things in a very large dimension we both have an interest in the person of and the contribution to buckminster fuller and other comprehensive us who have tried to understand things in that very large tablo he's doing very interesting work and we're going to be talking about that and david welcome to new york into conversation very much you know really quickly if you can go over your background you're born and raised thirty three little of the education is a lot of important questions we want to deal with but could you just go over that and will we be and sure i was born and raised in the american south east various cities primarily north carolina and asheville north carolina for the past twenty years or so home based travel quite a bit and i moved there originally for university when i was studying with that we can perceive things beyond our everyday awareness and you were drawn to mold because you were interested in things that preceded that you were in your did things that were of interest to you brought you to mr mode yeah absolutely and since i was very very  fan of music but also the ways of manipulating perception with music ok and so as an undergraduate i was studying with a lot of the nature of what synthesis was and how it was that we would develop relationships with for quite some time yeah right in that if that's where you came in from dear do music yourself i'm more behind the scene right now ok really enjoying the engineering aspect of it i haven't actually done it much in years because i had skipped a number of frequencies multimedia if that's the term and you're also an interested mood say here for a public access already and you have some info cision with the important significance of public access cable television programming that's part of the really looking at how it is we can use public channels for media to enhance our capacity for communication and how it is i mean a lot of this really stemmed from early work that i was doing in the ninet with online media and internet radio when i was a graduate student chapel hill i helped to put the st internet radio station online good and in my my interest was really in what does it mean to democratize media so that we can start to have access fuller taught in the late forty's or the summer sessions there and i became increasingly interested in a lot of the interactions that were going on with various characters the after actually i'd been working with domes for a number of years and i left undergraduate i went to grad school i started i found a group that was doing work with don't projection systems on the mid ninety's and so i became increasingly interested in dome projection if you think in the long sweep of human history you know it's we've been we've always done it i mean we've always projected our imaginations on to the perceived dome of the sky ok and the ways in which we interpret that dome has has a stablished human civilization if you think about the architectural structures of islamic mosques and buddhist stupas and christian cathedrals and indian sweat lodges a number of you know african lodges and igloos i mean that these are all representations of the ways in which were interpreted in the cosmos and imbedding them within this kind of archetype a lark a texture it's of my interest in fuller was really the ways in which he was playing at this nexus of trying to understand fundamental geometries that are functioning within the universe as well as the ways in which we could be using the dome form itself to reprint jacks so that we could reflect back on what our own perceptions are or were really good for the educational implications of that are and with the computing it's going to become more ubiquitous than it has been it was very limited to a few who would have access to that technologically but it could become right into the realm of everyday life as a way of educating sure students called the bare maximums for humanity ok right ok if they're good yeah i love it but how can we really begin to structure human society design the future in such a way that we could be working with synergistic forces so that we could provide for one hundred percent of humanity yeah i mean and so like with my own path becoming interested in domes and discovering the work because buck mountain was where he st started constructing fis so i'm really intrigued by what is it about this dome form that is compelling us to want to break beyond this firmament well within our imaginations that it seems to be some type of drive that we have to try to expand and that could be used for not only space questions like the universe and so forth like planetary but it could be feature films so or oprah documentaries or something that would be available to people and that's something that seems over the horizon when we get the cost down to work to become part of the general suicide is that a possibility or is that too far in the people i think it's already i mean just in terms of the theaters there's already hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that have been constructed in the past ten years i mean in the united system is the united system's a projection there's always something either distinct differences one country to another either standards conversions or connections of this way of having projecting reality me old multimedia reality what is the reality there in terms of the possibility of a system that would be united around the world like electricity sure all the commonality a spherical perspective ok so since the time of the renaissance  the western world has been you know really in training to think in the context of linear perspective yes it was a major sort of perceptual revolution when linear perspective was introduced and we had camera obscur bracingly and there really established this whole notion of the divide between the observer in the observed hope which really lit itself within the sight of the modern scientific paradigm to think in terms of an objective observer and so we were being  is project essentially of five point perspective yeah which is you know basic cardinal directions and straight forward onto a hemisphere so that more closely mimics the ways in which we actually perceive right but at m an h at the hayden planetarium they use multiple projectors none of that really matters because ultimately they all conform to this specification ok let's clear up a perspective i didn't important get down absolute is nearing absolutely i remember people have been working on standards for years and years and years to make sure that all these systems can interoperate work together we had their problems some of the various video tapes you know any kind of things is that ok and there's market competition