Tomer Strolight: How money works, affects people, changes your life, and defines civilization
Bitcoin fosters creation, fiat destroys it
(See FULL interview here 👆)
Tomer Strolight: How money works, affects people, changes your life, and defines civilization
Playable Characters Show Ep041🎙️
Presented by Bitcoin Trading Cards
Tomer Bio:
Tomer has been involved in Bitcoin since 2013 and has been writing publicly under his name about it since 2021. He is the Editor-in-Chief at Swan.com, a leading Bitcoin onramp.
He has also written and narrated the short Bitcoin film "Bitcoin Is Generational Wealth" (available on YouTube).
His articles appear on Bitcoin Magazine, Swan.com/signal, tomerstrolight.medium.com, Citadel21.com and more.
You can find him regularly tweeting at twitter.com/tomerstrolight
or at his site: https://www.blurb.com/user/TomerStrolig
Timestamps:
00:00 Bitcoin as a Catalyst for Personal Growth
15:32 Foundation for a New Civilization
35:11 Bitcoin as a New Constitution
38:23 Bitcoin's Impact on Freedom and Self-Determination
39:46 The Power of a Split Second Decision
40:16 Idealism vs Pragmatism
41:11 The Appeal of Bitcoin's Creation Story
42:10 Differentiating Bitcoin from Other Coins
43:26 The Six D's of Disruption
44:07 Peter Diamandis and Disruptive Competition
45:24 The Deceptive Nature of Disruption
46:23 The Demonetization of the Dollar
47:16 The Collapse of the Old World
47:56 Bitcoin's Asymmetric Power
49:23 Escape from the Fourth Turning
51:01 Bitcoin as a Solution to a Broken System
53:06 The End of History Illusion
54:25 Bitcoin's Role in Escaping Corruption
55:16 The Fear of the Fourth Turning
58:52 Incentives to Stay Informed
01:00:16 Tomer's Journey into Bitcoin
01:03:39 The Fascination with Bitcoin
01:04:33 Word Association Game
Transcription:
Brandon Gentile (03:41.237)
Mr. Tomer Strolight, I thank you so much for joining me today on the playable characters show. I always joke with everyone that just you're trying to find people can critically think in a sea of non playable characters. So I just appreciate you joining me here today. And you're just very apt for the show's title. So thank you.
Tomer (04:08.654)
Well, thanks for considering me a playable character.
Brandon Gentile (04:12.149)
Absolutely. So Tomer, just a real short bio in case anyone's not aware of who you are. Again, you wrote Why Bitcoin, which is which I have around here somewhere. Some of the Bitcoin trading cards, not Tomer specifically. Series one is Why Bitcoin book, which I actually have in a case somewhere. So I couldn't get that out to show everybody right now. But just incredible resources that Tomer has written.
Tomer (04:38.286)
Never thought you were a teen.
Brandon Gentile (04:40.501)
Yeah, there you go. There you go. There you go. So, you know, we thank Tomer for his many contributions to the Bitcoin space for really what over a decade now and writing articles, editor at Swann and just everything you have done to really push forward the narrative. So I would love to, you know, kind of just, you know, we talked off stage a little bit about this of just Bitcoin personal development and and really, you know, settling yourself and settling your mind and starting to.
Tomer (04:41.998)
Thank you for your coincidence.
Brandon Gentile (05:09.525)
Think of things differently. And again, your generational wealth video, which is, again, I was saying to you, I think one of the most phenomenal videos and just seeing what the future holds, but in your mind, in your words, what do you see going forward? Because we have, like we said, Svetsky seemingly changing his tune a little bit. You have Samson, Pierre, some people saying, hey, million dollar candles. Balaji in the last year, a handful of people saying, hey, this could happen really quickly. What are we in for? What do you see on the horizon here?
Tomer (05:38.254)
Well, I mean, I think when we it's hard to know where to begin to respond to this. If we start where you finished in terms of like what what we're seeing happen with adoption and price of Bitcoin. I think what we've always seen is we've seen these huge like it's not a continuous smooth function. We have these huge bull markets, these huge surges which blow everybody away. Nobody can believe.
And then everyone gets overconfident and then we have these big setbacks, but each time it's kind of like this fractal, right? It's like we, where we retreat to is somewhere where it was way above what was before. Eventually you hit something, which is all the money in the world or the inflection point on the S curve where things have to slow down. But I don't think we're there yet. Um, and it's hard to know exactly what can do with foresight, exactly what conditions need to be in place for another one of those surges to happen. I.
I don't think we're going to have those one hyper bitcoinization surge quickly. That's going to be, well, we go from 70 ,000 where we're at today to all the money in the world in the course of a year or even a cycle. Right. I think, I think there are still cycles ahead of us because that's the way adoption and creative destruction work. Right. They appeal to a whole group of people. Some of that group of people turn out.
to be disillusioned by the appeal that they thought would work for them. And so you have this leap forward, followed by this setback. But for me, what's really much more interesting is not the price of Bitcoin, but it's the impact Bitcoin has on the people who've accepted it and the bigger impact that it has over the longer period of time that people have accepted it. So you look at people who've been in Bitcoin for 10 years now, they've been changed by Bitcoin.
All right, more so than people who are just coming to it now. And it's not necessarily that everyone's going to be changed by it in the same way. People may have come to it later because they're a different type of person fundamentally. So what Bitcoin brings out in them is something different than what's been brought out in the people who've been around for 10 years. I still really hold true that Bitcoin is one of these, like the greatest gift that Bitcoin gives us is not wealth in terms of financial terms. It's the...
Tomer (07:52.558)
discovery and development of your true self, that under the fiat standard, we live in this world that's where lies are very prevalent. The money itself is a lie. The politicians lie to print more of the money that's itself a lie. You have to pretend to be a victim so that you get the benefits of it or participate in the lie. So it's a system that doesn't let you discover who you truly are. It rewards these incentives of being who you truly aren't.
and what truly isn't. And so Bitcoin is like this gigantic 180 degree shift towards truth. And the journey of becoming a Bitcoiner is a journey that develops your truth identification skills, your lie identification skills, your reasoning, your ability to form lasting relationships with each other, with other people.
the experience of what it's like to enter into an honest agreement and follow through. So it builds all these virtues. And that's why I wrote this one article a few years ago called, Richer Poor Bitcoiners Have What Money Can't Buy. And it's all about how the journey to become a Bitcoiner actually develops your intelligence, it develops your integrity, it develops your ability to tell the truth, it develops relationships and friendships that are genuine and authentic with respect to who you actually are rather than what other people expect of you.
And so you end up at the end of the day, you're smarter, you're happier, you're more insightful, you're more honest. Well, these are all virtues that money can't buy. You can't go into a store and buy intelligence. You can't buy friendship. You can't buy, you know, honesty. But becoming a Bitcoiner gets you these things. And the longer you're in it, the more you strengthen that muscle, the more you exercise the muscle of being virtuous. And this to me is the amazing thing. Like, you know, if we talk about the people who you just spoke about,
they've been in Bitcoin long enough that you've actually been able to see their journey, their discovery, their changes and transformations in them if you followed them all along or if you studied a little bit of their history. And I know that Bitcoin has changed me. So there's that meme, you know, you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. I think that there's something really powerful and profound about that. I want to say very much it changes you for the better. And it makes you aware of...
