[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.

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.

I think it was impossible not to come upon a lot of confabulation simply because any good scholarship that has been done since [Buckminster Fuller] death has really delved in that.

[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 don't really know what that job [experimental philosopher] entails.

I think that surprisingly few people right now know much about [Buckminster] Fuller beyond the few really iconic points. He invented the geodesic dome and he coined the term "spaceship earth" and that's pretty much the extent of what people who even have heard of him know. And I'm struck by how many people have not heard of him at all.

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