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Is it the fact that so few of us live in the future and are focused on the here and now? It’s hard to even imagine how things can change. I don’t know but I think today’s interview really dives into some of these topics. Today we’ve got Roxanne Meadows on the program. Roxanne’s a co-founder of ‘The Venus Project’. An ambitious think-tank looking to redesign the city and capital structures of the future; making an entirely new fabric of society. This is something a la ‘brave new world’. They’re not building a utopia, they’re not building a dystopia, but they’re trying to redesign humanity from the ground up, given the technology and innovation that we’ve had so that we can move further forward to us being a type-one civilization. Training: Roxanne’s a technical illustrator, architect, model creator and scientist. She’s worked since 1975 with Jacque Fresco, the legendary futurist on ‘The Venus Project’. A project looking to redesign society. The Venus Project’s been featured in dozens of publications, news outlets and podcasts; and Roxanne’s personally presented at conferences and seminars in over 25 countries including a joint presentation at the United Nations on some of these topics. In today’s episode we’ll discuss how we can transition from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance, the possibilities of a post capitalistic world, why universal basic income is a band-aid rather than a solution to the world’s problems, how and why we need to address climate change, why The Venus Project is re-engineering society to suit modern life, how government perpetuates inequality, what you need to know about a resource-based economy, where we’re headed when it comes to urban planning in the future of cities and the reason why ‘utopia’ and ‘too good to be true’ are bullshit terms. And now without further ado I give you futurist, designer, innovator: Roxanne Meadows. Matt: What do you describe yourself as? You have quite the background. Roxanne: Well I guess mostly a futurist. I know I work with Jacque Fresco for so many years and he used to call himself a social engineer, but I just feel grateful that I had the opportunity to learn and live with him. So I have a diverse background. I had a background in art, technical illustration, design, architectural design, medical illustration, I have my pilot’s license and I’m co-founder of The Venus Project which is an entirely new socio-economic system. Matt: Was that – was the basis of the name “This is what it should look like when humans expands beyond Earth? How did the Venus Project get started I guess? Roxanne: If you’re referring to the name Venus well, when I first met Jacque in 1976 he used to call it socio-cyberneering which is cybernetics and engineering applied to the social system. But nobody could spell it. It was before the word cyber became popular. Nobody knew what that was, and nobody could pronounce it. So, when we moved to Venus we just called it the Venus Project. Has nothing to do with planets or metaphysics or anything like that. Matt: It reminds me a lot what you’re trying to do, and specifically what I’ve what I’ve learned about Jacque, it reminds me a lot of Harry Selden in The Foundation. I’m not sure if you’ve read Asimov? Roxanne: No, I didn’t read that one. Matt: Ok, it’s a sci-fi book and you essentially have someone similar in that they’re able to look into the future using social science engineering and apply a mathematical lens so to speak to designing society which it seems like is what you’re doing. So you’ve been involved with The Venus Project for quite some time. Can you give me a little bit of an overview on what specifically you guys do? Roxanne: Well, The Venus Project is really based on Jacque’s lifetime of work toward an alternative social design to what we have. He would always say that, you know, why he does the work is because what’s out there really scares him. The values where we’re headed; we have no social direction to strive for and this is what it is. It proposes an alternative social system which is updated to our technological abilities. It proposes what we could have if we use science and technology toward the betterment of humans and the protection of the environment. To enhance humans and protect the environment. Matt: It’s basically moving to post-capitalism and a resource-based economy. Roxanne: Right. It advocates a resource-based economy which, yes, it does surpass capitalism. It really states that we have the technologies to design an incredible world. But what stops us, we really don’t need to perpetuate planned obsolescence and using money to determine who gets what; who very often lives and dies. It’s a very, very archaic way of determining how resources are managed. Matt: So, a lot of our listeners have are probably at least somewhat familiar with a universal basic income where everyone gets some type of stipend or otherwise. How does – how does the resource-based economy and how does what you’re doing with the Venus Project differ? Matt: Hey Matt here, a quick aside. Universal basic income or UBI has been giving a lot of momentum especially in the tech sectors as we see – as we see the automation and digitization of so many jobs and the prospect of artificial intelligence replacing much of our current job force and there’s not a lot that humans need to be doing if we’re getting rid of a lot of the grunt work and pure productivity. We can free up some of that human creativity to focus on other things assuming that they don’t need a job and aren’t going to starve to death, then we may enter a new era of creativity and flourishing. The next Renaissance so to speak. That’s the concept behind the UBI but