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.

To me, the reason to write about [Buckminster] Fuller is because I think that he has ideas that are incredibly pertinent.

[Buckminster] Fuller said that everything at the time was basically a horse and buggy in the form of an automobile and it had that boxiness and basically aeronautics hadn't been invented.

I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.

That is to say that despair does not seem to be in any way potentially to be productive.

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

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.