This article represents my own interpretation of the following ‘situations’. Keep that in mind. But not sure it could be otherwise though. If you take this article as “creating drama” then I can’t help you with anything. I am aware that the world became a drama of ‘confessions’, disputes, gossips, and so on, but for one I am not part of that world and I don’t care about it, and second: how else can I present my experience with TVP? Some people think that I did not cooperate with TVP, and others have no idea what went wrong because I never made my thoughts on this as ‘public’ so they project whatever they can about it – and TVP was completely silent almost as if TVPMagazine was swallowed by a black hole. Perhaps most don’t care, but I want to share some thoughts so that I may make things more clear and take this off my chest.
Very important: one thing I always found impossible was to project about individual people. Like I can’t say Emma, or Billy, or Jesus 🙂 are like that or like so, because people change their behavior a lot, they are too dynamic to define them in one way or another. Like everyone, I too used to have opinions about other people, but then I got confused because I was like: Coco is such a jackass and he likes to annoy people. But then, knowing Coco better, I realized that he is not always like that, and depending on the circumstances he can be a good guy who can listen to what you have to say. Therefore people are in one way or another depending on the circumstances they face, and so you can’t really summarize their behavior unless you observe them reacting to many situations. And even after that, it’s super hard to have any valid opinion since people can change. So if Coco is a jackass in general, then maybe in a week he will change and become a nice guy. SO, this article is not going to be about people, but about situations. I cannot know how Roxanne is, or anyone else around TVP, I can only let you know about some of my experiences with them, from my own perspective. This is super important if you understand it!
Let’s begin:
My experience with TVP left me with a mix of ‘feelings’. If you are in a relationship (married or whatever) for 3-4 years or more and you break apart, then it is nearly impossible to explain to others what went wrong. Sometimes you might be bothered by how your partner responds to your questions, sometimes you feel like you are ignored, at times the partner’s attitude annoys you, and so forth. It is a journey of moments and the cumulation of it all leads to the break up. That’s how I feel about me and TVP and this is why it is so hard to try and explain what lead to the break up of TVPMagazine (and me overall) and TVP. I mainly felt that TVP was always distant from TVPM, never embracing the project, but mainly seeing it as its ‘little brother’ or ‘cousin’, or later on a ‘distant relative’ (or perhaps forgotten relative).
I’ve been focusing on TVP-like subject many years before knowing about TVP. I had a blog where I was writing about all kinds of similar subjects to TVP: beauty, abundance, monetary system, technology, human behavior, etc..I always ‘hated’ this world seeing how my parents struggle to survive, drowning in huge debts, and others in the world in the same situation. Once I came across TVP through the “Future by Design” documentary and later on Zeitgeist, I realized that a more organized set of solutions for today’s problems is already out there and I thought to help out. So, I contacted TVP multiple times around 2009-2010 offering to make videos, articles, or help with the website. No one got back to me. Later on I worked alone to make a huge series of videos explaining the problems of today’s world and solutions to solve them – they were based on my blog’s articles. I did that because I felt like TVP or TZM were extremely unorganized and no one would understand their direction very well, unless they made a huge presentation of their views: through a huge book, video series, or whatever. The problem was that I was broke and in college. I had a shitty computer and no one to support my views of the world. But I managed to make that series of videos after a long journey that put me through a ton of stress, argues and fights with the others around me, and so on.
That video series was called “TROM: The Reality of Me” because I knew that it was a worldview (a presentation) from my own perspective, my own interpretation, the way that I saw the world. After a year of work and minus 50 Euros budget, I released it and it made a substantial impact online (at least from what I expected before the release). I got hundreds, if not thousands of emails from people saying how much they loved it. I even made a fundraising campaign at the request of other people to raise money to buy a new computer to make TROM again with better voice overs (for the original one I used a text-to-speech at that time since I could not record any voice), and have a proofread script (my main language is Romanian so I had to translate the original TROM into English and I didn’t do a great job at that). I worked for almost another year and made it. So, a two years experience working for free (and mainly alone) on a humongous documentary.
Side note: my family was a ‘normal’ family financially speaking, but normal from Romania means very poor on a worldwide scale. They were full of debts and working like slaves in Spain. Once I went to Spain and saw my father who looked like a skeleton because of so much work, I got scared that things are going from bad to worse, and that was also a reason to make TROM, to ‘scream’ somehow at how fucked up the world is and how many solutions there are.
Ok. Until that moment when I re-created TROM, I worked 100% alone. I made the original tromsite, or any website I needed; I wrote articles, did research for them, translated them, edited videos and audio files, etc.. Now, after the fundraiser for the new computer, I got to work with a few awesome people who recorded voices for TROM, proofread the script, or made the main website better. All of them helped for free. We worked very well together and I was so impressed by that.
After making TROM I contacted TVP again, multiple times, and propose to them to use TROM (or any part of it) as their own stuff/material if they want to. Never got any reply. Somehow I ended up working with them for their Paradise or Oblivion website later on (don’t remember how I go into that), then after other such ‘projects’ for them (providing help here and there), around 2013 I proposed to them to let me manage tvpmagazine.com (that was their blog-like website at that time, with 96% of articles as copy paste from other sources) because I wanted to make TVP a much more detailed set of ideas. I thought that they lacked the details, and I wanted to help bring them to the project. I demoed the new magazine format that I made to Roxanne (something entirely different than a simple blog), she loved it, and I ended up volunteering to work for some 8 months for the magazine.
Stop for a moment. Please understand that all that I’ve done (my main blog, TROM, websites for TVP or other stuff, TVPMagazine, VideoNeat.com and so many other projects of my own that reached many thousands of people every month) I made them for free. 100% free. No ads, no nothing. Just free. Because of that I had to suffer a lot. Argues with my parents, a ton of stress, and so forth. My family was always poor, mainly living to work to live. And I was financially dependent on them but not making any money myself, so you can see how this situation was stressful for all of us.
Ok. So I reached a point where I could not work without a financial support anymore. Roxanne tried to financially help the magazine here and there, but I needed a steady help to keep on making the magazine.
Another stop. Please understand that I never did anything for money, because I never considered money as important. For me what I do is important and I never wanted to think about money. I can’t emphasize on that enough, but I suppose that making TROM, VideoNeat, other stuff for TVP including the magazine, all for free, are a testimony that I am never seeking for financial gain, only trying to get the basic financial help to allow me to do important projects. So I only need money to be able to keep on doing these projects.
Ok. So I told Roxanne that we need to do a campaign to raise money for me and Ray (who proofread the magazine) to work for a full year for the magazine. Mind you, the work was intense. 6-8 hours a day. No weekends, no holidays. She agreed. We made the campaign. We raised the money. Huge surprise for me! First time that I ever made any money to support myself. I was so happy I can’t describe it, because I knew that now I can focus on the magazine and there will be no more stress for me. I asked as much as to cover my and Ray’s needs for a year. We kept our promise and made the magazine for a year. We grew it. I made a website and created other tools for it (something not included in the campaign as ‘to do” things). The articles became more complex and we increased the reach. The following year we did another campaign and we raised the money and the third year we continued with Patreon (a monthly fundraiser). Every time we discussed with Roxanne about these campaigns, so that she would agree for us to make them and how much money to ask. Financially I was still in a struggle because having money for only the basic needs is not enough. Sometimes you need medicine, clothes, or who knows what, and I rarely had money for those. But it was much better than before. Much, much better! When you do something that you love doing, you don’t care about buying stuff, you care about having the money to keep on doing that what you love. However, for the past year we only got half of the financial support from Patreon and that made the project unsustainable, but the reason for that lack of support has to do with TVP’s attitude towards the magazine as I will explain, and this attitude of them made me want to move away from TVP regardless if we got the entire financial support or not.
In all of this time of managing TVPM (3 years) I felt like the magazine was becoming bigger, better, and more known, but I always felt like it was not part of TVP, despite Roxanne and Jacque being super excited about the project for the first 2 years or so. I felt like it was only TVP’s ‘cool’ project. Like: “Oh, look guys, we have a magazine.” I thought that if we present scientific and well-made articles, they could be part of TVP. Instead of providing simple answers and unsourced ones to people’s questions (see their FAQ), TVP should have used our articles as answers when necessary. How can we automate the world? We had a 260 pages TVPM ebook for that. How can people work without being motivated by money? We had a well-sourced TVPM article on that. How does TVP compare with other systems like socialism or communism? We had a 370 pages TVPM ebook that is very well sourced, unlike an answer of two sentences long based on a wrong interpretation of communism or socialism, or any such ideas, that TVP provides through their FAQ page.
So it felt like TVP would not incorporate any new ideas into itself. Regardless if those ideas were verifiable or beneficial to the project. I also experienced many weird, nonsensical, and surprising events/situations with TVP, Roxanne, and its teams. I was dragged into endless teams and lists, I came across some very ‘rude’ and egocentric responses from TVP people (I also felt like those managing TVP’s projects knew so little about what they were doing) – not saying all were like that at all, but some were; I saw how TVP is paranoid about people stealing their stuff (photos, videos, whatever) and it looked to me like they spent so much time fighting those who used their materials without their approval, and little to no time encouraging those who wanted to help them. They were like a full blown company from my perspective, from the way they ran the project, to their attitudes. For example I had to sign some papers for whatever reason, to be able to help them out. If TVP smelled like a new and futuristic society from outside, from the inside it smelled like an old library to me. I am sorry but that’s how I felt, to be honest. It is the best way to describe it. But I wanted to bring on some perfume, to try and renovate the walls, and make the books from the library as digital and more accessible to everyone. You can see more details at the bottom of this article about my attempts to revamp (renew) TVP (in my own view and with my own skills), so for now let me talk about the recent events.
Important: make the distinction now between TVP as an idea (rbe, circular cities, a world of abundance, etc.) and TVP as people (Roxanne, Jacque, and their teams). I think TVP is a great set of ideas, not that original in my view and not very detailed, but nevertheless awesome stuff and important!, but TVP people seem to reflect something else from my experience with some of them – the way TVP is organized as an “organization” looked to me way too rocky, unprepared, unorganized, and highly inefficient.
To keep in mind: in the first 2 years or so of the magazine Roxanne was very happy with it. She tried to help us financially when she could; she trusted us over other people when it came to posting stuff on social networks and so forth. We collaborated more than not and you can see that in the emails I attached bellow. I still found them to be paranoid about their stuff, very closed to new and different ideas, and so forth – maybe that’s just my projection, but that’s how it looked to me. But overall we had a good relationship. Though, again, I didn’t see them use the magazine very much, if at all.
