A World Worth Imagining
0 (0 Likes / 0 Dislikes)
Greetings, I'm Evan Hirsch,
executive producer of the film
and co-founder of S.O.U.L. Documentary.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Before we get into the film,
I’d like to have a brief talk with you
about some pretty serious stuff.
Have you noticed lately how
people seem really stressed out,
almost to their wit’s end in many cases.
You probably feel it yourself.
Things just don’t seem to be
working so well these days.
And does it feel like besides voting,
marching in the street at an occasional rally
or supporting some charities,
there isn’t much we personally can do
to affect real change in the world?
Let’s consider some of the
major causes of our stress problem.
Hyper-competitiveness, polarization,
and ad hominem attacks on one another.
Deep programming, causing people
to believe gross misinformation
and remain stuck in close-minded traps.
A lack of actual problem solving,
as treatment of symptoms
is the main focus of our efforts.
Discrimination against so many groups,
whether racial, gender,
sexuality, religious, etc.
Gross income and wealth inequality,
poverty, homelessness and starvation.
Refugees and immigration issues.
Technology becoming so complex
that it wastes our time more than it helps us,
not to mention the threat of
merging with the machine
and potentially losing our basic biology
and what it means to be human.
Manipulation of information,
especially in the media.
Complete distraction of attention
and denial of our true nature
as collaborative, ultra-social beings.
Pharmaceutical industry manipulation of science
to keep people sick and buying drugs.
Doctors who believe misguided
hype and bad science,
paid for by those seeking
to profit off of bad health!
Industry lobbying’s influence on government
and therefore our world.
Religious influence on government.
(so much for separation of church and state!)
Dirty, opponent-bashing campaigns,
voter discrimination and election fraud.
Ineffective politicians, with liberals
and conservatives at constant loggerheads.
Hyper-consumerism driven by
psychologically manipulative marketing tactics.
Plastics and endless garbage.
Industrial pollution.
Melting ice caps, ocean acidification
and other climate change consequences.
The sixth great extinction.
Guns. (as in 400 million in the US alone)
Constant wars and the threat of worse.
Nuclear stockpiles in many countries
and mutually-assured destruction.
And a lack of any comprehensive plans
to rectify this course of collective mass suicide.
What are we doing to ourselves?!
And what are we waiting for
to finally wake up for real
and actually change the way we live
for the better, once and for all?
One fundamental issue
is that we’ve been very successfully
divided and conquered
by implanting into our thinking
an "us versus them" mentality
in which we blame and scapegoat
rather than take responsibility,
and contribute to unification
and collaborating on solutions.
We are polarized to the maximum,
and lack the support to cope well,
so we turn to less healthy
means of feeling fulfilled,
or just not going completely crazy.
Do you really believe that if we just
vote the right person or party in,
that it’s going to fix
all of our problems in this world?
Let’s face it -
our problems run so deep
that we are literally afraid
to even really look at them,
let alone put our attention, brainpower,
energy and resources into solving them.
So how do we ever possibly get out of this
incredibly complicated mess
that we clearly are in?
I’ve got to admit: I’m a guy who cares,
and that’s why I'm doing this.
I recognize that we are
actually one human family,
and to me, everyone matters.
I came into some money a few years back,
and wanting to be responsible and share it
by contributing to causes that touched me,
I had to really consider
where to direct my philanthropy.
But no matter which way I turned in my research,
my effort to determine where it was best spent
ended up an exercise in futility.
You see, for every drop of ocean
I support in cleaning,
a thousand more get polluted right behind me.
(Fukushima fish, anyone?)
And for every hungry mouth I feed,
a hundred fall into starvation.
I could advocate for the
rights of one race or another
or LGBTQ people, but come on,
we have to advocate for people who
others feel shouldn’t be able to get a job,
rent an apartment, or be able to
buy a cake at their wedding?
Does that not seem
ridiculous to you?
How many of you can honestly say
that you have hope that we will
solve these massive problems,
that things will really change for the good,
and that we can at last thrive
as one human family?
I used to be a guy with very little hope.