Tomer (10:11.758)
how much potential there is in you to be so much better when you're coming from a world that's really broken. And I think that this is something that's going to lead into the growth and continuity of Bitcoin itself. I really think it's going to change civilization. It's going to change the game of politics. It's going to change the game of a contract law or agreements. We have all these systems that we set up that are
competitive, they're rivalrous, right? If you have a contract with someone, you're two parties, you each hire a lawyer, the lawyers act exclusively on each of your behalf at the expense of the other. We think that's the, we know it's a bad system, but we think it's the least bad of all the systems. And if you have a disagreement, then you go to court and a judge rules and it's a rival, you know, it's an adversarial system. You have a solicitor on your behalf, the other party has a solicitor on their behalf. And Bitcoin is like a totally different type of agreement.
All right. But here it is. It's this agreement. When you join Bitcoin, when you start to Bitcoin, you agree to the rules of Bitcoin. I have a big thing of the white paper here, but I've just hung up another work of art in its place. You agree to those rules. And not only do you agree to those rules, you enforce those rules if you run a node. And not only do you enforce the rules in a different way than the courts do. In the courts, it's like if you and I have a contract and you breach the contract,
then I can sue you for breach of contract. But you've already broken the rules of the agreement, right? And we just go into court to see, did you actually break the rules and how much damage did you cause? And in Bitcoin, nobody can break the rules. It's an agreement that has no court of appeals, no court at all, no judge at all, because the software is the judge that prevents anyone from breaking the rules. So you can't double spend and then someone sues you for double spending. You just can't double spend. You can't break the rules. So it's like, you should not steal. You cannot steal.
Right? Like when you agree to the agreement, you, you and everybody else looks at every action that everyone tries to take before the action is taken and says, this is actions permissible. It will proceed or this action violates the contract of Bitcoin's rules and it won't proceed. And so it's a giant agreement. It's a giant cooperation with nobody breaking rules with everybody, you know, not finding any reward from, from it and no settlement system that's rivalrous, that's removing, you know,
Tomer (12:36.43)
Cryptography is an adversarial system. There's a challenge, you know, there's a creator and a challenger and all this kind of stuff. But Bitcoin actually takes this rivalrous technology, this rivalrous know -how and turns it into a giant cooperation. And everyone who is in Bitcoin agrees to the agreement. And it's a very hard agreement to change. And the piece I just finished writing this morning, although it still needs some work, is like the only way to change this agreement is in a non -rivalrous fashion, right? It's through consensus. And...
And we're so not used to it. Like there's a bunch of discussion going on in the Bitcoin community right now about changing Bitcoin and it's going nowhere. It's stuck. Why? Because people are using the same techniques that they see being used in democracy, right? Assassinate the character of your opponent, call him stupid, call him, in Bitcoin you can call him retarded, right? You know, so just insult the other side, tell them that they're ignorant, tell them that they're hopeless. And this doesn't work in Bitcoin, right? It's just everyone getting more and more frustrated that nobody's...
prepared to move forward with a decision that the status quo holds because Bitcoin is built to enforce the status quo unless everybody or near everybody agrees. And so we need to change our tactics of how we interact with each other, not to call each other stupid, but to try to understand what the other person's objection is or what the other person's concerns are, and then address them through honest dialogue and cooperation and respect rather than through just this Donald Trump tactic of
insulting the other person and making fun of them and coming up with names and wearing meme faces. That's not going to work. And I think it's a lesson that we have to learn because we have to try the old ways and see that the old ways don't work in Bitcoin. And then enterprising, intelligent, innovative people have to come up with the innovation that does work. And so if we're going to change Bitcoin, whether that's in the next year or in the next 30 years or...
Maybe we'll all die out because we've got all these bad habits of insulting each other and can't come to any kind of agreement, but eventually it will come. And so it's like, you don't change Bitcoin unless you change yourself first to be honest, to be virtuous, right? Like through honesty, through integrity, through building something that's actually going to work and persuade others that considers everybody else's interests, not just your own interests that works for everybody. So I think it's going to change civilization in the biggest way because.
Tomer (15:03.246)
We've forgotten, like our current civilization, this isn't true throughout all of human history, but in current history, we're dividing and conquering each other. We're divided and Bitcoin unites. And it demands that you unite. It offers no solution to the how do you change Bitcoin unless you unite, right? It's like, get yourselves together and get a solution that works for everybody. So.
Brandon Gentile (15:25.109)
guys.
Tomer (15:32.27)
I don't even remember what your question was at this point. I've gone off on a really long tangent.
Brandon Gentile (15:34.645)
No, yeah, this is this is it. I mean, honestly, like I could just I could just kind of sit back and listen to you for the entire hour or whatever. It kind of talk about this, which is the theme. Like we said, kind of Bitcoin personal development, you know, like it's this world of how do you go to the site and where I was going with this also was the like George Gammon and Jeff Booth, right? They've kind of been going back and forth over the last year plus whatever it is in this in this thing. And George Gammon actually, honestly, I think I actually have it up. And he yeah, I actually do.
Tomer (15:46.318)
Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (16:03.797)
He said, you know, he distilled it down to one thing, which I think he's accurately got. But I think you what I would love for you to touch on more is how, again, Bitcoin changes you like George doesn't he doesn't think that the dynamics and just the way Bitcoin aligns incentives, he doesn't think it's going to change people. And like someone like me or you were like, well, I've seen everyone in Bitcoin basically change themselves because of Bitcoin adopting this standard. And for someone like George, who's not fully in it, like he gets intellectually like he's almost there, almost fully orange pill. But.
Tomer (16:25.422)
Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (16:33.557)
Once you got across at Rubicon to under fully understand it, see the wizard behind the curtain, I guess my question to you kind of is, what is the framework? Like you touched on it on Cafe Bitcoin today actually, which I thought was so brilliant. It's like this framework almost that people have to kind of walk through. Everyone's got to get through this gauntlet of study and this work that has to be put in to actually understand the asset to then.
understand it's money, it's a technology, it's an invention, or maybe it's none of those things, right? Like it's that's the nuance of all this. We don't almost don't even know and humans have such a hard time grappling with this. Like you were saying, you have to understand what money is, you have to understand disruptive technology and how they work, all these frameworks. So I'd love for you to kind of touch on like, what is this framework almost for you? What does it look like for people to fully understand and for a George Gammon or a normie or someone who's completely like, what do you have to go through it in order to see?
generational change, seismic radical shift in humans.
Tomer (17:25.614)
Yeah, well, I think that there's two types of people who go through the changes. There's the pioneers and then there's the people who settle into the areas that have been developed by the pioneers. Right. And I don't know where George Gammon is going to end up on this thing. I'll speak as though there's a 100 percent certainty that this change is coming and it's going to be successful. I want to talk about the the ifs. Right. In the same way that America, you know, the Americas was an undeveloped land.
Brandon Gentile (17:44.597)
Yes.