and that kind of thing but you've been in that for a very long time you're also no one not mistaken president of the board or involved with the book with president of the institute might be well we're talking about that because that's a major institution in terms of intellectually understanding the human project in a very comprehensive  attempts to understand and visualize different notions of the universe and trying to think in terms of the largest possible frames a minute fuller said you know if you're trying to solve a problem start with the universe so that you could avoid leading up living out any critical variables right  so if we're trying to address problems comprehensively really antithesis of the way that we've been trained in some ways that we're not trained to be the specialists you know when we're constantly especially in an academic settings yeah being told we have a daunting daunting question if it is and eventually what i came to is that these these visualization tools are so powerful and yet so that we can visualize our notions of across all of these different sciences and we can you know with with  carters done you know scale within a kind of powers of ten scaling engine to conceptualize phenomena of far far far beyond everyday perceptions but i was attracted to the work of five specifically because ultimately once you  e run the course of asking all these big questions and conceptualizing and abstracting and trying to grapple with all of this that for me anyway this this pragmatic need hit hit me hard then when when when  the sort of interesting proposals that he was making in the ways in which they really manifest within his artifacts right and that is that there was this drive to demonstrate physically these metaphysical principles to really thousand dollars a year prize given to a project with the greatest potential to help make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or to the disadvantage of the but the the ways in which b f i had started this program and i actually st got involved in two thousand and six when we did a what's called a design science lab in nashville was a ten day program looking at how it is we good set up a system where that can emerge you reform the argument instead of the people right and that was in large part of his life was spent within that context no account hardly at all of the normal political new kind to host one of these design science labs in asheville also with the dar gable one of the students met our game and i know and that are profound impact on me i mean like i really started to see this process as being one in which it was actually trying to look at problems from the most comprehensive perspective and this was something i hadn't really encountered before really looking at it from the cosmological level the ecological level you know from physics and biology and sociology i mean like every possible lens could be accounted for within the system and i found it so compelling that i wanted to be one of the become more involved and be a five m b to be on the board and it was just when they were starting the challenge and the interesting thing about that for me was that by putting the call out for projects designed to make the world work on percent of humanity that all of these projects were coming in from all of these different countries across all these different disciplines and the very process of inviting jurors to come in and vetting these projects and really asking ourselves what does this mean it started to become a very pragmatic endeavor for working with really some of the most you know brilliant and visionary people on the which is working to realize emergent properties that can't be predicted just by looking at the components of the system individual i think synergy when he would add to people about synergy to a group of scientists back in the fift is kind of the antithesis of the reductionist approach which is the mark of a good deal of academia you know you have a clue on that of the entire you know western scientific endeavor for the most part and that we look for answers by trying to pick things apart yeah and looking for all the dis components and that's important it's given us remarkable capacities for manipulating the physical world yes but i think that it needs to have some balance whereby we start looking beyond the supply and we start looking beyond the individual discrete parts start to try to understand what does it mean to solve problems with the intentionality of making the world work one hundred percent of humanity but also to be looking at these you know sometimes unintended sometimes intended consequences of the interactions of these complex systems yeah right and yes so my mind bob it would be if i was really been about by really my need to have examples so that when we're telling stories of global change you know when for instance you can take people on these these cosmic tours and you return to the simulations of earth and you can talk about all of the things going on with regards to biodiversity loss and chemical pollution and you know ocean acidification and all of these things that are really quite daunting right i mean it's impossible for us as individuals in many ways to wrap our heads writings of all of that but what i've found is that the stories around the types of projects that are coming into the challenge are absolutely the most important grounding for can we start to focus on cultivating incubating all of these other projects that have been submitted so that we can have a profound profound community a practice of aided and assisted and funded and everything else and so that we can begin to demonstrate what does it look minds coming up so specialized out one thing you know that they'll never think comprehensively or system and become a threat to those who are running the world that's a little bit of a it's an interesting take on things there may be some truth there well i mean i think a great example is climate change i mean that the complexities of global changes have been reduced basically to c o two yeah right and so the ways in which people try to quantify the relative value of that are constantly interacting and i think the trick now the challenge before us is how do we begin to balance this hyper specialisation with very compelling ways to help people think in the big picture it's a very big you're onto comp well actually just a university share of a department of everything or there's an art of didactic thing coming now in the world it's making it possible for people to greeks comprehensive and the systems thinking rather than specialized but it's gall people have recognized the absolute necessity of whole systems thinking whole systems design