So. For the past year or so, TVPM and TVP relationship became colder and colder, to the point of freezing. I always complained to a few close friends about how TVP is run and how it ignores the magazine or about the ridiculous situations I’ve been dragged into over the years, but never online to anyone, except mentioning these to Roxanne multiple times over the years (and at times to their teams when necessary), but it was like talking towards the sky as nothing improved. This is why for someone from outside it looked like I and TVP had a great relationship, because I tried working with TVP to solve these issues and not making them ‘public’, but after 3-4 years of trying to establish an effective communication path with them, it was enough for me as this attitude didn’t help much at all.
So recently (past year – 2016) they tried to reorganize TVP (again, as they tried that multiple times in the past…) and they took all kinds of decisions behind my back that affected the magazine, and because of that we lost several thousand readers and/or the opportunity to reach more. This made us lose exposure and financial support. I told Roxanne multiple times that their attitude will kill this project eventually, but she did not listen or did anything about it. In May 2016 I started to feel sick and despite going to the hospital more times than I went in my entire life, no test could figure out what I had. Severe indigestion, abdominal pains, fever, chills, lost lots of weight, and so forth (you can read more details here). I struggled with this for 2-3 months. Interestingly in the same period of time the stress with TVP was at the highest peaks. This was the time they cut us off from the Newsletter, they told me that they won’t allow us to post on their social network anymore, they delayed the release of a super important book “The Money Game and Beyond” (370 pages) for which I worked months to finish and they delayed it because of their Choice is Ours documentary in a very unfriendly way (they didn’t even bother to reply to my emails and tell me what is going on….so I was left in limbo some 1-2 months), and sooo on. They blocked us everywhere out of a sudden in a situation in which we were trying to maintain this project with 50% of the financial support we needed. All of that because of NO reason at all. Only their projections as to how they can run TVP as a company (their words) in a better way, and they decided TVPM will not be part of their plan that much. You will see more details at the end of this article.
SO. Since the only explanation for my health issues was the stress as doctors suggested (especially the seborrheic dermatitis that appeared on my face and for which there is no treatment so I have to deal with this for the rest of my life – it is thought this is created by stress and at least intensified by it and I can confirm that this is the case) I said that I won’t swallow TVP’s stupidity anymore. It was enough for me because the cumulation of stressful situations with them was affecting me physically and in a very bad way that I never thought it could.
STOP. Read! It would be beyond ridiculous to accuse TVP of this, I only accuse myself because I tried to be so patient and helpful with some people who were not willing to change or listen, and I swallowed so many ridiculous situations making me stressed inside.
So after this period of time, I became more vocal and I proposed to Roxanne several ideas to make TVPM financially sustainable (you will see the details bellow), or to make them understand the unnecessary roadblocks they put to the project. I was mainly ignored, if not entirely, yet again. So recently, after some discussions, Roxanne and a few people close to her accused me of not collaborating with TVP for the past years, not taking their suggestions into account, even went so far as to accuse me that I asked money from their own supporters for myself. And Roxanne took the decission to disolve TVPM entirely. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say.
You need to understand the following:
– I never published something for TVPM (articles, design, etc.) that was not approved by Jacque and Roxanne. They had to approve everything before going public. They had full control over the magazine. I even sent the quiz, or news module we had on tvpmagazine.com for review before making them public.
– I always cooperated with Roxanne and took her suggestions into account. You can see most of the emails between me and Roxanne here (emails about TVPM articles). Decide for yourself if I collaborated or not.
– I was always nice to everyone and always tried to find solutions to our differences or issues. See this example with the newsletter situation in which some people around TVP didn’t take my suggestions into account and because of their actions we lost 80-90% of the readers that came from the newsletter. I proposed a solution and to help with implementing my approach to not lose so many subscribers, but I was ignored, and in a very unfriendly manner. In my experience this attitude was always present in many of TVP’s project coordinators or people close to TVP. Multiply these situations and you can see how this can become stressful. Therefore I always looked for solutions and most of the time I was ‘rejected’ in very unfriendly manners.
– I never asked Roxanne to help the magazine financially. She helped a few times because she wanted to, but we were primarily (or entirely) supported by our readers. I never publicly asked money for TVPM if that wasn’t approved by Roxanne first.
– They put so many roadblocks for the magazine for the past year that they made it unsustainable. For the past year we were not added to TVP’s website as a TVP project, or to blog/news when we released a new issue, we were not allowed to send a separate newsletter for the magazine anymore, and I was told they won’t let us post TVPM memes on their social networks in the near future. All of that for no real reason at all. I asked, I got some answers that were assumptions (like they said companies only send 1 newsletter a month so they should do the same and remove the TVPM one), but more often than not I got no answers at all – a complete mystery to me. We lost more than 50% of our total readers because of that. We were unable to ask for more financial support (they didn’t want that), and overall they did not use the magazine (not recommending it to TVP supporters, not using it to correct or improve TVP, not mentioning it in interviews, and so forth); so they left us without options.
– Lately they accused me of asking money for myself from TVP’s supporters and that I did not cooperate with them very well, despite all of the above, which was extremely strange. Also, they always forgot that the money was split 60% me and 40% Ray (they only accused me of asking money for myself); on top of that I also spent tons of money on hosting, domain, plugins, and so many other stuff for tvpmagazine.com. Plus I never made any fundraising campaign without it being approved by Roxanne first. So keep that in mind.
This is one of Roxanne’s last emails to me:
“ Tio,
I want to set up new guidelines for TVPMagazine.
Since I we really do not have any input with the articles you are doing as you have many times rejected what input we gave you and since then we do not make any suggestions because there has been too much resistance when suggestions were given, that it has now become your private venture that you are asking money for from our supporter and under TVP name. Because of this we are asking that you do not use The Venus Project name any more with the magazine you are producing. It is best that you do your own thing as it has been that for quite a while. Also we ask that you set up your own advertising on your own Facebook and do not use our Facebook for that any longer. “
This is what Roxanne said only 5-6 months previous to that email, addressing Filip’s comments about TVPM not representing TVP (Filip was in charge of many TVP projects – including the main website):
“Fil I need to talk with you about what you are doing with Tio and the magazine. Both Jacque and I think he does a lot of good to help people understand this direction. He did it in his own way but this is fine. Tio doesn’t have to have that many advertising, but Jacque and I feel he does a good job with the magazine and it is important. I am sorry Fil but TVPMagazine represents TVP. It is his way of describing it but that was ok with both me and Jacque. All people will interpret different aspects their own way – even you. This is only what everyone can do is to describe it as they understand it and Tio does a good service to help others understand certain aspects of Jacque’s work and this direction. Jacque would like TVPMagazing to be listed on our website as a project that TVP endorses. He always wanted that. Jacque and I want to support TVPMagazine. Jacque would like Tio to be able to send a separate news letter for the magazine whenever it is issued even if it does not come out the first of the month. Jacque feels strongly about that and wants to support the magazine. That is the bottom line.“
So what happened in that 5-6 months timeframe for Roxanne to change her attitude that much? I was very sick (as I said) and Ray had to take care of his mother who went through 2 lung cancer surgeries, so we didn’t even release a new issue in 2-3 months time because of these, therefore fewer opportunities for ‘conflict’ because of that. We only released one issue in that timeframe. An article about Luke’s journey across America to spread the word about TVP, and one article on Language that was scientifically accurate presenting how the written language came into existence and how it works today across many languages, and that was part of a series that I explained to Roxanne as follows:
“ This will become a book, and I think it will be massive but the subject is too complex and people need a brain enema for this subject because it is a religion to most. This first part is huge, and I had more written but I don’t want to overkill with it. When you review it keep in mind that this is only the introduction to the subject, to learn how languages of the world work. It will be crucial for the next parts when we explore mathematics, chemistry, biology, sign language, body language, and then how we can invent a better language.
I went into details here and there because I think that we can’t explain language without exemplifying. The next part will be about the religiosity of language, the context (as I understand now it is the most important aspect of language), looking at new attempts to invent a new language, and more. So the journey is big, fun, and really interesting I say. “
Roxanne said Jacque couldn’t read the entire article, and she reached her saturation with it….We talked a bit about it and in the end she decided that I can publish it. As I remember (since we talked over skype messages and not email and I do not have that conversation anymore) she only said that I could have made the article smaller and that Jacque’s old ‘lectures’ are better. I asked if Jacque’s lectures are about the history of the written language and so forth (what the article was all about), but as usual Roxanne decided to not follow up on the discussion, as she did so many times in the past. I told her that I know about those lectures (I listened to them many times) and I will address some points form there in the next parts of this series as this one is specifically about the written language. From what I can tell they really do not understand language if they could not see such an article as important. You can read it for yourself to decide if this article is important or not, and you can also read the explanation I gave to Roxanne to make sure they understand what this article is all about:
“ Haven’t heard from you since I’ve sent you an email about our meeting (with Filip).
Anyways, the next TVPM is ready but let me explain a little the article on Language that you and Jacque didn’t regard as that important or well done, because I think I failed to explain what I aim to explain with this series:
1. I am trying to first clean people’s heads of language as a religion because in my experience people go crazy when it comes to language – we too at the magazine got a few emails and comments from people being so repealed by ‘grammatical errors’ that we’ve made. So with this first part I wanted to “destroy” this confidence that most people have, and this “trust” in language so that people understand it is not a well thought “thing” but a chaotic and nonsensical one, so they are prepared for changes in language/communication. But in my view this takes a lot of time to do since we’ve all learned “grammar” and language in this erroneous way in schools for 12+ years. It is an ingrained “religion” in most brains.
2. I want to prepare people for the next parts where we explain the most important aspect of any language (I think), and that’s the CONTEXT. The words and syntax, grammar and so on, make little to absolutely no difference. Everything relies in the context. So in this first part I wanted to show how many different grammars are out there, yet in the next I will point that regardless of grammar, human behavior and how we communicate is mainly (if not entirely) created by the environment (the culture – context). In short: it does not make any difference if you speak Chinese or English, you will end up hating black people or understand the world in certain ways due to the environment. Both a Chinese and American can share similar values if they share similar environments, regardless of what language they know.