Tomer (17:55.118)
you know, in terms of Western culture, when Columbus and his crew landed and then the pioneers followed suit and settled, like when they came, there was nothing for them, right? There weren't like stores, there weren't welcome committees. There were people living on the lands, but they had a very different culture and a very different civilization than Western culture did. So it had to be built.
in some degree before other settlers were prepared to come to this wilderness, to this new frontier. And once the new frontier was developed, then we had this shift where everybody wanted to come to America and still to this day, despite all of its current problems, tons and tons of people are trying to get into America and are getting into America and that's creating controversy within America. But the people who had the vision to go there and to build out who were fleeing oppression and...
you know, or just dreamt of a better life. Those were the pioneers. And I think that's what we're seeing as the phase of development of Bitcoin now. And it's not an overnight thing. Again, we've grown up in a civilization that's like, oh, it's instant instant gratification, immediate results. It takes time to build something as dramatically unique and different as a consensus system that has.
tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people participating in the consensus and scaling it, working on it, enforcing it, taking on all the responsibilities that come and making sure that all the responsibilities are checked for and developed properly. There's a lot of discoveries that we still have to make in terms of what exact responsibilities we have as the thing grows. So you've got a very pioneering group of people inside of Bitcoin. And what they're prepared to do is let go a lot of...
of a lot of old assumptions and discover what needs to be true rather than what was supposed to be true. And I don't mean like, you know, he says, it's supposed to be true. What was supposed, what we supposed was true when we were all born into a world where the government says this piece of paper is worth 10 times what that piece of paper is worth and that's worth an hour of your work. Like,
Tomer (20:10.926)
we are now awakened to the fact that there's something not necessarily true about that and something unsustainable about that, that it's falling apart because of corruption and bad, you know, and bad ideas. And it's eroding our civilization because it's not built on a stable foundation. It's built on a fragile foundation where lies, the lies have crept in long enough that the foundation is crumbling. That's certainly what we did coiners.
have come to view and so we're not trying to build on that foundation of fiat. We're trying to build on a fundamentally new foundation and we found Bitcoin. I think that's what makes Bitcoin historic. There've always been people who've been questioning fiat, you know, and occupying Wall Street and protesting against this and protesting against that. And they've had solutions like socialism and, you know, and other things that they've tried to implement. But those solutions haven't worked, right? Or they've had no solutions.
So they're just angry and protesting. But we suddenly have this foundation in Bitcoin that says, you know, I can fix all of these things. Or I'm an indestructible foundation that fixes a lot of the things that are broken at the base layer. And the other things that seem to be broken, whether they're at the base layer or elsewhere, can be built on top of Bitcoin. Right. And so we really believe like we're not just talking about building technology on top of Bitcoin. We're talking about building culture and civilization on top of built.
Bitcoin, a culture of honesty, integrity, intelligence, love of your fellow person, the understanding that you need to cooperate with them, nonviolence, non -aggression, non -war, peaceful. These are all things that you can build on Bitcoin and that Bitcoin doesn't tolerate their antithesis, right? It's like you don't win by killing somebody in Bitcoin. You don't get their property. You win by arriving at a mutually agreed exchange with them and then exchanging their Bitcoin through the use of their secret keys with...
Brandon Gentile (21:50.581)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (22:03.406)
with you. So it's a very different foundation. And this is why it's so hard to understand for people. I think I'm not going to pick on George Gammon, but I'll use him as an example. He's trying to understand the world. He's above average in IQ, but he's not like super genius. He's dedicated a lot of his life to trying to understand how to make money in the fiat system. And he's bringing a lot of baggage with him when he comes to Bitcoin about
how the world works and how the world doesn't work. And I haven't listened to a lot of him, but I'm just going to take it at face value. What you said, you know, he doesn't believe he's cynical. He's doubtful about the fact that Bitcoin will change, will change people. Well, you know, he's coming from a world that is filled with cynicism. It's filled with these assumptions that people are bad because the incentives reward people who are bad and punish people who are good. And so you look at that world and you see all these
greedy, backstabbing, lying, double talking, you know, people in the most powerful positions in the world. And you make the mistake of think this is the way of the world, but it's not, it's the way of fiat, right? It's the way, it's the way of a system that's filled with corruption ends up being filled with corruption. And we've seen it in history. We've seen empires that started off virtuous and strong and proud and hardworking and capable and open become corrupted.
Brandon Gentile (23:10.549)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (23:28.238)
and eventually collapse. And very often times it's because the money became corrupted, right? Whether it was fiat money or clipped coins or debased coins, in all of these cases, the empire got weaker and weaker. As the money got weaker, so did everything that the empire built, right? The money became fragile and so what they built became fragile. That's a really interesting thing. And that would be something that I would urge the likes of George Gammon to study, to study in history, not just the last 50 years of...
what's happened in our modern era, but the ideas that keep happening over and over. And he might then become a cynic. I'm not at all attributing this to George Gammon. He might then become a cynic and say, well, yes, it's true. This has happened, but because it keeps happening over and over again, why do you think it won't happen to Bitcoin, the debasement and collapse of the civilization? And for me, the thought experiment is, well, what happened? What did happen? What was the cause of the failure? And there were two things that are very related in every one of these failures that happened in the past.
Brandon Gentile (24:16.821)
That's it.
Tomer (24:27.598)
One is the leadership became corrupt and they, and two is they therefore corrupted the money, right? So like they, they clipped the coins, they made the coins less pure. They debased them. They lost their purchasing power. They lost their credibility and they stopped working for the good of the, of the civilization. They started being corrupt, right? Being, um, what's the word I'm looking for? It's the tip of my tongue. I can't remember it right now, or it's not coming to me right now.
Decadent. They became decadent. That's the word, right? And so instead of fortifying the civilization, fortifying the empire, they indulged in frivolous delights while the empire started to collapse around them. And they never took attention to redirect their effort at refortifying the civilization. In fact, these changes happened so slowly that it was generations after generations that it happened. So someone would have been born into a generation of decadence and they would have thought this is the way life is.
Brandon Gentile (24:58.933)
Yes.
Tomer (25:25.358)
And in the meantime, they're not protecting and developing the civilization. I think that's happened in an accelerated rate in our fiat world. And I'm kind of losing my train of thought, but, you know, I come back to the main point is like, so why won't this happen to Bitcoin? Well, for one, it doesn't have leaders to get to become decadent. Right. So like the biggest vulnerability of any empire was always its emperor. You know, if the emperor becomes decadent and corrupt,
Brandon Gentile (25:45.493)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (25:52.718)
fish rots from the head and everything starts to get worse and worse and worse and his lieutenants become decadent and their lieutenants become decadent and the senators become decadent and everything just is so rotten by the time some honest person gets to it that there's no there's no way to get through it we're kind of celebrating Easter this you know today's Easter Easter Monday and it's like you know this is what Jesus and his disciples seem to have gone through as well right and as the Roman Empire was collapsing there was no honest
Brandon Gentile (26:11.541)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tomer (26:22.862)
uh, process to appeal to and they had their heads chopped off or were imprisoned in their in their discussions with decadent politicians who were just trying to stay in power and too fearful to make uh decisions aligned with truth. So there's something in that story but you know bitcoin is resilient against the decadent leadership with a very simple solution. Nobody's the leader right? There's no election process to find the most benevolent, most intelligent,
philosopher king to put in charge, which is what Plato's thought, is like, we've given up on the idea of putting someone in charge because absolute power seems to corrupt absolutely. Eventually you get bad leadership and the leadership destroys the empire. We'll just remove the leader from the equation. This is a system that somehow works without a leader. And, you know, the more you study Bitcoin, the more you realize, wow, you know, the balance of power that it creates is much more powerful than simply the tripartite.
