fernley he's a gentleman i've been wanting to catch up with for about fifteen years now because you've been a person who'd been writing matt mightily and feels very similar to the ones that i was very interested in including not the least of which was work of our buckminster fuller and also in the in the realm of what is called synergetics and so forth he's got an incredible bio he's worked in many many fields he was a pioneer in and the linux movement and he's the cyberneticist and he's the president and c e o c e o of the lenox force incorporated he's also executive director of a synergetics collaborative and he's cole organizer of the greater philadelphia thinking society he's an intellectual and he's interested  has an amazing amount of information that he's from new year with and c j thank you so very much for coming in it's a great pleasure thank you for the invitation oh it's my pleasure i was so happy to see you at the recent challenge of the buckminster fuller's to where the winning challenge it was taking serious inroads if that's the right way of thinking of synergistic thinking or it visionary thinking into the established system by which the the larger planet in the systems war because it's tapping in not only to the state level and also the national level and terms of something that is confronting us all global warming in the breakwater project and so forth so they're really tapping into a major one of the buckminster fuller challenge ceremonies in i missed one or two but this was this was one of the best it was it was a really great program last make things just didn't you know that kind of thinking idealistic thinking i think is what we're talking about buckminster fuller's contribution she could be seen in some circles and idealistic as good many of the great thinkers of art of human history idealism but idealism rich in a way that now can tap into the practical reality is something that i think is called for now a new understanding of how we relate to a store called patterns you know one of the important things i think that comes from idealism is preparing the world for future ideas yeah i'm sure thoughts in many ways buckminster fuller was saying new form or y called himself that in is the last book fia new former and one of the things we need is the imagination to prototype the new form so busy that th luxury of sorting it out thirty or forty or sixty or a one hundred or a one thousand years into the future as they might have at the time jesus or something like that but the time has come for a major qualitative transformation in these very days possibly in the  contemporary moment is not one of a continuation of history but we're having a moment of break with the historical pattern that we have to relating to and in real terms in a sense that's what i'm getting at in a certain sense yeah i know now fuller talked about that he talked about the histories final exam but i wonder if maybe we misunderstand that ok what mabel are meant by the final exam he also wrote somewhere else that humans are born problem solvers and if you get any good at it then you get harder problems to solve that's true and so it may be that the final exam is just a prelude to the final exam well that could be and that really brings us around because you're part of a thing called the synergetic collaborative and synergetics if i'm not mistaken mr fuller would be he was a very very inventive be invented all kinds of and he believed in his asian doing more with less through good design he vaghul people not to begin to be interested in political but to design alternatives that could make the good emerge through good design and hundred thousand people or something and say have any of you ever heard the word synergy no hands would go up hardly then but now synergy is on the lips of every ad agency and essentially  definition is the behavior of systems unpredicted by the sum of its parts that's a big word in a big concept and apparently you agree with that you've got the synergetics collaborative able to talk a little bit about that word and its meaning and predicted by the behavior of that components considered separately yeah that is that part of it yeah and i would add in a certain sense maximally engaged i mean that's another twist that maybe we can put twists on it but it's essentially what it does rule out if i may ok it rules out almost any absolutism you don't have anything absolute because a science of synergy if siddur g is the behavior whole systems on predicted by the behavior of the parts can we make a science of that can we develop that as a way of understanding a way of knowing gap in the fuller community that we've been trying to fill good for you it should be done and there should be more and more i think he's taking it there's more more people as they say in binocular cotton you know and the man is being relevant to things and everything and all of that that we can come back to that and we're in we've got a clip we're going to show which has to do with some of the energetic aspects of design and so forth but i wonder maybe we should share your own background where you were born and raised and you had an education you've done a great deal of work in mathematics and so work so share your own background if you would be born and raised and educated a little bit and then get back to this i was born a trojan a new york trojan and  know i spent my junior and senior year in the library studying every reading every book i could on fuller and every journal article talking about fuller and i said but i said practical i went to class been educating yourself i really respect that mightily i think is going to emerge more and more that people will be educating themselves like hound dog on the scent of a fox they're running a thing down because they're really interested not because they're feeling some behavioral psychology notion of what somebody else thinks they ought to be doing in order to qualify to have a certificate that makes lists that makes them