or dedicated) a lot of their time to create new content for the project, help with proofreading, translating, website management, and so forth, therefore in order to monetize TROM it would mean to forcefully profit on the backs of all of those people, and this is the worst thing TROM can do. I hope it is clear that TROM will never be monetized in any way. We won’t sell stuff, we won’t lock stuff behind paywalls, we won’t give preferential access to those who donate to us, and so forth.

So, TROM is trade free and always will be.

I would say yes, of course. Our books, videos, everything we create can be shared and used by anyone. We only ask a link back to the original content, like we also do when we add stuff to our work from other places.

TROM has no producer or director, and it is not run by a company. I (Tio) started TROM back in 2011 and since then many others have helped propel this project forward. TROM is a volunteer-based project.

Hi 🙂
Heh I’ve read those things several times and they are a mess. I even started to make an article on it and then I thought it may not be worth my time since it is easily ‘debunkable’. Just to give you a few examples:

– when they measure poverty they look at how much people make per day, but there are many issues with that and they can never represent it properly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#Common_criticism.2Falternatives

– I also looked at the study that said “crime is lower nowadays” and one of the main reason was: better security. Meaning poor people find it harder nowadays to steal cars or broke into homes because of alarms, cctv cameras and such. So the measurement of crime shows what? That the world is getting better or that the security is getting better? Also back in the days you could be arrested for being a black man going for a walk at 2 am, and that counted as crime, today that’s not happening that much – so if crime in the past was higher maybe was because of such things that were “silly” and we don’t consider them anymore as crimes, but that doesn’t imply that “people doing bad stuff” are less of them.

– they don’t look into ‘perceived poverty’. Meaning if people nowadays have more money but are bombarded by advertising making them feel ‘poor’ (I don’t have new clothes, the news iphone, etc.) then this is important. More money per capita does not mean more happy people.

– they say today there are little chances someone will kill you than in the past. Maybe true, but we should also consider that today, with the internet and spreading of news so quickly, a guy in a truck can run over 20 people in Paris and kill 3, and that event will have a huge emotional impact on people (make them scared) + a huge political impact: think about what the “terrorism” idea made governments do -> from spying on people to feeling like in jail when you travel with an airplane. So less people killed (3 ran over with a truck) have far more impact today than maybe 1,000 killed in the past.

– also even if before we may have had less nuclear weapons than today, how can we measure the impact if today we are more or less likely to use them? If today the political stage is infected with hate and thirst for profit, then having less nuclear weapons is more dangerous than having more nuclear weapons but a more stable political arena.

– also if in the past 3 billion people were starving but we, as a species, only had the technological capability to feed 1 billion more, then how it compares with a present where around 1 billion are starving and we could feed 2 billion more? So today we have more capability to solve a problem like starvation, we throw away 30-50% of all edible food, and still we have around 1 billion starving. I think that’s worse. Same applies for homeless people. Maybe in the past there were few homeless people but we also had fewer houses. Nowadays we may have less homeless (though 100 million does not sound so little) but we have way more empty homes.

And one more because I could continue for longer:
– they measure ‘education’ as “people going to school or be able to read”. And they compare with the past where people didn’t go to school that much. But what does going to school or able to read means? Hitler and Trump went to school. Didn’t do that much good to them or to others affected by them. And poor people being able to read ….. maybe they are better targets for advertisements and scams. So all such measurements are quite poo-poo.

Maybe I’ll make that article after all with proper sources and everything. I’ll consider it.

There are several ways to answer this. Here’s my version:

1. I am not proposing an RBE at all because no one has a clear definition of that or because it sounds like it is about “resources”, so I migrated towards “a world where trade is unnecessary” because that means if it is unnecessary then it must be an abundance of goods, services, and opportunities. It also means that it is about solving the big problems: waste, corruption, violence, education, etc., and not about telling people what to do. Like I describe in The Money Game and Beyond ebook in detail it is like the goal is tackling aging to solve most health issues, and I don’t care it that’s done through replacing cells, modifying cells’ DNA, the telomeres, and so forth, as long as we keep it about “tackling aging”. Same here: I don’t care if you talk about circular cities, organic food, or whatever, as long as we are all about “tackling trade”.

2. Therefore point two: I or no one else can know what will happen in such a world and cannot try to imagine and solve all such problems like people throwing rocks and beating others, no more than thinking what will happen when people post mean comments on websites before inventing the internet.

3. My guess is that such situations will happen in any society, but again this is about tackling the big issues not these small ones. Though if people ask such questions ask them how are they resolved today. If someone beats other people then it may happen that others will either stop or beat this guy, some call the police and give him a fine, or he may be jailed. In a trade-free world people will have the time to find better solutions for this like avoiding such issues in the first place, and if such situations happen then they may stop this person and try to talk to him/her and resolve the issue peacefully. Who are “they”? I have no clue, maybe people seeing the event, maybe psychologists, maybe a different kind of peaceful police. Who knows what groups of people will form in this kind of society. I don’t think anyone imagined Wikipedia before the internet was invented, let alone the way wikipedia is edited by volunteers. But the goal was “create the internet and give equal access to all then will see how it goes”. Same way we cannot imagine all aspects of this kind of trade-free society.

