in a city that has been proclaimed

'The Entertainment Capital of the world': Los Angeles, California.

The entertainment industry generates billions of dollars in revenue each year

from the production and release of television,

film, music, online programming,

books, and video games for public consumption.

Revenue in the industry increased by 15% from the year 2000 to 2008,

the employment sector grew by 20%

and the overall entertainment industry grew at least 50% in a recent decade.

There is no question that, just as we discovered in the 1930s,

even in a recession or depression economy

people will happily spend a portion of their hard-earned, limited income

on entertainment.

Millions of people worldwide are pouring money into an industry

that allows them the freedom to escape from their everyday life

and that’s even before you consider the antidepressant revenue

generated by the pharmaceutical industry

or the underground illegal market of self-medicating substances.

There is a very human need represented in these statistics:

the need and/or great desire to psychologically escape.

I started off my college education training for a career in the entertainment industry

as a writer, actor, director and singer

but shortly after making my start into that world,

I had an epiphany that caused me to shift course a bit.

The epiphany I had came in the form of these questions:

What if instead of creating the perfect escape, we created a better reality?

Have we forgotten what we are escaping from

and that we have the ability to improve upon it?

What if we consciously shaped our society to be healthier and more enjoyable?

And as a result of these contemplations

here I am advocating a Resource-Based Economic Model.

[Applause]

I've titled this presentation:

'Moving from the Great Escape to an Improved Reality'

and I want to begin by posing this question to you, members of the audience...

(if we can... up the house lights just a tad for this one... thank you)

What comes to mind when I ask:

What do you enjoy escaping from?

Take a quick moment to reflect on your own circumstance

and consider what applies to you, personally

and of those answers that come to mind,

pick just one of those for a quick exercise.

Now that you have one in mind

(one of those things you enjoy escaping from)

similar to evaluating personal relationships

within a 'six degrees of separation' framework,

I’d like you to consider just how many 'degrees'

that problem you are thinking of, is from money:

either having money, needing money, or managing money,

a ‘degree’ being a relationship connection.

Now, raise your hand if money is three degrees or less

from what you are escaping from.

Keep your hands up only if it is two degrees or less from your problem.

Keep your hands up only if it is one degree away

or if money itself was part of what you were thinking of.

(quite a few)

You may notice that, just as in the well-known parlor game called

'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon',

when it comes to issues we’d like to escape from

money may be perceived as our 'Kevin Bacon'

[Laughter]

...which may give a whole new meaning to the phrase:

"bringing home the bacon."

[More chuckles]

This is not at all to suggest that money is “evil”

but rather to have you entertain the idea that money is a tool

used in our current exchange economy whose detriment

often outweighs the benefits of its use

both in work/reward scenarios and in a greater social context

when compared to what we can technically accomplish

using modern advancements in science and technology.

In our current market culture

money is considered a valuable commodity in and of itself,

in a market system where greater value is placed on scarce resources.

But consider this:

we can technically feed, clothe, and shelter every person on the planet Earth

at this point in human development.

Ways to meet those particular human needs

are not a mystery to humankind in the technical sense,

only in the monetary-economic sense of resource acquisition.

Now, you may have noticed that when I asked you about

the money in relation to your problem,

I didn’t just ask if needing money was related to your problem.

I also asked if having or managing money was related to your problem.

And some of you may be wondering: when is having money a problem?

especially when money can be used to purchase goods and services,

it would make our life easier!

Some people have even affectionately referred to money as “survival tickets”

and rightfully so.

So what can be problematic about having so many “survival tickets”?

This would be a great problem to have, no?

Let me start by recounting two quick stories.

I used to work for multimillion dollar investment bankers several years ago

and in this environment, one day

a financially-advantaged celebrity confided in me a secret.

He was looking particularly depressed and I asked him if he was feeling okay

and he responded by saying:

“Some people think my life is so easy, and in some ways it is,

but when it comes to relationships my life is especially difficult.

I never know if the person I am in a relationship with

is with me because they enjoy being with me for who I am

or because of what I can do for them.”

Fast forward two years later, I’m doing some freelance work

for a successful business owner who has made his fortune

in the financial services industry.

He discovers I volunteer for The Zeitgeist Movement

and becomes vaguely familiar with the model we advocate.

He says to me “I’ve been thinking about this Resource Based Economy

and Jen, I have to be honest with you:

I really like my stuff.

I worked so hard for it, and I really like my stuff.”

And I said “Well, you can keep your stuff. Nobody wants to take your stuff

in a RBE because they already have access to the best of what they need

but, let me ask you this: even with all your stuff,

how are your relationships since you made your fortune?”

Insert a long pause …

He says, “I think you got me there.