you know you look at the work of emery love and so yeah the work that you know you have schumacher was doing i mean like there's the number of people that are recognize the absolute importance of taking the largest possible frames of reference right helps so that we can understand all of these complex interactions with their own and that it's still i still think it's relatively nascent within i could denio because it's so counter to the ways in which academia  evolved and so that so for me it's been necessary to find a praxis now and demonstrations of this so the conversation can be grounded because you can't you know it's information overload permit pattern recognition we're being inundated every day david there comes a revolution over the transom from every field in about our understanding thirty years ago we didn't know the way the brain works we neurotransmitter we didn't know the genome it's coming to a time about like a quickening of understanding intellectual way the realities of the world that we just simply haven't had access to or are two hundred thousand distraction ok because i think a lot of times people are talking about the futures and when future studies and things there can almost be this kind of technological fetishism people are hoping that these new technologies are just going to come along and save us from ourselves and that a lot of the research that that i've done in terms of sort of the history of humans projecting their imaginations yeah into the dome and running the relationship that we've had with ecological cycles in the sky and everything but there's an extraordinary amount of wisdom to be found in ways that our ancestors have synchronized with the cycles of life yeah right and been able to deal with the paradox of what it means to be an organism with an environment added to live in all of these different kind of cultural mechanism running that have encouraged people to think long term real record you know the simplest example kind of being that the seven generations kind of you know yes right now and that within our particular culture we don't actually have a lot of those structures in place anymore  constantly were actively encouraged to be extraordinarily myopic and to think in terms of quarterly profits and to think in terms of our own personal satisfaction right and that it's almost impossible for us most of stephen imagine fifty years one hundred years let alone you know in the case of the long now foundation you know ten yards out yeah right right and so i think our biggest challenge is how are we developing ways in which we're encouraging people to think long term because we're only here because our ancestors took consideration for what was coming at you right up to them i mean and no matter what is happening i mean no matter what's happening we will want to anchor to history or the historical context  it's almost necessarily scientific to be able to do that four million years ago we weren't here there was often a pig thing we were contained within the troop in the it's a new voting pattern that we can come to understand we were in a different form and we were were well it's interesting there are in then we're you know and we get to this point and eldritch and stephen j gold we're talking about punctuated equilibrium in the way in which you have the new appear and we've got we now have people who are understanding high it would be evolutionary process got started and we're coming to a new kind of relationship and that's something that's very worthwhile taking account of maybe thinking very comprehensively in terms of the physics that if we just got brian greene and string theory to question the special theory of relativity that had informed physics in all of this and so it's coming it's something that this is not your normal time people probably have thought that but i really think it may be a time like a gestation or something of that order that we're coming to now i don't know if you get a sense of that or if it's necessary that we do get a sense of that true give us a comprehensive understanding of the context within one that we anchored in history but you're going to subsume in a certain sense that and in the new a new kind of relationship to the cosmos is going to be what would emerge i don't know if you can understand what i'm saying but this is not your normal time i agree i mean you do absolute mean there's an amazing amount of acceleration that's occurring with you know it's like a quick pregnancy but it has a good and i i'm very cautious yeah of good of placing it in too much of a moment of novelty ok because i think the danger is that we have gotten in some to become more comfortable with the fact that we are organisms within an ecology that as we start to understand our view are a logical surroundings from the by regional perspective all go up to the cosmic right act and right that we have to take responsibility for working within the regenerative capacity of those ecology right perhaps a little and that the problem with becoming to an amateur with the novelty and the acceleration is that it's very easy to once again kind of abstract ourselves yeah oh right cycles right right to see it as a linear progress and i think that the there's since you know the past couple of centuries at least there's been this very very strong myth of progress that things are yeah you know getting better and better  comes to appreciating the fact that there are many many many things that we could be doing especially with industrial processes like agriculture manufacturing that fit much more within the cyclical nature of this particular planet they are on and the things that we've taken for granted persona mean one of the beauties of science is that you know for ten thousand years we've taken the relative stability of the atmosphere for granted and really had to think about right and even kno that i would consider me a biologically a right you know right right right it's kind of what scale do you choose yeah to draw that line right i mean that that's something that i'm constantly intrigued by is when you look at for instance my sealy all networks and for briley possibly you know looking at some of these proposals in ways that they might actually be useful framing device you know writing or they're not absolutely as rigidly defined but then again you look at the definition of what's the rigid with the challenges to the science to the rigor of the scientific process itself because it was becoming politicized so that's an interesting she was coming very worried about that in terms of the peer review in the years after the occurrence of the big bang thirteen seven because that's a heck of a measure of being able to take the measure