that’s not what The Venus Project’s doing. Now let’s jump back to Roxanne for a quick explanation. Roxanne: Well we feel that the monetary system causes the problems. It’s the root causes of our problems. It has elitism, planned obsolescence… you know as I mentioned the – determines your standard of living. It really, at which you’re born into, you generally live your life that way, whether you’re poor or whether you’re wealthy. It’s an illusion in the United States to say otherwise. So we feel that money as a means of exchange is not necessary today. When we have the technology to create a tremendous standard of living that we don’t even begin to use that potential today. We talk about using science; the methods of science applied to the social system. If we go to universal basic income, which you know people are beginning to about this today and Jacques used to talk about it 50-60 years ago, where capitalism – one of the methods that will put an end to capitalism is when enough people lose their jobs through technological displacement then they won’t have the money in their pockets to buy the goods and services turned out. This is one scenario that capitalism can’t overcome, and people are beginning to write books about it but they really have no system and no method to bring us to the next stage in civilization. What kind of possibilities we could have. Universal basic income to us it just keeps things as they are. You keep the schools the same, the education the same, the values the same, the social stratification the same, and I think it just delays a revolution in this country. It is more humane in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t solve our problems. Matt: It’s an interesting perspective that Roxanne has here. If you do think about it UBI would be just a band-aid because if we do have an economic system it’s not going to be exponential it’s not going to be growing, accelerating forever. It’s gonna be an s-curve; eventually it’s gonna start to level out, and as things level out especially as our resources decline, because you don’t have unlimited resources you create a scenario where if growth for growth’s sake is the only thing keeping the economy and world afloat, you have some challenges. Roxanne: When few nations control most of the earth’s resources you will continue to have problems. Matt: Well especially when it’s almost, the way you describe capitalism it could almost be seen as a Ponzi scheme where everyone has to have the money coming in to be able to spend the money because otherwise the people at the back end aren’t getting the money so it kind of is filtered in a strangely evolving or strangely running Ponzi scheme. My question though is how do we transition? There’s a lot of vested interests in what we currently have. There’s a lot of people now, especially in tech as we’re moving towards an AI and automation-based future, where jobs are going away. How do we transition and not get into a revolution status where it’s bullet-proofing your Teslas? Roxanne: First we really have to introduce what we’re doing. People have to learn about it and decide that’s where they want to go. Actually, I don’t see any other alternatives out there other than bringing people back to socialism, communism, fascism and those didn’t work and we can do much better today with our technology. First of all, what we’re doing here, we’re making books and videos and documentaries, and we built 10 buildings here to try and experiment with architectural forms and many other things. We have over 400 models of the future, we have many blueprints and we are working on our next phase which is we call ‘Center for Resource Management’ where it will kind of be a hub and an experiment for designing the future. A sustainable future. We ultimately talk about new sustainable cities that are efficient and use resources wisely because what we advocate is to feed, house and clothe and provide a high standard of living for it literally everybody on the planet and this could easily be done if we directed our technologies toward those ends. But we don’t because we are in a fixed society which is established and those who are in positions of advantage want to maintain that and of course they have control of everything in order to set a value system to maintain it. All of our values that we have are to perpetuate whatever system we live under and all countries do this. All countries, all children pledge allegiance to whatever country they’re in, but the control is so subtle that we don’t even feel the manipulation. Matt: If you listen carefully you can catch a little bit of an American bias here. So around in other countries around the world kids don’t get up and pledge allegiance to the flag during school, this isn’t some mandatory process. In America however, it is because there has been a process of indoctrinating us against the world. It’s very interesting to see how these different perspectives affect people’s thoughts on the future and on government and society as a whole. Roxanne: So, getting back to your question of how to transition, because there’s so many other things to talk about as well, that we want to show an example of what society could be. Ultimately, we want to do a city. We are doing a stepping stone toward that to work out many problems and have whatever we learn there be directed toward the city as well and be designing the city also. Within this, we call it ‘Center for Resource Management’ as I mentioned, we are going to have a museum of the future that takes people through evolution and shows them the history of science and technology and where – and many other things; behaviourism and how we acquired language ,how we can be creative and cooperative, and