Now that you mention it I think I lost one of my best friends recently

because I’m doing so much better financially than she is

and our last conversation was really awkward.

She seemed so frustrated that I’m afraid she’ll never talk to me again.

Maybe that goes to show what kind of a friend she is,

but I don’t think there’d be an issue if she was also doing well financially

or if I wasn’t doing so much better than she is.”

With these examples and as we move on,

I want you to consider an underlying theme of social inequality

and the ways this inequality is ultimately costly to all of us

as individuals, and society.

I had a great grandmother who was known to say:

“If everyone swept their own porch, the whole town would be clean”...

this echoing the idea of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand of Free Market Capitalism,

suggesting that, if everyone simply motivates themselves to

care for their own needs as individuals, then society as a whole

will be automatically taken care of as if by an Invisible Hand.

Sounds easy enough, doesn't it?

However, if my great grandmother were alive today,

I might ask her how the simplistic porch-sweeping metaphor,

the one that suggests an equal amount of sweeping per household,

accounts for people born into homes with dirt porches

or people having to move to a home with a dirt porch

after a corporate workforce reduction.

What the Invisible Hand theory fails to acknowledge,

or fails to even seek out,

are the true root causes of social outcomes such as poverty,

crime, disease, drug addiction and environmental instability.

In a competitive market system there is

an inherent profit motive for creating and mass producing goods

as cheaply as possible.

The benefit may seem to serve the

cost-conscious consumer and the business owner alike

in a happy win-win scenario.

Where is the win when the product is nuclear energy

and the cost-conscious measure was a cheaply made and maintained

nuclear plant in Japan on the verge of a large scale technical failure

that threatens people’s lives and the general stability of planet’s ecosystem?

How expensive did cheap just get?

And who ultimately benefits from that?

No one.

This is the world we are living in now.

It’s not ponies and apples and bread and mittens and lanterns anymore,

and we need an updated system that is conscious of this

interconnection by design.

Money has been considered by the free-market advocates to be a great equalizer

probably because it does allow for far more flexibility of exchange than barter

but mostly because of the erroneous notion that money serves mankind

as a tool of equalizing democracy.

It is perceived that we are voting with our dollars and thus

directly forwarding the progress of the best goods and services for us

as individuals and thus also, all of humankind.

But here’s where that particular market system vision falls short of reality

and moves into the realm of mythology.

It presumes consumers start out

with the same amount of “votes" or money.

It presumes consumers are omniscient:

knowledgeable enough to always properly evaluate

what is best for them in the short and long term.

It presumes business owners and advertisers,

with huge profit reward incentive to mislead consumers,

would never actually do this.

It assumes the best possible quality is always a factor in a purchase decision

instead of perhaps quality relative to limited choices

that fit budget restrictions.

It assumes that the people who have made the most money in society

have rightfully earned it by

public purchase consent related to their high quality goods and services.

Unfortunately, as consumers in today’s monetary system,

our actual 'freedom of choice' is limited by our purchasing power.

There is no equalizing democracy with our money and

Adam’s Smith’s Invisible Hand is, in fact, so invisible

we cannot observe any evidence to support its existence.

[Applause]

As human beings, we start out with the same basic life needs:

biological and physiological needs, safety, belongingness and love needs,

self-esteem needs; the needs behind the things we hope money can buy us.

If we’re all motivated to alleviate and satiate these needs

and we all have a supposed 'equal opportunity' at doing so,

how is it that some end up accomplishing this easily

and some don’t accomplish it at all?

Are there cause and effect patterns that can be detected?

Are there conclusions that can be drawn from the feedback of these patterns?

Yes!

And here is where we move from the seeking a Great Escape from Reality

to consciously creating an Improved Reality.

These are characteristics of a Resource Based Economic Model.

(1) No Money or Market System,

not even a barter or exchange system in that sense.

Money is not a need, it’s merely a route to a need,

an abstraction conceived by men to presumably make life easier,

but we can move past that now.

(2) Automation of Labor: Machines doing the jobs that machines can do

freeing people to contribute to society in ways they enjoy contributing.

This places 'automation innovation' in a position favorable to humans

as opposed to the current one where technology replaces jobs.

(3) Technological Unification of Earth via a "Systems" Theory Approach

(4) Strategic Access in place of "Personal Property", for example:

you have access to the best of what you need when and where you need it

instead of everyone owning and storing individual goods.

(5) Self-Contained/Localized City and Production Systems.

(6) The Scientific Method as the Methodology for Governance.

The proven current best solutions are implemented instead of solutions

based on popular opinion of elected officials.

What I like most about this strategic access model

is that the reward for exploitation is removed,

offering no reward incentive to gain from exploiting another person.

But wait, wait, wait… not so fast, you may say:

what about the 'human nature' of competition?