2. This economic crises, inflation, recession, whatever we are passing through it is beginning to seem like the stories I've heard about the '30's Depression. Is it similar? Is it going to get worse?" Ah. It is not similar. It is incredibly different. The other one came on, society wasn't expecting it at all. I was amazed by it. That 4-D that you have, you'll find there are letters of my mother about the stock market and about the selling railroad bonds, and things like that. 4-D was written two years before the economic before the '29 crash. And I could see it coming, and I really tried to tell people that it was coming in many ways. If you read that carefully you will find, as I talked to people in the stock world and so forth, I am saying those things. At any rate, there were not many people who had stocks and bonds. That was a very esoteric subject society just didn't know what had happened. They were not thinking much about banking, the society was extraordinarily naive, and they didn't know what had happened, the, it is, I say many people really don't know today what it was all about just that it was the Depression. And it had a very it was depressing, that's one reason it was the "Great Depression." The people really stopped being communicative. I told you, in those days the number of literates were very much lower, the vocabularies were less, and people began to get just sitting in rooms and not doing anything. It was a very stagnating kind of a thing. There was no protest down the street, just suddenly things began to be wrong and the newspapers, the financial world kept trying to say stupid things, that prosperity was just around the corner and all of the nonsense. And you heard just exactly the same thing in the Nixon government and so forth, "There is nothing wrong, there is nothing wrong " so were just suddenly, so it is obviously but all the time it was wrong. So that there's been much more education about what's going on, and this time the issues are different.

That was the beginning really as Roosevelt's term was "the forgotten man," but the forgotten man is very much in today, so it really is an everybody based and it was not at that time. It was still very and I said this poker hand business showing that, there was in those days a respect for power that was incredible. The for which reason the poor of those days when they did get the money immediately wanted all the labor man who suddenly made money then got a lot of things his kids didn't like it, but dad got marks of distinction. In other words the association the superficial associations had very powerful psychological effects they don't have anymore. Society has really been completely purged of that kind of a feeling so that what is so very different in this one, is that the young people in my day were not supposed to know anything and the older people knew everything, so the young people just sat around anyway, leaving it to older people, and the older people were in confusion. But today all the young people have been purged of the respect for superficial grandeur and strength and so the base is different.

I actually find around the world, now, just having come around again, everybody really very cheery. You hear that things are awful in England it couldn't be nicer in England. Everybody is feeling great, I assure you. The newspapers keep they keep saying that, and they want to have the other people, our newspapers like to have the other people are in much worse condition, here than we are, you know. We're pretty bad but everybody else is worse. But I find people around the world really are very expectant. They are expectant of something good coming out of this. And the other times you thought, you've got to leave it to politics, so you did finally get in a new deal. Everything, the whole hope was in politics the leader. But the people don't do anything, you've got to elect a big father and the big father would decide what to do. That's not the way people are now. They really are all feeling

What makes me say what I do, and I think you saw the piece I wrote which will be coming out in the Philadelphia News. I think we are coming to where politics simply you say, "what kind of politics we are going to," my communist friends say if you don't join up with the communists, this was all the way back in the '30's, what are you going to have?" I said, "You don't have to have a government." They said, "Oh, what are you talking about! of course you have to have a government." "You don't." We do have spontaneous commitments, so we're off cruising in my boat, or we're going around the world and there's a big crew on the ship, a sailing ship, I assure you every sailor knows what every sailor does on that ship. And you don't need any politicians when something goes wrong to know what to do. You really do know your job and the other guy doing it, and you really know he is doing it. If anything went wrong, the only reason he wouldn't do it is because he's actually been hurt, but there is spontaneous coordination because everybody can see the other guy really at work.

What fascinates me is the sea, and the sailor. I've seen then in incredible conditions they really do fight for that ship, and even then, you get another ship that is in much worse condition, this one is getting on and having a pretty hard time, but this one they really are going to perish and the people on this ship will go after the people in worse condition, but on the land they won't even stop when the people are dying beside the road. I find man on the land does not behave very well, but the ship of the sea, really has shown, if there is anything that is an anathema to a sailor it's a sea going politician. It stinks. They don't want any sea lawyers around. So that I can see you can really get on very nicely without any politicians to tell you what to do. There are, and you do develop codes and you develop laws laws are important. I think what we may, unquestionably have, is something called "city managements," we may very much have administrations, but we are going to have people nobody is going to be doing what they're doing because it's a job and they're going to make money. Everybody is going to be doing his job because he would like really to be doing something, he wants to make a contribution, and this is the one he feels good doing.

Now, one of the things is rather sad you find in America today, I can understand it and I'm glad that we had labor unions and so forth, but they are the money makers have made such a battle between labor and the money makers that they get tougher and tougher, and Howard Johnson really takes on kids that are pretty hard up and gives them much more to do, and one person has to wait on 20 tables and so forth. But you get even in England where they have plenty of labor organization, people still really love their jobs and they're really doing their job because they like their job and they're having fun at the serving of table and all the conversation that goes on. That used to exist in America, but with the hardness of business, and the firming up of labor which was a very great thing that happened really almost the complete joy has gone out of most things, it is very hard the clock punching, and so on so I simply say once we disconnect the idea of how do you carry on, or live, from the doing the job, people are going to want to do jobs, going to want to do beautiful jobs, and they're not all going to want to do the same jobs. So I'm glad somebody does want to paint and somebody else does want to sing, and somebody else I personally would enjoy very much waiting on tables. It can be a very conversational kind of a job. Very informative.

