Jacque Fresco: The Futurist Behind the Venus Project

A high school student near the bottom of his class became a self-taught American futurist, industrial designer, and self-proclaimed social engineer who lived to 101. This episode traces the evolution of a brilliant but uncompromising mind that pivoted from building better gadgets to trying to redesign human civilization from scratch.We follow how the artificial scarcity he witnessed during the Great Depression shaped his belief that society's problems could only be solved through a total redesign of global resource management.His 1916 Brooklyn birth to Sephardi Jewish immigrants and the Depression-era realization that food rotted while people starved due to broken economic rules.His rejected radical aircraft designs at Douglas Aircraft and his variable camber wing concept at Wright Field during World War II.The mass-producible Trend Home project, funded by Madman Muntz, that collapsed under federal housing bureaucracy.His wilderness years, including a psychology consulting business and controversial experiments joining Klan and white citizens groups to test environmental determinism.The 1985 founding of the Venus Project with Roxanne Meadows, its resource-based economy, and the Zeitgeist documentary that brought late-life fame.