Jacque Fresco - The Venus Project - Redux

00:00:00 Cold open and Brian’s 2014 introduction

Brian Rose: This week on London Real we’re taking you back to our 2012 interview with futurist Jacque Fresco.

Jacque Fresco: We must eventually design a language that’s not subject to interpretation. Whenever you talk to people, you think you’re talking to people, but it goes in their ear and comes out in relation to their background. They don’t hear exactly what you say. There is no way you can think outside of your culture.

Brian Rose: What if we elected you president this year, and you started in the Oval Office on 20 January 2013?

Jacque Fresco: I’d be shot in three days. Who makes the decisions in The Venus Project? The answer: nobody. They arrive at them. We abolish all separate nations, because they’re all corrupt.

Brian Rose: Jacque Fresco has been designing cities of the future. What do you think of England and London?

Jacque Fresco: Foul. Awful. No city planning. All cultures are corrupt.

Brian Rose: And the banking system, what do we do with that?

Jacque Fresco: Banks are gone. No money any more.

Brian Rose: London Real presents Jacque Fresco: The Venus Project Redux.

Jacque Fresco: Most politicians know nothing. Please don’t take my word for it. Ask them.

Brian Rose: Summer, summertime. I’m thinking of that Will Smith song, which we probably all partied to back in the day. We’ve got a sunny day here in London, England. We don’t get many, so I’m going to take advantage of it. This week on the show we’re taking you back. We’re going retro, to a guest we had on probably a year and a half ago, for episode number 47. At the time he was 96 years old, and he is the futurist Jacque Fresco, the creator of The Venus Project, a man who was made famous by the Zeitgeist Movement and the Zeitgeist films. He’s been preaching the ideas of a resource-based economy and technology solutions that make our humanity better for a long time. I mean, let’s be honest, he was talking about this stuff before it became trendy, before it became popular, before Al Gore started talking about it. Fresco’s been around, man. This guy had conversations with Einstein. That’s old school.

Brian Rose: So we had him on the show, and it was quite an honour. We were actually contacted by him; they asked to be on the show. For such a new, early broadcast as London Real was, it really made our show, and it was for a long time the most watched show, with over 200,000 views. So people really like Jacque, they like his message, and it’s just amazing that people really relate to him. I think it’s because he’s been dedicating his life to the way he believes. And it’s not just an economic platform or a technology platform. It’s really a different way of looking at humanity.

Brian Rose: We sat down with Jacque, and funnily enough, his handlers left him alone in the studio with us, and we were like, wow, what a big leap of trust. We sat there and had this conversation, and Jacque is sharp as a tack, with a great wit. I just hope that when I’m 96 my body and mind still work that way. So please enjoy this hour plus. We’ve remixed it into a single-person, single-camera format, which people really liked on the Dorian Yates and the Rupert Sheldrake episodes, because it brings you a bit more in. Although I still have love for our old-school split-screen format; I miss those sometimes, where you’ve got three faces on the screen.

Brian Rose: So I hope you enjoy Jacque. If you want to learn more about what he does, you can go to The Venus Project. His partner, Roxanne Meadows, I’ve been in touch with her, and they do lectures down in Venus, Florida, every Saturday afternoon for four hours, and you can go and see Jacque. I don’t think he’s doing much travelling these days, because he’s rocking 98 right now, God bless. But you can go and see him and he’ll talk you through everything. So big love out to those guys, and I hope you enjoy listening to him answer some of our tough questions.

00:04:06 Sponsor reads (promo)

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00:07:27 Brian hands over and the 2012 interview begins

Brian Rose: That’s it, man. I’m going to leave you guys. It’s sunny here; I’ve got to get this episode cranked out and uploaded and then I’m off. But if you want to give us some feedback, you know where I’m at: it’s [email protected]. We’re on Twitter, we’re on Facebook. If you want to book a guest for us or give us a suggestion, please do it. I’ve got about five guys around the world that are booking guests. We’re not doing this solo here; we need everyone’s help, so I really appreciate those guys putting in the effort. More things are coming. We’re going to have T-shirts in the house soon; one company has printed a couple of samples, so we’ll have a link on there if you want to support London Real. And if I see you on the street, I’ll give you a hug if you’re wearing one of those shirts. I always sit and chat with people too, so if you ever see me, just grab me. I love talking to people about the show.

Brian Rose: So, thanks for that. And now I’m going to leave you with a unique individual, one of a kind. It was a real pleasure and honour that we had an interview with him. It was just a special time, and one that probably will never happen again. So now I leave you with Mr Jacque Fresco. Let’s do this. Let’s go. Okay, here we go.

Brian Rose: Hello and welcome to London Real. My name is Brian Rose, joining me as usual is Mr Nic Gabriel, and today we’re very excited to have in studio futurist Jacque Fresco, who’s the founder and director of The Venus Project. Welcome.

Jacque Fresco: Thank you for the opportunity.

Brian Rose: Oh, it’s our pleasure. You’ve come a long way. You’ve come all the way from Florida to London.

Jacque Fresco: Yes, that’s quite a journey.

Brian Rose: Quite a journey is right.

00:08:57 Love, laziness and what creativity is

Brian Rose: You know, I heard a quote from you one time, Jacque, and you said that love is a bullshit word.

Jacque Fresco: Well, what I meant by that is I’ve never met a person that loves everything they’ve ever done. Sometimes you like yourself a lot, sometimes you’re down, sometimes it’s “what a stupid thing I did.” So if you lived with a replica of yourself, how long would you be together?

Brian Rose: That’s very interesting. Really, wow. You also once said that there are no lazy people and no creative people.

Jacque Fresco: No.

Brian Rose: What did you mean by that?

Jacque Fresco: Well, I asked creative people over the years, “What is creativity?” They say, “I don’t know, it’s just something that comes up naturally.” That’s what they say; they really don’t know. I’m going to try to tell you what creativity is so you’ll understand it, but those of you that can’t remember, you’d better make notes. Creativity is taking known elements and putting them together in different ways. In other words, if you go to a movie and you see a Martian, you think, “Gee, those Hollywood people have good imagination.” No, they don’t. A Martian has a grasshopper’s head and crab’s claws. It’s not made up of original ideas. All thinking is putting known elements together.

Jacque Fresco: If you were raised in some primitive culture, the headhunters of the Amazon, if you never saw anything else and never travelled, you’d be a headhunter. If somebody says to him, “Doesn’t it bother you to have ten shrunken heads?” he might say, “Yes, my brother has twenty.” Is he bad? No, he’s normal to that culture.

Brian Rose: Interesting.

Jacque Fresco: There are no good or bad people. People are shaped by the culture or subcultures that they’re part of, or their religion. So every word you use, every facial expression: your mother said “cup”, “bottle”, “light” over and over again, “Papa”, “Mama”, and that’s where you got it from. And when you think, you think in terms of your culture. If you ask an Eskimo, or tell him he can have anything he wants, if he’s never left that area, if he’s lived in northern Alaska all his life, he’d never say, “I want a Mercedes or a twin-engine Beechcraft.” He can’t say that. It’s outside of his frame of reference. Am I making that point?

Brian Rose: It’s so interesting to understand how so many of our desires and expectations are culturally conditioned. We think they come from within, but they actually come from external sources.

00:11:53 “Man cannot think or reason”: the camera and Tesla

Jacque Fresco: Whatever I say about man applies to me also. Man cannot think or reason. I’m going to back it up if you give me a chance, before you get mad at me.

Brian Rose: I was starting to get mad, but I will listen. Okay.

Jacque Fresco: By that I mean that it is not possible for man to invent anything. I spoke at Princeton, at the sociology department, and I wanted everybody to come, so I titled the lecture “Man Can’t Think or Reason.” That made everybody angry and they all wanted to come. So they came to the auditorium and the head of the optics department said, “I take issue with you. I believe man can think and reason.” I said, “Give me one example of man thinking anything.” He said, “There are thousands of examples.” I said, “I can’t do anything with that. Give me one example.” He said, “There was a time when a camera did not exist, and somebody had to think of a box camera.”