of ability to take the measure of things characteristic and we had the accelerator cern they were going to take a telescope array that didn't get financed i guess or something but there was going to take the picture of the shockwave within a nano nd if it's a current thirteen billion seven hundred million years ago it's in place and we have a capability that is incredible in terms of limit of the system if it is or is not a closed system which is a conundrum that keeps as well in a synergistic understanding of the reality if you understand what i mean but fuller used to cast about for what's it all about in terms of evolution or the existence of all the realities and he felt that the evolutionary process itself from the beginning of r n a and in the evolutionary process was an anti intro pick function in universe that moved across speciation does that make sense or do does that make sense to you and does that hold and if it does does that give us an understanding of how we can view the larger issues within a context that takes into  account the systems by which he wanted to get to a thing where he said we'd get an operating manual for spaceship earth is written beautifully on that to where we have a comprehensive context generous now and i'm saying that we could get to that kind of a thing  approaching where we would have a context that could could get us to that level of understanding and this understanding of his understanding of evolution and human role within the evolutionary process within the cosmos i think only through these kind of successful habits habits and to pick up on what those habits are meant to understand these phenomena from the perspective of the murdered properties and increasing complexity and increasing novelty and understanding  that synergistic properties that emerge from these systems are something that we can consciously cultivate that there are things that we can recognize instead of kind of trying to tear everything apart and then reconstructed from the ground up and to see that there's so much that's situation in which subtropical faxon or just effects can be maximized yeah that it's incredibly inspirational yeah when it comes to understanding what human beings can do and so on and one of primary tenets was that you know work was a problem solvers yeah as a species yeah and that we had this particular corner of our universe that has all of these various in are just sick effects that enable us to sit here and have this conversation in the air and we have the right gravity in the ma e i mean you kind of go on and on and on about all the things that have to happen in order for us to even be able to sit here have this conversation also had a very crucial moment and a crucial moment i mean temporally absolutely and so what what i hope we can accomplish with the buckminster fuller challenge and by focusing attention on those crucial issues does it need to be focused on on a on a global scale right now as well as the processes that are cultivating the synergistic emergent properties so that we can begin to heal so many of the systems that are being destabilized that are really being disrupted and so rapidly that it's difficult to actually the extent to which they could have a profoundly negative effect on humanity you know from from here on out well the interesting thing and that if i may is that the we have a unique capability of extending consciousness into the universe or tools and technology and that's coming to a point where the extension of that as been at the benefit within historical context of what princes were used by one tribe to gain advantage over another so they could go and conquer and be make their tribe strong it's called still it seems to apply and the weapons systems have according to the modeling that i can come across is the weapon systems that i've planted been developed by this process of extended consciousness to where they they reach the point where there are species lethal that is they have the ability to eliminate the homo sapiens species do you think that's true was it true seventy comes up the year when they mostly think we reach that armageddon point we're relates to the nd world war we could not we were trying but we were not but that the weapon systems our species lethal or a little if you're talking about cutting off conscious evolution or evolutionary process at least in terms of conscious at this extent so that's very crucial and then also former used to he did if i may he took with the i don't know if it's a science design decade or what but he had that chart that he made saying that the percentage of the world population terms or capability was increasing through time you're familiar with the ten percent for the st world war twenty percent by the nd and he said we were heading hyper toward where there would be we would cross a fifty percent mark and he lived out his life thinking we had crossed at the level of capability for providing life support the whole of the human society and the ecology and the ecology w existentially significant what do you make of all of that well i think it's interesting when you look back at the predictions that he was making with ok words to sort of what what he saw coming in the next few decades that would be an even challenge before i think so i mean he did talk a lot about gestation rates and he had great hopes in them politicians would prove themselves as useless as they seem to be today very rapidly and i think that you know his notion of so that that there's a lot of material to mine that by by his own quantification of what you were referencing in terms of you know the world capacities and world needs that there's a tremendous amount to be learned right now in terms of trajectories that we can be taking because of the i think the deeply emergent initiatives that are happening around the planet we're getting them paul can write about this extends yeah of the system that's driving the people he's going horizontal more and more inclusive or maybe getting out on one specialization that can encourage it isn't right you know i think it's i think it's very very interesting in that and i actually just think that it demonstrates the extent to which  more relevant than ever i would agree with you more and i think it's a part of what i would really like to see happen is and part of what we're working on to be a five gauge a lot of thinkers right now especially that are very very active in the realms of you know  social innovation and social capital and entrepreneurship and people that are working with all kinds of ecology and agriculture and sociology i mean to look at some of the fundamental ideas that full gigantic transformation from one where there's not nearly enough