Jacque: First of all, as a kid, when I was about 15 or 16,

I asked all those questions you're asking now.

I said to myself, "How can you make a world of uniformity,

bring all the nations together? Their social customs, their concept of God is different.

They may have 10 wives. You believe in one. How do you bring them together?"

And I said the most difficult three words in my life,

"I don't know."

I really didn't know. I said, "How can I do that?"

I said, "Don't try to design a global civilization

until you understand what you're talking about."

I got confused. I got into my own... Thinking is talking to yourself.

If I say, "I'll see you Saturday." "I'll take the kids... It means I can't see you."

It's talking to yourself, it's nothing magical.

I talked to myself and I said,

"How do you know your system will work? It sounds good on paper.

You sound like (it's my own language) a Utopian."

I got a book from the library years ago

and it was called "125 Utopias and Why They Failed."

To me, that was very important to read,

and I read that book and I came up with something slightly different.

I felt that... I had in my day a thing called a Victrola.

You wind it up and the record would play.

And I was thinking within those terms and my age... I'm 94,

I've seen so many changes that I couldn't accept the notion of Utopia.

If I designed a very good city that's the best I know up to now,

but I know that that new city would be a straight jacket to the kids of the future.

They'll design their own cities.

If you made a statue of me in front of that city, you hold back the future.

If you have a laptop, which I'm sure you may have...

A laptop is not the best that can be.

It's the best we know of up to now.

Ten years from now the laptop will be smaller, lighter, faster, everything.

You can't freeze anything, or you can't use the word Utopia because it assumes

you've delved on the ideal civilization. And to me that's ridiculous.

Anything I design can be surpassed.

Even in the history of my own work,

I keep changing things. I have no fixed notions.

Interviewer: All the visions of The Venus Project I've seen, they look beautiful.

They are stunningly well designed worlds.

But it seems like a lot of the people I've spoken to,

not yourself yet, I'm speaking to you now,

they see a world without greed, without fear, without murder,

without governments, without police forces, without investment bankers.

Jacque: How do attain that when there is such a thing as jealousy? Even a thing like that.

Interviewer: Or terrorism. Someone might want to blow up.

Jacque: Sure. I met many different people in my travels,

and I'll try to explain what jealousy is.

See, they don't define their terms. If you ask a particular person,

"What are your conclusions now, in life, that you're 70 years old?"

He says, "Well, I'm a nature lover. I believe in letting nature alone.

I think nature's a wonderful thing."

I say, "You mean you like hurricanes and earthquakes which kill thousands of people? That's nature too."

Being ruthlessly honest, there are some aspects of nature that preserve life and some that are dangerous.

A rattlesnake is natural. A cobra is natural.

And an earthquake is natural. Meteors falling on the earth is natural.

I'm not a nature accepter. There are some aspects of nature I like,

other aspects are detrimental to human beings.

When I meet a person who says, "I'm a nature lover,"

I say, "What do you mean by that?"

Another person says, "I'm spiritual."

I'm not sure what that means, so I say, "What do you mean by that?

Do you mean you have no locks on your door?

If you see a hungry person, you bring them into your house and feed them?"

"Oh, no."

I know that what they're talking about, they have no real clarification of the use of words.

And then I begin to get confused because I want to know

what the other person means when he says, "I believe in social design. I'm a socialist."

Or I meet another guy says, "I'm a communist."

I say, "How do you prevent corruption under communism?"

"I don't know."

I say, "How will you house the millions of people who need housing?"

"I don't know."

Then just say, "Tell me more about what you believe in." They have no information.

Then I met a friend of mine or an acquaintance, not really that close,

and he told me he was running for political office.

I said, "I'm so sorry to hear that."

He didn't get the message.

Of course he didn't get it. He said, "What do you mean by that?"

I said, "As politicians..." I've met many of them in Washington.

I said, "How would you stop cars from hitting each other?"

"I don't know."

"How would you increase the agricultural yield without exhausting the soil?"

"I don't know." "Well, what do you know about the physical world?"

"Well, I guess I'm not technical."

I said, "You understand that everything we have today:

your cameras, your car, your airplanes, your communications

are all technical. And a politician is not a technician.

I don't know what they can do. I really don't know what they understand."

I said, "When you fly in a commercial airliner today

you don't have to call the pilot and say, 'You've been flying at an angle. Straighten up.' "

He knows his business. The navigator knows how to get to where you're going.

And it's all done by some branch of technology.

Is technology the answer? No.

It was more answers than non-technology.

"Be good. Be kind." What do you mean by that?

To me it means that everyone should have access to a relevant education.

All people all over the world need clean air,

clean water, arable land, and a relevant education.

Relevant means no advertising, no lawyers, no business men, no investment bankers,

people that have the ability to make food grow, take care of physical injury.

Those are the real people. I don't know of any other kind of people.

But there are people called philosophers,

which sit back and meditate on their navel,

or go into a room and free their mind of all kinds of thought

and come up with wonderful answers: "What is needed in a world is peace and harmony."

"How do you attain that?" "I don't know."

I say, "You don't have a method of solving a problem."

They say, "I don't know what you're talking about, Jacque."