division of powers that the American founding fathers tried to put in place of separating the judiciary, the legislative judiciary and executive branches. I've written a piece on that too about how I've written a few pieces about how Bitcoin is so similar in spirit and goals to what the American constitution is and what America is, but with a totally different mechanism. Right. It's not a piece of paper that say we, the people are, you know, I'm viewed with these rights. It's like,
Peer to peer, everybody's an equal in this thing, an equal in it by code, right? Everyone can come up with a private key. Anyone can generate a private key with entropy, and that's all it takes to be a member. And all members are at equal standing. No private key has any more power than any other private key. So it's really a remarkable measure here. And then, so the first thing is, it doesn't have a leader that can't be corrupted. And the second is,
It can't be debased. Nobody can inflate the money supply, which was the other thing that destroyed all these empires in history. And it's not like these are but two of the causes that destroyed empires throughout history. I think they're the two root causes that destroyed empires throughout history. And they're probably very closely intertwined. They're two sides of the same coin, the corrupted leader and the corrupted money, because the leader is able to corrupt the money and the corrupted money further corrupts the leader. And so you end up with this death spiral of
Tomer (28:49.806)
of empire as these things get more and more corrupted and more and more corrupt people move into government because that's the way you get the money in the corrupted money world. Well, you can't corrupt the money, you can't corrupt the leadership. There is no leadership and the money is finite, it's predetermined, it's enforced by everybody, it's unbreakable. The monetary policy cannot be broken. And so we actually have this base to build a civilization, a global empire on that treats everybody equally.
Everyone is created equal in this empire. We all just need to generate a random number to participate in this empire. And we don't have to worry about a corrupt leader and we don't have to worry about the money debasing. So we can focus our efforts on other things than politics and keeping the integrity in the money, like building things of value for ourselves and other people. And we can focus on it across generations.
I mean, I think the first thing for our generation to do is to get our house in order before we start building houses for other generations. But as time goes on, I think more and more we'll see people satisfy their immediate needs and even their needs for their lifetime. And what they want to do is build for the future, even beyond what they're able to build for themselves. So I'm coming at it from...
having experienced some of these turning points myself and being filled with hope by them and seeing it in so many others. So whether it's Svetsky who's now saying it'll take 60 years or someone else who might be saying it could be right around the corner, to me, that's almost like beside the point. They're all pointing in this direction that Bitcoin is gonna make us better people and our civilization a better civilization. So it's almost besides, right? Versus we look at the fiat civilization and everyone's saying, oh my God, it's gonna collapse. It's pointless.
Brandon Gentile (30:37.845)
Hahaha.
Tomer (30:39.214)
Why have kids? Why even continue to live? Like that negativity, that nihilism that exists indicates how bad the foundation is crumbling in the fiat system. And the optimism and hope that exists throughout the entirety of the Bitcoin system illustrates how high the potential is of Bitcoin and how much it is changing people. Like, you know, if you're coming from a society where everybody's negative,
I shouldn't say everybody's negative, but where there's such a strong negative sentiment that survey after survey, year after year, people feel the condition of the country is worse than it was the year before, right? Like that's a data point you can point to. People are constantly saying things aren't as good as they used to be. And you can see it going down. You can see it used to go up in the 30s and 40s as people were coming out of...
the depression and the war. So something's changed and it's kind of, and the level of trust in institutions is at all time low. Anything new even that gets measured is like immediately dropping. So like that's the world that George Gammon lives in. And then you have all these people who are Bitcoiners and they don't live in that world anymore, right? So that's what I would say to George. It's like, well, take a look at all these people who are in Bitcoin, who've been in it for a long time. They all have optimism about the long -term.
future of our civilization that this thing repairs it. So does it change you? Absolutely. You know, might they all be wrong? Well, you know, that's another discussion to have, but they're changing to optimists and optimists tend to build things, right? They may not get everything right, but it's the people who believe they can build an airplane are the ones who build an airplane while everybody else is saying it's impossible for humans to fly. So you know, you've got this optimistic, hardworking, succeeding group of people.
that's a growing group of people. It's like Bitcoin is this new frontier that is attracting a lot of people to build a new civilization onto. And it's not a frontier in terms of like a geographically separate place. It's a financially separate place. And it's a politically separate place. It's been removed from the control of democracy, the control of governments, the control of existing financial institutions. It stands alone apart.
Tomer (32:59.598)
uninfluensible by these things. And some of them are kind of coming over now and trying to figure out what is actually going on here. And it's also got this great defense, right? In the sense that America was defended by the ocean and its coastline and its massiveness, Bitcoin is defended by cryptography and hash power and mining, which no government in the world today, in the same way that the British Empire couldn't come and defeat the Americans.
no government in the world can come and defeat the Bitcoiners. So it's really a historic, historic event, I think.
Brandon Gentile (33:35.445)
That's yeah, that's I couldn't agree more. It makes me think of I've always had this thought, too, with like you said, with the Constitution, the Constitution was great if you were, you know, maybe a friend of America, if you were inside the walls of America at an embassy somewhere around the world, right? That kind of kind of extended. That was it, right. But the the white paper is global. You know, it's it's possibly it can go outside of Earth. It can be. Yeah.
Tomer (33:54.99)
Yes, everybody in the world. It really is we all the people.
Brandon Gentile (34:00.181)
Exactly. And it's really the Constitution on a stereo. It's the Constitution 2 .0 and it's ratified every 10 minutes. And I think that's like.
Tomer (34:03.598)
Yes. Yeah. I've written an essay on this called, that one is called the United State of Bitcoin. And it speaks to how we're all united in the state and it's available for everyone in the world. And it compares step by step the constitution of the United States to the Bitcoin white paper and shows how while they're trying to achieve different things, they actually both achieve pretty similar things. The white paper in a narrower context, but the context on which it's all built upon.
Brandon Gentile (34:12.757)
Yes.
Tomer (34:33.326)
And I play a little fun on the word state because there's the state of the blockchain. And there was obviously the state of Connecticut or the right. And these two definitions. But I think we're all united by this, you know, and we're all united in the state of Bitcoin, right? Like you run a note, I run a note. They're united in their agreement on the state of the network. So we're like changing the definition of the word state to something that we can actually all agree on and and not fight over.
Brandon Gentile (34:42.069)
Yeah.
Tomer (35:03.246)
but use our energy to come to greater and stronger agreement about it. It's really, it's a 180 degree pivot in history.
Brandon Gentile (35:11.221)
It really is. And I thought I thought I wanted to say that because I thought it might touch you off a little bit because of that. So it's it's it's funny. So like I think of the other thing it makes me think of, too, is talking about George and using George as a placeholder. Obviously, like we kind of have been not to.
Tomer (35:26.19)
You brought him up. I don't, I've only heard him speak twice in my life. So if there's anything that I'm misstating about him, it's just like, yes, we're using him as a placeholder. I apologize to him if I mischaracterized him.
Brandon Gentile (35:31.669)
No, that was it.