I think what those who say this (decisions by machines) refer to different kinds of decision than what you said. I don’t think anyone (TVP, TZM, or others) think that an algorithm should decide how the educational system should look like, how to treat other people or animals, and so forth. You can make algorithms to suggest answers for these questions, but is up to people to decide upon such things.
Think about a treatment for cancer: even today there are AI’s used in arriving at decisions in regards to treatments for cancer, and these are life and death decisions. But these AI’s will not decide or force any treatment on anyone. They are also programmed by doctors to, perhaps, increase the healthy lifespan of the patient, not only the survival. So the AI is human flavored (the more scientifically flavored the humans, the smarted the AI). Then the patient can be shown the alternatives: X treatment has a longer survival rate but has these side effects, while Y treatment has a less survival rate though the side effects are not so bad. Then the patient decides what treatment to undergo. So the relationship between computers and people is complex and depends on the domain.For

For instance a software can be tested to see if it is safer to drive a car than a human, and if so then the software is chosen to drive cars (self driving cars) instead of humans.

So computers can be programmed to find better educational systems, or even how to best treat animals so that they won’t suffer, but these are all suggestions coming from a software designed by human minds, and only a scientifically minded society can make the best out of these suggestions. But it depends from situation to situation.

Server, services, needs for one human being (Tio) who works most of his time for the project.

I will say that I agree – this system/world is nearly impossible to change, however think about ‘aging’ – something I use to compare the TROM project with. When I made TROM documentary in 2011 and I talked about ‘aging’ as the cause of most health issues, something I learned from Aubrey DeGrey, it was such a controversial topic and very few looked at it seriously. It was like ‘pseudoscience’. 5 years later though, and now people talk about defeating aging as if it is a normal thing. To make people look at this idea of aging in this new way, it’s a HUGE challenge, and it requires a lot of time and persistence. But once you start to break the normality then things progress quite quickly. Now you can see so many doctors and companies that invest time and money into tackling aging, and only a few years ago talking about it, it was almost like talking about UFOs, that’s how strange it was.

So, in my view, the only way to change the world is through education first. Make people comfortable with the idea of living in a different kind of society where no trade is necessary (money, bitcoin, gold, and such), no property/ownership makes any sense, there are no leaders, countries, and so forth. It is vastly more complex than explaining the “aging” thing, but in the end what’s the alternative? To just ignore all of these and live like the rest and not care? Will that do any better? In my opinion it won’t.

So, first is to make people comfortable with these ideas, and then the chain reaction will follow and all kinds of emerging things will happen: maybe rich people investing into technologies that will bring such a world closer to reality, maybe other more well known people will promote these ideas further, and so forth. And as we explain in great detail in the Money Game and Beyond ebook, this is a never ending journey, no one should imagine that this kind of world will be implemented in 2070 or something like that. It is a journey without an end.

TROM was meant to mean “The Reality Of Me” or “The Reality Of Mankind” – I came up with that name while working on the documentary in 2011. Now it can stand on its own as simply TROM :). My name is Tio TROM because of the documentary actually, it is a ‘fake’ name per-se.

Yes it is automatic. If you supported TVPMagazine on Patreon then you will automatically support the TROM project. And thank you for doing that! 🙂

Because we believe that it is unfair to treat people differently based on how much they can donate to help us. If anyone donates to the project then they get the ‘perk’ of the entire project. It is as simple as that 😉

It means those books are part of a book and will eventually merge into a single book. So, green corners mean that a book/article is part of a bigger book.

Go to our Get Involved page!

Yes! Whatever we post in TROM’s name is independent from TVP and TZM. We have very similar goals but work independently from one another.

Yes and no. Instead of releasing an issue that has 2-3 articles (thus, 2-3 subjects) we will release articles as issues, or as we call them “books”. Why? Because is much faster and easier for all. For us to make them, for you to understand them. If we finish up an article, what is the point of waiting a few more weeks until we make 2-3 other articles, then release them at once?

In the past, while working for TVP Magazine, we released issues made of articles. But we then focused more on articles, separating them from issues, so that people can easily find them. We also made several articles that merged into books. So, it was confusing. Now we call everything “books”. We do not release issues anymore containing a few articles, but we release articles directly as books.

TROM is not that different in terms of what both of these ‘movements’ (The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project) seem to highlight: that today’s monetary system is the source of most problems and we need to move towards a world of abundance. What TROM tries to do is to make this more clear and explain it in easy to understand ways. As an example of making things more clear, we do not say that money is the problem, but any kind of trade (money, gold, barter, bitcoin, and so forth). This is more true than just focusing on money as the problem, because some may think that the issue is in the way money works today and a new kind of currency (like bitcoin for example) might be better. As we argue in “The Money Game and Beyond” ebook the trade itself is the issue, as IT gave rise to the many kinds of monetary systems we experience today. This book is also an example of simplicity where we use many cartoons and a very simple language to explain why trade is the issue, what money is, and what solutions there are. Speaking of solutions we have a humongous amount of materials to detail how a world without trade is possible. Check our books and the documentary for that.