through good design you from realization doing more with less providing for everyone is different than being condition that was one logically with one of scarcity kind of environmental degradation going on in the year that i was born you know myself as i was sitting there with my my own nephew and like wow you know we were born into this world we're born into this system and we're sort of forced to play the game whether we want to or more interesting lifelong experiment of what does it mean to really try to understand the true human capacity for designing a world in which we are operating within the successful habits of the universe that's right and we can present patterns that could be understood by increasing numbers of people it would seem i think it's widely understood and if you've got that kind of an opportunity then you would be able to have something that could be not only just to go to the poets and so forth liberating whole and it would be might be able to provide the context where not only would it be liberating the people who have not been in a good leadership position or something of that sort historically or politically or something but it would be something that could be understood by anchoring it to the historical institution and go along with those responsible for the outdated institutions which are manifest when you make that kind of a transformation and we need something that can be understood by and gone  of this to these very peculiar personality we want to be a little easy we're there so because we've been living in a world where everybody's trying to find who the bad guy is to fight politically and to have the idea that there's a context i'm to logic context that is accommodates to university level parents and species level could the universe we maybe we may be in a time of incredible you know your arms those weapons remain species lethal and they don't have a vision that is not historically myopic but they're not only species lethal for us we're losing so many species every day well that just went through you know and so part of the issue i think just want to focus and that many people aren't even aware of the impact that we're having  start to help people to understand it's very very very very difficult to understand these things just by reading about them but if you can visualize them a lot you can oh yeah right right you know absolutely  work within the full capacity that we have for visual cognition and they all use different you know modes that we have as a species and never tell me it's coming exponentially in new dimension really quickly because all good revolutions are coming out of the computer labs and those are all but you know but anyway but do you think the idea of design would go to things and i don't i know we don't you people have suggested serious people who are looking at you know the contemporary moment so what  the idea of design isn't designed just to some new technology or some new gadget or some machine or something it's a design at the level of economic theory or a new design principles or an operating manual as he said he led to fuller did that it's a design thing to design the political and not to avoid the political economic engagement get and be involved with it and bring new design principles up within dialectic which should be within you know things relevant to the emerging future when i think you know at the simplest level you know the whole notion of the paradigm paradigm you know head came in a coon thomas co center of our universe yes indeed you know they are and they don't for a long time we've been trying to escape this embodied reality and to become objective observers to look at it from this god's eye view and this new model  of an astrophysicist friend that worked on developing this was carter heat back to the napkin sketch he says he thinks it's about ten billion dollars worth of missions and research to create this new model of the universe right while it's sort of d symbolizes this quest to create our objective view on the where in fact we are situated in the exact center of it and in order to understand that you have to really look at it from a paradoxical perspective that the center is everywhere and nowhere simultaneous right reverend and that alien life and everything that what if the conditions the synergistic conditions that have developed in such a way to and enable complex body consciousness to exist on this planet yeah right really are the only game in town for the forseeable future how do we act what do we do we ask all of these these you know abstract philosophical questions what if they're actually much more practical than that that if we really want to colonize space if we really want to see thing to see if we can grow up if we can actually become responsible enough to take full responsibility for our own initiatives on this planet so that we're operating within the confines and boundaries and education consciousness raising is what it would be really important and i just wish you all the very best with all of that i really enjoyed talking to you and everything i think it's an amazingly  thank you for all that work and wish you all the very best in it as it progresses you're involved with be a fine you're also involved with nasa and other and other agencies that are trying to get good information out to the  do leadership but also the body politic and let's hope public access might be able to be one way in which some of that could be disseminated which we hope we might have done here and so it's really good and really good to have met you and to talk with you and i thank you very very are over the next twelve years what are your priorities how do you side your priorities to spend your time because you're connected in a very important way you're doing a ph d out of england university of flim a good place good thing develop  global changes for people from a cosmic global and by a regional scale to really engage communities and dialogue so that we can understand what we do practically to start addressing some of these daunting challenges wonderful is great work and yet it's so good to listen thanks a lot  in the cable audience is your pleasure the perception of a man who is very very important i recommend here be a project he's going to be much more made aware of in the general society as a leading educator and person who is helping to bring the planet into good accord with what the universe wants it to be and i thank you for all that good work and wish you all the very very best in terms of all your work thank you tune in yours always good talk and conversation soon again next week will be coming back  again david thank you really very much welcome to new york and keep up the good work