Jacque Fresco: So I asked him if he knew that a thousand years ago in the Holy Land they made their houses out of mud. They didn’t have concrete, they didn’t have the mixtures we have. And when they made their houses they made a little hole in the wall so you could tell whether it was daylight out there. And when you make a little hole in a dark hut, you can see the people walking upside down on your wall. Of course they didn’t know what it was. They called it the upside-down world, and they charged two pieces of silver for you to see the upside-down world. If you go into a barn today and there’s a knothole, you know, a small one, and the sun is out on the cows, you’ll see the cows walking upside down on the wall. That’s where the box camera came from. Nobody ever said, “I’ve got to make a camera.” So it wasn’t an invention, it was an accident.

Brian Rose: Yes.

Jacque Fresco: The same with language. They say people invented language to communicate. That’s strictly BS: bad science. In other words, there is no way you can think outside of your culture. You say, “Well, Tesla invented the wireless, he had to think of it.” So I said, look, let’s face it. When you bought electric wire in the old days they wrapped it around a cardboard spool so it wouldn’t get tangled up. And if you had a spool and you didn’t know where it was broken in the middle of the wire, you connected two electrodes to it to see if you’d get a flow of current. If you happened to have a coil nearby, it induced the current in it. That’s where Tesla got it from: induction, automatic. He didn’t say, “I’ve got to make wireless.” The brain doesn’t work that way. You can’t say, “I’ve got to make a wireless,” or “I have to make a ladder.” They tell you in school that plants grow. They can’t grow unless the sun’s out, the moisture is right, the soil is right and the heat is right. Of themselves, plants will not grow.

00:15:07 Einstein, perception, beauty and language

Brian Rose: Interesting. Jacque, you like shocking people a lot.

Jacque Fresco: That’s all right. I don’t mean to. I mean to speak.

Brian Rose: You always say, “I’m interested in the truth.”

Jacque Fresco: Well, when I was a kid I met Einstein, and I said, “Do you believe in God?” He said, “Which one?” Then I said, “Well, do you believe in truth?” He said, “What do you mean by truth?” “That certain things are so.” He says, “Like what?” He pinned me down; he wouldn’t let me get away with language. I said, “Well, this is smooth.” He says, “You really believe that, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, I do.” And he put it under a microscope and it looked rough. So I said, “Is that what it’s really like?” He said, “We cannot see things as they really are, only as our receptors allow.”

Jacque Fresco: You can’t see the craters of the moon unless you look through a telescope, because your receptors don’t pick it up. There are radio waves crossing this room; you can’t sense them. There are germs on the table; with a microscope you can see them. So humans use the words “higher consciousness”. You can’t be conscious unless you have variable receptors. Do you know what I mean by that?

Brian Rose: What’s a variable receptor?

Jacque Fresco: Microscope, telescope, magnetometers: different instruments to sense things you can’t sense. So when people say, “The way I see the world is the way it is,” that’s ridiculous. We can only see dependent on the quality of our receptors and our background.

Brian Rose: Well, that’s very interesting. So does that mean for The Venus Project you didn’t invent anything?

Jacque Fresco: That’s right.

Brian Rose: What about all your designs and a lot of your revolutionary ideas with The Venus Project?

Jacque Fresco: Well, they come about through a special process. What is a creative person? If you show a child a book on insects, all kinds of insects, grasshoppers, centipedes, spiders, he has more to think with. If you show him a book on all kinds of fish, the more he sees, the broader his concepts. So the more books I look at on architecture, primitive and advanced, and the concepts of other people, I extract from that.

Jacque Fresco: Your frame of reference is what you see. But if everybody had a pointed head, real sharp, and a nose a foot long, you’d have surgery done to fit in with your culture. Otherwise they’d run down the street and look at you and say, “He’s got a funny nose.” There’s no such thing as beauty. All that is made by man: “It’s a beautiful sunset”, “She’s a beautiful woman.” If everybody had horns, that would be beautiful to you. If everybody had a dark black face with white spots, everybody would be beautiful. It depends on you; you make up your own standards, or as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But you bring up people to believe in beauty, then they have beauty contests. Now, if a girl’s face were made of putty and she shaped her nose, I could see giving her a medal or something. But she didn’t shape her face. Why do you have a beauty contest? What’s it for?

Jacque Fresco: All cultures, not just this one, not just England or America, are basically corrupt. The language is old. It was designed hundreds of years ago, the British language or the American language. That means you can’t really talk to people. Whenever you talk to people, you think you’re talking to people, but it goes in their ear and comes out in relation to their background. They don’t hear exactly what you say. So when you read the Bible, it’s subject to interpretation.

Brian Rose: Interesting.

Jacque Fresco: Somebody says, “This is what Jesus meant.” Another person says, “Oh no, he meant that.” The third person says, “You’re both wrong.” So you have the Lutherans, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Catholics, because it’s subject to interpretation. So we must eventually design a language that’s not subject to interpretation, where everybody gets a similar reaction: mathematics, chemistry. When a chemist writes a formula and submits it to an organisation, they turn out the same thing no matter where in the world. It’s not subject to interpretation.

Jacque Fresco: The same with engineering. When an engineer designs a bridge, he puts down a list of what that metal contains, you know, cobalt, iron, whatever it contains to make it that strong. He also gives the specifications of the bridge, the thickness of the metal, the type of metal, and that’s not subject to interpretation. If bridge engineering were subject to interpretation, one could say, “I think the beams are this big,” and another, “No, no, they’re that big.” You can’t do things where language is subject to interpretation. That’s why each person in England, France, Germany hears what you say and puts it in terms of their background. So we’re not talking to each other. If you don’t believe me, look at the presidential elections. The Democrats can’t talk to the Republicans, the Republicans can’t talk to the Democrats. They both lie about each other. All cultures are corrupt.

00:20:25 What is The Venus Project? Children and education

Brian Rose: So what’s the solution to that?

Jacque Fresco: The solution is The Venus Project.

Brian Rose: Okay. Can you tell us about The Venus Project? Because some of our listeners don’t know about it, and I know something about it but I don’t know everything about it.

Jacque Fresco: That’s fair enough. I would say that if you get children to join the Mickey Mouse Club, you damage their brains. They do have big things like that in America, the Mickey Mouse Club. And then they tell them that Cinderella touched a white mouse and it turned into a horse. If you bring up kids with all of that sort of stuff, you damage their brains. And by the time they’re a certain age they speak a certain way, “I want a balloon,” and you think they’re original. They’re not. They’re saying the same things other kids have said.

Jacque Fresco: Having children is a pain in the butt, because they have nothing new to say. You have to wipe their behinds, take them to the bathroom, make sandwiches for them, pack their lunch for school, and you can’t talk to them until they develop a language. So the language they develop is “I want a train, Daddy.” When my kid came to me, he said, “Daddy, the wheel came off my car.” If you understand the grammar of motives, when he handed me that car he was saying “fix it”. When he said the wheel came off, he was saying “fix it”. So I took the wheel and looked at the little car and I said, “I’ll get you toy cars for babies, where the wheels don’t come off,” and I threw it in the garbage and picked up my magazine. I was watching him, and that lower lip went out. I said, “What’s the matter?” “You threw it away.” I said, “I’ll get you baby toys where the wheels don’t come off.” He said, “Maybe I can fix it.” So I grabbed it and gave it to him, and he sat on the couch. It took three minutes; he got it together. Then I picked him up and said, “How did you do that?” He said, “Daddy, I’m not that little.” And if you say, “Here, let Daddy fix it, let Mommy fix it,” you produce a blob. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Brian Rose: Are you saying that it’s an education issue with children?

Jacque Fresco: Yes, it is. Everything is.

Brian Rose: Okay. And you’re saying The Venus Project is all about, from the very beginning, how we educate, what shapes human behaviour?

Jacque Fresco: Okay. Today they say this man is good, this man is artistic, this man is gifted. All bullshit. All lies. It has nothing to do with the real world. There’s no such thing as a gifted person. A person who is very creative has been exposed to a great deal of situations. In other words, if you just lived in one county in Pennsylvania and you never left it, you’re a product of that county. But if you live in different communities… When Americans go to Germany, they go to the American club. You don’t get the feel of the German family. So I’m saying, when you travel, try to live with Polynesians, try to get the feel of the culture. You don’t do that if you go to the American club.