I’ve watched many documentaries about
how messed up things are in the world
and how self-defeating, self-destructive,
and even suicidal
our culture, politics, and especially
our economics are for us.
And at the end of some of those,
they offered a few suggestions
about what we could do
to mitigate the damage done,
correct our course,
and find a “sustainable” path.
But I had to wonder:
Is it even possible?
Is it too late already?
Are we completely at the mercy of lunatics
with their finger on that
dreaded red button?
How many people honestly believe
that if we protest in the street,
it will prevent that from happening?
So what on earth can we possibly do
with our attention, time, energy and resources
to make the big shift from
competition to collaboration?
From the hell we are in and
the cliff off of which we are headed,
to the heaven on Earth
that we brilliant humans
obviously have the brainpower to create?
I look around, and I see
the vast resources available to us,
and yet an egregious
misappropriation of them as money,
this god-like thing we’ve created
(out of thin air in many cases by the way)
gets funneled to an increasingly small elite few.
I see the suffering of those
who don’t have the money
to buy what they need to survive.
It just feels like such a mess.
I ask you this:
Could there be a world somewhere in
our imaginations and within our reach
actually worth imagining into existence?
And what would that world look like?
What value system would it be based on?
Who has got the blueprints for a way forward
that serves our entire human family
to the best of our ability?
I know of only one man
who walked this green Earth
with the brilliance and concepts
to help us do those very things.
I’ve met him, and the woman who
was there to support and inspire him.
I’ve seen the plans he laid out for us
and now support the nonprofit they founded.
Because he truly was the man with that plan.
Well I told him I loved him for
what he had done for all of us,
and he told me he loved me too.
And I truly believed him, because
I could see that at 101 years old
and obviously nearing the
final days of his life,
that he wanted better for me,
for every human in our 7 billion
strong and growing family,
and for this precious blue rock
hurling through space
with all the other vibrant creatures on it.
I knew in that moment that
this was my true hero.
A man who grew up in the Great Depression,
and after witnessing all
the suffering that caused,
devoted his entire life
to finding and articulating a better,
healthier, more logical
and sustainable way for us.
And my dear friends, I want to
share those plans with you.
So I proudly present our documentary
A World Worth Imagining:
Jacque Fresco - The Man with the Plan
♫ ♪
Hi, I'm Evan Hirsch.
We are here in the state of Florida
at the Venus Project to visit
centenarian futurist Jacque Fresco
and his partner Roxanne Meadows,
who have created this
21-acre futuristic wonderland
to give us an example of
what might be possible
if his visions come to life
for a new society for us all
that is centered around
a resource-based economy.
S.O.U.L. Documentary presents
.
♫ New plans for our human family ♪
A World Worth Imagining
♫ New plans for our human family ♪
Jacque Fresco: The Man With The Plan
.
Jacque Fresco: The Man With The Plan
♫ to free us from this dark age ♪
Jacque - 1974
The reason we emphasize machines
and technology is to free man
to go to art centers, music centers,
cultural centers,
and to find the meaning of
their own existence and lives.
Jacque Fresco interview take 4. [clap]
Jacque - 2017
This was Jacque's last interview before
he died in May 2017 at age 101.
Let's take a look at this beautiful body
of futuristic, visionary work. Come on!
What do you think of when
you contemplate the future?
Well we're finding out what Jacque Fresco,
a futurist, thinks about that.
You may not have heard of Jacque Fresco,
but he is known around the world.
Documentaries have been done about him.
He has a plan to build an entire
new world from the ground up.
Magazine writers from Europe
have written stories about him.
I've come to the other side
of the world to Florida
to meet a man who has a very
clear vision of what he thinks
the future of cities should look like.
...offering an architectural
plan for human beings,
technology, and nature to coexist
to create a sustainable future.
He's a social engineer, industrial engineer,
designer, inventor,
... who truly believes the ills
of society can be cured
only if we throw away the rules
that govern it, and ourselves.
But to do it Jacque's way there
would be no communism, no capitalism,
everyone living together in one
world, sharing everything.
