Leo D.M.J. Aurini - January 03, 2013


The Venus Project

Topics
Great Depression and economic thinking cultural relativism music zero scarcity zero scarcity utopia
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Jacques Fresco Hoover Justin Bieber Aaron Clary Chakotay Futurama Plato
Manning Up The Villainy of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (a response to Confused Matthew)

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

125.38

Word count

3,427

Sentence count

270

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

16

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the ideas of the Zeitgeist movement, and the intellectual development of its founder, Jacques Fresco, and why they are so hard to criticize. I also talk about the impact of the Great Depression on our understanding of economics.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Venus Project. If you haven't heard of it before, you've probably heard of the Zeitgeist movie, or the Zeitgeist Movement.
00:00:12.000 These are, it and the Venus Project are these ideas that have caught a lot of momentum.
00:00:21.000 Originally, it started with some 9-11 conspiracies that they've since backed off from, but what they maintain is a very apt criticism of the current banking system, and a sort of post-scarcity techno-utopia promise.
00:00:40.000 This is a video I've been wanting to do for a while, honestly, because the Zeitgeist people, the Venus Project people, they really drive me nuts.
00:00:50.000 Because they were so right about some things, and just so utterly, well you can't even say that they're wrong necessarily, but just so ephemeral, nonspecific.
00:01:01.000 Which is why it's so hard to criticize them, because they haven't actually said anything to criticize.
00:01:09.000 So I think, I think the proper route to go about criticizing them, in that case, is to discuss the intellectual development of the movement, of its founder, Jacques Fresco.
00:01:28.000 And then, explain the movement a little bit more, and explain what's wrong with all of it.
00:01:34.000 So, that's the best way to go about this.
00:01:38.000 Now, Jacques Fresco is a self-taught engineer, which is not a mark of criticism, that's not sarcasm.
00:01:49.000 He actually is a very accomplished, a structural engineer, I believe is what he calls himself specifically.
00:01:56.000 Very intelligent man.
00:01:59.000 And yet, there's this, this joke that, you go up to a mathematician, a scientist, and an engineer.
00:02:09.000 And you hand them, a little round, red rubber ball, and you ask them, what the volume of it is.
00:02:17.000 Well, the mathematician will measure the diameter, multiply it by, what he puts up, pi r cubed, and he'll come up with the volume.
00:02:27.000 The physicist will dump the red ball into a beaker of water, and see how much water is displaced.
00:02:35.000 The engineer, well, he'll just reach up on the shelf for his big book of little red balls, look up the serial number, and tell you the specific volume.
00:02:46.000 And the feminist will tell you that saying that every single ball has to have the same relationship between diameter and circumference is oppressive. 0.99
00:03:00.000 The point of this joke is that engineers, and I love engineers, most of my family are engineers, really admire what they do.
00:03:11.000 But they have a certain blindness to the way they look at the world.
00:03:19.000 So much of what they do is looking up facts and figures in little red books that they have.
00:03:25.000 There's this huge mass of information that the engineering field has developed over the years.
00:03:32.000 How much force is the wind going to exert on a building based upon how tall it is?
00:03:40.000 And how strong do you need to make the girders for that?
00:03:44.000 At what temperature will this type of rubber not be an effective tire on the road?
00:03:50.000 At what speeds? At what rate does the temperature build up going at a different speed on different types of material?
00:03:56.000 Well, et cetera. They have tons of information that they've accrued over the years.
00:04:01.000 But this leads them to seeing information as being something absolute.
00:04:13.000 That if they can't build something, it's because they just lack the information.
00:04:17.000 And the information is out there black and white. It just needs to be found.
00:04:22.000 There's no debate over these facts.
00:04:25.000 They live in a world of very, very trustworthy facts.
00:04:29.000 As opposed to the world of the historian or the artist or the soldier,
00:04:36.000 where it's a very factual world, but you can never find out the actual facts.
00:04:42.000 You're always guessing.
00:04:45.000 Whereas the engineer always knows definitely what's going on.
