Writing a book about [Buckminster Fuller] in the sense of deciding how much to - how much biographically to gloss over and how much I can leave out is relatively easy as it is because the true believers already know everything. They know a lot of things that are not true and they know a lot of things that I thought were (and seems there's very good evidence not to believe) and therefore, my starting point was I think to tell his myth because that's what grabbed me.

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.

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.

I think that as a society as well, we need to be smart about what technologies we take up and how construe progress.

I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.

Serendipity looks a lot like creativity, at least at a distance, and if I can tap into these ways in which one thing resembles another.