at the end we culminate it with a direction for society which is the resource-based economy and show people what this is going to be like. And it would also be a research and development center and it would be a location where we would disseminate as much information as possible about this new social direction and it would be as a sustainable – self-sustainable as possible. Growing our own food, taking care of our own wastewater, producing our own energy. So we are planning that at this time. Matt: That brings up a million questions but the first one I want to jump into is: what would my life look like in a resource-based economy? Let’s say that The Venus Project is successful, and we do transition to something that is different than the current capitalism we have. How does it work, what does life look like, what does value look like, what does work look like? Roxanne: First of all, all goods and services are available to everyone without money, barter, credit, servitude or debt of any kind. This could be established today. So you get whatever you need within the access centers which are right near the middle of the city, equal distance for everyone. You check out what you need, if you want to take out art materials you – say a child wants to learn about art they would go to the center they could check out whatever they want in terms of materials, they’re shown how to draw, there’s nothing mysterious about drawing. There – it’s really going to be contrary to most people’s beliefs but there are no people who are talented or have any inborn advantage for learning how to draw. Everybody could learn how to draw because it is lawful and once you’d learn the laws you can learn how it applies to technical illustration or Fine Arts or landscaping or portraits or anything. So, this culture really cuts people short because people don’t know how to teach drawing but so the student might go in or the adult, the child might go into the center, get lessons on how to draw, get materials, they could take it home, use it. If they don’t use it they can bring it back and other people can use it. And this is true with anything. With musical instruments, anything you might like to use. So, materials go further that way. Also, education is free for everyone. The smarter you are, the smarter the kids are, the smarter my life is. You can think of it as functional selfishness. If you have kids that are hanging out as they are today, just doing drugs because they have nothing that interests them in life, they’ve never given anything that could interest them nor a lot of times a good education, then you pay for that, in this culture anyway, through and in the resource-based economy too – but you pay for that through police, through prisons, through bars on your windows, through judges, through lawyers. It’s much better to give kids an education and have them become participatory in the culture and contribute something to your life. It’s much wiser that way but you know this is a huge business and why we do have that kind of system is a by-product of the free enterprise system and depriving some kids from education. So getting back to the resource-based economy you have access to your needs, you have access to a good education, you have access to medical care and whatever you may want to do. The kids would learn how things grow, how things are made, they would travel around the world and get a real good footing on reality and they would – we would encourage them to participate and help solve problems. So you would have a much broader range of access to whatever you would like to do. You know people today dare not dream because they can’t afford to. It’s painful and it’s very difficult even just to survive with so many – for some people – so many minimum jobs. People say well people are lazy, what do you do with the lazy people? People are made lazy. There’s nothing more terrible I would think than minimum wage and having crying kids but you can’t take to a doctor sometimes you have to take them to a free clinic and you wait there all day and you don’t get paid for that day. It’s much more expensive to be poor than to have funding. So it would be nothing like what you have today. Matt: So let me see if I can clarify or summarize. So, the resource-based economy is a bit of – it’s a bit of Uber on steroids but everyone owns everything, can use anything whenever they want and then the money or the funding, essentially the resources necessary to make something like this happen on a worldwide basis, that comes just from removing inefficiencies i.e. businesses’ profits and wages? Roxanne: Well all earth’s resources essentially would become the common heritage of all the world’s people and we would eventually eliminate the artificial boundaries. We would use science and technology to enhance the lives of everyone and protect the environment. All – the second question – give me your second question your summary again. Matt: So, it was everyone owns everything and then the resources or value from this comes from taking all the existing value and just not having inefficiencies in the system so to speak. Roxanne: You know, today we don’t have enough money to house everybody but we do have enough resources for that and much more. Matt: I understand what Roxanne’s saying here. I don’t actually think it’s true. I do think we do have enough money to house everyone. We could solve most all of our global challenges just from the economic wealth of a small minority if we were to allocate those resources properly but basically what Roxanne and what The Venus Project is pointing out is there is inherent inefficiency with money and with our current economic system whereby if we just used the wood and trees