00:04:53.000 And so that's one of the big things I see with Jacques Fresco.
00:04:57.000 He's a very, very intelligent man and seems to be an accomplished engineer as well.
00:05:01.000 But he has such a naivete when it comes to human nature or economics or any of these things.
00:05:18.000 Now the inception of kind of his political thinking began during the Great Depression.
00:05:25.000 Now, of course, we're all good Austrians.
00:05:30.000 We know that the measures used to try and save people from the Great Depression just wound up extenuating a two-year depression into a ten-year depression.
00:05:42.000 And that it wasn't World War II that solved the Great Depression.
00:05:46.000 It was the fact that governments were so broke, they had to stop messing with the economy at the end of World War II.
00:05:51.000 And then a recovery happened.
00:05:54.000 Now, we all know this, but imagine yourself, if you could go back to 1929, you're the president, you're Hoover, or you're Hoover's right-hand man.
00:06:07.000 Everything is going fine, the economy is booming, and all of a sudden, BAM!
00:06:14.000 Wall Street crash, as well as a Dust Bowl in the Central Americas. 0.88
00:06:21.000 All of this stuff happens instantaneously, overnight.
00:06:25.000 This golden economy just goes down the crapper, and people are starving.
00:06:30.000 What are you going to do?
00:06:32.000 What are you going to do?
00:06:40.000 If you actually think about being in a position of power like that,
00:06:44.000 even though, you know, we can play armchair quarterback, the ends of the earth,
00:06:48.000 and certainly, as much as I admire Hoover, he made a lot of mistakes.
00:06:54.000 But, who could have done better at the time?
00:07:00.000 We hadn't run into something like this before.
00:07:03.000 It's the beginning of the technological society where we're all very divorced from the land.
00:07:08.000 We rely upon the economy to be stable just to eat.
00:07:15.000 Unlike, you know, 500 years ago, you could just grow your own food.
00:07:19.000 It would suck, but you could survive.
00:07:25.000 So, Jacques Fresco is a young man, hit hard by this Great Depression.
00:07:31.000 And, of course, everywhere it seems like nobody's doing anything.
00:07:35.000 The rich are still rich, and they're eating, even though they're far poorer than they used to be,
00:07:40.000 and their businesses are being manipulated and controlled by the government.
00:07:45.000 But it's understandable that you think that somebody should do something.
00:07:52.000 That the king should open up his granary, even though granaries don't exist like that anymore.
00:08:01.000 And this is when you start getting involved with the Communist Party.
00:08:03.000 So, early on, you can see this.
00:08:07.000 Now, it's a low-level, naive sort of Marxism.
00:08:12.000 It's not the suicidal, life-hating sort of Marxism that you see coming out of the White House nowadays.
00:08:22.000 It's the low-level, well, I could do a better job of running things.
00:08:29.000 You know, we just need a central authority in charge.
00:08:32.000 So, that's his start on economic thought.
00:08:40.000 And, from what I've seen, he never really went further than that.
00:08:42.000 Then he gets older, starts traveling around, mostly to tropical places. 0.98
00:08:50.000 What is it with warm climates and encouraging idiocy and laziness and pretentiousness? 0.98
00:09:00.000 California, Florida, I don't know what it is. 1.00
00:09:04.000 The heat rots the brain, maybe.
00:09:12.000 Maybe Plato was right about the brain is there to cool the blood and it just can't do the right job in those climates.
00:09:17.000 Anyway, so he winds up going to Hawaii.
00:09:22.000 And he credits meeting the native Hawaiians as his introduction, what convinced him of cultural relativism.
00:09:33.000 Good God.
00:09:34.000 You just got to love when the liberals celebrate the noble savage, when they celebrate the shaman.
00:09:41.000 Look at the treatment of the Native American character on Star Trek Voyager, Chakotay.
00:09:50.000 See, they praise this mystical civilization.
00:09:54.000 Ooh, they're in touch with the land, but there's always an edge of condescension to it. 0.96
00:09:58.000 They're so in touch with the land and wise, but they're incompetent and they need the white man to support their culture. 0.82
00:10:06.000 It's this admiration and hatred at the same time.
00:10:11.000 And this comment of his saying that he was inspired by the native Hawaiians.
00:10:18.000 All right, Hawai'i, prior to the unprovoked American invasion, was a perfectly typical civilization for that population level.
00:10:32.000 Now, I'm not an expert on Hawai'i in particular, but given the population, it was in the tens of thousands of people living there.