Jacque Fresco: So The Venus Project encourages you to work with your children, to give them the best knowledge you’re able to give them. In other words, parents don’t know how to raise children. They won’t let a human being touch a turbojet engine unless they’ve gone to school for many years. Raising a human being is very complex. If you’re a Lutheran and I say, “Don’t play with that little Catholic boy,” I’m poisoning you, I’m damaging your behaviour. Do you know what I mean?

Jacque Fresco: Now, if a person learns how to say three words, which are very difficult: “I don’t know.” I used to ask people, “Do you think we’ll ever get to the moon?” “No, not in a thousand years.” I said, “Have you studied rockets?” “No.” “Have you studied space travel?” “No.” “Do you know anything about the moon?” “No, but I believe everyone should have a right to their own opinion.” That’s the worst thing you can do, give people the right to their own opinion. In other words, if you have a sister and she lives across the way from me, and I see ten guys coming out of her apartment, I can have all kinds of opinions, right? She can be a language instructor, a ballet instructor, an art instructor. So the answer is “I don’t know what she does.”

Nic Gabriel: I think you’re right. You know, Jacque, do you not feel that we need mental heuristics and stereotypes to help us make our way through the world?

Jacque Fresco: We need formulas, we need understanding. In other words, when I work with kids I give them seeds. They put them in the ground and they water them and they depend on the sunlight, and they know that the seed of itself cannot grow. And when the first shoot comes up, since they can’t write, I have them draw pictures of the first shoot coming up. And I say, “Now I want you to block the sun.” The kids do that, they block the sun, and the plant begins to shrivel. I say, “Take the blockage away,” and it comes back again. Stop the watering, it shrivels again. So they understand that the plant of itself cannot grow. Neither can a human being. If you raise a human being in a grey box and feed it, wipe its behind, take care of it and let it out when it’s seventeen, it’s a drooling idiot.

Nic Gabriel: So you’re for practical learning. You want to put people in the deep end, with hands-on learning only?

Jacque Fresco: Okay, because when you talk about certain things, a kid thinks in terms of his own background and doesn’t hear what you say. So in the future all education will show visuals of exactly what you’ve got in mind: how parts go together, how the pavement turns up so no car can hit a kid.

00:26:07 Politicians, leaderless cities and Edison’s light bulb

Jacque Fresco: People say, “I care, I have feelings.” But what is your recommendation? Don’t take my word for anything I say, but ask anyone running for political office, “How can you prevent war?” “I don’t know, there’s always been war, there’ll always be wars.” “How can you increase the agricultural yield?” “I don’t know, I’m not an agriculturist.” What do you know? Most politicians know nothing. Please don’t take my word for it. Ask them.

Brian Rose: So are there leaders at The Venus Project? Are there any leaders?

Jacque Fresco: No. And in the future cities there are people that are studying various aspects of it, and they come up with the most efficient way to design a city. In other words, if we make our cities round, with everything in the middle, the computer, the socially integrated computer, adjusts everything in that city. You know, in the old days they talked about “open sesame” for a door to open. Today you go to a supermarket, you don’t have to say anything, the door opens. So we’ve surpassed primitive concepts.

Jacque Fresco: A Frenchman watched a bird fly and he said, “Gee, if I made wings and put my arms in them and beat the air, I might be able to fly.” He jumped off the Eiffel Tower and he died, and his brother-in-law wrote, “Make wings larger next time.” There’s no way to know. That’s why nobody ever makes a mistake in their life. When you take your belt off and hit your kids, that’s what you picked up from your environment. When somebody says, “Get me a [racial slur], I’m going to kick his ass,” that’s what he picked up from the Klan environment.

Jacque Fresco: There’s no such thing as man thinking. He can’t. Now, people say Edison invented the electric light. Did he really? Here’s the truth. Edison didn’t know how different wires would conduct electricity, so he ran electricity through different kinds of metal. Some of it would glow white hot, so he bent it like the letter U to get all the light in a given area. He put it on his desk and it fell over and burnt papers, so he put a glass over it. That was the beginning of the electric light. Nobody said, “I’ve got to make an electric light.” There’s no way man can do that.

Jacque Fresco: And in school they tried to tell me that man invented the wheel, that it was the beginning of the technical age. Not true. A log fell over another log. When you pulled it, the bottom one rolled, and there was one stone in the way of that whole log and it wouldn’t roll, so they shaved the bark off, took years off the middle, so the middle was thinner and the edges were larger. That’s where the wheel came from.

Jacque Fresco: So somebody from the optics department at Princeton said to me, “I take issue with you. I think man can think and reason.” So I said, “Give me one example of man thinking.” He said, “There are thousands of examples.” I said, “I can’t do anything with that. Give me one example.” He said, “Well, man had to invent a camera,” and I explained that to you.

Brian Rose: Yes, you’ve explained that.

Jacque Fresco: Then I said, see if you can think of this. Nobody knows how big to make a propeller. Do you make it this big, this big? You make it the wrong size, the plane doesn’t move. My kid said to me one day, “Daddy, what makes an aeroplane fly? Is it the propeller?” I said, “If the engine doesn’t turn the propeller, it won’t turn. Is it the engine? Now, if you don’t put fuel in that engine, it won’t turn over. Is it the fuel? If there’s no oxygen, the fuel won’t combust.” It’s many interacting variables that shape human behaviour, not one thing.

Jacque Fresco: What’s the cause of a serial killer? They have no idea. They say he’s a bad person. He’s no worse than anyone else. We’re all bad people in this culture, because we have judgements, and when we look at things we don’t understand how they work, so we invent gods and demons that punish people with disease and all that. If scientists thought that way… What makes bubonic plague? They said, “I don’t know,” and they found little fleas that live on rats that jumped on the human body and infected it. And they got rid of the rats and they got rid of the problem. The church has no way of dealing with any problems at all.

00:30:35 Changing the world: the Klan and the flat-earth balloon

Brian Rose: So how does The Venus Project change the world? Where do you start? Because it seems like such a huge problem. You’re talking about language, you’re talking about behaviour, how we teach our kids, you’re talking about technology to a certain extent. How do we get from Democrats and Republicans yelling at each other at the conventions to… Is there an ideal world that The Venus Project sees one day?

Jacque Fresco: There’s a better world, never ideal.

Brian Rose: Okay.

Jacque Fresco: You can never design the best city. You can design the best city you know how to design at this time, but ten years from now there’d be newer cities. Kids would generate their own cities in the future, and their own concepts.

Brian Rose: But the best city you know how to design right now: how could we get towards that city? Because we’re not going towards it right now.

Jacque Fresco: This is what I did. I said, “Jacque, how are you going to change the world? In the Arab world a guy may have ten wives, or fifteen if he can afford it. All people are very different. How are you going to reach them?” I said I didn’t know. That was when I was 21. So I said, “Why don’t you test your system and see if it works?” Thinking is talking to yourself. If I say, “I’ll see you Saturday,” he goes, “I have to take the kids… no, I can’t see you Saturday.” That’s thinking. It’s not a special process, it’s talking to yourself. So when I said to myself, “How do you know you can change the world?” I said, “I don’t.” “Then why don’t you test yourself to see if it works?” So I joined the Ku Klux Klan in Miami, and I dissolved it…

Brian Rose: What year was this?

Jacque Fresco: Oh, about 65 years ago.

Brian Rose: Okay.

Jacque Fresco: And I dissolved it in a month and a half. Then I joined the White Citizens’ Council. They hate foreigners, all foreigners, particularly Orientals and blacks. So I joined that organisation, and I dissolved it in one month.

Brian Rose: With new ideas alone?

Jacque Fresco: Well, by exposing them to the way I thought about those things. You don’t ever attack. When I met the head of the Klan, he owned the war surplus store. You know what that is?

Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah.