"This economic crisis "you asked me, No, it's not similar dear. It's very, very different, and people didn't seem to have any idea what was going to come out in those days. I was publishing my SHELTER magazine here in Philadelphia at that time. We do have copies of that over in the office and you can read, because I quote all the newspapers in there what is being said at that time. You can really get quite a feeling about it there. And I did feel that my kind of structures and things would have something to do with things someday but I didn't think they would happen for 50 years and I didn't think they would be immediately of importance.

I did work on the idea at that time of buildings that were empty and business buildings were empty. But the property owners felt so strongly about them that the Empire State Building had just been finished in the crash, this incredibly big building with nobody in it. So I made drawings of how it could be used for what you call "space hotel" and move all the people in there who were sleeping in the subways and things, and there was not much enthusiasm about that from the homeowners. I was surprised the veterans of W.W.I, with the Depression on, thinking something ought to be done in Washington, got up a march to Washington. And they encamped over where the Pentagon now is, which was just more or less marshy lands over there. And they were so annoying to the still in Republicans who were this is when General MacArthur drove them out, and they, then, marched to New York, and because of my publishing my SHELTER MAGAZINE their leader came to see me. And I tried very hard to find someplace where they could be housed in New York and I was finally gratified that I couldn't get any of the churches to pay any attention the subway stairs were all full just with New Yorkers already there people were really sleeping all over it was a little warmer in that subway, and the my, interesting, The Guarantee Trust Company had a lot of properties on the lower East Side where today there are enormous housing developments but they were really terrible old houses, they were really terrible messy, just like Detroit, much as Detroit looks today, and they let me have one of those buildings. And then another one, and the floors were all gone. These men moved in, they repaired all the floors, and they found the neighborhood was wonderful to let them have scraps of boards and things. They got the floors repaired, they laid out newspapers on the floors so that it was something to lie on, they used to try to keep up the morale, they used to have drilling everyday just to sort of get and the butcher at the end of the week, food that he hadn't sold you have to get rid of because so he gave them this food.

We found the community being wonderful to these people. There were I was only able to take care of a certain number of them, but I did have them, and I had quite a lot about that in SHELTER MAGAZINE if you go back and read that. There are pictures of the work that they did repairing the buildings. When the New Deal came in, they took on these people, and the WPA, and they sent them down to work on the Florida Keys Highway the bridges, and they were all on Matecumbe Key, I'm sorry to say, the minute they began to get some money then, they'd been through such rough things that they did much too much drinking, and they were getting pretty messy. They had just been pushed around, sort of half dregs of humanity, Matecumbe Key, there was a great incredible hurricane, and it wiped them all out. This is the story. So I felt God just cleaned that up decided to get them in a better condition. They were not recoverable. They were living in the railroad cars down there on the key, and it was not a good life, and the WPA thing was not being administered in a too friendly way, it was a mess. It was a handout and really and enormous, really an ignominy. They were not being honored.

"How many miles per gallon of gas did your Dymaxion Car get?" Remember, it carried 11 passengers, so I rated really in the terms of passenger miles, but I did get up to, due to its low drag, I did get up to as much as 30 miles to a gallon. The sum total cruising I think she was running around 20, but this would be for 11 passengers, so if I would take the gallons per passenger mile she was very low. I changed the driving ratio and 2.8 to 1, so that the low drag I could get my engine, when she was really peaking, to get my wheels moving around very fast.

"Once while explaining your 'Rethinking of the Lord's Prayer' you mentioned the physical accelerating and the metaphysical trending to slow down to eternity, will you explain that statement?"

As I have said, man is apparently the physical norm being 186,000 miles per second of energy unfettered in vacuo. As we begin to employ the energies, we are not going so fast, because our earth is going 60,000 miles an hour around the sun, so getting up to 100 miles an hour over the land isn't something very impressive. We are going faster, but so I find physical accomplishments more rapid to the point that there is such an acceleration that you and I are experiencing in days, where in terms of total numbers of experiences and changes of information changes we have to make in adjusting, we're in enormous acceleration compared to our forbears. But, I find, then, the metaphysical, we learned a little about that precession, and then how do you describe it properly. We get some equations for it, and it's done in quantum mechanics. Get it a little more simplified. But we're dealing in the metaphysical is really dealing in those generalizations, and generalizations themselves are eternal. And, as the Heisenberg principle shows, we can't get to be absolutely exact because the act of measuring alters that which is measured. So what we do is get we have finer and finer tolerance we'll tolerate less error. We find a way of getting to say it a little more accurately. But the more accurately you say it, the less frequently you're going to change what you say. Do you understand that? That really is a metaphysical slowing down because we're dealing in eternity where there is no change at all. And you get, Universe is always showing these balances. And then the but the motion one only gets to a limit of 186,000 miles a second it doesn't go on accelerating beyond that. That is the maximum. But it works back, everything works back to the eternity of no change. That's the end of Janet Janet's questions, not the end of Janet.