00:10:43.000 It looked exactly like every other civilization, with that number of people and those resources available to them.
00:10:50.000 So they, of course, they had marriage. Every society has had marriage.
00:10:56.000 They had a monarchy that was a bit of a theocracy, although I believe the priests and the king were somewhat separated.
00:11:07.000 They had division of labor, a bit of a caste system.
00:11:10.000 They looked like any other civilization.
00:11:12.000 Now, certainly mimetics affects things in many ways.
00:11:19.000 You're going to have the same type of practice practiced in many different ways in different areas.
00:11:27.000 There's a lot of different ways that you can have prostitution, for example. 0.98
00:11:33.000 In the Muslim world, it's a short-term one-night marriage or something like that. 0.96
00:11:40.000 You know, you're going to have various levels of acceptance of transgenderism.
00:11:47.000 Sometimes with transgenderism, the cross-dressing will replace the prostitution, an outlet for unmarried males. 0.96
00:11:53.000 But civilizations tend to look the same.
00:12:01.000 And of course, you know, the genetic material going into the people is going to affect it as well.
00:12:06.000 But overall, we're all just different breeds of the same species.
00:12:12.000 Humans is gonna human. 1.00
00:12:14.000 So this comment of his, that they taught him about cultural relativism, it's just so pig ignorant. 0.99
00:12:23.000 Listen, Hawaii's awesome. Go Hawaii. 0.99
00:12:26.000 But they're not any more unique than anything else on the planet.
00:12:31.000 There's nothing particularly special about Hawaiians. 0.75
00:12:35.000 Population level and resources heavily affect things.
00:12:47.000 Japan.
00:12:49.000 They managed to stay feudal for 200 years longer than they should have by shutting off the outside world.
00:12:57.000 Except it wasn't the spread of ideas that they were preventing.
00:13:06.000 Because Christianity had already taken root in Japan. 0.51
00:13:09.000 It was already spreading a little bit, even though it was persecuted.
00:13:13.000 What they did by shutting the country down for 200 years was shut down the trade networks,
00:13:20.000 was shut down the population base.
00:13:22.000 So you have the rest of the world with, you know, European explorers connecting with other civilizations
00:13:28.000 and putting them into big trade networks.
00:13:30.000 And each one of those civilizations starts modernizing to a varying degree.
00:13:35.000 And it's the population levels that are doing this.
00:13:39.000 When you have an access to a billion people,
00:13:43.000 you're going to have a different sort of civilization than if you only have 10,000 people.
00:13:48.000 You put 10,000 doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and science fiction writers on an island,
00:13:57.000 and within a couple generations, it's going to look exactly like Hawai'i did 200 years ago.
00:14:03.000 So that this comment about, you know, cultural relativism.
00:14:12.000 What relativism, please?
00:14:14.000 They have marriage.
00:14:15.000 They have the same basic ethical code as everywhere else.
00:14:19.000 They have the same sort of polytheistic religion that every 10,000 population community has.
00:14:26.000 Just nonsense.
00:14:33.000 But see, you can see the engineer coming into his head now.
00:14:38.000 Because here he is trying to figure out this problem.
00:14:43.000 The problem is how do you engineer a proper society?
00:14:46.000 He lived through the horrors of the Great Depression.
00:14:51.000 I mean, here's a guy that couldn't afford to get his proper engineering license because of that,
00:14:57.000 and yet is smart enough to go out and accomplish engineering feats.
00:15:03.000 More substantial than many people with engineering licenses.
00:15:07.000 I'm sure he did eventually get it, but the point is that you can see his frustration.
00:15:14.000 Why is the society not working?
00:15:16.000 Why is it broken? Why the Great Depression?
00:15:19.000 And yet he hasn't found the big book of variables for how people work.
00:15:25.000 And so, with this background of Marxist influence, he goes to Hawaii and he sees what he wants to see,
00:15:35.000 and he gets convinced that people can be reprogrammed.
00:15:44.000 There is a fine line between mimetic engineering and trying to turn people into something we ain't.
00:15:51.000 We are not worker ants. We are never going to be.
00:15:55.000 Mimetics will affect how a society organizes itself.
00:15:59.000 There's a reason the Middle East is still stuck in the 1400s. 1.00
00:16:06.000 But ultimately people are still people.
00:16:10.000 And the Venus Project, and its founder, just aren't able to acknowledge this.
00:16:16.000 Co-founder of the movement is an artist.
00:16:23.000 A portrait painter, apparently.