money or something like that that motivates so much of the educational process and i respect that but how did you happen to me and i was in the bookstore one i liked books and there was a book in the subtitle is an exploration is in the geometry of thinking or does that book i know it i know the subject i can't remember the title of the title is synerg so but i found the book very difficult going yeah it was a real struggle and so i said i know what i'll do i'll go to college i'll major in mathematics and then i'll read it so i after i got mine bachelor's degree i started really have but where does that say about calculus or what does that say about the historical tradition of mathematics for instance you're sort of in a certain sense you know i'm saying well yeah you know i i i'm going back and i'm reviewing my no that's school geometry at most just build the models so mind my library is filled with geometry models that i build until you get your hands on it you start making a wit how could you learn it until you build it yourself i wonder if we could talk what is a tetrahedron what is that maybe you could talk a little bit about that and don't we have a clip that we're going to show somebody that was at  design science here at the rhode island school of design they've been our major educational partner for building bucky's work interesting there in rhode island there in providence rhode island yeah a clip is one of the rhode island students nick tomlin he busy and this is on our you tube channel and i wanted to show it and share it because it shows the of taken too much so too much bucky too far yeah right and i think everyone needs to on learn reading a book i'm going to lead a discussion in philadelphia on sunday november th something l that does is provide the framework upon which to build more ignorance to build more or to apply or to throw back the one about how about at taking another tack and saying you're pulling back the bale of ignorance that has been surrounding it and we're going to i was making progress in terms of understanding the application of things in universe or not i think maybe they're going to change can be made for that through the evolutionary process perhaps i think it's very much tied up in a paradox ok i think knowledge and ignorance go hand in hand i don't think you can have one without the other edge interesting and as you learn more it grows both busy your knowledge and your ignorance well how do we deal with that kind of thing there's ten segue to the idea of ten segregated tension and in and and compression these two things are part of the order that they've discovered that's another important concept is it not and that's got a duality to it into you know it's got compression and then it's got intentional integrity that goes through almost like parallel almost horizontal more yeah more vertical and the other is more inclusive and rounded and so forth but consecutive part of the synergistic way of seeing universe wraps right tension compression  knowledge ignorance right left yeah all that i think really fuller has that great model you know we don't war when you're walking you walk right foot left right foot left foot you you can't really ferret out the knowledge and cordon it off and put it into a seven pound textbook and people who try to do that if narrow and specialized field and that's another issue about high specialization is going on the education process that is just some people are saying is just dividing and conquering the intellectual community into highly specialized little corners where they can't get a picture of the whole pattern recognizing which is really important you know and it takes out the mystery yeah where's the excitement and rare is the you know learning is exciting because you don't know something i find yeah and i'm discovery yeah yeah yeah it really shows how a naive student and i mean that in the most honorable and noble and loving way i even as a great quality i think that i think five year are my favorite people they're very naive and dead yes they have no artifice at all hardly every five year old almost you know what i'm saying is they're just on it he says and i think they're all geniuses and we did gene you know through the have earned an reify institutional structures that we've taken as being as essential because some of our scholars have told us this is what's really essential this is the real truth and there are no real truth is a synergistic kind of the universe and we may be at a liaison with the tradition where the way of being in the universe is transcended to what we've been through two hundred thousand years of human history perhaps if you can understand it that's something that is an opening up on the fuller offers yeah i think we need to apply ignorance to this history and evolutionary process evolution is very subtle you know and it's very hard to ferret out the qualities of evolution that are sort of just history and the qualities for which there may be a mechanism is there is there a mechanism driving evolution well that's a big question our yeah right it's a thing that we're trying to understand because we're getting closer and closer to understanding things in an intelligent way that we have not had any possibility of having coming out of history it seems every day comes over the transom some new breakthrough in every field every where we're coming to understand things more and more it seems to me you know if time is a very pregnant moment we live in a lot of those big breakthroughs though or mistakes yet enjoy twenty years we're going to find  going to set you free in zero if you buy a hostess cupcake or whatever a lot of it as to do with selling stuff and making the old system where a lot of it is through the economics and politics but anyway back to this clip you got that clip and maybe think it set it up you could say set it we often do students to come up and show us what they've been doing and the clip is nick tomlin sharing his work with us and myself