That first of all feeds into what I do and secondly, it is emblematic of what I hope to achieve through what I do. That is to say all those conversations that are a result of it are the sorts of conversations that I think are the ultimate, most valuable by-product of what I'm doing.

Once you start backing into all of that, then you see this incredibly intricate, totally wrong-headed way to do things, but nevertheless has a lot of merit to it for the fact that [Buckminster Fuller] is recognizing much larger patterns, seeking much larger patterns and seeking much larger ways of trying to solve for the problem of unhygienic conditions in slums. They really were unhygienic. Whether his family was living in the slum is debatable but they were unhygienic. That needed to be addressed. He was attempting to address it.

I think that what we need to do is we need to think about what scale makes sense for dealing with our need to live within a habitable zone and to do so without using air conditioning and heating in the way that is so incredibly expensive to the environment.

On the other hand, the way in which that car fit into this whole very roundabout way of attempting to solve the problem of what - the problem that [Buckminster Fuller] perceived as being the cause of his daughter's death and meningitis. I mean how you get from your daughter dying from meningitis to making a car with three wheels and saying that it's like a bird and a fish. That really is amazing.

Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.

I would say that what the value of talking about and thinking about a dome over Manhattan is that [Buckminster] Fuller has identified a scale of action I think is actually really compelling.

What I think is really interesting is to look at the culture of disruption and of world-changing in terms of what [Buckminster] Fuller was doing and to draw the contrast more than the similarity.