00:16:26.000 And, I don't know if you know any artists,
00:16:30.000 but they really tend to live in a world of their own imagining.
00:16:37.000 This world of dreams without the concrete reality.
00:16:40.000 And so there you have the ideology going into the Venus Project.
00:16:49.000 The one hand, the engineer that thinks everything can be a number,
00:16:52.000 that everything can be boiled down to a known fact.
00:16:55.000 And the other extreme, the artist, where, to quote Futurama,
00:17:00.000 being a scientist is just imagining things and then making them happen.
00:17:10.000 Nowhere do you see the practical, real-world soldier, politician, historian...
00:17:18.000 None of that grasping, grappling with heuristics and assumptions and prejudices
00:17:29.000 and a biased approach to reality.
00:17:34.000 So, that's the background to it.
00:17:37.000 So what exactly is the Venus Project?
00:17:40.000 Well, for one thing, it's zero scarcity.
00:17:47.000 Now, again, the problem with the Venus Project is they don't know anything about economics.
00:17:55.000 You know, economics. Go talk to Aaron Clary.
00:17:58.000 He can pick out a few variables and he will make good assumptions
00:18:02.000 and give you an answer that is probably correct. 0.96
00:18:06.000 Because he is a very, very goddamn good economist.
00:18:11.000 He can take limited data, not enough data. 0.86
00:18:17.000 You never have enough data.
00:18:19.000 When you're judging somebody on their credit score,
00:18:21.000 should I lend this person money?
00:18:23.000 You never have enough data.
00:18:25.000 You're looking at maybe 500 pieces of information when you need 50,000.
00:18:28.000 But a good economist can pick out the relevant sources of data,
00:18:34.000 filter out the noise, and come up with a probabilistically correct decision.
00:18:41.000 That if he lends money to 100 people, 99 of them are going to pay it back.
00:18:50.000 And the Venus Project? No training on economics.
00:18:53.000 So, the zero scarcity economy.
00:18:56.000 We're already seeing the zero scarcity economy rapidly approaching.
00:19:03.000 I have mentioned this before, so I won't go into too much detail, but music.
00:19:08.000 The fact is that each and every one of us has more music on our iPod
00:19:13.000 than an audiophile did as recently as 20 years ago in their entire collection.
00:19:19.000 Music has basically become zero scarcity.
00:19:22.000 And if you're going to try and make money as a musician, I'd strongly recommend against it.
00:19:29.000 The only guys really making a lot of money are the mass appeal pop sellouts that have the right image,
00:19:37.000 and also lucked into it. 1.00
00:19:39.000 Justin Bieber was from one of those stupid reality shows or something. 1.00
00:19:42.000 Anybody could have been Justin Bieber. 1.00
00:19:46.000 Like, there's a million other potential Justin Biebers out there.
00:19:50.000 He's the one that got selected, and he'll make a lot of money.
00:19:54.000 And all these other equally talented, talented kids will go nowhere.
00:19:59.000 Information is fast becoming completely zero scarcity.
00:20:06.000 Which is problematic if you're trying to create information,
00:20:11.000 if you're trying to add to the body of knowledge of our species.
00:20:15.000 And it's quite possible that energy will become zero scarcity in the near future.
00:20:31.000 So, all of these things spell a certain sort of economic upset.
00:20:34.000 And we should have a plan to deal with these things.
00:20:39.000 Mind you, right now, we're too busy creating the greatest depression
00:20:43.000 to even think about the shocks of zero scarcity.
00:20:48.000 So, best of luck with that.
00:20:50.000 But it doesn't mean that the Venus Project is doing a good job.
00:20:54.000 So they envision this post-scarcity utopia.
00:20:58.000 Now, some of this, and this is all, of course, very 1950s, 1960s science fiction.
00:21:09.000 Star Trek universe that they never quite explain how things work on Earth.
00:21:14.000 Supposedly it's a paradise.
00:21:15.000 Let's not look directly at it.
00:21:18.000 So, certainly we see in our major cities that a lot of transit has become free.
00:21:25.000 Here in Calgary, the train downtown is free.
00:21:29.000 If you want to catch for five blocks from one end of downtown to the other, it's free.
00:21:33.000 You don't have to buy a ticket.
00:21:35.000 And you're probably going to see more and more of that.
00:21:39.000 And it might even get to the point where, instead of cars,
00:21:42.000 we have automated self-driving taxis that are free.
00:21:47.000 They're covered by your taxes.
00:21:48.000 Now, when we're talking about future economics, and when we're talking about zero scarcity,
00:21:57.000 and we look at ideas like this, we are still being realists.