[ ♫ Dramatic music ♪ ]
♫ ♪
If you were to describe yourself,
what would you say?
I just about have to call
myself a social engineer,
because I'm not just interested in architecture
and learning theory, and human behavior,
but I am interested in all aspects
of the Earth
and people, people mostly.
I'm not too interested in technology,
although it may seem that I advocate that.
In actuality, all the
wonders of technology to me
are just so much junk
unless it makes humans better.
My favorite part of the
day was the lecture itself.
I've watched a lot of
Jacque Fresco's lectures.
He struck me as a genuine person
hell-bent on saving the
world in every way he can.
But I think Jacque has this
amazing ability to zoom out
and look at stuff from above,
on society, on structures,
on life, on people.
Parkinson's Disease affected Jacque's ability
to speak in the last years of his life.
- The depression had a big influence on you.
- Yes.
How did it change you?
Well, I had to think my way out of it.
I went to the library.
I read many books.
Everybody had a little bit of something.
Jacque has been working
on this all his life
and what pushed him in this direction was
that he experienced the Great Depression.
Well I remember as a kid,
during the depression,
my father, being an agronomist,
was one of the first guys laid off.
And he really tried to get a job;
he couldn't,
and the family was threatened.
And there were no provisions
for that kind of condition.
And I remember seeing millions
of Americans displaced,
and children riding freight trains
across the country.
They were good kids,
they just couldn't make it.
And people were sent out of their house
because they had no money for the rent
and people in bread lines.
And that's what initiated people talking
in the streets about communism and
free enterprise system and Mankind
United and all different things.
And he felt that it was the
rules of the game that we play by
that were so screwed up,
that he started a quest of looking
for a different social system
that enabled people to thrive moreso,
and he couldn't find one.
Environment Shapes Behavior
What has humanity failed to learn?
They failed to learn:
what makes people behave as they do.
It's the indoctrination
in schools, and in magazines,
and in radio and news.
Suddenly I realized,
not a lot of people understand
this factor that the environment shapes us.
And it was, whoa! Really?
If you raise an American child
by the headhunters of the Amazon
he will shrink heads and
behave as a headhunter.
You might dislike that behavior,
but if you maintain that environment
you will get that as a result.
When you're brought up in the slums
where every kid grabs what he can grab,
otherwise there's nothing left for you!
You understand?
You're brought up with a philosophy
that parallels where you're coming from.
So, when people steal, I say
"Every human being is lawful."
They obey natural law.
What you've been exposed to,
if it's hatred, all that is lawful!
Fresco's vision goes beyond architecture.
He sees his cities as tools for
fostering humanistic values.
I feel that environment shapes our values.
The people we know,
the people we identify with.
It isn't human nature
that people have greed.
It's reinforced in this culture.
And by having greed,
you get more things.
You get more money.
You do it off of the backs
of many other people.
Every human being is perfectly
well-adjusted for where they've been.
What you've got to remember is,
we can raise a dog
to tear Japanese soldiers to pieces,
or we can raise the same
police dog to help the blind.
How do we find our way through
from the standpoint of human nature?
We look at it as a scapegoat.
They think that,
"Well if there is a human nature in people
that they can't exceed what they're doing."
[So] there will always be war,
there will always be hatred,
there will always be jealousy and crime,
and that's just not true.
From our point of view,
there are no criminals.
There are people that have
been subject to deprivation.
They've been subject to environments
that have little warmth,
little love, little caring,
and the result and the
byproduct is criminal behavior.
All of our bigotry, and our
hatred, and our prejudice,
and our notions of good and bad
and right and wrong
are given to us from the
culture that we're raised in.
You believe that we teach competition,
that it's not bred into some?
Competition is dangerous,
socially offensive,
considered right and normal,
because you are brought
up to that value system.
Can you take a primitive baby and make an
aeronautical engineer out of them? Yes!
In the last 25 years, and from a
background of isolated village life,
such tribesmen have driven
their first tractor,
have acquired and practiced
totally new medical skills,
and mastered the skill
of flying an airplane.
They don't have a primitive mind!