Brandon Gentile (35:35.989)
No, no, no, no, that's you, you said it very well. And you even, you even, you know, kind of got the gist of what he, his whole point with a lot of this is, you know, very Thomas soul, like Thomas soul is one of his biggest mentors by far probably. And, you know, life's about trade offs and, you know, basically like we need to educate people and you know, you have to educate people in order for them to change. Yeah, exactly. And his thing, like you said,
Tomer (35:46.894)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (35:52.43)
Yeah. Okay. I know Thomas Sowell better than George Gammon. Yeah. And he's a very hard and crusty guy, right? Like he's very smart. He's very honest. Um, but also, um, very, the way I read him is he's, he's very skeptical about the intelligence or intentions of the opposition. And I, and I'm sympathetic to that. Sometimes your opposition is wrong. And, and, but.
Brandon Gentile (36:01.269)
very much. Yeah. Yes.
Brandon Gentile (36:13.941)
Yes. Yes.
Tomer (36:21.614)
It's different to say that they're stupid. And it's different to say that their intentions are wicked. They might be. But again, why would people move forward with wicked intentions? It's because they live in a system where they believe their wicked intentions will be rewarded, that they will get away with their wicked intentions. And I again go back and say, well, take a look at what actually happens in Bitcoin. It was set up in such a del...
splendid structure that it really doesn't reward wickedness and, you know, and it raises in its followers and the people who participate in it, a keen eye to routing out and identifying calling out and extricating wickedness from the system. So it's
Brandon Gentile (37:07.477)
Yeah, and you you you forecasted basically without even knowing it like in essence, what are you saying? And you've seen it. I think of the kiyosaki to kiyosaki is my biggest mentor coming out of out of college and 15 years ago and seeing him with the first person I really got into and his change just over the last few months talking again with Jeff Boothmore and seeing and he was like, oh, wait, I got it. Like it's not it's a new system. It's not like I'm not trying to get more fiat. And that's where George comes from or a kiyosaki came from. Right.
Tomer (37:26.446)
Great. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (37:35.413)
And so it's a whole sea change. And that's what the human mind is a very hard time. Like we're getting off the sinking monetary debt -based Titanic and getting on to a life raft, a new boat. And people just have a very hard time recognizing.
Tomer (37:47.31)
Yes, of course. They've, you know, at some point in their life, when they were young, some lesson got impressed upon them that, you know, this is a do unto others before they do unto you world. Right? Like the bad guys get away with crimes. And we were told all these stories that were nice and fairy tales and the happy endings and stuff, but that's not really the way of the world. And they get ripped off or they get beat up or they get, you know.
or they do something wicked and they get away with it and they get rewarded for it. And so it starts to distort and shape their character. And I'm not saying that Bitcoin somehow prevents people from lying and getting away with lies in general, but it does so at this very fundamental base layer of money.
Brandon Gentile (38:23.093)
Right.
Tomer (38:29.39)
which is what the government has become, right? The government has become an issuer and handler out of money, right? Of incremental money and a confiscator of money. That's 99 % of what they do, right? They say they're doing it for good reasons, but they're violating the notion of property rights and self -determination in the first instance. The minute that they think that they can do this, they're already saying,
you know, implicitly that they can judge better what's good for you and others than you and others can judge working between yourselves. Right. And so it's, it's this fundamental violation of freedom, you know, and not, not just freedom in the legal sense, but freedom in the spiritual sense. I mean, like someone, there's someone there who's going to make determinations between you and others without letting you and others arrive at those determinations on your own.
Brandon Gentile (39:10.293)
Yes.
Brandon Gentile (39:21.429)
Is it as simple as again, like it's the whole like when when you don't understand you haven't crossed this Rubicon, it seems absurd. And when you have you've seen the wizard behind the curtain, you know, I guess for most Bitcoiners, right? It seems obvious. And it's this it's almost too easy where where it's the is the is the Occam's razor or is it is Occam's the simplest answers? Yes, it's.
Tomer (39:41.134)
Yeah, the simplest solution is the most usually the right one.
Brandon Gentile (39:46.101)
If people don't want to believe that it's that easy, like it's just a switch. Like we're not, Tomer and I aren't saying, hey, you need to go get in a bodybuilding competition and go work out for a year and a half and watch with the E and be super disciplined. It's one simple split second decision to say, I'm going to use this money instead of this debt -based instrument. And all of a sudden life starts changing. It doesn't immediately change overnight, but all of a sudden things just start changing. Like you said, the incentives are unlined. And is it just idealistic versus pragmatic people? Like are Bitcoiners in the current epochs? You know, are we just very idealistic and most people are cynical and like what?
I don't know, I think that's the question of the day.
Tomer (40:17.838)
I think people can come to it from different points, right? Like, you know, there may be a naive idealism that is an easy route for someone who's naive and idealistic and discovers Bitcoin. They're also vulnerable though to all sorts of other traps, right? If you're naive and idealistic, someone comes to you and says, I've got a smart contract platform where you use proof of stake and this and that. And so they can get led down all these garden paths that lead them to disaster because they're naive, right? They're not able to scrutinize.
Brandon Gentile (40:20.885)
Hmm.
Brandon Gentile (40:27.029)
Mm.
Tomer (40:47.374)
what is actually happening. So I actually think Bitcoin is a harder path. First, it's a path to recognize that something's wrong, which isn't that hard anymore today, but it's hard to know exactly what's wrong. It's then the listening to all these ideas around what actually is wrong. Why does this present itself as a solution? How is it a solution? I think there's many appeals to the idealism.
idea behind here that aren't naive, like that I've written a lot about the story of Bitcoin's creation and Satoshi Nakamoto. Here is this individual who keeps his identity secret, solves this mathematical problem that mathematicians say is impossible to solve. He finds a practical solution to it anyways. It is the idea behind how this thing works. This thing works as a form of incorruptible, unled money. And then this guy disappears without spending any of his money, without doing it for, you know,
Brandon Gentile (41:17.109)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (41:41.358)
for the money, for the power, for the fame, for all of these fiat -based pursuits that people have. He just did it as a gift. And so there's also this spirit that rises. It says, wow, people, you know, this thing was created by someone who was really good, good in the sense of really smart, you know, really creative, really hardworking and really generous and really disciplined and really virtuous. And so you have this...
wonderful creation story that comes behind this thing that now is a gift to humanity, which differentiates it. I think this is one of the things that helps perhaps the naive and idealistic differentiate Bitcoin from all the other coins whose creators you know, who'd simply forked Satoshi's code and then said mine is better because it's faster. It's more reliable. It's whatever they said, right? Like none of them, you know, they were trying to step into.
Brandon Gentile (42:33.077)
Right.
Tomer (42:37.39)
the shoes that Satoshi intentionally left unstep into, right? He said, well, nobody should be the leader. Nobody should become famous for having created this thing. Nobody should have the power to wield over others. This is an egalitarian peer -to -peer system. And then you have these people fork the code and say, I'm the leader and I'm going to run it better. What's Satoshi done for us lately? And it's like every day, but not being here, Satoshi is doing more for us than anyone could possibly do by being here.
Because the whole idea is it's peer to peer and everyone's equal and there is no creator coming in charge to tell us how they will change the system and change the rules and change what we thought was true yesterday into something that's no longer true today. So yeah, Satoshi's doing his work every single day for us.
Brandon Gentile (43:26.261)
Yeah, that's that's an incredible point. Transitioning just a tiny bit, you were mentioning earlier, too, which I thought was fascinating. And I'm a big fan of Peter Diamandis, and you were touching on him earlier today a little bit. I would love for you to go into a little bit of like it was it was a six D's correct of was it a disruption? Yeah, I would love for you to kind of touch on that a little bit, because again, like, you know, like a lot of what we've been talking about a lot of what Bitcoiners go through is this obviously we're in a world.