00:22:02.000 We are still being economists.
00:22:04.000 We have, you know, there's entire people that, civil engineers that focus on how to charge the right amount for a train ticket so that people won't abuse the system,
00:22:16.000 but that less people will drive so they don't have to spend money repairing the roads constantly.
00:22:20.000 That's not what the Venus Project is doing.
00:22:26.000 They paint this picture of the utopian city where energy is free and information is free and there's automated cars everywhere.
00:22:36.000 One of those shining silver pictures from the 60s or 70s of how the future would look.
00:22:42.000 Always a guy with a giant beard for some reason.
00:22:44.000 And that's it. That's all they're presenting.
00:22:52.000 They don't have an actual plan about how to implement all of this stuff.
00:23:00.000 They certainly have no concept of geopolitics.
00:23:03.000 And as for normal human conflict, the fact that people are born with different levels of intelligence, different levels of charisma,
00:23:14.000 that people are all going to be competing for sex, basically.
00:23:20.000 Sex and attention and prestige. 0.99
00:23:23.000 None of this is mentioned in the Venus Project because, of course, Jacques Fresco believes in cultural relativity.
00:23:29.000 That we can somehow have this zero-scarcity economy with no need for women to get married. 1.00
00:23:39.000 You know, why bother? Everything's free. They don't need a husband to pay for anything. 1.00
00:23:44.000 So they'll just sleep with the bad boys. 1.00
00:23:46.000 The result is going to be gang warfare between all the men trying to show off who has the biggest dick. 0.99
00:23:52.000 No mention of that, of course. 0.98
00:23:57.000 The one thing they do mention, though, that they love to mention, and this drives me straight up the wall,
00:24:04.000 is the resource-based economy.
00:24:08.000 Do you know what a resource-based economy is?
00:24:19.000 The gold standard.
00:24:22.000 Gold is a resource.
00:24:25.000 Like, you don't need a new word for this.
00:24:28.000 It's the gold-backed currency, is the resource-based economy.
00:24:32.000 And if they'd done any reading of Austrian economics, they'd know this.
00:24:37.000 And yet they insist on bringing up this ridiculous new term, resource-based economy.
00:24:44.000 Every economy is a resource-based economy.
00:24:48.000 The reason that you had to pay for a CD 20 years ago was because a lot of resources went into making it.
00:24:58.000 Information isn't something with an on-off switch that's either free or not free.
00:25:05.000 Effort goes into making it.
00:25:08.000 The question is how much?
00:25:10.000 You know, today I'm making this YouTube video with the help of a webcam and myself.
00:25:17.000 It does not take a massive amount of investment the way a news station did 20 years ago.
00:25:22.000 But that's because we're using the resources more efficiently.
00:25:28.000 And we're just going to pretend for the moment that we could afford to manufacture computers at these prices in North America without, you know, slave labor in the third world. 1.00
00:25:37.000 The resource-backed economy.
00:25:44.000 Now, the way they like to describe it is that we all have infinite energy and we all have free maker machines.
00:25:50.000 So you have the X number of resources and you can do whatever you want with them.
00:25:55.000 You can drive your car around, then you're sick of your car, crunch it up, make a new car with the energy that's unlimited.
00:26:02.000 And, you know, this is fine for a science fiction setting, but this is not a proposal for how to actually run a society.
00:26:11.000 There is no substance to it.
00:26:13.000 There's a couple of interesting ideas which they did not come up with, for the record.
00:26:18.000 These are much older ideas.
00:26:20.000 But then they just run with them.
00:26:23.000 And that's their promise.
00:26:25.000 Their empty, airy promise of somehow, if we stop using gasoline, because they've got environmentalism in the mix, of course.
00:26:36.000 If we stop using gasoline and switch to solar, we can live in the future.
00:26:41.000 And you don't have to work anymore.
00:26:44.000 Or something like that.
00:26:45.000 Like that.
00:26:49.000 So there you have it, folks.
00:26:50.000 There's really not that much debunk with it.
00:26:53.000 There's so much nonsense and yet there's nothing specific.
00:26:57.000 You'll see some very good critiques of the current fiat banking system, particularly with the Federal Reserve, coming out of the guys with the Venus Project.
00:27:08.000 And their critiques are excellent.
00:27:10.000 But they don't have a real plan.
00:27:16.000 Hope that clarified things for you guys.
00:27:18.000 Have a good night.
00:27:19.000 Have a good night.