They have a mind
set by the primitive culture!
You make more sense than about
anyone I've ever heard!
Why is your level of logic so rare?
You can't expect a person to do
anything outside of their conditioning.
So reconditioning is the
foundation for finding a new way?
Yes.
It's too difficult
once the kids get out of school.
They've already been poisoned.
You managed to break out
of it and find your own way.
Aren't there enough of us out there
who can make something happen?
Well this will make something happen,
this film.
Constructive Cooperation
in Human Endeavor
All environments generate behavior.
We don't like to look at it that way.
“Well, I make my own decisions!
No one ever told me what
to buy or what to think."
When you go to school
the first thing they do to you
is you raise your right hand; you don't
even know which is your right hand.
And you pledge allegiance to a flag
but you've never seen all
the other flags of the world.
You pledge allegiance to the American way
and the American way doesn't exist.
When I went to school
the beds we sleep in
were designed in England.
The electric battery came from the Arabs;
it was designed 600 years before Christ.
We've learned a lot from so many people.
And most of us are alive
because of Louis Pasteur.
So we owe so much to so many.
"To get away from patriotism;"
Einstein said that.
To surrender our concepts
of individual uniqueness
in exchange for constructive
cooperation in human endeavor.
This is the future.
Whether you can see it or not
depends on whether there will BE a future.
I don't have any expectations.
Whatever happens is real.
What I think SHOULD happen is not real.
That's what hurts you:
your expectations of the world.
Social Design And Values
What Jacque has developed, what you've
developed with him in the last 40 years,
it's so much more than buildings.
That's right. We always say it's not
architecture, it's the social design.
It's a Resource Based Economy and
it's the values that go along with it.
So it's more than a building, it's-
the building is the statement
of some underlying philosophy
(- Yes) ...about how to run the world.
It's like the human body.
If the brain said hey-
I do all the thinking,
I want most of the energy of the body,
then the liver starts choking.
The liver says, without me you can't exist,
so the brain says, well here's a little bit;
the liver suffers.
You cannot give certain things
to some organs of the human body.
The whole mechanism, the planet Earth,
and all its inhabitants live here.
And there is a way today,
fortunately only today,
with science and technology,
to overcome these problems.
Science And Technology
With Human Concern
Being concerned about
the environment without
making the environment
better for everyone,
and keeping that in mind
as your prime directive,
for computers as well.
Their prime directive is human concern.
You can't be human, or decent
without the knowledge to overcome scarcity.
Today we can produce an
abundance for all countries
so they need not invade other countries.
We can provide for their needs.
Who will do all the work to build it?
No one.
The Venus Project will be
automated: factories, farms...
If you unleash science and technology
to create a high standard of living
for everyone and automate boring jobs.
Jacque Fresco's background
as an industrial designer,
social engineering guru,
and architect
have led the 98-year-old futurist
to be dubbed a modern-day da Vinci.
He has a long held theory for
a more sustainable society
and his city designs are like
nothing we currently have in place.
Technically, how difficult
is it to build these homes?
Well we will prefabricate like
automobiles on production lines,
not carpenters and hammer and nails.
That's okay 50 years ago,
but no longer adequate.
He did the first prefabricated house after
World War ll out of aluminum,
but he made extrusions so the windows
snapped in, the doors snapped in
and everything could be built very quickly.
But because he worked on extrusions
he came up with extruding
entire apartment buildings.
Everything's so futuristic,
even today, it's so futuristic.
And when did he make these?
He really made all of these designs
60, 70 and sometimes 80 years ago.
He's 101 and he started
designing when he was 13.
We made these about 30-35 years ago but
a lot of the designs are very old.
So you have the monorail under the bridge?
Yes, this is a covered bridge
with a monorail underneath.
And this is actually a
very old design of his.
Jacque had a concept for
a train before I met him.
But the train wasn't in a tunnel.
It had a probe out front that
shot electricity, you could say,
in front of it, so it broke the air.
So there was no sonic boom
or there was no air pressure
and it could go very, very fast.
But you don't need the tunnel.