I said, "Well, if I had anything to do with it (with the running of a nation)

I would take down signs "Drive Carefully, Slippery When Wet".

I'd put abrasive in the highway so it's not slippery when wet.

There are other signs "School District. 14 mph."

The power output would be 14 mph.

So you can step on the gas all you want to.

And it says, "Danger. School children crossing."

I'd design a gadget that looks like this

and when a kid presses the button to cross the street, he can't go across

until the red light goes on and the pavement turns up like that,

like a cone. So no car can hit a kid.

That's how I say I care. I don't know what it means

"I believe in peace and harmony and goodwill."

I understand the language, but I know it has no backup.

The Venus Project differs from other projects in that when I said to myself,

"How are we going to change people?"

I said, "I don't know." So I joined the Ku Klux Klan.

Did you know about that? (Interviewer: No, I didn't.) In Miami.

And I dissolved it in a month and a half.

There were 32 members including the head guy.

After that I joined the White Citizen's Council. They hate foreigners.

I joined by identification. I identified with them.

But I always worked on their leader and I dissolved it in one month alone.

Then, when I came back to New York from California, I asked a lot of people,

"Well, who are the most backward people in the area?"

They said the Arabs. They said they still believed the earth is flat.

I said to myself, "I'm going to see if I can dissolve that group."

But before I did I found out who the leader was.

His name was Elbaz. I called him on the phone.

I said, "Elbaz, can I come and talk to you?" I know his dialect.

He said, "You are Arab?" That's the way he spoke.

I said, "Eah". It means "yes" in Arabic.

I speak many little bits of language, German, French, a little bit.

So, what I did is I asked Elbaz if I could see him.

He said, "From where your father he born?" I said, "Lebanon."

He said, "Come and saw me." Means, come and see me.

So he said to me... when I got to see him, alone,

"You believe the world he round?" I said "Yes." He went "Tsk-tsk."

In his country that means, that's ridiculous.

Then he held his hand up like this and he pointed to his head. I'm telling you exactly what he did.

He said, "If the world he round, man fall me down here.

All the water, he fall me down from the world."

He said to me, "You saw what I'm telling you?"

I said, "Eah."

So I gave him my balloon (I brought the balloon there)

and I rubbed it with fur real fast

and I put some corn flakes in his hand and told him to hold his hand

10 inches away from the balloon.

Do you know what happens with corn flakes if you rub it with fur? (Interviewer: I don't.)

Electrostatically, they move up and adhere to the balloon.

It's called static electricity.

His jaw hit the pavement after the corn flakes went all over the balloon. (Interviewer: And didn't fall off.)

He said, "World, he magnet?" I said, "Eah".

"Aah!" And he explained that to all the others. Interviewer: So, you showed him some evidence.

Jacque: It took an hour and a half and I turned them around.

You don't turn people around with logic. It doesn't work at all.

Interviewer: Evidence is what they like.

Jacque: Well, for him, what he considers evidence. Not what I consider evidence.

Then I thought, in the Bible it said, "Honor thy father and mother."

My mother was a racist and a bigot.

She hated foreigners, Japanese, Blacks... And I brought a Japanese kid home one day.

She said, "I don't want that kind around."

So I used reason, as a dummy.

I was a kid and I thought reason is the bridge. It didn't work at all.

So I said, "If you can't get to your mother you can't change the world."

Do you want to know how I changed the clan and my mother? (Interviewer: Sure.)

I befriended a guy named Lou Merlin, who was head of the clan in Miami of that group.

And he had a war surplus store. Do you know what that is?

Interviewer: Yeah, Army Navy store.

Jacque: I used to buy lenses.

And he said, "What do you do with this stuff you buy?"

I said, "Lou, you're welcome to come to my lab and see what I do with it."

And I did different optical devices.

And he said, "You're a smart guy. What do you think of the Klan?"

I said, "It's a great organization but it doesn't go far enough."

See, if you attack, it doesn't work.

He said, "What do you mean it doesn't go far enough?"

I said, "Lou..." After he visited my lab he respected me. And here's what he said,

"Will you come on down to the Klan and talk to our boys about what you're doing."

I said, "Lou, they wouldn't listen to me. You know."

He said, "I'll get them to listen to you. You're a smart guy."

I said, "Lou, if you can do that, that'd be fine."

So he said, "I want you to listen to this here Jacque. He knows what he's talking about."

Because he was impressed by things I showed him.

I can tell you what I showed him too, later on if you want to know.

Anyway, he said to me... After I talked to his guys a little while...

I tried to talk to them about animal training because they were interested in dogs. They hunt a lot.

So I showed them some films I did on a bunch of animals that I had trained

that sit at a table and I bring food there (It's real) and they eat it.

And I said, "Before I worked on animals, I worked on insects."

I paint formic acid on a tin can, put an ant on and the ant would follow the formic acid.

He never said, "Wait a while, I've been here before."

He never walked off unless I painted the formic acid off the can.

And then I know that most insects respond to sounds, chemicals, light.

Then I worked on animals. My greatest difficulty was snakes.

In conditioning snakes I didn't even know how to start. This was when I was a kid.

What I did is I put a black and brown mice in with the snakes,

and the snake would center his head and grab the mouse.