Tomer (43:43.31)
Yeah, he's fun. Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (43:53.621)
Really, I mean, the world is entropic, it's disruption all the time, it's change anyway. But he, DiMando went to school with Saylor, obviously a brilliant guy in his own right. I would love for you to kind of touch on what you've been studying in that world and where your thoughts are with him.
Tomer (44:07.885)
Okay, I don't have everything open in front of me. I might not remember all of his, but I think what Peter did really well was he took a look at the history of disruptive competition, kind of following in the footsteps of the innovators dilemma whose authors' names are in my tongue and I just can't remember right now. But this was a study, a book that came out of Harvard, the innovators dilemma that showed that...
Brandon Gentile (44:12.181)
No worries, we'll hold you to it.
Tomer (44:33.998)
Companies kept getting disrupted out of their incumbent position. They would achieve a dominant position in the market and then somebody else would come along and unseat them. Blockbuster get unseated by Netflix as the example that we gave and mainframe computers getting unseated by desktop computer, personal computers. It happens over and over and over again that these incumbents are unable to protect their...
position, Kodak gets disrupted by digital photography, despite inventing digital photography, right? It's just, you know, you invent the thing that destroys you and you have a patent and a monopoly on it for some period of time and you still fail to see its opportunity. And I think what Diamantis did really nice is single out six or seven concepts that tend to happen in typically the same order. And I'll certainly get the order wrong, but.
You know, they, they involve, and I'll just try to rhyme them off and then we'll focus in on one. They, they, they digitize something, they dematerialize it, they disrupt it. They demonetize it. They're deceptive. I got five of the six and I can't remember what the six one is. I'm always terrible at finishing off a list, but they, they do these things that he cleverly finds words that begin with D to, and eventually, you know, you find that, you know,
The video rental store is dematerialized. It's gone. It's just, it's your screen and remote control, right? It's digitized. It's coming. It's streaming over the internet. It's been demonetized. You don't pay for each rental. You know, you can download streams for free or you pay one monthly fee and, and, and you get all you can possibly eat for four people, um, at, at the same time. And so it's like all of these, you know, and it's deceptive because when it first starts,
Brandon Gentile (45:58.421)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (46:23.278)
Well, when Netflix first starts, it's mailing DVDs in physical mail. But then it starts offering some programs on TV, on streaming, and they're garbage. There's not many of them. They're lousy. The internet connection is not great. So it's deceptive in that it looks like a bad idea. But then as bandwidth increases and as the number of subscribers increases, their ability to get great programming increases, suddenly it's like, why the heck would I go to?
Blockbuster when they might be out of the movie that I want, when I can get it instantly here and I can even, there's magical features like I stop watching it on this TV, I go to the other TV and it picks up where I left off. It knows exactly who I am. It's making recommendations. None of these things were things that Blockbuster was doing. So these disruptive technologies completely eliminate the other things. And if you...
keep looking at the world, this was the point I was making, which is different from Diamantis' point, if you keep looking at the world from the perspective of the old...
It's like your whole world collapses in on you all at once, right? It just feels like this thing that was this distant, tiny little nothing of a nit suddenly became 10 times the size of you and is about to devour you or has devoured you and you're left disrupted. And you don't even understand the world anymore. And especially if you measure the world in terms of your old yardstick. Like the example I used was how many blockbusters is a Netflix worth? Right? And it's not just that...
Brandon Gentile (47:49.781)
in the
Tomer (47:56.206)
Netflix is now worth 10 times what Blockbuster was at its time. It's like Blockbuster is worth zero. So Netflix is worth an infinite number of Blockbusters because Netflix made Blockbusters worthless. And that's the demonetization piece that people really have a hard time understanding when we're talking about money. Because how many dollars is a Bitcoin worth? Well, it used to be worth less than a cent and now it's worth more than $70 ,000. So it's like, wow, that's seven million times.
what it used to be worth, but it's demonetizing the dollar in the process, right? It's going to be worth infinity dollars if nobody uses dollars anymore. And it just like, nobody asks the question, how many Netflix, how many blockbusters is Netflix worth? But everybody asks the question, how many dollars is a Bitcoin worth? And it's doing, but it's doing to the dollar exactly what Netflix did to blockbuster. So this is the most deceptive attribute of its demonetization.
It's like the unit that you're using to measure the value of this thing is being destroyed by the thing that you're measuring it with. So it's just like, that's a really hard thing for people to process. And I mean, it's not like that thing isn't destroying itself in the process. And it's not like there aren't other things that are being demonetized, like real estate and the premiums on stocks and bonds and all these high multiples on things. But it's also replacing the thing that you're using to measure its size. So it's, it's, it's where.
Knute's infinity divided by 21 million kind of comes in. You can put a dollar sign in front of that infinity symbol because that's the worth of Bitcoin ultimately as it demonetizes money and becomes the money.
Brandon Gentile (49:35.861)
Yeah, it is. It's so hard to wrap your mind around until you see it. You know, like it's in it's it's we just grown up in this world of inflation, fiat. I mean, there's really no one alive that knows anything other than inflation. You know, central banks and them printing and really destroying the value of everything. And we know inherently people talk about it all the time. They talk about politics and well, I've never go to politics. It's like the worst of people go there. And how do we have these two candidates like we all talk about it? But like, who really thinks about it?
Tomer (49:51.502)
Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (50:05.109)
You know, like actually sits in like, well, okay, what are we gonna do about this? It's.
Tomer (50:07.726)
Yeah. Well, listen, like we're resigned to the fact that we live in a broken system, right? We're resigned to the fact that lousy people are politicians, right? Okay. Well, like, well, you know what? It doesn't have to be the case, but maybe, maybe you're right that politics is ultimately going to attract lousy people. So the solution isn't in politics. The solution is to take the teeth out of politics and take the teeth out of politicians, which is what the American constitution first tried to do in a big way. But over time, the teeth grew back.
Brandon Gentile (50:11.253)
Yeah. Defeated. Yeah. Yes.
Brandon Gentile (50:29.045)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (50:36.526)
And, you know, we've got the government biting into us rather than us biting into the government. So, but rather than have a battle of bites, let's just take the teeth out of that thing, create a system that neither we nor they can corrupt and manipulate and use that, choose to use that as the system because it's just, because it's fair, because it's honest, and because it sidesteps all this corruption.
Brandon Gentile (51:01.205)
Yeah, makes me think of Mike Maloney. I was telling you earlier, you know, Robert Kiyosaki was when I got into him 15 years ago, seeing the crash, great financial crisis, seeing the tea party and occupy Wall Street here in America, really two sides of the same coin and the media, everyone telling each other they are against each other. But, you know, you look back and like we're on the same team. And you think of Mike Maloney always said that people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And like you were just saying, like if you actually.
Tomer (51:12.91)
Yeah.
Tomer (51:24.974)
Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (51:27.829)
the dollar amounts or like the Bitcoin amounts or what we've used to measure things by. But it's really like, what do you get for that? And I think that's such a brilliant way you said that, like, how many blockbusters can you get for a Netflix now? Well, it's infinity because blockbusters don't exist anymore. I think that's this mechanism that humans have that hard time understanding and visualizing. So I think that's the ones people.