And the same thing on aircraft,
he applied it to aircraft.
And in fact in 1956 he was in
Popular Mechanics with that device.
We hope to build a new transportation system
that can move up to 2000 miles an hour,
floating on a magnetic repulsive field
or an air cushion.
If 40 or 50 people have to leave the train
we slow it to 100 miles an hour,
lift off the passenger
section, or slide it off,
and slide on a section
with the passengers getting on.
This represents the building of
underwater dams within the Gulf Stream.
This dam will route the waters
of the sea into a spillway,
so the fish and marine life are
separated from the turbine blades.
The Gulf Stream will generate
power to oxygenate the waters,
to eliminate the red tide,
to monitor marine life,
and build an ecological relationship
between the total oceanographic world
and the continents.
Let's not wait for nature to do it;
we loused it up,
we're going to have to clean it up.
They arrive at the technology eventually,
he just worked in many fields
so he came out with things earlier.
But it's the social design
that's the most important.
We live in a monetary-oriented world,
we think in terms of money.
But the real value of any
nation is its resources.
Without resources you have nothing!
Say the ship sunk,
and you found yourself on an island,
and you had say 10 million dollars.
And you had gold and diamonds.
But the island has no water,
no arable land, and no fish.
You have nothing.
So all this emphasis on money,
which doesn't really represent anything
but some way of exploiting other people.
When the bottom line is profit,
it's very dangerous.
And if you squander your resources in war,
where you have 5,500 ships
on the bottom of the sea today,
loaded with copper, manganese,
tungsten, all the kids that were killed,
300,000 aircraft shot down.
With World War II [resources] we could
have housed everybody on earth,
built hospitals all over the world,
schools all over the world.
There's something dreadfully
wrong with our culture.
We won't make the history books
of the future.
We are that ignorant.
Not in technology. We're doing
fine in computers and electronics,
but the human value system
is not moving fast enough.
Governments are not changing fast enough.
What have we done right?
Nothing right ... yet.
These are our dark ages.
♫ These are the new dark ages ♪
♫ and the world might end tonight. ♪
Yes.
The future isn't Star Wars according to Jacque.
It's a home for everyone.
We'll show a world in
which values are different.
The aspirations of people:
they have compassion,
feeling for one another,
concern over the environment.
Building the structures of the future
may be the easy part of Jacque's vision.
The real future, people will be different.
Well today, a person feels good
helping an old lady across the street.
But where does she go when
she gets across the street?
Jacque thinks he has the answer
in the city of the future.
When I was about 12 years old
I was looking at a gear on a table,
and I saw the cities of the future.
I think all inventions are based upon
experiences like that.
I don't think they come out of nowhere.
This is what the total city-...
The total city looks like this.
This is an ecological program.
The cities are all immersed
in beautiful gardens
where there are lakes,
recreation areas,
arts centers, music centers,
cultural centers.
And surrounding the city
we have the agricultural belt
where we grow foods hydroponically.
Between cities,
we let everything go back to nature.
In Jacque's world, bold new technology
would literally change the way we live.
Cybernation would free us from long workdays
and allow us to pursue our own interest.
All of the new cities will be
a university, in essence.
There's no courses that are
used to exploit or abuse
any other human being.
United Nations Award For
Sustainable City Design - 2016
Jacque Fresco has blessed us
with his unwavering commitment
and uncompromising work
to re-engineer a better future.
On behalf of all of us,
thank you!
We are getting there
and you have been a critical
force for that change.
Please, a warm round of
applause for Mr. Jacque Fresco!
[Applause]
The whole idea of the future
is to stop putting up
little cities and buildings,
but to work on a whole system.
The center of the city, the nucleus,
will house an electronic computer.
The computers do NOT control people.
They maintain safety,
they oversee the environment,
maintain ecological balance
between animal life and plant life.
All the machines do
is control the physical entities
that comprise the environment.
We feel that machines ought to do
the filthy or the repetitious
or the boring jobs.
That man has to be free...
to pursue the higher things,
the higher possibilities of man.
What is to be done precisely?
