Where Google and [Buckminster] Fuller overlap are in the potential for putting together disparate technologies in ways that can lead to something that might be a larger solution to a larger problem.

[Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.

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

I select my technology based on what I need and I also don't take up what I don't feel that I need.

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.

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.

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.