3. This prepares me to explain to people that if we want a better language with better communication we should first focus on the context, so the saner the context (the society) the better we can communicate regardless of the language. I too use the “sun rises” saying, but I understand a completely different thing from my mother, even if we use the same sentence. The difference relies in the context (what I know about the Sun and how the Earth spins around it). So a society like TVP, I will emphasize, is crucial for a better language/communication.
4. On top of all these I will explain languages like maths, chemistry, programming language, etc., showcasing how those languages are less subject to interpretation (or not at all), not because of the language they use, but because the context there is based on either physical references or just because that context is “respected” by those involved in those fields and so the way they communicate it is an “agreed upon” manner of communication. In other words doctors use many of the words we use on a daily basis but between them these words can mean very different and universal things: from the word “theory” to “heart”.
Hopefully it makes more sense now. I want to explain this very very well in this series but I need to go into details or else there will be no “contexT” for people to get it. 😉
Also, the design for the language series may rely a lot on the words themselves being “designed”, highlighted, so less images there. Anyways, if you want me to change or add anything to the design let me know, if not we can release tomorrow. Let me know if we can send a newsletter for the magazine (I suppose not) or if we can post it on the TVP’s News section.“
I don’t remember for Roxanne to ever reply to that email, and Gmail history agrees with that.
So if that’s what bothered them, this article on language, then they failed to communicate it with me and propose changes. However, they approved it for publishing, don’t forget that. Regardless, this is not something Roxanne said in that last email when she accused me to not cooperate with them for “quite a while”, right?
I tried to talk to Roxanne about these issues with the magazine, the roadblocks they put to it, I offered all kinds of solutions, but she wasn’t keen about any of them, except when I proposed that we should better move apart if we are in this situation because what is the point in having a TVP magazine when TVP ignores it completely. Even if Roxanne would add the mag on TVP website right now, and take off those roadblocks, and we will be 100% supported financially, I would not continue with TVP because of so many other reasons that I will detail bellow. However please keep in mind that was Roxanne who finally decided to move apart as that email confirms, not me! I was still trying to find solutions when she slapped me with that email out of nowhere.
I am not ‘upset’ at TVP, I just think they do not know how to manage their project and waste people’s energy and motivation, and theirs too. And this article is pointing these flaws so that others are aware of them, and hopefully someone can fix TVP in that regards.
The main two reasons of why I became more vocal about such things are:
1. Because the stress caused by TVP over the years caused me or intensified many health issues recently that will affect me for the years to come, and I do not want to keep on swallowing stressful situations to make my health worse, so I want to spill them out to not affect me anymore.
2. I want for others to know about my experience with TVP since I kept many ridiculous situations for myself and people wrongly assume that TVP is what they see in “public”. In my experience TVP is very unorganized and interestingly the ‘wrongest’ people end up managing stuff for TVP – and in that sense TVP shots itself in the foot multiple times until it will no longer be able to stand up.
Here you can find all emails between me and Roxane for the past year if you are interested – so that you get the full context of our relationship for the past year and don’t project that I cherry picked stuff to make TVP look bad. These do not include the discussions about TVPM articles that I linked above. As you will see again in these emails Roxanne didn’t follow up on several of my emails/ideas, and this became frustrating in time for me as I felt like talking to myself.
So, here are many of such situations that made me so stressed because of TVP, and these situations led to this break-up (I will add more in time) – this is, of course, my side of the story, but many such situations are based on notes that I took while they were happening, as I was amazed at the ridiculosity of them all, and I also didn’t want to get stressed so much and “letting them out” (writing them down) helped me in that sense:
If these will bore you to death I will resume them as such: I tried to help TVP build a better website for example (their main website), multiple times, because their website was always very poorly made. I make websites for more than 10 years now, I demoed to TVP 3 or so functional websites and fully designed one at the request of Roxanne. All of those for nothing – lost time of my life, many months of wasted work. I tried to help with making videos, I wrote a script for their movie, I suggested many solutions for many of their teams (marketing, social networks, webdev, media team) and I don’t remember for anyone to ever listen much at all – and even if they seemed to listen, nothing happened; I proposed a new financing model for TVP to increase their revenue and also make their stuff cheaper for more to afford them, and I was ignored by Roxanne even if I tried to propose this change in detail; I always tried to come up with ideas, suggestions, and solutions, and almost every time their responses were either none at all, or super slow and fading out into the abyss. Interestingly I continued and continue to make websites (see tromsite.com, videoneat.com, tiotrom.com), videos (TROM Documentary, TROM Series), and manage a big project like TROM and teams for TROM. So I do stuff, I’m not merely talking. I can, and I do stuff. Though that wasn’t possible working with TVP. Unfortunately!
The following are random ‘events’ and the only reason I tried to provide details is for you to try and put in my shoes when I tried desperately to help TVP with so many things and my time was wasted.
Make sure you click all tabs bellow:
A year or so ago I and a friend worked like crazy to take all of the youtube adn vimeo videos with TVP (interviews, tours, press conferences, etc.) and coalesced them all into a single youtube channel here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyywXrIYhdOXsiRh_n1h6ag/playlists
My friend had to merge many such clips into one as many were uploaded in parts on youtube, changed the resolution for some, and so forth. So he worked a lot. He had nothing to do with TVP teams yet he helped doing this massive task in only 1-2 weeks or so – something I know many TVP teams tried to do for years. Since no one cared, he lost his interest like almost everyone I knew trying to help TVP, did. We shared this with TVP, Roxanne, and its teams several times, but from what I can tell no one was that interested or took advantage of it.
So, another failed attempt to organize TVP…
This book was the most interesting to write and deal with and I’ll briefly summarize why. But also a very important book that now stands at the core of TROM project (of course after I removed the TVP footprint from it as I will explain in a bit).
TVP’s main proposal is to move to a different kind of system than today’s monetary system. But I think that proposing to change the monetary system you should explain in detail why the monetary system doesn’t work and why your alternative is better. And because I never came across this kind of explanation from TVP I said to take the challenge and explain how the monetary system works (and what it is) and how it differs from TVP.
First part was about how the monetary system works and Roxanne and Jacque thought it was an excellent article, though they missed some key errors in the article about how money is created, errors spotted by Ray while reviewing the article one more time. Anyways, the next parts were very interested. Here’s why:
TVP always promoted its ideas as bold, new, nothing like other systems that were before like communism or socialism, and so on. I never cared about TVP being original or not, that’s not the point when what you seem to want is to help the world, right? But while researching for what ideas were proposed for the past 200 or so years in regards to organizing societies, I quickly realized that socialism and communism were so similar to TVP. They too proposed no social classes, no leaders, no private property and money, no countries, even went as far as saying that people should have more leisure time and let the machines do more of the work. They talk a bit about family values and how the infrastructure should be built in a way that changes people’s behavior because as they said behavior is created by the environment….and so much more. I said, hold on….TVP doesn’t shy away from slapping communism when they have the opportunity, saying that it is nothing like TVP as it has armies and police, leader, uses money, and so forth. And this made me question TVP’s ability to know stuff. How can they be so wrong about a subject that so many are question TVP about? And is no wonder why they are questioning how TVP differs from communism knowing these.
I too was one of the TVP’s ‘evangelists’ who said like a broken record to those people who were wondering about the difference between TVP and communism, that TVP is different because “communism uses money, has armies, leaders,…”. And I was so wrong because I took TVP for granted in that aspect.
In TVP’s defense, they are right about the communism that was being applied to various tribes for the past 100 years, like China, Romania, and so on, as these stole the original ideas of communism, but only applied the name to themselves. But is like a self sustainable community will call itself TVP, being inspired by TVP, yet not projecting TVP’s values…I bet TVP would sue them! 🙂 – In that regards Karl Marx would sue TVP by misrepresenting communism. 🙂
Ok, so I got stuck while researching these ideas like communism and socialism because I was starting to doubt TVP – its ability to know, its ‘egocentrism’, its ‘evangelism’. Am I the only one to take the hat off my eyes and see where TVP was wrong?
Let me be clear, I give no fucks that TVP is similar to communism, but why hide that? Or why not be aware of that when so many tell you so? Are you really so blinded by following TVP that you can’t accept any criticism, you TVP activist or whatever you are? And if you, whoever you are (R&J). TVPActivist, or TVPFollower) got this one wrong because you just listened to TVP, how many other information did you get wrong just because TVP told you!? Research for yourself never blindly follow anyone!
Anyways! I presented communism and socialism and a few other ideas for what they were, sent that part of the book to Roxanne, and she didn’t react that much to it except saying that we need to present solutions and not leave people in mid air with this part. So for one, why didn’t she say anything about the similarity between TVP and the others? And second this was a presentation of history and I told her the next part will be about presenting TVP as a solution, but I sent her a big email asking her about why they misinterpreted communism and socialism as such on their website and in general. I kindly suggested to them that they can make things more clear and say that communism was a great set of ideas but the implementation of it was a totally different thing, or something along these lines. I got no reply….
I didn’t insist with this because at this point I was very accustomed with TVP ignoring what they found uncomfortable to answer.
I wish that was it all, but not!
In the second part of the book I presented other such ideas of organizing society: Metabolism in Japan, Bucky Fuller, Technocracy, project Cybersyn, and so forth. And guess what….even more similarities with TVP: from the infrastructure (cities in the sea, modular buildings, dome homes, etc.) to ideals (let the society be run by computers not humans, let scientists decide not politicians, let’s alleviate conflicts by making cities in the sea, let’s use dome shaped homes because are easy to build and efficient, automation is replacing jobs and we need a restructuration of society, etc.). It was almost like TVP copied all of these ideas and put them into one.
Again, keep in mind, I give no fucks about this! as it matters if these ideas are valid and how we can apply them for creating a better society, but TVP is quite annoyed when people try to measure it against any such ideas, yet they are very similar. So similar that after writing this part and arriving at presenting TVP, I did not know what to say about TVP being different from all of these….I went through 2-3 weeks of complete confusion because of this. I wanted to give up at finishing this book because I just could not finish it up with TVP being “so bold and different”.
I contacted Roxanne and asked to send me everything they have about TVP, any materials. She told me to read The Best that Money Can’t Buy, that I have read many times…I said I want more, I want to make a biography of Jacque, what inspired him, what is the research based upon, and so forth. I asked them to have a chat over skype with me as I have some questions for them, if not let’s do it by email. Roxanne briefly said she does not have the time. 🙁
So I had to basically think of TVP in terms of TVPM and say that we have a way more detailed plan than the others, due to the many TVPM books that I wrote. And then go with the faith and say that Jacque has the blueprints (I have no idea if that’s true or how relevant they are) and that he is so knowledgeable. Sure Jacque may have way more designs than the others, and goes in more details here and there, but fundamentally TVP is not different from the other systems that I presented in that book, at least from what I found online about TVP, and I saw all of the interviews and lectures and read everything (I think) multiple times.