An international system for the maximum
utilization of the world's resources
without any special privileged group!
There's no technical elite.
No scientific group that sit on
cushions, that make the decisions.
What form of government?
Resource management government.
Non-political:
neither communist, fascist,
socialist, free-enterprise.
Merely the installation
of resource management
to enhance the lives
of all human beings.
Fresco poses a question for us all.
Will humanity create the
paradise we know is possible?
or will it drive itself into oblivion?
The choice is ours.
Resource Based Economy
As automation advances
and we lose all these jobs
how do we provide the food,
shelter, medical care and energy
for all these people who aren't
going to be able to earn it
because there aren't jobs
for them to do so?
A Resource Based Economy.
The Venus Project wants to use
a Resource Based Economy.
Meaning, we have enough resources
to take care of all the
conditions and problems...
...and make everything available free,
like the library.
A library for everything, a library.
- That's right.
There would be no money
because we wouldn't need it.
Resources would be available to everyone.
You don't want to own anything.
You don't want money.
What do you want is ACCESS to things!
It's just no need to profit
over other people's misery.
You get a toothache,
somebody makes a buck off of that.
And we don't need to do that anymore.
We can get beyond that
by creating abundance.
We can achieve a level
of production so high
that it'd be superfluous to
put a price tag on things.
And that's the beginning
of a civilized world.
The money system was designed
hundreds of years ago
and it no longer fits the situation.
So when this society grows up,
they will understand that
money is no longer necessary.
They can go to a new kind of economy.
No society in history
ever looked into the future
and designed things to fit that.
They waited until - boom!
the bottom fell,
then they changed,
you see? ... unfortunately.
We're given the notion of individuality
because it fits in with this culture,
that you have to be
responsible for your survival,
your healthcare,
and we don't need to do that.
We could provide that for everybody.
If people have access to things,
who's going to rob things from you?
Who's going to take things away from you
if there are access centers?
If there is no money
we don't need bankers,
we don't need lawyers,
we don't need
advertising agencies,
we don't need stockbrokers.
There's so much superficial waste.
This culture, you have to sell
things to keep the economy going.
So we're plundering our resources
just to keep selling.
There are people
that believe in the power of money.
They're so wrong.
And you can't tell them that.
They think you're a communist.
Communism isn't radical enough.
Communism isn't radical enough!
That's a great Jacque quote, right?
I don't want communism or socialism.
That's too old-fashioned!
We are moving into a system,
a different system, and a
system free of political bias.
And if you elect the people with
unquestionable ethics in government
and if you ran out of resources,
I can assure you
crime would grow again.
And The Venus Project
is the redesign of our culture.
To design a society
with the intelligent use
of science and technology
to lift up the lives of everyone,
not a selected few.
The economic alternative
to most of the world's societies
is to declare the earth as the common
heritage of all the world's people.
And then remove all the
artificial boundaries
so people can travel anywhere
on earth without a passport.
And there will be no problems
such as racial problems.
There will be opportunities
for all people.
We do it because the smarter your
children are, the richer my life.
So everybody in the world represents
an extension to their life
rather than, "I've got just
the car you're looking for,"
rather everybody selling themselves
and making a profit on one another.
That will motivate them to see
that everything they do
goes out there for all humanity.
All children are well cared for;
all older folks are taken care of.
So that means they will be taken care of.
Because everybody cares
about everybody else.
Science Applied To The Social System
Before you launch
a spaceship to the moon
you want to know how many people
are going to be on the ship.
Is there water on the moon?
And so everything you design has to be
in accordance with the physical reality.
People speculate about how many people
the Earth can sustain and support.
First you have to do research and find out
how much energy we have.
The first thing we have to do is
take a survey of just what we have
and where the arable land is,
where the water is,
where most of the population is,
what the illnesses are.
We have to take many
surveys of where the technical
personnel are, where the needs are,
and that dictates what we do where.
We have to learn how to manage
real economics, not for profit,
for human betterment.
Then you'll see the beginning
of the civilized world.
And once we get that in,
children will not understand how
we couldn't see that in the old days.