Jacque Fresco: Ammunition and guns and things like that. And I used to buy lenses from him. He said, “Jacque, what do you do with the lenses you buy from me?” I said, “I make optical devices.” He said, “Can I see them some day?” I said, “Any time, Lou, but call me first.” He came to my lab. He was so impressed that he said, “Jacque, would you mind coming to a Klan meeting and explaining to the boys how you think?” I said, “They wouldn’t listen to me, Lou.” He said, “I’m in charge. I’ll get them to listen to you.” That’s what I needed. Don’t attack. Because one day in the surplus store he said to me, “You’re a smart guy, Jacque. What do you think of the Ku Klux Klan?” I said, “It’s a great organisation, but it doesn’t go far enough.” That gets his ear. If you attack, you lose it.

Brian Rose: Again, you’re shocking people to get their attention.

Jacque Fresco: Well, I got his attention. And he said at the Klan meeting, “Jacque is going to talk to you for one hour. Listen to what he says, then ask questions, because right now you can’t ask questions, you’re not qualified.” If you were raised in Georgia, in a Klan area, among uneducated people, they’d say, “Aren’t you a member of the Klan? We’re not going to buy stuff from your store.” So you join the Klan. You join the Klan not because you know anything, because all the people have the patch on their back. So I learned how to dissolve the Klan.

Jacque Fresco: So when I got back to New York City, I asked a lot of people who the most backward people in New York were. I just wanted a consensus. They said, not all Arabs, but the Arabs that live on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I said, “What makes you think they’re primitive?” “They still believe the Earth is flat.” So I called the head of the group. Always work with the head of the group, never the group. His name was Elbaz. He said to me, “You Arab?” That’s the way he spoke; I’m imitating his voice.

Brian Rose: You have good accents, by the way.

Jacque Fresco: Yes. I said “aiwa”, which means yes in Arabic. I speak a little bit of many languages; I’ll tell you why later. Anyway, he said to me, “You believe the world is round?” I said yes. Where he comes from, that’s not possible. So I said, “Can I meet with you?” He said, “Where was your father born?” I said, “Lebanon.” He said, “Very good. Come and see me.” So I came to see him, and he held up his hands like this. He says, “You believe the world is round, like this?” I said yes. He kept tapping his head. He pointed to his head to show how smart he was. “If the world is round, man fall down here, all the water fall down.” Those are the words he used. So I figured, boy, if I can’t change him, I can’t change the world.

Brian Rose: So how were you going to change him?

Jacque Fresco: Well, I thought about it before I went there. I gave him a balloon to hold in his hand. I put some Rice Krispies in his other hand and told him to hold his hand away from the balloon, and I rubbed the balloon fast with fur, and the electrostatic charge pulled all the cereal out of his hand and it adhered to the balloon all around. And his jaw hit the pavement. He said, “World is magnet.” I said “aiwa”, yes. And he explained that to the others. It took me two and a half hours. I didn’t go this fast with him, I went slower.

Brian Rose: So you used science, basically, or you used a non-language in order to communicate with someone.

00:36:19 His grandfather, the pledge of allegiance and Larry King

Brian Rose: Okay. Can I get you to slide up just a little bit, Jacque, so we can keep you in frame?

Nic Gabriel: Jacque, I wanted to ask you: it seems to me that you’re someone who at a very early age realised that there was something not right with the current systems in our world.

Jacque Fresco: Where did I get that difference from?

Nic Gabriel: Well, more specifically, was there a pivotal incident which caused you to feel that way?

Jacque Fresco: Yes. My grandfather.

Nic Gabriel: Okay.

Jacque Fresco: He said to me, people came from all over the world to America and they brought the printing press, language, different religions. He said, “If you love the world, never pledge allegiance to any one country. They’re all corrupt. Pledge allegiance to the Earth, to take care of it. Never dump toxic materials in the rivers.” The US Army about 40 years ago dumped 67 tons of nerve gas off the coast of Miami. Those American soldiers must be stupid beyond description, because they don’t even know… They obey orders. You don’t obey orders. You listen to ideas, and if they don’t make sense, you question them until they do make sense.

Jacque Fresco: So what happened: my grandfather made it impossible for me to pledge allegiance to the American flag. So when the teacher said, “We’re all going to pledge allegiance today,” I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” She didn’t ask me why. She grabbed me by the ear, right to the principal’s office, and she said, “He doesn’t want to pledge allegiance.” So the principal said to the teacher, “You’re excused.” The minute she left the room he put his arm around me and said, “Why don’t you want to pledge allegiance? Everybody does.” I said, “Everybody once believed the Earth was flat. That doesn’t make it flat.” So he said, “Well, what do you think of our teaching methods?” “Terrible.” “What do you think of American history?” “Strictly BS. Bad science, or bullshit, depending on your background.”

Jacque Fresco: So he said, “What’s the matter with American history?” I said, “Everybody in the history books always says the right thing.” When you read about science, you’ll find out that Edison had to go through 7,000 different elements before he found the one that would burn. No politician makes the right decisions. They make mistakes, they make erroneous decisions. History books don’t look like that. They look like they’re trying to get people to be uniform. Then you can control them, if they have similar values. But if you brought people up as individuals, you’d have 50 different political parties, not Democrats and Republicans.

Brian Rose: Wow. That’s a very good explanation.

Brian Rose: You know, I saw an interview with you with Larry King in 1974.

Jacque Fresco: Well, Larry King was a nice guy. He was honest, he was good. However, there was a problem.

Brian Rose: What’s that?

Jacque Fresco: I called cigarettes cancer sticks on one of his shows. I said if you smoke for 20 years, or 15 years, you’ll get heart disease or cancer; most people who smoke continuously do. And he said, “Well, what do you think of the American automobile industry?” They had an airbag in front of you, so when the car hits another car the airbag inflates. I said, “Well, if you get hit on the side, your head goes right through the glass. The whole inside has to be an airbag.” He said, “Why don’t they do that?” I said, “Larry, I can’t answer that.” Then later, after four times on the show, he said, “Can you come in and not talk about certain things? Leave the cigarettes alone, because they sponsor our station.” The cigarettes, the cornmeal, everything that they sell you, and all the auto companies. “Why do you attack?” I didn’t attack the automobile. I just showed him where they don’t work, the airbag. And he never said, “Thanks, I never thought of it that way.” He could have done that. He could have said, “Hey, auto companies, listen to this guy.” He didn’t say that. He said to me, “I depend on advertising.” I understand that. “I can’t have you on unless you talk about the future, but stay away from individual things.” I understand his reason for it. He’s a nice guy. He has a family, he has to support people, and you can’t be direct in a culture that’s not direct.

00:40:40 Unsustainable civilisation, war and the Great Depression

Brian Rose: Right. Well, on that show you said that civilisation in the modern world was not sustainable, and you said in 15 or 20 years it wouldn’t exist in its current form. And that was 30, 40 years ago.

Jacque Fresco: Unless we go to war, I said.

Brian Rose: Oh, is that what you said?

Jacque Fresco: War hires everybody again.

Brian Rose: Okay. But now we have war going on all over, and it’s not helping in America. Are you saying war postpones…?

Jacque Fresco: Not me, but Smedley Butler, who was a top army man, said, “I’ve been fighting for private industry, not for the well-being of people. I’m a prostitute.” All of us are prostitutes when we work in this culture. The minute you go to work for any industry, when you punch that time clock, you’re in a dictatorship. Think about it.

Brian Rose: That’s so true. It’s hard to argue with that. But do you think that the current state of being in this world is unsustainable?

Jacque Fresco: Yes, it’s unsustainable, because they’re making nuclear weapons, and the scientists that gave them the formula were very stupid individuals. You don’t give children real guns to play with. You don’t give an undeveloped culture nuclear weapons. The scientists don’t ask what makes war, what makes hatred, what makes a serial killer. They’re not scientists, they’re specialists: some specialise in structural engineering, some in bridge building, but they know nothing about psychology or sociology. They have to be well informed about the factors that shape human behaviour, and they’re not. That’s why you have conflict.

Brian Rose: How long do you think the world has, Jacque, if you…

Jacque Fresco: That I can’t say.

Brian Rose: You can’t say. In your lifetime, in what way have you seen the world deteriorate? Is there anything that’s really shocked you?

Jacque Fresco: The first depression. 1929, the market crashed, and I saw 15 million Americans sleeping in every empty lot.

Brian Rose: You were 13 years old?