Tomer (51:45.166)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like 60 years from now, let's draw the line. Kids will be born. Bitcoin will be the money. And, you know, maybe in some history class, they'll study the history of the thing called the dollar and how it started as gold, back a paper that was back in gold, and then it became nothing. And then it collapsed. And then Bitcoin. So it'll be an interesting history if they even bothered to study it, because they'll just be born into a world where they use Bitcoin or some derived technology from Bitcoin.
Brandon Gentile (51:52.341)
Okay.
Tomer (52:14.734)
and that'll be money to them. And they won't imagine that there was a world. They'll actually, I think if to the extent that people do it, some people will, but not everybody will, the people who study it, they'll look back at this era and they'll say, man, those people were primitive, right? Like they relied on trust to make them this thing called money work and the trust was constantly being violated and breached and.
fortunes were being destroyed from people who earned them and stolen by people who didn't earn them. And it led to war and there was violence and we're like the 21st, the 20th century, I hope was the most violent century in all of human history with multiple world wars. It didn't, you know, and the 21st century was the century characterized, I hope by this rise to peace. And now in 2180, you know, the people living 60 years from now are going to say, wow, like we've really solved the problem.
But it is interesting. I grew up in the 20th century and we thought we solved the problem. We thought we'd come to the end of history when communism collapsed and Western liberal democracies took over and everybody wanted to be a part of a democracy. We thought we had it figured out, but it was actually it made us come. I think the worst part is it made us complacent and that complacency led to all sorts of vulnerabilities and corruption, which we now can't find our way out of. And I think that's going to be a little bit of the same truth for Bitcoin. Right. It's like.
Brandon Gentile (53:26.101)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (53:36.686)
You need to not get complacent. The nice thing is being not complacent in Bitcoin is just running a node and staying informed. Whereas being non -complacent in the world of wars and physical violence and physical force, physical government is too much for any individual. And so you need these movements, but most of these movements get crushed by government because people have day jobs. So they do the tea party for a little while, or they do occupy Wall Street for a little while, but they don't have resources. It's like...
Well, we've made it asymmetric in our favor. We have the resources, bitcoins. Those are the resources that we recognize and nodes. Those are simple enough resources to run. And the decentralized nature of it and the use of asymmetric cryptography turns the tide over to this side of things.
Brandon Gentile (54:25.621)
So this is really interesting and I'm glad you brought this back up because I didn't I don't I didn't close off our George Gammon and you know and again he's a placeholder for anyone listening. It's it's someone thinking like I do like you said George is a very high IQ very big macro thinker studied the system probably knows it dang near better than anyone the existing Fiat legacy inner working plumbing of the system and so his big thing and just to kind of come back full circle and put a cap on this is what you just touched on which is.
And my question to you is, George's big fear is the fourth turning, the next fourth turning, like you just said, 2080, whatever that is, 2080 or 2100, I guess, or maybe something like that. The next fourth turning, George's whole thing is, I get what you guys are saying. However, we're gonna have this generation, a couple of generations of people who all they've known is Bitcoin, and that's great, and then they become complacent, and then we start the cycle back over again. That's like his macro point of all this. I don't think it's gonna change humans enough.
Tomer (55:16.878)
Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (55:22.645)
So my question to you is do we escape? Do we reach escape velocity with Bitcoin where you can't go backward? You can't have this fourth turning in the cycle of humans relearning things again?
Tomer (55:22.766)
Yeah.
Tomer (55:27.79)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, here's what I think. Yeah, I mean, here's my response. I'm not saying nobody becomes complacent. People who become complacent pay the price, but every single person has the choice to be non complacent in the Bitcoin empire. I'm going to run a node. I'm not going to accept the rule changes that some clown is making. We've already seen this happen in the history of Bitcoin. Roger Veer forks Bitcoin along with Jihan Wu and they say they're going to change everything and a bunch of people follow them. Right?
Brandon Gentile (55:38.421)
Right, right.
Brandon Gentile (55:59.157)
Right, right.
Tomer (55:59.342)
A bunch of people don't and the people who do follow them end up paying the price for following them and they have to come back and restart or they can continue to live in their deranged world where it's still right or they can come back. And so even small faction, like let's say someone convinced the whole of the Western hemisphere that they need to be in charge of Bitcoin, but they didn't convince...
the African continent of it. And so people in Africa or even just in certain countries of Africa continue to run Bitcoin as is and these other people run some hard fork where there's leadership and elections and all this stuff and it eventually collapses just like every empire did before. Well, those people who chose Bitcoin...
Brandon Gentile (56:25.077)
right.
Tomer (56:40.078)
get to continue to survive under the Bitcoin standard, under the Bitcoin empire. And I drew to these geographic lines, but I think what's actually going to happen is just like it did with Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash is the people who choose to stay on the system get to stay on the system and the people who choose to leave, leave the system. And so they can be neighbors. They can be two people living in the same household. And the consequences of being complacent play out.
You know, it could even be you divide it, right? You can keep your Bitcoin when the hard fork happens, you can keep one and the other and just see how it both plays out. But inevitably, if something is subject to corruption because of its complacent holders, then it will become corrupted and the value of it will be destroyed. Whereas the thing that isn't subject to complacency will continue to have integrity and hold up. And so I think, you know, as long as you've got some group of people in the world holding up.
it'll be, it'll hold together. And I think, you know, I can't say this for sure, right? This is after my time here is done, but I think people will recognize enough about the merits of this thing to be highly sensitive and highly worried about easy solutions by giving someone control. I'm not saying it won't happen. In fact, I think it will happen, but it won't be worldwide.
And it'll be short lived and it'll be, you know, right now we say in history, every fiat currency that ever existed has failed. I think people will come to say every fork of Bitcoin that has ever existed failed. And that will be the historic reflection after this happens dozens of times. And it's already true, right? There have been dozens of forks of Bitcoin. It's fair to say that there have been failures. You know, some people will dispute that, but I think those people are insane.
Brandon Gentile (57:57.397)
Mm -hmm.
Brandon Gentile (58:08.821)
Mmm. Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (58:24.629)
Yeah, but you know, I know we're getting close to the end here. So I got a thing or two left for you here before we before we run, be cognizant of your time. But I what I what I gather and I love the way you said that when I gather basically from that is people that are concerned about that. It's you know, when you're forking Bitcoin, like you said, whether it's some fiat government coin or it's some actual digital fork of it, it becomes very costly to do that. So it incentivizes people to stay up with Bitcoin.
and it incentivizes you to be informed about this system or else you're going to cost your life potentially or your wealth or your family or whatever to not be informed and understanding. And that's the whole Bitcoin changes you. And now we're really coming full circle.
Tomer (58:58.574)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tomer (59:06.254)
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, these are all related. These are all simultaneous things, right? There's not one that causes the other that causes the other. They're all like simultaneous happenings that are a result. Some things take time to play out, but they're all happening before our very eyes. And I think that to me is why, like, I'm so fascinated by this because it looks like such a wonderful thing. And...
Brandon Gentile (59:14.197)
I know.
Tomer (59:30.67)
It's so historic and it's an innovation. So everything that I've ever been interested in in my life is like playing out in this thing. And I'm, and I'm able to use the tools that I've developed in my life to perhaps peer into this thing and see a little bit more accurately than other people. What what's actually happening here that, that is of interest to me and, and share some of that with other people that they might find useful. So that's, that's what has me like unable to stop thinking about.