As an example of forcing TVP into the picture through TVPM: what I think the other ideas lacked was to define what they mean by “abundance” when they proposed it, and I said that TVP does a great deal in doing that. However that was true for TVPM, not TVP. But since I considered both as one, then I saw TVP different in that regards. Or when I said that compared to the others TVP is very active today producing many new materials to explore solutions for today’s world, but that was true because of the magazine primarily. What new stuff did TVP produce for the past 10 years?
Again, please understand that I do not care about who said something first, but TVP does and TVP wanted for me to present IT as the solution. But they did not force me to write those things, and I didn’t lie, but I forced TVP into the picture assuming they have the blueprints, assuming Jacque indeed made experiments to prove TVP’s concepts, and assuming TVPM was TVP.
TVP is a great set of ideas regardless of who inspired or not Jacque. And for the last time I give no fucks about this, but I strongly think TVP gives lots of fucks and that’s sad and weird.
Roxanne thought I didn’t present TVP very well in this last part of the book and I asked her for details on that – but it is ironic since (remember) I asked them to spend a few hours and answer me a few questions about TVP and send me everything they have about the project and they refused. I managed to contact the representative of Technocracy and ask him several questions, but wasn’t able to contact TVP for that for their own magazine. Ridiculous. They did approve all the book for publishing though.
One more thing. Roxanne was very vocal about the second part of the book (with communism and socialism) because I didn’t present TVP as a solution and I left people in mid air as she said. Then I promised her the next part will be about this, but I realized I need to present the other ideas as well like Technocracy and so forth, so I realized that we need another part before the solution one. But I said ok, I promised to Roxanne that the next part will include the solutions, so I worked in one month to write 2 huge parts, one containing the solutions. I worked in a month as much as I would have worked in two. So exhausting. Then sent the issue for approval and proofreading and TVP forgot about me for almost 2 months….I was sending emails and messages like crazy, and no responses….I thought they were kidnapped by aliens or the government :)). But it was super frustrating for me because I worked like crazy to speed up the release becasue Roxanne wanted that, and now they were nowhere to found. Later on I found out from them that they were busy with their new The Choice is Ours documentary….but why in the freakin’ world didn’t they tell me that sooner!?
Can you imagine building a super important book (370 pages) in this situation that I just described, then when to release it to be ignored in such a way!? If people wonder why I don’t want to work with TVP anymore, here’s my answer.
Nevertheless the book was very well sourced, very accurate, and super important, despite forcing TVP into the picture. Now I removed TVP from there and made the book better. You can find it at TROMsite.com.
Oh, I almost forgot. After they got back to me and we managed to release the book I wanted to send a newsletter as we did thus far, and I talked with one of the guys in charge with TVP’s website. He said that we need to make a responsive template for TVPM to send newsletter. I and another friend worked on that quickly and in 1 day we made the template. We sent it to the guy. The guy was like: it’s all good. Then in a few hours the guy was like: the other guy (Filip) 🙂 said “It’s not going to happen.” So we were not allowed by Filip to send a newsletter for the magazine with the new book because apparently they changed that in the meantime and decided without consulting with me, that they will only send a monthly newsletter, and not one for TVPM when we release an issue. Trying to talk to Filip he said that TVPM is my project and does not represent TVP. He compared us with TZM. Roxanne sent him an email completely disagreeing with him….but as you can see these are the situations I had to face all the time. More to this, when I asked to publish the magazine to their blog/news so that visitors know about the release, it was complete silence…even when I propose that I’ll do it myself if I have access to the website. Silence….as always. Ignored.
One more (I promise): I eventually accepted the one newsletter per month idea. They asked me for a short text to present the TVPM book in the monthly newsletter. I made the text, it was proofread by Ray. Two small paragraphs. They decided to shorten it without consulting with me, removed a short sentence where we mentioned the huge quiz (hundreds of questions) that we just released, and sent the newsletter. Nice folks…
For the past years I’ve been trying to promote TVPM by making original memes for and from our articles. I posted 3-4 images or more a day, every day for the past years. I’ve been through a plethora of stupid situation here as well, let me briefly mention them:
At one point I’ve been told by the TVP’s social media manager (SMM) that I post too many photos and it is an overkill. I asked why he/she thinks that and he/she gave no answer. Later on he/she concluded that we must post a lot of posts a day because that’s what major FB pages do. What!? Form that to this!? And based on what!? Ironically I ended up telling her/him to not post 3-4 posts in 10 minutes interval because he/she started to do that and as I showed her/him the engagement for these posts is always very low. So he/she was the “manager” but he/she had no clue about managing a social network it seems, changing her mind 180 degrees in a matter of weeks. That’s a brief example of the many moments that I had to face and that consumed me bit by bit.
At one point I made an article for TVPM explaining how social media works with a focus on FB (I did my research, and I exported tons of statistics from TVP FB page for accuracy) yet when I asked her/him to contribute and review that article and learn from it I was, again, wait for it, ignored. That article could have been extremely important for anyone trying to manage Facebook pages yet I doubt it was ever used by anyone who tried to manage the TVP FB’s page. So even if I made an article that was helpful for the Social Media, the TVP’s social media was….well, in a coma.
Speaking of that article I did about FB showcasing how FB is a business and a ‘scam’, I was told by Roxanne to stop promoting that post on TVP’s FB page because TVP works with some people that work for FB….no clue….but I had to accept and censor. Btw this article was, as with all TVPM articles, approved by Roxanne for posting. I loved the idea of TVP being bold when I first heard about them and giving no shit for anything but science and facts, so such situations were so strange to me and disappointing.
TVP SMM removed several of TVPM FB posts based on her/his own subjective opinion like: we can’t post that bullshit on TVP FB’s page. Yeah those were her/his words. I had to go through a ton of discussions with her/him and Roxanne so that Roxanne could make her/him aware to not ever remove my posts, posts from TVPM that was reviewed by Jacque and Roxanne. So this ‘manager’ tried to project what is best for TVP to post and what not even for TVPM that was approved by J&R.
TVP SMM wanted for me to also stop posting things that may be ‘offensive’ to TVP followers. Again I thought that I ended up in a political party.
TVP Social Media team bans words like “fuck, TZM, god…” and so on. So, if anyone posts anything containing those words on their FB page, their comment automatically gets hidden. Sure you may need some moderation but c’mon TVP what the heck are you a political party? Leave people to comment whatever the heck they want to and make sure you are there to answer their questions as I was for such a long time, trying to reply to everyone in a nice and detailed way. I had to unhide so many such comments that were like: “That’s so fucking awesome!” because they used the word “fuck”…
For the past years TVP Social Media claimed to be a thing, however the vast majority of FB posts were from me about TVPM, and rest were mostly recycled TVP content. But more than that I ended up fully managing Twitter and GPlus for the past 2 years, and Instagram for several months. ALONE. All alone because no one cared about them. In a situation in which I had to manage GPlus, Twitter and FB for TROM and VideoNeat, other 2 of my free projects.
I bought a hootsuite account at one point, for which I paid so that we could better manage all of these social network accounts. It was rarely used by TVP, except for me. And for the past year was almost not used at all by TVP. But despite paying for it and asking them to use it, a few months ago I get an email from Roxanne telling me to please give access to the girl/guy in charge with Social media team (same creature I’ve been talking for so long here) because he/she asked me so many times in the past to give her/him access and I refused to do so. Are these people joking or being trolls intentionally!?
I’ve been told several times to send the memes I make to their social media team to check for grammatical errors, even if I explained so many times that these memes are proofread already. They have copy-pasted text from the magazine! But, well, they asked again. As if I was a ghost and no one heard me…..
At one point the one managing Instagram disappeared out of a sudden. I was the only one asking left and right where is he/she. Weeks have passed and no one replied to me at all…I took the lead and changed the Instagram password so that we make sure the account wasn’t hacked and I managed Instagram for 3 or more months. Social media team was a disaster in that situation. Complete lack of interest.
And let me mention again: I managed TVP’s Google Plus and Twitter for the past 2 years 100% alone and told them to help with that, and no one heard me. By this time I was so sure i’m a ghost that I tried to walk through walls just to make sure … :))
I am bored myself at this point writing about all of these situations with TVP so I’ll try to be brief with this one. Out of kinda nowhere a few months ago Roxanne proposed me that would be great to move TVPMagazine to TVP’s website. In the past I told Roxanne to let me manage the main website and to let me build it because TVP’s website sucked big time (not mobile friendly, crowded, bugs, etc.). But as you can read in other ‘tabs’ here I was unsuccessful with this many times over. I could have built TVPM directly into TVP’s website from the beginning but well…
Anyways, they were trying to restructure TVP again (what they tried multiple times) and one of their decisions was to channel everything through TVP. So they wanted the magazine to be on TVP’s websites and all links to go there. They even said they won’t let us post promotional images for the magazine on their social networks unless we move to TVP’s website. But their proposal was from an ignorant perspective, not knowing what tvpmagazine.com is for and how it works. The best I could explain to Roxanne is that is like moving a house into another house. That meant breaking tvpmagazine.com apart (a website that I worked for years and that was optimized for any screen and was custom made) and add parts of it (the issues mainly) to a TVP website that was poorly made. I even said that she has doubts to give me an hour on skype and I’ll explain to her everything in detail. After many discussions on the topic, with me trying to understand what they want and to explain to them how impossible this move is, I was asked to talk to Filip who was in charge with these new changes for TVP. I asked for Roxanne to take part of this conversation. She accepted. In the meeting Filip’s decision was now to not add TVPM at all to TVP’s website, not even as a TVP Project….see the confusion? Because I feel it.
He also said many surprising things like this is not TVP’s project but Tio’s project; before that he told me on skype that TVPM is like TZM and is not TVP….So such people are managing stuff for TVP, people who had these opinions about TVPM…how in the world does this happen?!