and transmit some of this to others who may be viewing possibly and it was just part of the synergetics collaborative oh yes it was yes this is our two thousand and pretty sure it was the two thousand and seven work symposium at the rhode island with all kinds of funny ideas but i've been feeling my way through and what was wonderful about the foundation classes was they do a drawing class a two dimensional design class and three dimensional design ok this is a chance here but we had a class where we took we had to take a rip a shape and repeat it and i took a coat hanger and then found a way of doubling it with another coat hanger like that from very familiar with this one it's also the coat hangers it's just the long side they're making up triangles and then i really don't know the names of any of these i just learned that this is a that's what it seems to do it on its own happy to do it without me having to interfere too much either which is nice takes my kind of human error side of it this was one of the interesting ones because i was going for a q but then i gave up and then it right yeah ok so what they're what they're saying is that this is a quadrant right and there's another one back here and another one on the bottom so you've know this is cool but we can talk about it later so that was last year  you can name this one you know start off with this shape here and you can bring it up and twists like that but then you can arrange it round so this also works like that in the spring is that the tension in  metal ring steel ring this last one is an offshoot of this one here and you and you have two rings and and you get all the wires twist around each other and make and this is sort of the you know the pension like that so i mean it's they're all investigations and i'm just you know flying blind right now but i think this is the last three days i've been extremely oh ok well that's really engineered brings up the dimensions of synergetics and the way those manipulation of the tetrahedrons and so forth can be understood and that all relates to the geography the geometry of reality you know the geometry of thinking i think want to shut them up we want to help them explore what they're doing and learn how the universe works so that they can go and design our future so that we can have a sustainable somebody somebody of which we could all repair i think and i think that's why i was so happy to run into you at this recent event and so forth and because you were both at advocates of his way of thinking so you got involved in back to your story in  on to him in terms of that in and then you went on you did your degree at binghamton in mathematics you like mathematics mathematics and philosophy yeah i tend to be a detail oriented person i lead these discussions  philadelphia on various topics like a sunday will be talking about ignorance and i usually come in with like three page of really tiny detailed notes and i use that to spur the discussion i up others that nest with him well and so forth you find anyone else it is as inspirational to you i know you're often from and are there now we could talk about a little later maybe we're going to do a nd program with you but do you get into politics do you get into other things like the news or that kind of thing do you sort of stick to just energetics and color and that kind of philosophy you say yeah i try to keep away from the news the destructive and so i try to avoid politics although you can't you know it you know because we have to make decisions in the world politics is the science of decision making we all make decisions in our personal lives of the context within which is made which is something that isn't brought up nearly enough i think we just take for example certain we just take as given certain issues one of which is there never be never can be by the laws of all the laws of physics  everybody that's something that's assuming to be so back to observe to consider anything other than scarcity is an ontological reality it is not scarcity is one of those wonderful paradoxes because on the one hand bucky is absolutely right and not run out of oil so you need to figure out how to come up with automobiles that run it a one thousand or ten thousand miles a gallon we haven't done that yet because doing more with  it yeah so so scarcity is something that we think we have but we really don't if we engage our design faculty but if we fail doing gauge our design faculty of the human experience we how would you measure fuller did that magnificent thing back in fifty two i guess it was part of what was to become to design science to kate and so forth but he measured the percentage of the world population that could be seen to be a half in terms of our technological capability of providing life support and added on to push it presented to the world population and it coming out in history of flat in terms of six century it took decades to invent attack now every day there's thing coming every day it's going exponential it's developing exponentially and the percentage of the world population that could be realistically seen at the level of capability not the inherited reality the reality which could be called have we haven't got a definition what do we mean by half how do we deal with surplus and so forth but that's an interesting concept that he came up with and one that gives a certain kind of reading to this idea that it's been scarcity we're transcending that and we're coming into a new kind of ontological reality in universe and that's never able to be mentioned it's so facto absurd to say anything except there's not nearly enough everybody starving as you can all scarcity to say in a starving artist and bushwick or in fishtown in philadelphia how do they experience the abundance than we intellectuals think they're supposed to have i don't think it's fair to  put that critique on it any more than the people at work that town down or missouri now where they just got a bad decision by a court system