Brandon Gentile (59:54.645)
That's so cool. Right, I know. I mean, it's like, yeah, again, I could listen to you for hours, talk about this stuff and wax poetic about it. I know many people could, but I know we don't have hours here, unfortunately. But in saying that and kind of wrapping with the last thing or two here, what started you down that path? A brief history of how you got working with Swann and editing the content there and stuff like that, writing the books, obviously Bitcoin trading cards, like we said earlier, we have your book as one of the,
Tomer (01:00:16.91)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brandon Gentile (01:00:24.245)
first cards, basically one of the first education cards in that series. You know, what led you down this path of you, like you said, using these skills to all of a sudden you find yourself here, producing content and, you know, really edgy, helping educate people. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Tomer (01:00:30.862)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (01:00:36.206)
Yeah, here's the trading card. I keep it handy. For me, I was interested in the nature of money my whole life. I was born in Israel and we had a hyperinflation event, which is part of the reason my family left, as they told me. They were also concerned about war, which is a very valid concern to this day. And...
And so I always had it in my mind to try to understand business. And I did a couple of degrees in business school and I had a career in business. And then the 2008 financial crisis came around and I saw all sorts of really unjust things happen. Like I saw the people who should have been bankrupt get these bailouts. And so it was like, well, this game, this game is rigged. You know, I've worked my ass off to try to make a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what these people got for free. Who should have, you know, who, if I had made fucked up like them, I would have been broke.
Brandon Gentile (01:01:29.589)
Right.
Tomer (01:01:30.382)
But they got, they got, you know, and I probably would have gone to jail if I did what they did, but they didn't go to jail either. So there was just, there was this real sense of something's very wrong in the world. And, you know, and then I found Bitcoin in 2013.
Brandon Gentile (01:01:34.965)
Yeah.
Oh.
Tomer (01:01:48.942)
And it started to answer a lot of these questions for me. It was like, well, a system can exist and study that other system better. So a lot of what we discussed about, about like finding this new frontier and exploring it and trying to understand it, it became quite obsessed with Bitcoin. And eventually when the COVID thing came around, the job that I had in the fiat world evaporated because it was in a company that did things in person. And so like there was no more in -person stuff for a year. And I am...
Brandon Gentile (01:01:51.253)
Mm -hmm.
Tomer (01:02:18.766)
I decided, you know, I love Bitcoin. I'm just going to put my faith in Bitcoin. I had this motto. I think if I take care of Bitcoin, Bitcoin will take care of me. And so I started writing the articles that became the book, Why Bitcoin? And they got noticed. A few people share them around. Eventually, Corey from Swann reached out to me and said, why don't we turn it into an ebook? And one thing led to another. And I started writing for their newly formed private division.
and eventually became the editor -in -chief there. And lots of opportunities came to me when people were reading my articles. Lewis Liu, who's an investor who runs Mimesis Capital, came to me and said, I really like the article he wrote about this work of art that Fractal and Crypt created that he bought, which was his first mirror -based full note. He said, can you write an article called Bitcoin as Generational Wealth? I said, I didn't really know how to, but eventually the idea came to me when I wrote it. I took it to him and I said,
Brandon Gentile (01:02:59.413)
Oh yeah, yeah.
Tomer (01:03:12.75)
You know, it really feels more like a movie than an article. Can you give me a few bots to make a movie? And he was thrilled to do it. And I met Bitcoiners who were directors and editors. And so it all just, it came together. So like for me, the thing was, you know, I threw myself into it without looking back, kind of burned the boats. Wasn't planning on going back to the fiat world and made the best home I could in this new frontier. And it's been good. It's been very good. It hasn't been without.
You know, we had a very long dry spell, a very long bear market. And there's been times where I've questioned, you know, do I still have creative juices inside of myself to keep going with this thing? But I'm here and I'm staying.
Brandon Gentile (01:03:55.669)
That's so cool. Well, we are very appreciative of that, for sure. Last segment here before before I let you go and new segment that we've been playing with everyone for a little bit here for the last couple of weeks. The World Association game. So for a new segment presented by Bitcoin trading cards. So that and that's a Sunday conversation. Barstool sports. Right.
Tomer (01:03:59.118)
Thank you.
Tomer (01:04:11.31)
Thank you.
Tomer (01:04:15.662)
I may not be very good at this.
Brandon Gentile (01:04:20.821)
I'll tell you what, between the Smetsky and Dr. Jeff and a bunch of people, we've had all kinds of different skill levels. So don't worry, Tomer. I've got like 10 or 15 words and just whatever you think of that comes to mind to wrap here, throw it out there. So word association, deflation.
Tomer (01:04:33.422)
Okay.
Tomer (01:04:41.518)
Fake.
Brandon Gentile (01:04:43.637)
fourth turning.
Tomer (01:04:46.318)
Not gonna happen.
Brandon Gentile (01:04:48.373)
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Tomer (01:04:50.158)
hero.
Brandon Gentile (01:04:52.085)
Hyper Bitcoinization.
Tomer (01:04:56.046)
Bitcoinization.
Brandon Gentile (01:04:58.549)
freedom.
Tomer (01:05:01.07)
Bitcoin.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:02.997)
How funny.
Tomer (01:05:04.942)
Hero.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:06.997)
Elon Musk.
Tomer (01:05:12.59)
corrupted.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:15.605)
Volunteerism.
Tomer (01:05:18.894)
freedom.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:20.885)
writing.
Tomer (01:05:23.566)
learning.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:25.653)
Vitalik Buterin.
Tomer (01:05:27.502)
Laughter. LOL.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:32.917)
I love it. Donald Trump.
Tomer (01:05:36.206)
LOL.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:38.517)
George Soros.
Tomer (01:05:41.518)
Forgotten.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:43.797)
Bitcoin Trading Cards.
Tomer (01:05:45.55)
Have fun.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:47.605)
Why Bitcoin book?
Tomer (01:05:51.566)
Orange pill.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:53.429)
and swan bitcoin.
Tomer (01:05:55.662)
Good guys.
Brandon Gentile (01:05:57.461)
Love it. Thank you so much, Tom. I appreciate you coming out here and giving us an hour today. Really, really appreciate it. Where can people find you?
Tomer (01:05:58.382)
Bitcoin. Yeah. Thank you.
Tomer (01:06:04.91)
I'm mostly on Twitter. That's where I'm most active. So at TomerStrolite on Twitter. My Nosterpupkey is pinned to the top of my profile. So you can find me there too, but I'm a little bit less active. And my latest articles are all on the Swann blog, swann .com slash blog. And my earlier writings are on Medium. So medium .com slash TomerStrolite.
And you can find, if you're YouTube, Tomer, Sterilite, you'll find Bitcoin's generational wealth and a few other films that have been made from various ISAs.
Brandon Gentile (01:06:36.309)
And they're phenomenal. They're very good. And so for anyone who hasn't read Tomer or seen that video, again, I'll link to a bunch of that stuff here too, but they're phenomenal. One of the best writers in the space, quite honestly. So appreciate you Tomer. Thank you so much.
Tomer (01:06:45.07)
Thanks.
Thank you, Brandon. All the best.
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