Anyways please listen to our meeting’s recording and draw your own conclusions: PLAY
I felt like Roxanne was very ‘pro-magazine’ at this meeting, and that she didn’t get along with Filip’s views much at all, so I wondered even more why people like Filip end up managing TVP’s projects if their views were so different in many regards. Please, don’t think that I am attacking Filip. I am not. I don’t know him, I am talking only about the situation itself. After this discussion I felt like Roxanne and us at the magazine will get to have a better relationship, especially after Filip left TVP entirely a few days after this conversation, but this wasn’t the case as this article explains.
For the past year it was very confusing to me to see Roxanne changing her attitude towards the magazine many times. From telling us that we can’t send a newsletter for the magazine or post on TVP’s social networks, to say that the magazine is very important, and so on. But in a way I understand her and I always told that to her, because she has to deal with many opinions from many sources.
A while ago there was a guy (Colin) who was writing for TVPM quite a lot, more than anyone else who wanted to help out with articles. He made a few interesting articles, but then he submitted one about meat consumption saying from the get-go that he is a vegan and he made this article from his vegan perspective. I didn’t care about that, only the article though, but it became apparent later on that there was a bias in the article.
The article was full of non-scientific claims, and I won’t even go into details because is pointless and I don’t have the original article anyway (he deleted it as I remember, or made it private) where I showcased to him in detail where the non-scientific aspects were. This is the original article that he posted on his website
http://colinculbreth.tumblr.com/raisingthesteaks –
I spent almost 3 months discussing with him over his article, reading all of the sources he provided, watched documentaries and videos he sourced, and so forth, but it was not a scientific article unfortunately. Just as a small example, he used Cowspiracy as his source for some of the claims, but this documentary has been criticized many times to have relied on sources that are not ‘peer reviewed’. For sure the consumption of livestock is a huge issue and I didn’t realize the extent until Colin wrote this article and I had to ‘investigate’ the matter, but let’s present it in a scientific manner – no point in inventing statistics and claims when there is enough scientific data that’ll do the job.
Anyways, so the article was very unscientific relying on shaddy claims and a ton of assumptions, and I provided a detailed review, sentence by sentence almost, for it all. Later on Colin agreed to rewrite the article and take my notes into consideration. I was super happy, but then when he sent the new article it was pretty much the same article he sent before….and I told him that I am not going to review it again and say the same things again. I proved to him beyond any shadow of doubt where many of his claims were dishonest and not scientific. But because I thought this is a super important subject to discuss I told him that I will write a version of that article from my own perspective and based on scientific facts and I will send it to him for review and for suggestions. I did that, sent to him, and he was very put off by it all. No reason other than an emotional one. He sent me several messages while the entire story was unfolding telling me that I do not care about planet Earth and I need to act now….and so on. He was very emotionally attached on this subject, and this is something he said many times, but that made him (I think) prone to mistakes. Anyways, I need to mention again, I am not attacking Colin at all, but I needed to present that for what will follow now:
Colin sent the article to J&R first, and usually all articles were sent to me first to review them as J&R didn’t have the time for that. He was also in touch with J&R for a while. So J&R approved the article for publishing and they thought it was a “very good article”. A suite of conversations between all of us happened in this period of time, and I saw J&R how unable they were to verify facts – they were ping ponged between me and Colin, sometimes trusting me, sometimes Colin….and could not make up their minds. That was a proof at how vulnerable they are when it comes to verifying facts. For sure they do not have the time to go through such articles and verify the claims, but just keep this aspect in mind.
Roxanne was also very put off by the fact that I re-wrote that article….and I never understood why. I only tried to present that important subject from a more scientific perspective after Colin failed to do so. I even told them I can publish using Colin’s name if they want that as I never cared to be ‘mentioned’ as an author…for me the subject is always the most important one, not who talks or writes about it.
In the end I told Roxanne that if they don’t agree to publish my version of the article in TVPM then I’ll publish it on my blog and that’s that, but I won’t publish Colin’s article as I am not going to make TVPM a pseudoscience magazine that then I have to deal with the backlash for it and overall mess up the magazine’s reputation. I would have, for sure, made another article “debunking” Colin’s article if they ‘forced’ me to publish it anyway :).
But this entire story that lasted a few months taught me that I can’t rely on J&R to ever check any facts for any article.
Roxanne contacted me at one point to ask if I can help make a script for their big budget movie. I was super excited and I said I will give it a try! Even if it just so happened that I didn’t have an internet connection for a week or so because of some reasons, I managed to work on it. They wanted a script for a movie that would be appealing to the masses. I thought of adding some drama and mystery and in 2 weeks I managed to make something. I rushed to send them the script as soon as possible because Roxanne told me that they would appreciate if I send something to them in a week or two as I remember. This is the script if you want to read it 🙂
I enthusiastically sent the script to Roxanne but I got no feedback for a couple of days….they really have to work on this because is very unfriendly to ask something from someone to do for free and then they do the thing, send it to you, and you don’t reply. At least say: I received your script and we will get back to you in 3-4 days. Or we are busy….but say something. Anyways, they replied after a few days time with a very simple and unsatisfactory feedback. Something like “this is not the direction we would want for the movie but there are many good ideas in there”. So that’s how that story ended. I will become like a broken record but understand that I don’t accuse Roxanne of anything, but when people struggle to do stuff for you at lease please take some time and focus on what they are doing. TVP is very un-motivational from this perspective. VERY!
Later on they shared a script with me that someone else made for them (a script producer…writer…not sure) and I can only say that I was deeply disappointed. But won’t say more than that. I told that to Roxanne in a bigger feedback than she sent me for my script.
Anyways…I wonder though if they managed to make the script as I remember in 2011-2012 Roxanne was saying that they are so close to finish it up. It is almost 2017….I really wish they could do the script by now. I really do!
This one is short but interesting. I always sent statistics for the mag to Roxanne, for every issue: unique readers, time spent on the mag, and so forth. However they never had statistics for their main website and I asked them so many times, even recently, and they said the stats don’t work properly. Same answer I got in 2013. So if TVP has a web development team, why not foxing this minor issue?
What was interesting while sending the stats to Roxanne was how disappointed she was when we dropped in views. Almost like views were the most important factor for the magazine.
Recently I propose to Roxanne a detailed plan of changing their financing model to better help themselves, the magazine, and other projects, plus allow more people to buy their materials as it would have reduced the costs of their materials. I did that after I asked her if I should bother with that proposal, and she said I can tell her about it. But she gave me no feedback to my proposal. In short my proposal was about making all of TVP’s materials digital – books, dvd’s and cd’s. And offer them as a subscription plan ($5 a month). I also proposed to extract a winner out of those subscribers each month for a free tour and make new TVPM issues a week available in advance for the subscribers on TVP’s website. I had to remind her later on to respond to my proposal and she did very briefly like “we can’t do this right now”…but I also wanted to know how much money they make a month to know how to approach this and much more. She was completely disengaged.
I even tried to make their “The best that money can’t buy” book in the magazine’s format so that they can sell it digitally so that people don’t pay lots of money on the transport when they buy it physically. It took me a while to convince Roxanne to let me try that, but again Roxanne lost her interest.
I tried several times to create a comic book depicting life in the future based on TVP’s ideas and designs. But from what I got from them, they do not like cartoonish ‘things’ so it was a failure and something I wasn’t able to even start. Even if Roxanne said at one point that I can give it a try, later on she wasn’t sure Jacque would want his designs to be ‘cartoonized”… these answers that you can’t make sense if they are a yes or a no, was something I had to deal with TVP for years, and it gets stressful after a while because you are always confused as to what they want or do not want.
TVP had a newsletter system that was broken since I first saw it in 2012. It didn’t have a captcha nor a confirmation for subscription, making any spam-bot able to sign up thousands of times. I told them that several times in the past, but again I was being ignored (their best quality). Later on the guy in charge to sending the newsletter to about 250,000 subscriber list (most of which I always suspected are not real subscriptions due to that flaw in the subscription form) stopped dealing with the newsletter and I had to take over that process and send the newsletter for TVPM, even if I was not familiar with Joomla (the ‘thing’ the main website was built on). I told them to build the website on WordPress several times as I could help with building and managing it, but they ignored that as well. Now I had to adapt to Joomla to send out the newsletter. I even ended up being the one who sent newsletters for TVP, not only TVPM.
Anyways after a while, new people in charge with the website decided that the list, guess what, is indeed made up of many non-human subscribers and said they had to sort that out somehow. Pause for a moment because this is important: since TVP had such a huge newsletter list it required a big expensive server for them to send out the emails to all of those. Interestingly it is super expensive to send out newsletters (server-wise). So a part of what TVP paid for the sever was to send emails to no one. But the way they tried to sort this out brought me again in a stupid and nonsensical situation with TVP as follows:
When they decided to do that, it was exactly when we had to ask money again for yearly donations for the magazine, and so this break, this inability to send out a newsletter in this period of time was affecting the magazine a lot. Anyways, using some sorting methods the TVP folks ended up with a list of some 13,000 subscribers out of 250,000. They reduced the list in the past for several times and I have the bad habit at looking at the data and what I saw was that every time they reduced the list they also reduced the engagement for the newsletter. Meaning: list shorter, fewer people got the message. I thought for sure they must do something wrong because that ‘good’ list of 13,000 or so was bringing about 300 people to the magazine while a few months ago, that huge and ugly list brought about some 2-3 thousand readers. HUGE difference.
Because we dropped so hugely in readers due to this new newsletter list I decided to try and help them because here’s what they did to ‘fix’ that list: their server was compromised and was recognized by many email clients as a SPAM sever. Meaning: when they sent you a newsletter the Gmail server recognized thevenusproject.com as SPAM and the email ended up in your SPAM folder. HOWEVER, they decided to send a confirmation email to the ugly list so that only those who subscribe/confirm again their subscription, will become the good list. That’s how they ended up with 13,000 from 250,000. BUT what I tried to explain is that it is naive to use an already compromised server to try and reach the 250,000 list to build a new one out of them since most of these emails will end up in spam as always. So I proposed to take all of the 250,000 subscribers and import them to an external server for mailing, like MailChimp, to make sure that when they send the confirmation email it reaches most of those people. Quite logical, isn’t it? But again I was either ignored (completely) or they tried to tell me that I do not understand how newsletters work, or that it is too expensive. I talked to Roxanne and she was ready to pay for such a thing as she thought it was a ‘great’ idea. I asked TVP folks why my idea is not good, and I got no reply. So, nothing happened, as usual.
