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'll always be war, there'll always be hatred,
there'll 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.
Cooperative 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 sufferers.
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 they'll 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 on 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 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