Jacque Fresco: Oh, about 13, 13 and a half, somewhere around there. And I looked around and noticed that in the store windows there were radios, umbrellas, vacuum cleaners, but people didn’t have money. If they had the money, they’d buy them. And then I hear politicians say, “I’m going to make jobs.” You can’t make jobs. If people don’t have purchasing power, they can’t buy stuff. If they can’t buy stuff, you’re going to have a recession, and if you have a recession they lay people off in stores because they don’t need as much help. But if you go to a big market today and you’re honest, you’ll notice they’re working on a way to get rid of the cashier: you run a card through. The more industry gets rid of people… There used to be thousands of people in the auto industry. Today robots pick up the car and put the wheels on. They’re doing away with people.

Brian Rose: Isn’t that progress?

Jacque Fresco: It is not a machine takeover. It’s machines being assigned tasks that man can’t handle.

Brian Rose: Is that progress?

Jacque Fresco: Not really.

Brian Rose: Why do you say that, Jacque? Why do you say that’s not progress? Because it’s my understanding that that’s leveraging science to…

Jacque Fresco: Because if people don’t have purchasing power, they can’t go to school and become engineers. The more scientists you have working on cancer and heart disease, the safer you are. If you deprive people of jobs, they’re going to steal. They’re going to do what they have to do, if not for themselves, for their kids. So thieves are made by a given culture.

Jacque Fresco: For example, there used to be a guy named Albert Fish. They believe he ate 30 or 40 children. He cut them up and cooked them. Now, a psychiatrist named Wertham said, “Don’t put him in jail. I want to try to find out what made him that way.” That’s the important thing, finding out what makes a criminal or a serial killer. People say, “I don’t know, I guess he’s just born that way.” No. Nobody is born any way. No Chinese baby was ever born speaking Chinese, no matter how many centuries they’ve been speaking Chinese. They felt that if you took an English baby and a Chinese baby and brought them to China, the Chinese baby would learn to speak Chinese faster. They both learn at the same rate. So of all the things we believe, I’d say 99 per cent of our beliefs are strictly bullshit.

00:45:13 Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist Movement

Nic Gabriel: Wow. Jacque, can I ask you a question? What do you think of the Zeitgeist Movement, and what do you think of Peter Joseph?

Jacque Fresco: Peter Joseph pointed out the shortcomings of the banks, cheating the public, that they can lend more money than they have. He pointed out the stock market. He pointed out religion as being a false structure based upon ignorance. Man didn’t know where all this came from, so he figured God made a man and a woman up in the clouds and they lived in a beautiful garden. And then it says in the Bible that snakes walked upright in those days, and the snake told Eve to eat of the fruit of knowledge. But I was also told in my religious training in the old days that God knows everything. So I raised my hand and said, “Why did Jesus insult God?” “I don’t remember Jesus insulting God.” I said, “Yes. Just before they crucified him, he looked up and said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'” And God said, “Gee, I didn’t know that”? If he knows everything, you don’t have to tell him that. That’s an insult. It’s like telling a cancer specialist that cancer of the fifth lumbar is very difficult to treat.

Nic Gabriel: Your work was featured in two of the Zeitgeist movies.

Jacque Fresco: That’s correct. I was featured by the Zeitgeist Movement because people said to Peter Joseph, “Okay, the system is corrupt. What can we do about it?” He said he didn’t know. So Roxanne sent him the book called The Best That Money Can’t Buy: you have to do away with the money system. Now, he got that book and he flew out right away, and he spent many hours with me, and he said, “I’ve got the idea now. I’m going to run it my way.” I said, “You can’t do that. I’ve spent 75 years working on this. You have to study more.” He said, “No, I’ve got the idea. I can make a movie or anything else.” I said, “You’re going to have to go on your own.” So I split with him, because I’ve been working on it for so many years, doing away with my own beliefs in order to understand what shapes human behaviour.

Jacque Fresco: So I really went into the guy that was a serial killer. The public wanted to burn him alive, torture him and everything. The public doesn’t know what makes him that way. This is what Wertham found out, but he did not put it in his book: he was touching his private parts when he was seven years old. A kid touches every part of his body; he doesn’t touch it thinking of sex. But his mother was an old-time Baptist: “You’re going to burn in hell touching that part of your body. You’ll be tortured continuously for eternity.” She scared the hell out of the kid. And the mother said that at two in the morning he was screaming, so she went into the bedroom, and he had stuck needles in himself because he didn’t want to go to hell. What do you think a soldier is? He sees movies of Japanese and Germans raping American girls and says, “I’m going to enlist in the army.” It’s propaganda. All sides work the same way.

Brian Rose: Wow. That’s some powerful imagery.

Jacque Fresco: Definitely. I don’t have the time to go into hundreds of examples.

Nic Gabriel: Yeah, no, I understand. I just have one more question about the Zeitgeist Movement and then we’ll move on. So many people like both what you and Peter Joseph say, and they would love to see some way for you to work together. And they ask, is it an ego reason why you have clashed, or is there some way… Because you both have brilliant ideas, and it would be so nice if your ideas were promoted on a different stage. Is that something you would ever…?

00:49:01 Tradition, nature and why there are no bad people

Jacque Fresco: I can’t let anybody go off in their own direction… Like an elderly Jewish man came to me and said, “Will you permit tradition?” I said, “Will you?” He said yes. I said, “The Ku Klux Klan has met once a month for 60 years. Is that okay with you?” He said no. Then how do you decide which tradition? The traditions that hurt people will be surpassed. Traditions that don’t hurt people will be used.

Jacque Fresco: Then they tell you, always be honest with your kids, teach them to be honest. And I noticed a kid said, “Daddy, where do babies come from?” He said, “The stork brings them.” Lie number one. Lie number two: “How does Santa Claus come down the chimney? It’s too narrow and he’s fat.” “Well, he has a way of doing it.” That’s lie number two. And then they give them Cinderella, the Mickey Mouse Club, all kinds of crap that they belong to, and books that are irrelevant to the world: that plants grow, and insects, that life has purpose.

Jacque Fresco: There’s no purpose to life. When you look at an animal with three horns, they say the animal is born with those horns to defend itself. Where are the horns on a rabbit? It could sure use them. If you take a turtle and turn it over, it can’t get back; its legs will move. But if it had a point on its back, the naturalist would say the reason for the point on the back of the turtle is so it can’t be turned over. They project their own values into nature. Some horns go sideways, some go forward, some go back, some go around. Animals are born with every which way horn and they learn how to use them. If you were born with a heavy bony growth on one side of your body, you’d turn that toward the attacking animal. Do you understand that?

Brian Rose: I think so.

Jacque Fresco: So I said, “How do you know that what you think is true, Jacque?” I said, “I don’t.” I used to train police dogs and dogs to lead the blind. A woman of about 60 walked over to one of my dogs and was petting it. I said, “What are you doing?” She said, “It’s such a nice dog, for helping the blind.” I said, “I could have raised that dog to tear soldiers to pieces. There are no good or bad dogs; it depends on how you raise them.” She said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.” I said, “Think of it that way.” There are no bad people. There are people with insufficient information to make appropriate decisions. Husbands and wives argue continually, the same old argument for years. People will never argue when they understand The Venus Project, if you understand where a man is coming from. If he was born in France, he says “the Eiffel Tower”, and you say, “They’re funny people, they speak funny.” Of course; you were brought up to speak English and you think that’s the right way. There’s no right way or wrong way. There are improved methods that can be constantly engendered.

Brian Rose: So to summarise, you want to keep your ideas your own, The Venus Project and Jacque Fresco’s ideas, and you want to not have…

Jacque Fresco: Oh, that’s not true.

Brian Rose: Okay.

Jacque Fresco: Peter Joseph needs more exposure.

Brian Rose: Okay. He needs more exposure.

Jacque Fresco: Yeah. I told him, “Come on down, I’ll work with you one night.” He said, “No, I’ve got the idea.”

Brian Rose: Okay, so he still has an open invitation from you to come down?

Jacque Fresco: Oh, always.

Brian Rose: Okay, well, that’s good, because a lot of people from the Zeitgeist Movement want to see you two work together more.