and food and water etc., we could easily clothe, shelter everyone on earth. That said I still find it somewhat questionable that we would be able to have the same level of economic standard or well-being. Quality of life is one measure that people use. Although quality of life typically should take into account things like happiness which most standard metrics don’t. Roxanne: So, it’s really inefficient to stay on this system. We have what? 7.6 billion people all out for themselves and all nations out for themselves continuously consuming in order to keep this system going we have to continuously buy and sell things. We are plundering the earth’s resources for profit. It is killing us. It’s proving to be ecological suicide. So, unless we come up with something else and I don’t know how people will just come up with something else, Jacque worked a lifetime at arriving at this through many different disciplines. A universal basic income will not solve our problems that we have today we have to have an entirely different value system to do that in a different social system. It is the monetary system that perpetuates war and greed and hunger and corruption. You know, they say it gives you incentive but it also – you have to look at the other side of the coin also but it does give you incentive for greed, corruption, war, poverty, hunger. It generates all these things. So you’re not born with greed and envy and bigotry. You acquire that through your culture and if we don’t change the culture we’ll perpetuate the same behaviors. Matt: Roxanne and I talked about this a little bit after the podcast. The problem with changing a culture is the only way to really do it is to kill every living human being on earth because we are our own culture. Even the cities and societies we’ve built are our own culture and they perpetuate this so to change the culture means either killing everyone or starting a moon colony with completely infant babies that are suddenly raised by robots etc and even then, you have a culture of something else. It’s not necessarily what you try to design and it’s often very, very challenging to redesign. Matt: One thing that I would I would like to bring up, it sounds like a great world. It sounds like a utopia but when things sound like a utopia I’m always a little bit sceptical because utopia always becomes dystopia and typically it trends towards communism and then eventually Russia. What have you guys thought about – what’s the research look like on that front to avoid being another USSR Roxanne: Well that’s a red flag where they always use – just you know it’s just like human nature – human nature will never exceed our destructive tendencies but there is no such thing as human nature. It’s a BS word or bad science or bullshit, however you want to interpret it but we’re not born with those destructive tendencies we acquire them within the culture. So it’s a word just like utopia I think. It’s a red flag so we don’t even question or try and improve the situation that we’re in. There is no such thing as utopia. It would be the next stage for a more civilized world I think. A possibility of eliminating, you know, if you have access to goods and services people don’t steal. They would eliminate greed or envy or corruption. It’s not these – these tendencies are not inborn. They’re superimposed upon us by our culture. For instance they sometimes put a man in jail who cuts the horns off of a rhino just to feed his family but they – the society doesn’t look at what it is in the culture that allows this family to go without food in the first place. It’s much easier to blame the individual than look at the conditions that they’re subjected to. So, this is what The Venus Project does. Look at the conditions and the root causes of our problems and try and offer alternatives. There are no final frontiers. Jacque would always say that his cities would be a straightjacket for the next generation. But within a resource-based economy, if there are problems, we would try and look at what it is in the culture that causes aberrant behavior or causes people not to get along and we can change those quickly because there is no vested interest. There are no people making money off of your misery, off of keeping you sick or keeping you in jail or keeping low wages. You know, there you eliminate those things within a monetary – within a resource-based economy. Matt: What’s the governing structure look like? Roxanne: Well that’s something that’s very difficult for people to understand because today everybody is looking for somebody to govern you. But if you looked, what do the politicians and the people who are governing today, what do they really do? They are there primarily to serve the interest of those in positions of power and advantage. They’re there to keep things as they are. They’re mostly bankers and lawyers. They don’t really know how to eliminate war, they don’t know how to make a higher yield per acre without poisoning the foods, they don’t know how to make clean sources of energy. I don’t know what they’re doing there frankly. What we need are multidisciplinary people working with computers that have electrical – sort of – it’s sort of – to speak – electrical tentacles out – sensors into the environment so we can make more appropriate decisions. As and the value system would be for human need and the protection of the environment as opposed to wealth, property and power which are two separate things. You can’t make the free enterprise system into something ethical. The basis of it is corrupt and people say well it’s broken; it’s not broken, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The money today is going toward the wealthy faster than any other time in