[Buckminster Fuller] started talking about it far enough afterwards, an audience that was far enough from when they - when the air flow and the Zephyr and these cars in the time period that were made by mainstream automakers. It was far enough in the future, far enough after that point that nobody really bothered to fact-check.

...there's no reason why scholarship can't be as seriously playful as bubble-blowing.

Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.

I don't know whether what I do is art. But making things out in the world and having as many conversations as possible.

First of all, [Buckminster Fuller's] identification of the problems that are all that much more pertinent, all that much more pressing in the world today than in his own lifetime from sustainability in terms of the environment to income inequality.

Take the self-driving car and the smartphone and put those together and think about how to manage a smart grid because suddenly you have all of this data coming from those two mechanisms that allow for a much higher level of allocating energy much more efficiently.

I think that surprisingly few people right now know much about [Buckminster] Fuller beyond the few really iconic points. He invented the geodesic dome and he coined the term "spaceship earth" and that's pretty much the extent of what people who even have heard of him know. And I'm struck by how many people have not heard of him at all.