Jacque Fresco: Well, he made a great presentation, in the opening. It was one of the most successful internet presentations. And people said, “Jacque, why did you leave it? Why didn’t you work with him?” Because he said he would use the Zeitgeist Movement as the activist arm of The Venus Project, but he never consulted me about what the activist arm would do.

Brian Rose: Okay, interesting. Were you happy with that being the activist arm?

Jacque Fresco: No. He quoted from my books all the time as though he had worked on all those things. He hadn’t worked on them, and he doesn’t know the detail of how to raise children to become creative. I said, “How would you do that? How would you prevent automobiles from hitting each other?” He said he didn’t know. I said, well, you have to have… It’s wrong to criticise government without offering possible alternatives.

Jacque Fresco: So there are signs on American highways that say, “Drive carefully, slippery when wet.” I would take down the sign and put abrasive in the highway so it’s not slippery when wet. Instead of having a sign, “Drive carefully, schoolchildren crossing,” I would have a pavement designed like two combs intersecting. When a kid pressed the button to cross the street, the pavement turns up so no car can hit a kid. That’s the way I say, “I love my people.”

Brian Rose: Okay. No, I understand that.

00:53:46 The activist arm and life on a South Seas island

Brian Rose: Do you have an activist arm of The Venus Project, or do you want to have one one day?

Jacque Fresco: Yes, we have.

Brian Rose: You do? Okay. What do they do?

Jacque Fresco: If they’re architects, they sign up: “I’m an architect.” If they’re bridge engineers: “I’m a bridge builder.” If they’re psychologists, they sign up. But most psychologists try to adjust people to fit into this system. They have to be stupid to do that. And most psychiatrists try to fit you in with the system. That’s no good. Psychiatry is not a study of human behaviour. And you can’t study human beings to find out what makes human behaviour. You have to study the environment they’re raised in.

Jacque Fresco: Like in the South Pacific islands. I wanted to know as a kid: is man’s reaction toward a female inborn, or is it trained? I said, “I don’t know.” So I worked on a boat and I got off in Tahiti. But there they said to me that human beings are all different; they didn’t know what the hell shapes behaviour. So I said, “Do you guys know of any islands that are primitive, without money, without schools?” They named one to me. So I worked my way over there, and I brought mirrors and beads, which I was going to give to the natives to say, “I didn’t come to take anything away from you. I’ve come to understand your culture.”

Jacque Fresco: Anyway, they were already in my hut about three hours after I landed, and they’d opened my suitcase and were giving out my mirrors and beads to one another with great big grins on their faces. Now, to me that looked wrong, from the culture I came from. I said, “What’s going on?” They said, “You have too many mirrors and beads.” I did have a lot of them, so they were sharing them. But I didn’t understand that until three days later, when they pulled in a net full of fish. They threw fish at anyone standing there. They didn’t say, “You owe me five bucks, you owe me eight bucks and 50 cents,” nothing like that. They just gave it to you.

Brian Rose: And is that a resource-based economy?

Jacque Fresco: Yes, that is. So I asked them, “Do you want me to do anything for you?” They said no. And I said, “Will you help me build an outrigger canoe? Because I want to go canoeing with you.” I can build a better one than they can, but I wanted to participate with them. Do you understand that? I also know how to make better bows and arrows than Indians, because I know more about the science of it, but I don’t do that. So they got in a huddle. They didn’t say anything, they disappeared, and they came back a week later with a canoe they’d made. They put it on the ground and indicated that it was for me. I said, “Do you want anything from me?” They said no; they didn’t know what I was talking about. They didn’t want any payment or any work from me.

Jacque Fresco: And about a week and a half later, I’m not sure of the time, I heard rustling outside my hut and I looked out, and they were sneaking off with the canoe they gave me. That looked strange to me. So I came out and said, “What’s going on here?” They said, “You no use.” I didn’t use it, so they took it back. I didn’t understand that until later. Do you understand? I couldn’t understand their decision-making systems, because where I came from, if you gave a person a gift you never took it back. I thought that was wrong and this was right, and then I realised later, of course, different cultures have different values.

00:57:26 The transition from capitalism, libraries and access

Brian Rose: Are we any closer to a resource-based economy now than, say, 30 years ago?

Jacque Fresco: Not really.

Brian Rose: Okay. Do you think it can exist? Do you think the transition can be made from capitalism to a resource-based economy, or is that going to be done in a violent way?

Jacque Fresco: I don’t know. We may kill each other. I can’t say.

Brian Rose: Nick says this sometimes, that it would take a revolution to cross that bridge.

Jacque Fresco: No. The public is not well enough informed. In Syria, if they threw out their government, they don’t know what to put in its place. This is the problem. All the revolutionaries don’t know what to do. Neither did the Communists. And they say, “Is your system communist?” I say no. Communism has banks, it has money, it has positions of social stratification. We don’t have armies, navies, prisons or police.

Brian Rose: Well, how do you maintain a dynamic equilibrium in society without police?

Jacque Fresco: By making things accessible. See, what you don’t understand is, women marched to get a public library once, to make books available. People couldn’t afford books; books were very expensive in the old days. So when the women marched to get a public library, they had rotten eggs thrown at them, tomatoes, and they were told to get the hell out. The women wanted the books to be available, and the people that threw rotten eggs at them owned bookstores. They felt if books were made available free, people wouldn’t buy books from bookstores. That’s why they did it. There’s always a reason for it. But the women got the library in, and people read more and they bought more books than ever from the bookstores.

Brian Rose: Wow.

Jacque Fresco: They were wrong. So next door to the library I have a camera centre, where any citizen of that country can go in, just like the library, and check out a camera. Next door to that, musical instruments: just like the library, you can check out a saxophone, a mandolin. Anything is available. If you make things available, people have no reason to steal or lie.

Brian Rose: That’s interesting.

Jacque Fresco: Do you understand what I’m saying?

00:59:33 Has he made up his mind? Machines, guns and violence

Nic Gabriel: I wanted to ask you, Jacque. It’s pretty clear to both of us, and to anyone listening, that you’re a very intelligent, open-minded individual. But it seems to me, as someone who doesn’t know you very well, that you have made up your mind on a lot of things, and I wanted to know…

Jacque Fresco: Oh, I never did. Because when I was a kid I used to work for airplane people, pilots, and I was always curious about airplanes. The pilot used to look out and say, “I’m about a mile high.” With Doppler radar, it hits the ground, comes back up and tells them, “You’re 5,300 feet five inches off the ground,” far better than any man can. So all army planes are equipped with better equipment. It’s not an equipment takeover; it’s assigning equipment to jobs that man can’t do. Do you understand? When aeroplanes fly 2,000 miles an hour, you can’t see an enemy coming; he’s gone. So they have radar scopes in military aircraft, and the radar goes way the hell out and tells you that in the next seven seconds the enemy will appear within your scope, and the dot appears.

Jacque Fresco: Now, if you press the machine gun, no bullets come out today unless that plane is within the cone of fire. Do you know what that means? Where the bullets are. So today they make machine guns for soldiers where no bullets come out if you’re off the guy. There’s a laser beam, and if it’s on the guy and you pull the trigger, the bullets come out. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Nic Gabriel: I do understand.

Jacque Fresco: Now, if you get mad at somebody and you shoot them with a gun, but you miss the heart by one inch, you’re not a murderer. If the gun is over one inch, he’s now a murderer. What the hell’s a murderer? He’s a guy that doesn’t know how to handle a certain problem, and he uses a gun to try to solve the problem, do you know what I mean? Or a guy may shoot his wife if he catches her in bed with another guy, or he may shoot them both, because he doesn’t know what to do. This is what he’s been given: “You let that guy say that to your wife? You let that guy look at your wife with sexual intent? I’d knock his block off.” We watch prize fights, where a man punches another man in the head, and the brain is always damaged, not sometimes. The more you punch him in the head, the more brain damage. We wouldn’t even want to see a prize fight. Children wouldn’t want to hurt another child if they were raised in a sane society.

01:02:07 His life’s work, prisons, war and 9/11

Brian Rose: Jacque, you’re 96 years old. You’ve done so much work in your life. What’s left for you to do, or what’s the one priority right now in your life’s work?