history which is going to bring a lot of trouble. So, and it’s very difficult because people can’t just sit down and evaluate what’s happening because we’re not taught to do that because it doesn’t serve the interest of the free enterprise system. You know in the old days they weren’t allowed to have slaves read. It was against the law and it’s kind of like that today. The less people know about what’s happening to them and to the environment, the easier they are to control. So it’s a difficult situation which means we would probably have a collapse of things before people become disillusioned with their political leaders to understand that they can’t solve the problems and many times they’re the cause of them. And if people lose their homes I don’t advocate this but I think it might take that for people to lose their homes, lose their jobs and lose confidence in the political systems before they look around and say this isn’t working, we need something else. Matt: We definitely do need something else. And I like that you brought up the distractions. Even in Rome they had Olympic Games just to distract the masses. So I want to transition a little bit now to your cities. So you look at the cities that The Venus Project’s designing and it looks like something straight out of Star Trek. Talk to me about what it’s like, what the construction process looks like and how you guys are designing better, more affordable and efficient housing. Roxanne: There – the designs of The Venus Project’s total city systems approach and that’s what it is they really correspond with the aims: how they’re designed. Meaning we want to feed, house, clothe, and provide a high standard of living for, as I mentioned, everybody on earth and we feel that that’s possible. To help accomplish this we want to do sustainable cities ‘cos it’s easier to design new cities from the ground up than to maintain and restore the old ones, just as it’s more efficient to design something like a state-of-the-art production facility than to upgrade an obsolete factory. So The Venus Project proposes all different types of cities but they would function as a living, breathing organism that all works together just like the human body. If you get an infection in your toe, you don’t have a democratic committee meeting going up to your head and saying we’re gonna do a three-month study. By that time you have gangrene up to your waist so the human body acts as a symbiotic process. Everything gets whatever it needs whenever it needs it and in fact some people think well a resource-based economy came from socialism or communism and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It came from living systems like the human body. So the cities are circular mostly and the circular arrangement employs a systems approach for instance pre-fabricated architectural elements are designed in automated factories and then they are assembled on-site and some of these elements can be interchangeable. We feel that this is the most feasible way to provide a high standard of living for everybody in the shortest time possible. It really – you know, today mostly architecture – I’ll give you this example. Somebody once came up to Jacques and asked him to design a large high-rise that takes care of its own waste, produces its own energy and grows its own food. And Jacque said I’m not interested in a monument to my own ego, I’m interested in social change, that’s where the problems lie. So he learned firsthand he was a multi disciplinarian who was also technical. He wasn’t an artist or a philosopher. It’s not – this is not based on his wishes or aspirations or political affiliations or religious beliefs. It’s based on the methods of science and applying the methods of science to the way we operate society. And we don’t do that today. We couldn’t be farther from that. Business, law, banking, politics and militarism use most of our resources and money, where we could use science and technology to make a higher standard of living for everyone, make clean sources of energy, efficient transportation, sound and strong housing, and other infrastructure so that everyone can live well. Matt: I wish I’d brought this up during the episode but unfortunately just didn’t have the time, but whenever people make things sound too easy I always get a bit sceptical and this is one of the largest challenges of our era and generation will be solving some of these challenges. So making them sound easy is inherently, I feel inherently a bit sceptical about the ease of actually accomplishing this. I think it is doable which is the reason for Fringe FM: to bring together the world’s greatest innovators and creators but I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as Rox- Matt: How do you account for the unknown? So, when you’re starting a startup, you’re trying to create something, whatever it is, things inevitably go wrong and have to be changed, the direction has to be altered. Roxanne: That’s true with anything new. What we’re saying, you know, even the monetary system was an experiment a long time ago, experiment that kind of went wrong. Mostly was verbal platitudes of equality and equity which are not built into the system at all. You know whenever you design anything new from airplanes to televisions to everything you encounter things along the way but if you’re agile enough to be able to change them and no vested interest in that as well other than the well-being of people and the protection of the environment then you would be able to work on new things. You know, sometimes people say well what if somebody wants to do have swept forward wing with an airplane or swept back wing? Well you do both. You don’t do one or the other, but first you have