I think that as a society as well, we need to be smart about what technologies we take up and how construe progress.
Jonathon KeatsI'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.
Jonathon KeatsTake 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.
Jonathon KeatsI think that in the first place, why we can get excited about [Buckminster ] Fuller, why it's plausible that people might - why my publisher would publish this book [You belong to the universe] about it long after he's dead and irrelevant by many standards has to do with the fact that he was in a sense coming up with this job for himself that is the job that we now refer to when we speak about world change.
Jonathon KeatsJust getting totally absorbed in that and therefore when I came back around to [Buckminster Fuller] and found that much of it was made up, I realized that nevertheless, it really was crucial, crucial for how he understood himself, I believe, and certainly crucial for how anyone else ever engaged in his ideas and therefore as a starting point, how can we engage in his ideas today, but with a remove of knowing that it is a myth and being able to navigate it in that sort of level, at that level of reading him as a story.
Jonathon KeatsAll sorts of problems and the interconnectedness between them that [Buckminster Fuller] was able to perceive sometimes rightly, often wrongly, always interestingly and also the fact that he was looking at solutions often that were not feasible in his own time but potentially could be applied today.
Jonathon Keats