Jacque Fresco: To train other people in this way of thinking, and teach them how to approach people that have a different way of thinking. I went on a global lecture tour to many countries, and there were audiences of 300, 400 people. And I’d say, “Did you learn anything?” All the hands would go up, and they’d say, “We can’t operate in our culture any more.” I said, if you don’t talk to other people, nothing will happen. When you hear about The Venus Project, if you just keep it to yourself, you’re going to get involved in nuclear war, environmental destruction. So I don’t know what people will do. I can only recommend what they can do to make things better.

Brian Rose: Do you ever think about retirement?

Jacque Fresco: No, I can’t think that way. There’s so much to be done, so much misery in the world, so much suffering, and it’s because people don’t have the tools. They’re not bad. Your prisons in America are filled with criminals. That’s not the way to treat criminals. Putting a man in jail is the worst thing you can do, and when he doesn’t behave you put him in solitary confinement. That’s another stupid thing. Where are all the psychiatrists and psychologists saying, “That’s a stupid thing to do”? Where are all the military people that say, “How can we prevent war?” They think you need armaments and anti-aircraft guns. No, you don’t. War has always been big business, lots of profit. You get a billion dollars for every submarine you sell, every aircraft carrier. So war is never about bringing democracy to another country. They tell us in America that we send armies there to bring democracy and free women. No, it’s because they have oil or something we want. We’re no better than the English or the French or the Germans.

Nic Gabriel: Thoughts on that, Brian? Do you agree with what he just said?

Brian Rose: He makes some very good points about that. I mean, when I see Iraq…

Jacque Fresco: When you see Iraq and Afghanistan, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you see footage of us? They had nothing to do with the planes flying into the towers. That’s the first thing that comes into my mind. The second thing is, I’ve watched all kinds of television and I never got the reasons for those planes going into the towers. They just said, “They did a terrible thing and we’re going to make them pay for it,” but they never gave the other side. So I looked into that, and we’ve been killing Arabs and Sunnis and others for 75 years. We’ve been slaughtering their people. That’s why they flew into the towers. Americans don’t know that, so they think, “Jesus, I’ve got to enlist.” They don’t know.

Jacque Fresco: And I can’t get on the air. If they put me on the air, as they did on some stations, they give me three minutes. I can’t do anything in three minutes, I can guarantee that, so I refused. They say, “We can’t let you on for an hour, people will fall asleep.” I don’t believe that. I believe they’re hungry for knowledge. They want to know. And as long as I can talk, I will talk to them about it.

01:05:33 What has he been wrong about?

Nic Gabriel: Jacque, I have another question for you. Is there anything you have been completely wrong about when it comes to your ideas on the future?

Jacque Fresco: In the old days, yes. When I saw the Klan people beating up a black boy who was just walking down the street. They beat him up, and in those days I said, “Why are you beating him up? He didn’t do anything to hurt you.” They said, “[Racial slur] lover from the North.” They don’t hear that, because they were brought up not to hear it. And I said, “How do you account for blacks making inventions or new ideas?” They said, “They’ve got white blood in them, that’s why.” So you must understand that they’ve been trained to keep those viewpoints.

Nic Gabriel: So what have you been wrong about, if you look back on your career?

Jacque Fresco: I got beaten up in the old days when I was straight with them. So I learned how to talk around the subject and bring them around.

Nic Gabriel: Okay. I was referring more to the actual tenets of your system, and your view of how we can improve society, and technology.

Jacque Fresco: It came from the Great Depression, when 15 million people were sleeping in every empty lot. I looked in stores and they had all kinds of equipment, but the people didn’t have money. So I figured, if we could do away with the money system… If you put up half a million dollars to help him get elected as president, he owes you a favour. Do you want to do it, Brian? Do you understand what I’m talking about?

Brian Rose: I do understand what you’re talking about.

Jacque Fresco: There’s no such thing as decency and ethics. It never existed. Like, I met a young girl who said, “Jacque, would I be free in your society?” I said, “What do you mean by free?” She couldn’t even describe what the hell she was talking about.

Brian Rose: It’s probably the language. She doesn’t know what it means.

01:07:22 If Jacque Fresco were president

Brian Rose: Jacque, what if we elected you president this year, and you started in the Oval Office on 20 January 2013?

Jacque Fresco: I’d be shot in three days.

Brian Rose: Okay, assuming we had a great security detail. What would you do, if you could do anything?

Jacque Fresco: I’d declare all the world’s resources the common heritage of all the world’s people, and get them to join and become one nation that takes care of the environment, the Earth, the atmosphere. No smoke coming out of smokestacks, just warm air, using the Cottrell precipitator. Cottrell was a man in America who, 75 or 80 years ago, made a unit that can take smoke particles, charge them and make them adhere to a plate, and water flushes the plate every week. So no smoke comes out.

Brian Rose: Okay. And abolish nations? You think that’s a big…

Jacque Fresco: We abolish all separate nations, because they’re all corrupt.

Brian Rose: And the banking system, what would we do with that?

Jacque Fresco: Banks are gone. No money any more.

Brian Rose: That would be some chaos in the streets.

Jacque Fresco: And also the conduct of people. You can’t outlaw sex. You can make laws, but they don’t work if they’re against nature. So politicians make all kinds of laws not based on reality. Like when I went to the South Seas; I didn’t finish that. The people in the South Seas wore no clothing. When I was there they were all naked, and I noticed that the men never looked at the women’s bodies, always the eyes, when they talked to them, because they had been swimming nude ever since they were tots. Do you understand what I’m saying? And there were no peeping Toms on the island, because you didn’t generate the environment that generates peeping Toms. And there were no fetishes. There were no “tit men”, “leg men”, “ass men”, “hair men”, you know what I’m talking about? Unfortunately, if you’re brought up where you have pictures of nude women, girls dancing, stripping their clothes off, that makes men say, “Hey, get a load of that chick.” You get that from your environment. If you were brought up in the South Seas, you’d never look at a female body like that.

Jacque Fresco: Unless the chief likes girls with a big belly; he feeds them before he marries them. But that’s a custom of the island. And the witch doctor says the volcano is angry, because he has to account for eruptions, so he says, “I recommend that you throw your brother-in-law into the volcano to placate it.” So the witch doctor used to recommend those things. And if you did throw your brother-in-law in and the volcano stayed active, he says, “You’ve got to throw your sister-in-law in.” Never the witch doctor. Never the mother-in-law, unfortunately. You understand?

Brian Rose: Yeah.

Jacque Fresco: So all societies with kings and queens are all bullshit societies. They’re all manipulators of people. I hate to disappoint you. I could say things you’d like to hear, but that’s not my position.

01:10:21 London, politicians and the Gazecki film

Brian Rose: No, I want to hear the truth. What do you think of England and London and the British?

Jacque Fresco: Foul. Awful. No city planning. Stupidity, homogenised.

Nic Gabriel: We were in a taxi on the way over here and Jacque was talking about the street lights, how they were timed, and how it was just a complete waste of energy and pollution, having the cars all gridlocked on the street.

Brian Rose: Interesting.

Nic Gabriel: He was dropping some transportation science on me.

Jacque Fresco: Oh, transportation, was it? Oh yeah. You’ve got everybody driving cars. You’ve got roads and highways built by the car companies. And one senator said to me, “Jacque, when you work on a highway, can you bring it over about 40 miles and then turn?” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because I’ve got 90 acres over there. It will raise the value of my acreage.”

Brian Rose: How many times has that happened?

Jacque Fresco: Probably a lot. It happens all the time. There’s no such thing as a decent politician, because they’re not smart enough to know what to do. I had a very wealthy guy come and see me. He was worth millions. He said, “Jacque, if you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” I said, “You’re rich. How come you’re not smart?” So he hired William Gazecki to make a film on me. Well, Gazecki left out all the social stuff.

Brian Rose: That’s probably convenient. Can I get you to slide just a little bit closer?

Jacque Fresco: He left out most of the social stuff because he felt it wouldn’t sell. And so I can’t deal with that.

Brian Rose: Well, because your Venus Project is so technical, with your designs and your new city structures, and it’s also very social, with how you talk about how you bring up babies. I think it’s sometimes confusing for people.

Jacque Fresco: Yes, it is.

Brian Rose: To get their head around all of that.

Jacque Fresco: I understand that. That’s the best I can do.