Actually one of these TVP folks sent me an email calling me ‘desperate’ because I insisted to take my idea into account, and he told me he will ignore any of my emails from now on. Ha!? :)) I was so surprised, I just tried to help, at least they could have give me some info as to why my proposal may not work. Later on the same guy apologized for his email. Ok, I said, np. And I moved on. Here’s part of that conversation (pdf).
Some 3-4 years ago TVP was paying, as far as I remember, over 150$ a month for their server to host a website that was much more simple than many of the websites I had and I was paying 120$ a YEAR for them all. After some discussions trying to propose to them better alternatives and being told that I was wrong as I don’t understand why they need these expensive servers, they indeed did that and reduced the cost by a lot. But again, if my memory doesn’t cheat on me 🙂 their attitude and response was not like: “hm, interesting, ok let’s look into how to reduce costs for TVP.” – So, again, a situation in which I tried to help TVP and I was ‘dismissed’ in a very ‘rude’ way, only to later on implement a solution similar to what I proposed. Classic TVP scenarios from my experience.
When I asked money for TVPM (campaign approved by Roxanne) to keep on making TVPM for another year, I kept my promise 100% like with all the projects I’ve done. But now I had to ask again for another year and I got a huge message from a TVP guy (Saso) telling me that he does not agree with the campaign and that the money could be spent in a better way and that he won’t support the campaign. Mind you all of these campaigns were first approved by Roxanne, I didn’t just go bananas and ask for money for TVPM. So he said that we could better use the money to make a documentary about Jacque, a documentary someone else was working on and I even helped with making the website for the upcoming documentary. But TVPM is TVPM, who is there to decide that instead of TVPM let’s raise money for another project!? As I told him I wanted to give TVPM readers the opportunity to keep this project alive: if they do that then ok, we will keep on going, if not we will stop. As simple as that. He also said that if we don’t raise all money then it looks ‘bad’ for TVP…weird.
He (and others) also came with ‘solutions’ to reduce the magazine size or how often we release it in order to ask for less money, not knowing anything about how we work for the magazine. This reminded me that some TVP people in the past told me the same: to make the magazine no more than 30 pages long and release it every 3 months or so…. What the fuck is that? :)) Do you release a magazine for the sake of releasing a magazine!? I guess that’s how many people think, but TVPM was the other way around: we released it because we had to present many important subjects that are not limited by pages or sundays :). Weird way of looking at things….
Anyhow because of this new campaign I then got an email from Roxanne (or several emails) asking if I can reduce the cost for the magazine. I made her a list of my spendings (how much I pay for my rent, electricity, food, etc. – not that she asked for) to show her that the money I ask merely allow me to survive and be able to focus on the magazine, but do nothing more than that + I also pay for services for the magazine. But then she said that some people complained to her that I want to do something “extravagant” (the exact word) with the money. I just couldn’t stop laughing. I had to call some friends to tell them about that because it was so hilarious considering I barely had money to buy a new pair of shoes and I was working non stop for the magazine. Roxanne seemed to not agree with such views from those people though. And I always appreciated that, though I suspect in the end such opinions from people like Saso had an impact on her attitude towards the magazine. She denies that, but I find it hard to believed that if some people who visit you regularly or are so close to you have such distorted views about the magazine, that won’t influence your views at all. Anyways.
All in all, such reactions from people close to TVP are very ‘interesting’ because they never, as I remember, asked me how we work for the magazine or any details in that regards, so they always projected what we do with the money, even if I always tried to be transparent and even made a few articles for TVPM explaining where the money goes, but as I later on found out several such people close to TVP never even read the magazine (3 years of making it and not reading one issue), yet they came up with ‘proposals’ for how to run it. Not productive.
‘Some’ TVP people complained that TVPM articles are not connected with TVP. Though check all articles to see that all are connected with TVP. I guess they feel the need to repeat the same things over and over again for all articles like : TVP proposes an alternative….bla bla bla. Which is redundant.
Also, as I explained to them so many times, TVP from TVPMagazine stands for “The Venus Project”, plus 99% of our readers came from TVP (social networks or newsletter). So why do we have to even explain that these articles are connected with TVP? But more to the point: shouldn’t TVP be about science? Why should it matter if I mention TVP when I talk about how we can automate the entire world, or how language works?
Roxanne asked me several times to add Jacque’s quotes to articles, and it really felt uncomfortable because it sounds wrong from a scientific perspective. If you ever read my articles you will see that I avoid mentioning people’s names when I quote them. I say “this guy said…..” and I link to the word “this guy” to a wiki page about “that guy” :). I say “this guy said this”, without telling who that guy is, because in my view it matters what people did or what they said not who they are. It sounds so cultish to say: As Jacque says: “An intelligent engineer in the 1920s could not understand today’s technology”. Why not just say that without mentioning Jacque!? I made those views of mine clear to Roxanne, but nevertheless in the end I did as she said. I accepted her suggestions.
Later on Roxanne started to say too that I did not tie the articles to TVP. If that was the case then she should have spent the time fixing that as she was always welcomed to make any suggestions. But I guess you can read the articles and judge for yourself if they were connected or not with TVP.
In January 2016 they announced a ‘huge’ interview with Anonymous group that had over 4 million followers on Facebook. Great I said! Even if that group is full of pseudoscience is good to have such an exposure. I listened to the interview and aside the fact that I honestly thought that the TVP guy (Saso) didn’t explain TVP well at all in my view and also in many commentators’ view, when asked where people can find more info about TVP and how people can get involved he spent a lot of time mentioning this or that and the other, yet not once mentioning by far the most active (or the only one) TVP project, the magazine. The only project where you could get involved by writing articles, help with the website, help create new tools, etc.. How come did he forget about the most active TVP project? The one who produced thousands of pages to explain things that TVP should have explained many years ago. Oh, guess what, this guy is the same guy who complained about TVPM campaign…Then later on went bonkers and accused me of taking advantage of TVP to gain followers to make money for myself and so on….Weird. Anyways, I sent a message to Roxanne asking if this guy represents TVP or himself since TVPM is still an official TVP project and he never even mentioned it in the interview. Roxanne told me that she told him many times to mention the magazine in interviews.
I told Roxanne that if they have a future interview I would like to give it a try so I can (maybe) better explain what TVP is. Roxanne said that she will put me next for an interview.
After a few days they had another interview with another Anonymous group. I wasn’t asked to go for the interview. The same guy went plus another TVP human :). Same happened as before where they forgot about the magazine’s existence, though this time the magazine was only mentioned by the other human 🙂 when they said people can donate to the TVP research center, the magazine, etc.. I mean, wtf 🙂 that’s the reason to mention the magazine that people can donate to it even if no one knows what you are talking about? 🙂
I mentioned these details because that was the song for the past years: they always forgot about the magazine in interviews and even on tours. I was interested in TVP so I listened to all interviews and I saw so many tours posted online, and I don’t think I ever heard them mentioning the magazine, yet they mentioned other projects. This was something that bothered me for a long time and despite being vocal about it, nothing changed. And, in the end, why do I have to insist on this!? Do I have to tell TVP to mention their magazine in interviews or recommend it on their tours?!
Some years ago TVP said it is going to release a new documentary, Paradise or Oblivion, and they need a website for that. I said I can do it and I brought the guy who helped with tromsite.com to help with this as well. I did the design, he did the rest, as with tromsite. I got in contact with Roxanne for the first time for this website. But I also got to see how TVP works in general, the “behind the scenes” :). First was when they tried to release the documentary and they didn’t know much about how to put this documentary out and I helped them with putting it on torrents; they also looked rocky at adding subtitles on the DVD they made and I was wondering why not just stream it, why sell a DVD… Just some thoughts inside my head at that time. I also didn’t understand why they chose such a name for the documentary as it sounded too dramatic.
Watching the documentary was my first TVP disappointment because I realized it is mainly about segments of old TVP footage added together. I did the same for TROM, the RBE part, and it was twice as long and in my view many times more relevant, and I didn’t understand why they didn’t consider using that part as their official documentary instead of making a new one again that was basically similar to that part of TROM from that perspective. I was also a bit disappointed when at one point Roxanne told me to remake that part of TROM (the RBE one) and add TVP’s watermark on the designs I used. I refused to do that though. Btw, I gave credits for all the stuff I used in TROM at tromsite.com since the beginning.
Here’s the thing: I saw TVP as this neutral ‘thing’ that doesn’t care about such things like watermarks, or put so much emphasis on little details like the music for their documentary, or details of their website (use this font, not the other one, etc.), or it looked to me that they just emphasized these minor things instead of focusing on the content. For me content is the king. This didn’t look to be the case for TVP and I first experienced that with the Paradise or Oblivion release, then later on when I tried to help make a better main website for them. But anyways, I moved on, as I was only focused to try and help them.
A period of not so great experience with TVP followed in 2012 in which I tried to help with rebuilding the website but I was turned down based on subjective reasons and sometimes in ‘rude’ ways. I was told by those in charge with the website at that time to just accept that my suggestions are not taken into account because ‘they’, or ‘he’ is the coordinator(s). I am never angry or put off by people saying ‘bad’ words to me, but I was just very surprised that this happens inside TVP. I contacted Roxanne and after many discussions she agreed to let me redesign the entire TVP website. This was a big deal in my view because people will come in contact with TVP through such media/online ‘tools’, so they need good tools to make sure TVP is properly presented.
So, I worked for several months redesigning the entire website in great detail: I even made designs for mobile use (something not so popular at that time, but I did it to prepare it for the future), I provided them with all the images I used (optimized), colors I used, fonts, PSD project files, and so on. It was the most professional website I designed until then. You can still see the entire project here.
Roxanne loved the design but then those supposedly in charge of building the website decided they won’t put my design into practice entirely, as one of them said at one point: “just because I don’t want to” – haha. I was literally shocked about such replies – maybe I took TVP’s team too seriously and they were in fact a bunch of angry kids. Many messages between me and Roxanne and these people, but nothing really happened. I proposed them to move from the Joomla platform on which the main website was built, to WordPress because we can build it faster and better since that platform is way more well known and you can find tools for WP (plugins) for everything. I wasn’t successful at that either….No one listened. I said I will try to help with making the website if we build it on WP, so I will do more than design it in Photoshop, and I made a big list of what plugins they could use if they moved to WordPress to make a great TVP website. They refused to listen and I can’t tell any real reason why they did that, but one seemed to be that people working on translating the website are not used to WordPress. And I asked them many times what are the priorities: a good website that needs some training for those translating it, or a bad one that is already translated in 4-5 languages? I tried to help with presenting how simple it is to translate websites in WordPress, but again I was largely ignored. Any of my attempts to make them build a better website were turned down in childish manners.