They'll say “Dad wasn't that obvious
that if you live to yourself
you die to yourself?”
You're talking revolution.
- No.
When society breaks down-...
- Technical revolution.
But when society breaks down,
then they'll want to do it a different way.
I'm sorry about that, but it seems
that conditions were so
abusive in some lands
that they put in socialism,
communism, whatever, or fascism
that fits the conditions
that people live under.
None of them are the solution.
All governments all through history
have been corrupt.
Our priorities are all screwed up
within the system
because it's wealth, property and power.
And within a Resource Based Economy
it's the protection of the environment
and the well-being of people.
When few nations control most
of the earth's resources
you're going to have trouble.
You're going to have
territorial disputes, wars.
No matter how many treaties you sign
or no matter how many laws you make,
it won't stop that condition.
The human condition,
which causes people to invade other lands,
torture people, build armies
to protect what they have,
this is not going to work,
it never has worked.
It's as old as man.
So what we need is an entirely different
approach to the human problem,
and preserving the earth for
the future; future generations.
At age 100, Jacque's vast body of work gets
recognition in a fine art museum exhibition.
We've come to Naples Florida
today to check out the Baker Museum
who have curated a beautiful exhibition.
We've made it up to the
exhibition hall where
Jacque Fresco's life's work is on display
decade by decade through an entire century
starting from the 1910s through the 2010s.
We're here with Frank Verpoorten,
the Director and Chief Curator
of the Baker Museum.
We'd like to learn first of all,
what made you decide to house
this exhibition at the Baker?
We are the first venue
I believe, on record,
the first in the United States,
to devote an exhibition to this subject.
The impetus really for this came from
the portrait of Jacque Fresco
that Harry de Zitter
took I believe in 2013.
It's been a good response really, I mean...
you're going to think this is funny, but especially
the response also from different media,
and so many different
young filmmakers who are interested in
this person and what he's accomplished so far.
Recently I was here with an architect
who saw the exhibition for about 20 minutes,
was not familiar with this artist,
even though this architect
is in his mid- to late 50s.
And he said "This is so remarkable!"
and he was looking at some of the designs
and he said "I can show you
some architects or designers who are
working on this sort of concept right now."
In Jacque's case, these were designs
that he made in the '60s or '70s.
These are the '50s, these are
pretty futuristic considering
we didn't send a rocket
to the moon until 1969.
For the '50s, these are
pretty ahead of their time.
But also look at how,
how serious he took himself
from the very early days.
This is really remarkable.
He knew he was onto something very big and
it means you have to take yourself seriously.
We're very proud that we were the first
to bridge this topic.
Now It's Up To You
So the Resource Based Economy
is the nonprofit organization.
Say they're inspired.
What do you want them to do?
Well we'd like them to come to our website.
Read more about it;
there's a lot more information there.
And go to the “Get Involved” section where
you can see all of our different teams
if you'd like to help out.
And we are working on the
blueprints for our next project
which is called
“Center for Resource Management,”
which will include
exhibitions of the future.
We would also have a huge media center,
an educational center,
research and development,
and much more.
We really welcome your help,
we need your help,
we're not going to get there any other way.
The problems that this
culture generates are endless.
And that's why it's so important
to show an alternative direction.
We don't even know what it means
to be civilized yet, in this culture.
As long as we have war
and poverty and prisons,
we're not civilized.
We have the ability to
do such wonderful things.
So there it is,
we visited The Venus Project.
Jacque and Roxanne couldn't have been more
welcoming and informative and inspiring.
And we're taking this knowledge with us
and we are here to inspire you.
We urge you
to watch their documentaries,
go to their website,
read more, do the research,
and come support this important project
that really gives some new hope
for us all.
Thanks for being with us.
Special Thanks to The Venus Project
Executive Producer
Evan Gary Hirsch
Producer
Kip Baldwin
I didn't expect to walk
by and see alligators.
To see an 81-years-old Palestinian
and a 31-year-old Israeli
share the same visions
about peace and about love
and it's the perfect place to do it.