As explained on the homepage, TROM is a project aiming to present in details today’s problems and solutions to these problems, but it is also about changing people’s values. We think it is as radical in doing that as more and more doctors today are starting to recognize that ‘aging’ is the source of most human diseases; in the same way we showcase how trade (money, bitcoin,barter, whatever) is the root of most of today’s problems: from famine to exploitation of people and the environments, terrorism, waste, climate change, and so much more.

I sent them all to Roxanne in PDF format, so please contact them about this.

Nothing will disappear! I sent all past issues in the original format to Roxanne so TVP can post them wherever they want to.

Interestingly Roxanne accused me of that in some of her last emails to me and this was so surprising because I never made any donation campaign without it being approved by Roxanne first. So, I never ever asked for money for the magazine until Roxanne approved that. This is almost as nonsensical as being accused of being black, while I am quite white :)). More so the money I asked for TVP Magazine were for TVP Magazine not for myself. 60% went to me and 40% to Ray who was proofreading all articles – we asked for money to be able to make the magazine. Even more than that, I spent a ton of money on hosting, plugins, backups and so many other online accounts for TVPM. So this ‘accusation’ is so ridiculous I have no words for it. And it is sad that Roxanne even thought of saying that. Here you can find the details of what happened between me and TVP, from my own perspective.

It’s true Roxanne said that lately, but I do not see how that could be true. I always cooperated with them and always had the time for discussions where there were misunderstandings. But Roxanne rarely had the time to engage in more detailed conversations. Regardless of all this, I NEVER published anything that Roxanne didn’t approve. So, everything I published for TVP Magazine was approved by Jacque and Roxanne. If you want to know more, please read this.

Every article was reviewed by Jacque and Roxanne and approved before publishing, thus if that were to happen (to deviate from TVP with any article) then they approved those articles. I also did not put an end to our collaboration, Roxanne did that and honestly I do not know the exact reason. On the other hand, I too proposed to split because the magazine was ignored by TVP for the past year and, because of some of their decisions (that they did not discuss with us at TVPM), we lost many readers and financial support, making the project unsustainable. Here you can find the details of what happened between me and TVP, from my own perspective http://www.tiotrom.com/tvp-and-me/

I removed the TVP quiz because TROM is not representing TVP. I think that’s the short answer. TVP quiz was mainly focused to promote The Venus Project, and TROM is focused to promote a scientific way of thinking and not a particular organization.

It is extremely difficult to have an answer for that. TVP Magazine was a project that I (Tio) managed for over 3-4 years and in the last year of managing it the relationship between me (and the magazine) and TVP got less and less cooperative, so at one point, after several discussions with Roxanne, we both (I and Roxanne) decided to make the magazine independent of TVP. I merged it with TROM, another project I made before the magazine which I control entirely, because they are on the same track. TVP Magazine was doing what TROM was doing, and vice-versa, so merging them was the perfect solution. From my personal point of view, TVP ignored the magazine way too much for the past year of the project, and so they are (in my view) to blame for not continuing with the project. Regardless I think that merging the magazine with TROM is a much more productive endeavour as I have the freedom to post whatever I find scientific and relevant to this direction and not be forced to tie everything to one organization like The Venus Project. This makes the new TROM Magazine a more scientific project than before. Keep in mind that TVP Magazine was almost entirely my work, except one layer of proofreading for all articles done by Ray, and proofreading (again) done by Ray. So nothing changed in that regard. Here you can find the details of what happened between me and TVP, from my own perspective http://www.tiotrom.com/tvp-and-me/

Most of TVPM’s articles were written by me (Tio) and so you will find most articles on TROMsite, books section. However, if you want to access the old issues in full format please contact The Venus Project. I sent all of TVPM’s issues in PDF format. IMPORTANT: I edited all articles that you will find on TROMsite and removed TVP from them for various reasons, so the old issues containing my articles are not something I stand by anymore. If you want to read the articles that I wrote and I endorse then head to TROM Books.

We removed all of the translated materials (including subtitles) from tromsite.com because we created a special tromsite page that is designed for translators. Anyone can start translating the entire project and its files now. Go here to read the instructions, and here you will find that special page. There is little to no use to add some subtitles for some of our videos for our English based website, and it was also a very time consuming task. And, if anyone wishes to see our videos with subtitles, then they can visit the translation page where all of the subtitles from amara.org are displayed automatically.

It means those books are part of a book and will eventually merge into a single book. So, green corners mean that a book/article is part of a bigger book.

This requires a long explanation so I made a blog post on my personal website (Tio) to answer this. You can find it here.