So they started to build the new TVP website in their own ‘view’. After months with very little to no progress on the new website, Roxanne asked me if I can get involved again and try to speed up the work these guys were doing. I did that and speed up the work by a lot because I found a template for them to buy for Joomla that looked very similar to the design I made, so that they wouldn’t build the entire website from scratch as it is no point to reinvent the wheel. They finally saw the advantage and bought that template but failed to project the design I made. It still took them over a year, almost two, to finally make the new TVP website. For me it was a big failure as the new website was not mobile friendly and was very very cluttered (so different from my initial design). I was extremely disappointed and I swore I won’t help TVP with anything else from now on because my months-long design work was largely ignored for no reason.
The irony: a year after this ‘event’ they eventually moved to WordPress for the main website, and they removed the translations….
The more I learned about TVP the more I realized that the details are missing: what do they mean by abundance? How can we really automate all jobs? Is human behavior really influenced by the environment alone? What do they mean by “we need a language that is not subject to interpretation”? And so much more… But instead of complaining about this I thought let’s help bring these details to TVP as much as we can, and I asked if I can take a dead project at that time: the TVP magazine that was basically a website with 96% of articles copy pasted from other sources. I made a demo to show to Roxanne how that online magazine may look like and she loved it a lot. From there on I continued to make more and more issues and take this project to fully manage.
In the year that followed I worked almost every day for the magazine, for free, ignoring the TVP main website entirely because it was such a badly made website and I didn’t want to get involved with it anymore after trying to help with it and being ignored so many times. In this time a few people wanted to help with the magazine and to my surprise, even if these people were TVP folks (from TVP teams) they knew very little about some basic things that TVP itself talks a lot about, such as that design is subjective, and they criticized some of my designs for the magazine saying theirs are better or that I have to follow some strict design rules for designing a magazine, even if this was an online magazine, entirely different from a paper one. These situations where communication was an impossibility made me rethink of who those people from TVP teams are…do they even understand TVP? Anyways despite that I was always open to any of their suggestions – at one point I left a guy do the design for an entire issue the way he thought is better, but Roxanne liked my design more so we stuck with that.
I kept on making more and more issues, tackling very important and essential subjects for TVP such as: abundance, how we can automate most jobs, the influence of genes on behavior, psychology, artificial intelligence, how the monetary system works, why TVP is not about technology, and sooooo much more. Thousands of pages. Years of work. In this time I did everything for the magazine: design, write most articles, promote, I made a website that is very well made and optimized for any device, I offered support, reply to emails, manage the posts I made on social networks for the magazine (3-4 posts a day), managed the financial situation for the magazine, and so on. Everything except proofreading that was done by Ray.
While Roxanne liked the magazine and the articles a lot, it felt like TVPM was not part of TVP since in all of my experience with TVP’s social networks that I also managed for a while, TVP folks (admins and activists) rarely or never provided the magazine as a source of information while replying to people’s comments. I also saw some TVP tours (on youtube) where not even Roxanne was mentioning the magazine when people asked at the end of the tours where they could get more information about TVP. The theme from my point of view was something like this: people asked “How can we automate most jobs?” and TVP folks replying with simple, copy paste answers from Jacque that didn’t address it at all, forgetting that we have a 260 pages long magazine answering in detail this question. If people asked how can people work without being motivated by money, instead of linking to TVPM articles detailing this, TVP Folks again copy pasted simple answers or linked to various other websites than TVP’s, like the magazine. Why!?
It really seems like I somehow spied on TVP to see if they mention the magazine or not, but the reality is that I was always very interested in TVP and always watched all videos on youtube with or about TVP, or interviews, and I was so involved that it was kinda’ hard for me not to spot this.
I used to read a lot of TVP criticism online and try to answer these critiques in detail in the magazine, yet no one seemed to use those articles that are (sometimes) better sourced than Wikipedia. I made a smart search engine so that anyone can easily search for these articles and provide answers for people’s questions. But it looked like this didn’t help. It felt like I was pushing like crazy, work every day (no weekends for me, holidays, and so on) and my work was largely ignored even if I did that for TVP, under TVP’s umbrella.
I told TVP folks many times to write for the magazine so that we expand TVP’s library. Plus, as I told them so many times: while writing for TVPM you learn how to present a subject, how to take in critiques, how to source your claims, how to work in a team, so this was more than expanding TVP’s library. PLUS all of these articles were highly promoted by me so it was an entire system that anyone could take advantage of. But I don’t remember for anyone to do this.
So I tried to create a wonderful tool, TVPM, but TVP ignored it quite a lot and it was never part of TVP.
I always felt like TVP ‘teams’ were not efficient or existent. I’ve been dragged into so many Skype groups where people mainly talked (from my perspective and experience). They had some online meetings, and I listened to many of them, and been to 2-3 of them, and I still think they were mainly to talk, but do nothing more than that. I am sure that many of these people are nice people and with good intentions, but I never understood what is the point of a meeting. You don’t have meetings because is Sunday, you should have them when you want to say or solve something….it was exactly backwards with them from my perspective.
I also saw again the same focus on little and non significant things and not the content, like how the logo for this team should look like, even if there was no team, or a solid one. Some people were looking for a ‘motto’ at one point, for their team, but they had no team :). And these discussions were filling up the many Skype groups I was added to, creating a noise for me while trying to focus on writing articles and do other stuff. I know that I may look like a jackass saying that I was bothered by such things when people try to volunteer to help a good cause, but experiencing this inefficiency for 4 years or more will put a toll on anyone.
I challenge anyone to test if TVP has any teams or solid ones, because from my experience they have none. This sounds too harsh to be true, but test it. Where was the web development team when TVP needed a website? Why did Roxanne ask for my help with websites if they had a team? Why did I ended up helping with posters, editing images, and such, if they supposedly have a ‘media team’? Where was the social media team to promote the magazine, or to manage their twitter, gplus, or make new original posts on FB? Why did I had to do it myself for 98% of the time? What did TVP teams create so far? Let’s be honest, ask that question. How many videos did they create for the past 3-4 years? Why TVP still has a poorly made website after years of supposedly webdev teams and ‘coordinators’? Their social network coordinator (or manager) had no idea how Facebook works and how it ranks posts, or what views are, and I realized that when I was writing this article about Facebook – I took the time to learn these things, and then checked with the coordinator to see what he/she knows, and not much if anything. Basically you can end up a ‘coordinator’ for shallow TVP teams just by luck or maybe talking a lot – that was my impression at least – if I am wrong then ok, but maybe I am not. Sure this sounds so harsh, but I got sick of seeing for the past 4 years people pretending to do something for TVP. Not saying all people were like that, but from my experience that was the theme.
Regardless of any of my ‘opinion’ on this, check for yourself what TVP teams did for the past 4-5 years and make a list to see if they were/are efficient or not. I am not accusing people, but this is the situation I encountered with the TVP teams. I know people are busy with their daily life, but I am not addressing this towards them, but towards the situations that I encountered.
I wanted to prove to Roxanne and the rest that they could have made a website in WordPress in 2012-2013 in just a few days time, and I made it on my own server in 3 freaking days. 3! It was mobile friendly and had more features than their main website. I enthusiastically presented it to everyone, including Roxanne, and….well as far as I can remember no one was impressed. I even showcased how they could move from selling CD’s and DVD’s to stream these videos. But, none of that was really impressive I guess. I just could not believe….It made no dent.
My stupidity and maybe naivety continued and I asked Roxanne again in 2015 to please let me deal with the main website, let me make it because it was so poorly made that I couldn’t even reference it to people. It looked like a ‘scam’ website to be honest. And guess what, Roxanne said ok go for it, rebuild the new website (again…). Not even 2 days pass and she tells me I will have to work with another guy(s) on it and I started to doubt we will make this website because I knew people are so focused on insignificant details, and that’s what actually happened in my view. I was dragged in meetings and lists again, delayed, many times ignored. I told them at one point that I am busy with the magazine, since I was very busy, and I will try to come up with suggestions if I could. That’s because the momentum for me was lost. I had the time to build that damn website in a week, but TVP seems to be so focused on details that even the font color, or logo color are registered as I am told and we could only use certain colors. Also in order for me to design pages I needed photos or else I can’t design the TVP Technologies pages without these photos with TVP models. But TVP wouldn’t share their new 3D renderings even for us to add to the new website, until later on. Very weird in my view.
A year later the website was released and it as (again) more simple and less mobile friendly than the demo one I made in 3 days back in 2012-2013… Yet it took more than a year to be made… I just can’t grasp these things. I also sent a few premium plugins to the guy in charge of the website (plugins that I paid for) as I continued to be a nice guy, but I got no reply from him, ignoring again my help and good intentions. The same guy who refused to share a plugin with me that was paid for TVP website and could have been shared with me for free. I needed it for some personal websites, maybe even for TVPMagazine, but he didn’t share it. Why? Just because. I asked him kindly if he can send it to me as it costs a lot of money and he has nothing to lose, but he refused to do so. 🙁
One more thing to add to the awfulness and I feel ‘mockery’ of my time: even if I was super busy with the magazine I still managed to build several new pages for this new website, despite the fact that they would not send me new 3D renderings to use for the design, but these pages were deleted without anyone telling me when, how, why. Lost hours of my life, again.
Seeing that their last attempt to reorganize TVP seemed a failure as explained many times in this article, and other people leaving from TVP, I asked Roxanne who is managing the main website now. And only one guy was doing that. So I said to make an ‘offer’ to Roxanne for the last time to let me help with the website. I said to give me 6 months trial to let me make the damn website as I think is best, to help them help me, to help them again and help others, to then help them, and so on. I was aiming towards a ‘stunning’ website. Roxanne didn’t say yes to my offer, but didn’t say no. She said to talk to the guy in charge with the website. We talked, but I couldn’t convince him to let me do the demo website on TVP’s servers, so I did in on TVPM servers. I bought a $70 template to build the website (although I was so low on money), and started the work. In a few days I made an awesome website in my view, demoing TVP’s technologies. On each page you visited a full screen video was automatically played with the interiour of cities or the transportation with TVP’s new 3D renderings, so that it looked almost like visiting a new kind of society. All photos were new and high quality, and for example the Circular City page was a special one, something I wanted to do since 2011 and I proposed for the past 4 years but no one listened or implemented: Imagine the TVP circular city on a big screen and you clicking any parts of the city that will open up details about it with photos and videos. The website was interactive, responsive for any screen, and Roxanne indeed liked it very much.