01:11:55 The Best That Money Can’t Buy, jealousy and telepathy

Brian Rose: What’s the best way for them to educate themselves about The Venus Project?

Jacque Fresco: They have to get the book and read it, called The Best That Money Can’t Buy.

Brian Rose: It’s called what?

Jacque Fresco: The Best That Money Can’t Buy.

Brian Rose: Yeah.

Jacque Fresco: That’s a book we wrote. And if you read that twice, you will have the knowledge of what makes humans behave as they do. Today they try to tell you this man has a criminal mind, this man is creative. Not true. None of those things are true. They’re all brought up under different circumstances. I got a book out of the library because I wanted to know how planes can fly on this thin substance. I asked my folks; of course they didn’t know. I looked at my folks as peasants. I didn’t go by “honour thy father and mother”. When I was a kid, I believed in honouring any human being worthy of honour, not necessarily a father and mother. It depends on how honourable they were. Do you understand? You don’t just do things because the book says so.

Brian Rose: Right. You said you went on a lecture tour two years ago: 26 countries in 26 weeks. Can you believe that, by the way, Nick?

Nic Gabriel: That’s crazy. Pretty impressive.

Brian Rose: And you said that if… I hit them straight, no bullshit. I saw one of your lectures in Sweden. It was no bullshit, that’s for sure. And you said that if people don’t go out and tell other people about what they’ve heard from you, then it’s all lost.

Jacque Fresco: Yes. And they say they’re growing now, and they’re forming new organisations all over the world, which is good. So I know that the work I’m doing is not in vain. Of course I can’t reach everybody. There are people that believe in human nature, that people are naturally jealous. I met a group of psychologists and they said jealousy is an inborn thing. So I said, “What’s your evidence for that?” They said, “Whenever I reach for my cat to put it on my lap and pet it, the dog growls.” So I said, “Gee, that’s interesting.” So I took my dogs, since I used to raise dogs to lead the blind, and I fed them fresh liver, and then I’d pick up the cat. After giving them liver nine times in a row before I reached for the cat, I would reach for the cat and the tail would wag. If it was inborn, they’d still growl.

Brian Rose: That’s interesting.

Jacque Fresco: They don’t even know how to conduct a survey. They don’t know how to do research.

Jacque Fresco: So I read about people that had the power of telepathy. I said, “Gee, if we can do that, the hell with science.” So we invited a guy over from India, and I said, “Can you read my mind?” He said, “Any time. I never use a telephone.” I said, “If you read my mind once, I will shout it from the highest towers.” He said, “Well, I do it all the time.” I said, “Just suppose I’m thinking about something technical.” He said, “I won’t use your words, but I will describe what happens.” I said, “That’s fair enough.” So I pictured a little white mouse, about this size, eating an elephant, not getting any larger, and walking out of the room. If he got that, there’s telepathy, because it’s outside the box. Normal people think of their brother-in-law or their wives or their kids. Well, when he talked to a 73-year-old woman, the same guy said, “There’s been a death in the family in the past three months, or three years.” She says yes. When everybody’s 73, there’s always been a death in the family.

Brian Rose: So did he read your mind?

Jacque Fresco: No. He used probability. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just thought he had special powers, but he didn’t.

Brian Rose: Okay.

Jacque Fresco: So I invited people that had the power of telepathy to my house, and this guy sent his wife into my bedroom. I’d never seen them before. And he said to me, “Just get one of your own books on presidents.” So I picked James Fillmore. I didn’t even mention his name; I pointed to the picture: James Fillmore. And he said, “Honey, you can come out of the room,” and she came out and said, “I see a politician with hair puffs on the side of his face, and his name is James Fillmore.” Well, I didn’t know how he did that, but I went to the library and got out some books on magicians and how they work. Sitting like this means Kennedy, this means Fillmore. So whatever position he assumes, he communicates it to his wife. It’s a known technique. But if you don’t know that, it looks amazing: “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Jacque Fresco: Then I had another guy come over. He said, “I’m going to convince you of telepathy. Get yourself a book of pictures of movie actors.” So I got my own book and I pointed to Cary Grant; he was an English actor in those days. I pointed to Cary and didn’t mention his name. He said, “Now call this guy in England, his name is Throckmorton. He’ll tell you who you pointed to.” So I called the man on my phone. I’d never seen the guy before, and he said, “I see a skinny, tall English actor. His name is Cary Grant.” Do you know how that’s done? He has a friend in England named Smith. If he asks for Throckmorton, or you ask for anybody else, there’s a list of names: when you ask for one name it’s Cary Grant, if you ask for another, it’s somebody else. Do you understand what I mean by a list? But if you don’t know that, it’s “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” Before you try to investigate extra-physical phenomena, read everything you can about how it’s done.

01:17:24 Cloud computing and who makes the decisions

Nic Gabriel: I have one more question for you, Jacque, and then we’re going to have to wrap this up, because we’re almost finished with our hour here. Jacque, we were speaking earlier, I was asking if you ever considered yourself wrong about anything, and the example I wanted to refer to was your city of the future with the centralised supercomputer. It’s my understanding now that in computer science we’re moving to a distributed model, something called cloud computing, which is apparently the way to harness the most out of IT infrastructure. Surely you would have updated your plan for the city of the future to include something like that, as opposed to remaining with…

Jacque Fresco: I see The Venus Project, after the transition, as being computerised. No government, no people in government. But the computer has to be connected to agriculture, production, heart disease, kidneys, so we know how many hospitals to build. The question you’re really trying to ask is, who makes the decisions in The Venus Project? The answer: nobody. They arrive at them. In other words, we take samples of the soil from all over the world and send them to central agriculture. There they dissect the soil, and by the contents of the soil they say it’s best to grow beets for three years, then rotate to corn. That’s not an opinion, that’s a finding. So in the future we do a survey of the carrying capacity of every environment. That determines the size of the city, not Fresco. Do you understand that?

Nic Gabriel: So it’s like a leaderless society.

01:19:01 Farewell: no credentials and a 100th birthday invitation

Brian Rose: Our hour is up. You know, Jacque, it was a real honour having you on the show.

Jacque Fresco: I hope I helped some of you.

Brian Rose: I think so. I think our audience doesn’t know much about you, and they’ll be really intrigued by The Venus Project. And thank you. I think you were our only media stop here in London, so thanks for that, we really appreciate it. If they want to know more about you, they can go to thevenusproject.com.

Jacque Fresco: Yes.

Brian Rose: And they can follow you on Twitter at @JFresco and @TheVenusProject.

Jacque Fresco: I have no credentials, I just want you to know that.

Brian Rose: We don’t either.

Jacque Fresco: I have the same credentials the Wright brothers had. Did you know that scientists used to write books on why man can’t fly?

Brian Rose: I didn’t.

Jacque Fresco: They’re not scientists. They should say, “I can’t conceive of how to build a flying machine.” Then they’re okay. When they start forcing their own opinion, on the story of Jesus or Moses, they’re projecting.

Brian Rose: Wow. You know, Jacque, I’d like to invite you back here in four years for your 100th birthday. I’m sure you’re going to still be fighting.

Jacque Fresco: I don’t know. I don’t know how long I’ll live, nor do I concern myself with that.

Brian Rose: That’s cool. That’s a great way of living.

Nic Gabriel: Excellent. That’s very cool.

Brian Rose: All right, well, thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure, Jacque. Thanks for coming.

Jacque Fresco: Thank you for the opportunity, and thank you very much.

Brian Rose: Yeah, thank you. And Nick and I will be in LA in about five weeks for The Joe Rogan Experience, so I hope everyone tunes in for that.

Brian Rose: And you’re going to Russia and Slovenia, right?

Jacque Fresco: Oh, this next week.

Brian Rose: Are you off to Bosnia and then Russia?

Jacque Fresco: Yes. I don’t know how it’ll work out, but they want us there.

Brian Rose: Good. I think you need to go ahead and tell more people about this message. So thank you so much, and until then, it’s about the journey.

Jacque Fresco: All right. Thank you very much, both of you.

Brian Rose: Thank you.

01:20:45 Next week: Geoff Thompson trailer (promo)

[London Real promo removed]