to have an inventory. Say people wanted to do this, which is unlikely, all over the world all at once, it wouldn’t work like that we don’t think, but first we have to know what we have to work with. We have to take a survey of the earth’s resources, the technical personnel, the arable land, the health of the people and the needs of the people and that determines what we do where. How many hospitals we might build. We want to – what we need to work within the carrying capacity of the earth’s resources and the inventory would let us know what that is. Today it’s like we’re taking a trip to Mars and we haven’t calculated how many people are on board or what their needs are and we don’t even know if what we put on board would fulfil those needs. So we have no planetary planning today and that’s what we’re talking about. That’s updated to our technological capabilities. Matt: A big problem there is just the incentives that individual parties have of information advantage by not sharing that. I want to transition a little bit you mentioned space. What technologies or inventions or new coming trends are most important to what you guys are working on and then what are you just excited about personally? Roxanne: Well any new technologies – if you’re talking about space I’ll address that a bit. I think I heard Elon Musk if I’m not mistaken say that Mars is the most inhabitable planet which was absurd to me. We have a beautiful planet here that we’re destroying and if we bring the same values and attitudes to Mars we’ll have the same problems there too. So, we really need to work on the problems we have here on earth; enable all earth’s resources to become the common heritage of all the earth’s people, eliminate boundaries and then if people decide to do that, then go into outer space but we have so much to do here first that it’s a waste of time and a waste of money at this point in our stage of evolution. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the saying “We’re kind of like cannibals in Cadillacs”. We don’t know how to use our technology wisely. Matt: Our reach exceeds our grasp. Yeah I would – I would definitely agree with that. So with the city that you guys are focused on building, you said you’re at Venus right now. Where exactly is that located, how BIG’s the team and what does the progress look like in terms of putting together this social experiment? Roxanne: We built ten buildings here as I said we have over 400 models, we do tours every Saturday toward seminars and we only – due to zoning restrictions we could only put up three residents here so the next project we want to at least be able to accommodate 400 people. There are so many people that want to come here and work with us and if we’re all in the same location we could probably get a lot more done but what we do have now, if you go to our website, you’ll see the many teams that are organized and they work through Trello boards which are task oriented and they help perpetuate this direction and this idea. We – they are all volunteers at this time and we have teams for social media, for marketing team, for data statistical teams, we have to really evaluate our progress or what what’s happening. We have a web development team, we have transcription teams because we have many lectures, over 600 lectures that just Jacques did alone about this direction on many different topics. So we are working on many different things at the same time. As you – as I mentioned if you go to ‘get involved’ you will see a lot of the different teams. Matt: It’s crazy the amount you have going on and it seems very decentralized, it seems very swarm-eque. Roxanne: All over the world – they’re from all over the world. It’s very nice to see when we have these meetings with the architects or engineers or civil engineers, they are, you know they’re from Australia and from Ireland and from Canada and from Bulgaria… it’s very nice. They’re all very interested. They understand if you do nothing, nothing will happen and they would like to see a different world and they haven’t seen and I haven’t seen anything that could have more possibilities to solving a lot of the problems that we don’t address in this culture. Matt: How much of your modelling is based off of ant colonies or bee hives? Because I feel like it’s very applicable to what you’re doing. Roxanne: Yes it may be in some ways. Many – we have many interdisciplinary teams that are working together and that’s the way we would develop the first city too. Many interdisciplinary teams working together to develop one-eighth of the city and then duplicate it. As we were talking earlier about what our cities look like this keeps the costs down and makes the cities efficient as well. Matt: So a little bit outside of Venus Project as well, a part of the purpose of this podcast is to get thought-leaders on and then explore that the exterior, the fringe is so. Blockchain and cryptocurrency and the developments we’re seeing? Roxanne: Well I think in some ways it’s very interesting but, you know, we have the technology to create abundance all over the world and the free enterprise system tries to keep things scarce. Planned obsolescence, they make things to wear out and break down. You know if tree – if apple trees grew all over you couldn’t sell an apple. You can only sell things that are scarce, hence planned obsolescence in many different areas and we’re ruining our planet for that. Polluting the air, the soil, the food, but you know we don’t have guards on beaches to make sure people don’t come at night and steal a cup of sand. The air we breathe is tremendously valuable, but we don’t monitor how many breaths people take because it’s abundant. What we need to do is to organize