But I had to face the same slowness in responses and indecisiveness from their part. At one point Roxanne told me that we can better use this design for an RBE website they want to build. Mind you we were in an already shitty situation with TVPM from many perspectives, and me trying to help them build a better website was also an attempt to save the magazine by adding it to the main TVP website as Roxanne wanted recently, but now after all my efforts Roxanne decided that we can better build another website for another of their projects….
So that was it, I just could not handle it anymore. They pushed me from one place to another for 4 years when tried to help, they ignored many of my ideas and efforts, and so much more.
Shortly after Roxanne told me about the RBE website, the emails about TVPM discontinuation followed. And at the end of all of our discussions and disagreements lately, I said I will try one last time to cooperate with TVP and I told Roxanne that whatever happened between us we can forget and she has the opportunity to change the situation 180 degrees and I accept for her to do that so is up to her to contact me and talk to me if she wants to as I am available for this. And in a last reply to me, Roxanne didn’t reply 🙂 – as she did so many times.
Now I am so happy I do not depend on such people for anything.
Bottom line: I always tried to help TVP because I felt like it is such an important project, but I found it super difficult to do so. I say give them a try, get involved and try to help them, because this is only my experience though I have heard the same complaints from so many people. One thing TVP must understand is that usually those disadvantaged in this world want to get involved and help with TVP. Those who are already suffering because of today’s world and they want to see a change, so TVP must not give them false hopes and/or ignore them. This may not be entirely TVP’s fault though, since so many people contact them, but a simple reminder that they are busy and they may not reply soon or at all, is a must, because I can’t tell you how many people contacted me or the magazine, because no one from TVP replied to them. These people wanted to help with so many things but no one got back to them. So, TVP, please try to understand that and fix it.
I will continue to talk about the TVP idea, but I don’t want to have anything to do with TVP the organization. And regardless of what a few around TVP may say about me that I do not cooperate well with others, that I want to do things by myself, and so on, at least I am doing something and I want to hear from anyone who felt like it’s so hard to collaborate with me, because I collaborate with anyone and am super happy when I work with other people. But again, I am at least doing something, creating a ton of new materials in this direction. What does TVP do? What new stuff is TVP creating?
If I misinterpreted something in this article make me aware and I will change my mind! Also, I wrote this article quite fast and for sure there are typos and some parts are hard to properly decipher :D, but I am too busy with TROM and I want to remove TVP from my list of to do things 🙂 so I had to rush with that.
One last mention: the fact that I experienced stress so badly physically was because it was a built up for the past 6 years in which I tried to help this ‘good’ cause and I was sent from here to there, from nonsense to nonsense, and I was ignored so many times, and so many times the replies from Roxanne and others were so vague that they left me in confusion. When I tried for the past year to send a freakin’ newsletter for our Patreon campaign Roxanne was like “that’s great”, then I was left in limbo….then many times she ignored me, other times she replied talking about something else completely, other times she was like “we need to send just one newsletter a month because that’s what we decided”….months and months of this blurriness while trying to get a NO or YES answer to my question about that particular thing. And still never got an asnwer. I was striving to save the TVPM and she and others were slow, they ignored me, they talked about something else, and so on. I asked why TVPM is not represented as a TVP project on TVP’s website…and Roxanne ignored that all the time, giving no answer at all. I am telling you such situations for months and months, and even years, are going to put a toll on anyone.
By the way, all of the TVPMagazne project moved to TROMsite.com in case you are not aware of that. I continue the work there with a few other people. We make new magazines (or as we call them “books”) and we also started to make a video series out of these books + transform them in audio books too. So, awesome stuff! 🙂 – If you liked TVPM you will love the new TROM.
19 Replies to “TVP and ME”
Thankfully I realized this within a year’s time frame, instead of six… I’m sorry that this happened to you Tio. I wish there was another way, but just as you have experienced yourself, once you learn the material, it is up to you to make the direction happen, because working with TVP will simply not bring about an RBE as we all hoped.
I realized many such things before trying to help TVP, but I hoped that I can make them change bit by bit and be more open to new ideas, let others help them, and so on. But that didn’t happen.
Ya I feel you, for me it was just suspicions at first, but in order to confirm them, I had to volunteer just in case I was wrong. This is why I always tell people I love it when I’m wrong, because when I’m right, it’s always about something negative.
It is as if TVP’s strategy to make people do more “real” contributions, like the ones you did, is to stress/burden them out so much with bureaucracy, lack of knowledge, not living with accordance with updated values, so that those people leave and do their own thing without the burden of the things mentioned that are, more offten then not, associated with TVP. You are certainly not the first nor the last one that has gone trough this kind of a hassle, although you are for sure the one of few, if not the only one, who has managed to keep pushing despite the resistance for this long. It is a sad situation and i fear that even if TVP somehow managed to get the attention of someone with the money (but for real), they would not be able to showcase a viable plan of action for such an investment, because of lack of sourced/verifiable/detailed material. The world is running out of time, clearly. I am glad that you have made the desicion to go on “your own”, as has PJ done, and many other people that left TVP, because TVP clearly has no idea, or balls, to do what is necessary in these difficult times. I know im ranting but from your perspective this is so sad/frustrating/damaging that i could not leave without leaving a comment.. Respect for your effort Tio.
Sorry to hear that Tio! From my perspective, TVP Magazine was/is something very valuable because of all the sources attached to every article. This is something that i miss at the book “The Best that money can t buy”, they should have a version of that book with hyperlinks to many of the informations or some claims that they have there. It should give a possibility to dig deeper and deeper into the sources of the 70 + years that Jaqques worked in that direction. It is a valuable book but it could be better. It could be a “changing book” accordingly with the best knowledge we have up to now, isnt it more or less what Jaqques always speak about? “The best that we can do up to what we know today”…? I am very grateful to have read TVP magazine and have shared it to some of my closest friends, thanks Tio! I ll keep following your work!
Thank you! TVPMagazine morphed into TROM books https://www.tromsite.com/books so we will keep the work going with or without TVP. I agree with you 100% about “the best that money can’t buy” book and this was my main critique of the book – where are the sources? – If TVP wants to present itself as a serious project then ‘sources’ for the claims they make are a must. That’s what I tried to bring to TVP with TVPMagazine. I asked Roxanne several times to make 1-2 blueprints available to the public so that the public understands that TVP is more than just pretty designs, but nothing of relevance emerged from that discussion. If they have a ton of materials: from blueprints to sources for their claims, then they better start to make those public so that people look at TVP in a more serious/scientific way.
Tio
Thank you for sharing this. I feel that we had a very similar experience back in 2009/10 and share the same beliefs. In 2016 I stumbled across the magazines and thought they were absolutely brilliant. I shared them with my students when they asked certain questions and I used them briefly as a resource. I came back on because I hadn’t been on here for a couple of months and noticed it was no longer TVP. When i read this i was disappointed but not surprised. It is definitely not the first time that this has happened. Well done for everything you have achieved. You have my 100% support.
So wonderful to hear all that! The same magazines, or as we call them now “books”, can be found at tromsite.com (if you were not fully aware of that). We are now making a video series out of them, and also transform them into audiobooks. So all of TVPM and more is on TROMsite.com. And honestly thank you for your message!
Please, upload them to youtube!
We have them on youtube – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlkY7JhD4qyMYw-KaDkWBZympzIt4TZJD and we are making more. 😉
Yeap, found it & subbed! Watched a few of the 30min ones already.
Hi Tio, i read your amazing magazine, back then it was TVPM. It made a lot of sense and such an eye opener. I’m sorry to hear about your struggle, stress and bad experiences with TVP organization. I guess humans will be humans and everyone only have 24 hrs per day..
I strongly believe that this world can be a much better place if only we can change/update our primitive mindsets.
I cannot help you with money yet, but I can help with audio needs such as music, sound effect, recording cleanups etc(I’m a music producer) so hit me up if you need those!
Sorry for such a late reply. Usually I get an email when a new comment is posted but didn’t get for this one. So sorry honestly and thank you so much for the message. Can you please subscribe to TROM Newsletter https://www.tromsite.com/ bottom of any page – if you are on that list then whenever I need help with something or any TROM updates I will send an email.
Thank you again for your message and I feel so bad that I didn’t see it soone, but wasn’t my fault.
According to POSIWID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
yeah I believe TVP cannot accomplish a RBE, but it can diminish the FINANTIAL NEEDiness of the population, which is pretty amazing. Bad News that TVP rely strongly in the construction of a City. I would love to see a city of Fresco,but originilly conceibed, just with material sciences and robotics, even without the programming and electronics that we have today…
Hey, Johnny come late.
I recently remembered I used to read the magazine and I ended up here.
Dang. I still respect Jacques though. I think TVP definitely has organizational issues, same with Zeitgeist. Jacques being a century old doesn’t help, and the rest of the movement seemingly not structured right for growth and resilience.
Even progressives(Real ones) have hard times trying to unite. Look at the American Greens and more. Or other movements entirely that go against establishment grains.
Anyway, good to see you’ve continued it with your own moderation.
So overall your point is that The Venus Project’s ideas and proposals are good, but the organization itself is not. Am I right?
It’s interesting to see what will happen once Roxanne Meadows is gone (I’m not wishing something bad to happen, just to be clear). Who will then get the leadership, will everything be reformed? Especially reformed the way you and others (Sasha, Lucy, Roberto etc) would wish? I agree with you about the liabilities of the current organization of TVP, but I won’t blame Jacque that much. He always rejected the position of “leader”, “martyr” or celebrity, but the fact is that if there was someone who knew TVP to its core, that was him.
My opinion is that TVP is probably the best idea/vision of the sustainable and better future we have now (by scientific standards), but that organization needs a massive hollistic change. Also, if something like that happens in near future, it would be nice to see TVP join or at least exchange ideas and views with your TROM.
Yes overall TVP has a very nice set of ideas about the future. I’d say good for inspirational purposes only. They do not have the details nor the structure to create anything in the “real” world. As far as I can tell. Regardless, Jacque’s ideas are great and they deserve to be wellknown. But now I think even Jacque’s focus is not what I would follow as guidance and I argue what’s my line of thinking here https://www.tromsite.com/books/#dflip-df_6562/1/