or it was unfair to put that down upon  said let's take care of the least among that there wasn't the capability to do it in the way that is now emerging fuller it looks about individual initiative throughout not the individual have an access to this abundance  not every individual have access to this abundance that has now become available to all one hundred percent of humanity plus the ecology so that we're coming to that moment now never before in history we've got two hundred thousand years of our existence on this planet as a species this is unique moment not the french revolution or a moment of history or something like that or a democrat republican re election or something so how can we help the individual achieve that abundance now while ok well that's something that not only that but no what you need to have is an overarching idea of what is the to life what is the reality is it possible we're transcending material scarcity that would undercut virtually the assumptions of all of our narrative that institution but in even if we are overcoming no as good as it is not the level of reality is not the reality reality is formulated when there's not nearly enough to wonder when somebody else had to lose reified by military power creation stories p r campaigns by people who set themselves up as i mean the authority for it's right for us to scarcity and creating a reality that burdens us with a scarcity was of the same manic patterns i drove out to a friend of mine's out in brooklyn the other day and it  were driving you were just looked out and there's all these buildings building buildings everywhere and it's just a major me every brick had to be laid by somebody everything had to be built all of the institutions i mean the structures the architecture of structures all of the institution the invisible structures of the system by which we operate politically and economically into thinking it's all been predicated upon a particular situation that was characteristic at the level of capability that you have to make a distinction between capability and then you've got all of the inherited institutions that have to somehow in their realistic way to keep you couldn't do it in one thousand nine hundred and fifteen you couldn't do it there is a building up of the capability and we're making progress on the percentage of the world population that can be seen to be a have we don't have a definition how do we define a have we don't have we don't even bring it up because it's just thought if so facto absurd there never can be one thing shared everything is limited it's a limited capability that we have we can't have the theme of mr f hundred percent of humanity including the ecology and everybody with nobody left behind is such an over sweeping kind of think it's not been possible any time in history until perhaps our lifetime is it possible to think that could be the moment  yeah as your generation solves the problem is set for you buying universe by history you passed to my generation a world that has the problems that are the results of your solutions yeah every generation does that so the next day i have been and how many generations have there been and what we should do i think yeah is that think the prior generation they think you for doing the hard work you know ok alving yesterday's problem and presenting me with the much more difficult problems of today i think we should read yes failing to solve all the problems right right but as i mean my reading a fuller yeah ok the reality is that every generation succeeds in solving the most critical problem of the moment yeah of the moment  be extinct right you know all that's another thing so you bring up yeah you solve the problems in your generation and the natural consequence of course is that my generation has to solve bigger harder problems  and it's unfortunate that too many of us blame those who came before the only realized the terrible situation that they were a generation had been born into not to mention in generations a couple one hundred years back and success you've done daedalus in bringing society forward now so the way i interpret battlers final exam yeah is that every generation is got a final exam and the generation that fails to pass their final exam that's it ok you know all good don't go further but if you pass if you pass your final exam what you're going to do is you're going to saddle your children with harder problems than you ever faced before and that's the joy and wonder of modern civilization ok well that's a good way to think and everything like that i wonder though about that because like we're talking about ten segregated and we talked about the time and a history is a nightmare from which were attempting to awaken in a certain sense that makes sense we've never had really universal joshed us it's always been since pharaohs the greek the even even athens even apparently in athens was based on a slave says yes slavery made it possible for some to live well to be able to have investment made and then capitalism comes and so forth and then if you have that possibility if you're thinking about transcending scarcity as something you can't even hardly say you just can't even say it hardly at all but on the side of just that's positive that view that we may be transcending and coming into a new relationship in the universe and this moment this th th generation is coming into their own now and that but on the left on th of the possibility of them failing as you said failing now means and this is something else that i think mr fuller was very aware of and everything the  means by which political legitimacy was established throughout all of human history was whoever had the biggest club hit the other on the head and conquered the st law of international laws the right to conquer you can conquer people in slave them  all of that and you can do that then you have armies to support that and then you have creation stories to give your your view of political legitimacy the leeway then