our automation and our technical personnel and create abundance as quickly as possible. That would bypass any type of exchange that they’re trying to do and it would – it would arrange a very different value system for the culture. Matt: And that’s a lot of what we’re trying to work towards here with Fringe FM. Getting on people that are creating and moving towards the future. What are your predictions on a time horizon? When do you see the first Venus city being completed having at least a thousand people and then when do you see something like this potentially becoming more mainstream? Roxanne: Well it’s very hard to predict because we don’t – it very hard to get these ideas on corporate media of course, they don’t want to do away with themselves. So for 41 years when I worked was Jacques we worked in obscurity and Jacques was doing this since he was 13. He died about a year ago at 101 and he still worked toward it. But, so, he had to wait until the internet came about before these ideas came out and they’re trying to restrict that as you know. So when this comes about I would say don’t put it on us, we work all the time on it, I mean those who work for The Venus Project, I would say it depends on what others do. How much they learn about this. If it interests them read about it, study it. We don’t want people to just follow it but really study the information on thevenusproject.com and our new non-profit organization called resourcebasedeconomy.org – you can learn about it on there as well. And you know sometimes it just takes meeting the right person or the right groups of people. To start the Center for Resource Management we’ll take it as far as we can but it really needs funding as well because we live between systems. So it’s very hard to give any time prediction but we’re always working on it. Matt: Is there a country in particular where you see this having a better shot? I don’t know if the US would be the easiest with something like this. Roxanne: I agree with you. We are looking, we have a land acquisition team as well and we’re looking at certain criteria and we would like subtropical perhaps, so we can take advantage of solar, maybe geothermal and other forms of energy, wind as well, and we don’t want of course any coal or oil or any destructive type of energy systems and there’s plenty that aren’t. So it will be a showcase for that as well but we are looking at other places around the world with certain statistical data that we have that may fit. It also needs to be near a tourist area because it won’t be totally self-sustaining because we are counting on people coming in and going to the museum which would be several buildings and it’s not just a museum where you just go and look but it gives you an education as to, for many different things, to culminate on a resource-based economy. So we’re looking around the world in other places probably I agree with you with your assessment of this country, perhaps, might not be the easiest place to build this. Matt: What’s your economies of scale? How large would a city like this have to be to be self-sufficient? Roxanne: You know the first project Center for Resource Management is probably going to be about 400 people and we will be working as closely as we can within this social model meaning people would have their needs met who work there; food, access to goods and services, housing and we would be working toward the first city. Doing the blueprints and development toward the first city. And then we see this, you know we could franchise different parts and our educational process and the Center for Resource Management as well and we’ll be refining and developing that as we go and before that but you know like we said we’d make many changes along the way to improve things and being agile enough we want to be able to do that. So after the first city is done, after the Center for Resource Management and we would like to be were improving the next city, making it more efficient, quicker. They would always be immersed in beautiful gardens so you don’t have to drive 40 miles to get to a park and so the cities would be sharing information freely and sharing resources freely and hopefully this would grow through evolution rather than revolution and we really need to, just like any new developments, we need to put it to test and that’s what these developments would be doing. Matt: What would happen to old cities? Like you said it’s much cheaper to build a new city than it is to upgrade an existing one. Roxanne: Right, well with the cities would be very open the new city so we would want people to come through them, see them, see if they want to live in them and then develop another one in their country and use our model, our educational systems and many other things that were developed and perhaps we would keep some of the old cities as kind of museum cities just to show how terrible many things were in the past. Probably mine them for resources and anything else that we could get from them once people do want to move into the new cities. Matt: I think it’s a very interesting concept. There’s definitely a lot of hurdles ahead of you but it is the general direction that we need to be going if we wanted to become a level-one civilization and start to start to expand galactically. Roxanne where’s the best place for people to find you? Roxanne: Well I would say thevenusproject.com and we have all the information for all the other social mediums at the bottom of the page and our non-profit organization called resourcebasedeconomy.org  – you can learn all about the projects that I’m talking about. Matt: Awesome. Thanks for coming on today and thanks for tuning in guys Roxanne: Thank you Matt, appreciate it a great deal.