Director of Photography
John Diaz
Editor, Post Production & Additional Footage
Joel Holt
Camera & Drone Operator
Raliegh Latham
♫ This is our last chance ♪
Jacque is a great visionary
bringing people to understand
what a world without war,
without money, would look like,
♫ Maybe we can
still have our last dance ♪
...where we have global resource management
in cooperation, not competition.
A special heartfelt thanks to Roxanne Meadows
for her assistance & consulting on this project
To learn more about The Venus Project visit
thevenusproject.com
♫ One last dance ♪
♫ One last chance ♪
♫ To love ♪
If we fail to accept the responsibility
for our own future
there will BE no future.
Jacque Fresco
1916 - 2017
Learn more at
www.soulDocumentary.love
Wow! I hope that moved you half as much
as it still moves me every time I see it.
And believe me, I’ve seen it a lot!
I’ve got to share with you,
making this film feels like
one of the most important things
I’ve done in my life.
And the potential that you may be
one of those who feels inspired
and makes the effort to initiate significant
change for our human family,
makes it all worthwhile.
You may be a believer that we, the people,
can truly make a big difference
and lasting impact in our world,
as we benefit from the visionaries
who have shown us
how to create the kind of world
that we want to live in.
A peaceful world, obviously,
and one where everyone in our
human family has their needs met
by efficiently utilizing the vast
resources all around us
and employing our best technology,
to capture and distribute them
wherever they need to go.
One lesson my dad managed to
get through to me as a kid was:
if you don’t have anything nice to say,
don’t say anything at all.
And that led me to become
a walking commercial
for everything about which I speak,
as I choose to share things about
which I have positive feelings.
And realizing that my image and
personality attracted attention,
I feel a duty to take responsibility
for what I represent.
After acting school,
I could have gone to Hollywood,
but that felt like it would have just served
to help make money for studio executives.
And being in a commercial for a product
just helps to sell that product so
someone can make money.
Well, I finally found something
that truly feels worthy of representing.
Something we can all represent
that isn’t looking to profit off of our
image, our talents and our efforts,
but that actually serves us all for
the better and for the long term,
including our grandchildren,
for those of you who have them.
We are open to talking with
all who proclaim themselves
seeking to participate in big
change for the better for us all.
We surely need those people
if anything significant and
lasting is ever going to get done.
To me, it seems clear that
the only thing standing between
us and the life of our dreams
is enough support to achieve it.
This one will take massive support, no doubt,
but there is no question that it is possible.
It’s just a matter of garnering
enough to reach a critical mass,
a consensus, a sufficient tipping point,
and therefore, ultimately, a new way!
Besides this, I have no hope.
Government won’t change.
Lobbyists won’t stop.
Regulations won’t all-of-a-sudden
curtail harm and exploitation.
And maybe in actuality there is no hope.
I don’t know; I can’t predict the future.
But I read a bumper sticker one time
that said "The best way to predict
the future is to create it."
This clearly isn’t some hippie dream of utopia.
It’s simply our life story to write,
and our world to create.
Will it take lovers and dreamers?
Maybe, but Jacque has done so
much of the thinking and
preliminary planning for us already.
Will it take intelligent people,
skilled professionals,
and some major effort on many
people’s part to get it going?
Absolutely!
Right now, it needs you.
It needs all of us,
or at least as many of us who get it,
and care enough to do something about it.
It needs our interest, our attention,
our help with promotion;
it certainly needs money, and lots of it.
I personally have been supporting
The Venus Project in many ways
including funding a successful
$50,000 matching grant campaign.
I urge you, to give and do what
you can for this one hopeful cause.
Let’s make The Venus Project
the biggest nonprofit in the world.
The nonprofit to end all nonprofits.
Because once we evolve our human
family onto a Resource-Based Economy,
the obvious things like homelessness, starvation,
environmental issues and wars,
will be a thing of the past,
and we can spend our time, energy
and ingenuity on real solutions
that create a sustainable world that
nurtures our entire human family.
Isn’t it about time?
To that end, we ask that you
please help others discover this film,
and all it represents.
Thank you again for joining us.