p r to build that up that's how political established and now that still holds in terms of the international order and that's based essentially upon military power to conquer and that's been the history of the universe and that's now reached a point where the weapons systems that if exist they didn't exist in reality they exist and they've not been used but the weapon systems are such according to the modeling that after  war nd world war we get gas we get that we've now got weapon systems that if they're to be unleashed in a spasm of hatred about one saying they're better than the other in fighting over the scarce and all of that kind of thing if they're to be unleashed it would mean the end of the homo sapiens species do you think that's true that destructive capability is building to a point where it's something new in terms of the destructive capability a bad decision making and reifying and outdated institutions that a different quality yes when you can wipe out the whole you can stop evolution of consciousness including the homo sapiens that's never been that's new what i'm looking for something new so there are now certain individuals who have a bad day and they have a brain cancer and suddenly the wiring says let me push this but yeah even though maybe they wouldn't thought that five years ago they wouldn't have had the ability we were impotent at the level of species so we're at it what we're trying to get to is this is not your normal time this is not like the french revolution or the republican event an election of two thousand and five or something like that is not your normal time this is an unusually significant moment in the evolution of universal conscious but i worry that that's this empowering ok i mean we're yeah i understand that if i focus too capabilities and what we're doing to the nitrogen cycle has me as worried as what we're doing to the carbon cycle you know ok yeah it's a very real thing so there are some threat thank you that we never had before well ok that global warming is certainly one of them and that's what that that reward that they went to challenge now is addressing that that it is very much of a politically it's just a murder they have four hundred thousand people in the streets of manhattan the other day about global warming and people are really caught not into that b that it's a capability those weapons are a capability they're not on leash we have a capability to liberate the human society with the advancement of our technological system to where there is enough for all to be have including the ecology in a way that is equally significant existentially significant in a positive format as to the weapon systems there's a balance between the destructiveness and the positiveness so that we can get ahold of something to get over the idea there's not nearly enough there is enough for all but that is something that can't be mentioned by anybody in a political condition because they're too busy to lining the pockets of those as of historically has been the case  history but for each person who's facing these challenges the question comes mechanically what do i do well but he says philosophy to be effective must be mechanically a reasons i've been very much part taking it personally to learn from free online courses yeah to try to get the understanding to hour with you after this and we'll get down to some of those questions of politics and that but you've been involved with the linux and you're involved with the information technology and think and that's open source and that's a thing of how we're going to use the internet which is an amazing thing and all of the capability to that involves those those education autodidactic courses that are becoming available are really valuable so why don't you talk about that because you've been involved in that from the very early stages and what the advantages of lennix or the open source and what are the issues that are involved in terms of the internet and it's being able to be made available to the maximum benefit of humanity and ecology i think one of the great things about linux and free and open source software in general is the ability to share it ok there are certain software and i won't mention any names that you're not allowed to share with your friends with linux if you want it i can get it for you and i don't have to pay anyone and you don't have to pay anyone and so it's a freedom of sharing and caring in and buckie talked about sharing and an education learning and you need he does share in order to learn and grow i think conversation and sharing is so important to culture and so i  managing is good and so i've done a lot of systems administration with linux good and it's important to have an alternative to other more popular well my know you through you tube is google which is linux based i'm pretty sure it is yeah ok i you know i don't work there yeah no but i understand that much of their infrastructure is linux but they're so on the server side you have it's growing one of the miracles of linux is the speed with which it's divel there are more lines of code added to the linux kernel each hour than any other software any human has that's encouraging that in order for markets to work you have to have a base of standards yeah and linux provides that standards base ok with that standards base it makes it possible for i b m makes a lot of their money off of linux ok well we got to that point and i think we're going to have to close this off now as we can we're talking with c j fairly fairly early and he's really got it all off a lot we've been talking about that we're going to go on talking another program and get around some of these questions of politics and that but thank you very much for such a very very very very very well led life that i congratulate you on and we invite you to would be coming up more with him  thank you for viewing ok so it's the end missing it's fernley no wonder that's why i was having a hard time with it now let me just make sure