I set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures.

I don't have a cell phone. I am not a Luddite.

It isn't a matter of hope. It's a matter of - between the options of trying nothing and trying something, let's try something but let's also be very thoughtful about what that something is.

I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world.

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.

You have those who have been living and breathing Buckminster Fuller ever since he converted them to his cult and to be honest, I'm really not interested in that audience at all. I think that they're going to die out soon enough.

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.