I first met Marshall McLuhan in Greece, thirteen years ago, and it was on board of a ship, and he somebody spoke to me, and I turned around and realized who it was, so he called to me, and he had two of my books in his hands, and one was NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON and he was just he said "This is my Bible," and if you ask Marshall about this he'll tell you his extensions to man, and so forth, came out of this he had the electrical extensions of man, and then got into, this brought him into ways of talking about the communication system whatever it may be. But Marshall said, "Bucky, your expressions are old fashioned, and I have a lingo," so when I talk to you about man backing up into his future, he said, "Bucky it's called rear-mirrorism." So he gave me titles. Marshall will tell you this, he really said, and deliberately said, he was enlarging on my ideas. We're very, very good friends, and these things we've said very much out loud on the stage platform together, so that I know what I'm I'm not saying something is offensive. He says that he's an English scholar, literature scholar, and his memory, incidentally, is incredible of things he has read, and he began to feel that a great many people who he read many books which society didn't know about, and society was missing some very important things, so he decided really, taking things he had read about that other people had written and began to get society to know about it. But he gets so enthusiastic that he didn't necessarily always say, I am extending this person's idea. His idea he began to make it his own as he began to develop it, which is very reasonable. But he is a man of integrity, so if you check with him about it, he will say, yes, that is correct. That his enthusiasm carried away and he forgot to give footnotes of where he got that. But, external metabolics, I have, metabolics, then, these are energy processes converting in the very kind of way of photosynthesis or whatever it may be. It is always energy interexchangings, and all to do with regenerations or doing work, so I have then the mechanical mechanics, internal to the man, and his, then using the principle external to himself. And then the energies to operate the externals, so that the external metabolics would be what he uses in his machinery in contradistinction to what the metabolics internally, the food that he converts into growth and work. Is that a good is that clear with that part?

"DYMAXION. Where did that come from? Does it apply just to a specific set of artifact inventions?" When the 1927 when I developed the Dymaxion House first my model, and we were in I told you we had this new-born baby and my wife, and we were up in this little flat up in the northwest Chicago, and some old friend came to see me, and in one way or another Marshall Fields, one of the buyers at Marshall Fields in Chicago heard about this and came up, and the head of the Advertising Department. In Paris, 1926, we had the great Paris Exhibition of very modern things it was the beginning of the world really knowing such names as Corbusier and there was the Bauhaus and many, many things were exhibited in that Paris Exhibit in 1926.

The Chicago stores, buyers like Marshall Fields and never mind the other names Scott, Carson Pierie Scott and so forth. These buyers went to the exhibit in Paris. They were trying to outdo the New York stores. Chicago in those days felt very competitive with New York, and was continually trying to show it was a more advanced culture. And they then were going to have their Chicago World's Fair of '33 and, at any rate, the buyers of Marshall Fields and these other stores, bought a great deal of the special fabrics and the special chairs and all of those things of the well-known Bauhaus Group, and they brought these things back to their store to sell. They bought quite a lot of stuff. And suddenly, Chicago decided it would like to have it's World Fair in '33, so they needed these things had come from they had been ordered in the Paris Fair didn't get delivered until about 1928 because they were things, where this boy was making a chair, he only had one at the exhibit and he had to make some more, so the people who got these orders had to find a way to produce them, so they did, and the things began to arrive in Chicago. The Chicago World's Fair was determined on by the community in that year, 1928, when the things began to arrive '27. And they said, we've got to have Chicago architects have to design this thing. We don't want any nonsense as European. The Carson Pierie Scott Marshall Field, had bought architectural models of Corbusier and so forth, they were going to have the windows of the stores were going to have all these European Bauhaus things in the windows so they could sell all the goods inside. And suddenly the really powerful people in Chicago Marshall Fields himself, and so forth, agreed that Chicago's World Fair should be run absolutely by Chicagoans. They didn't want these European architects being celebrated like that. So that they squashed the whole thing, and the house furnishings and whatever the department was that owned all this bric-a-brac chairs and furniture, were in a quandary because they had spent a lot of their money. I think they had well over a quarter of a million Marshall Fields had. So somebody told them about my house, and they came up to see me, this model and looked at it. And, said I didn't know about this dilemma that I just told you until after things were well underway. They asked me if I would they said they were very excited by my model and they wanted to exhibit it at Marshall Fields. And Marshall Fields does a certain amount of cultural things, they do have some exhibits, and once in a while they have some old Chinese Urn or something like that at any rate, they wanted my house to be on exhibit and they showed me the place where it would be and I felt that was alright.

So having decided they were going to show my model, they'd like to have me give some lectures on it, and so it was agreed that I would give these short lectures quite a few times a day, and then they said we needed a name for this. They said there's a Bauhaus, What's the name of this thing? I said, "It doesn't have any name." And they said, oh, we've got to have a name, and they had two men, called wordsmiths, who often invented names for Marshall Field for things they were going to sell in the store. And they also helped other manufacturers to give names to the products. These men had a great reputation because they invented the word "radio" which was quite a good invention, so they were in great demand, and one was named Warren and I can't remember the other man's name, but at any rate, they asked me to lunch with them down at Marshall Field's has a nice restaurant down there, so they asked me down to Marshall Field's restaurant for lunch, and they asked me to start telling them and talking about my why I'd produced this house, and what was the philosophy and so forth. They asked me questions till about 3:00. We'd started lunch at noon, and they stopped, and then a couple of days later, they called me up and asked if we could meet again. Have lunch again. So then they had sheets of paper and one of them would say, "What was it you said about this?" And then the other one would say "What did you say about that?" I didn't know what they were doing, but I was repeating as best as I could, and what they did was to go home independently after the first meeting, I can tell you everything that went on, because I was told retrospectively, each one went home, and they hadn't made any notes at the luncheon, but each one went home and wrote down what they thought the most prominent things, in their memory, that I had said, testing then their memory, what they remembered, sort of a sieve to bring out what was prominent.

So each of them had written down what they could remember. So they, but they were fragments of this fragments of that, so the piece of paper, then, had what they remembered. And then they asked me what I had said about this and what I had said about that, and then they'd say, "Would you say that again?" And so forth, and finally it turned out that they had then by listening to me, they picked out, then, which was the most prominent word which was the most prominent sentence in all the things I'd said, which out of all that I said the whole paragraph which sentence they remembered, so they'd write that out very quickly. This was highly impressionistic. And then they came back to find out which word in the sentence was most prominent. And then they finally had me say it over, which was the most prominent syllable in that word. So they resolved everything I had done down to a set of words, and the most prominent syllables. They had, really , an enormous list of them by this work, because they kept at this for a week or so with me, and finally they took all the syllables, and they said there are harmonic ways to bring the syllables together, and there are graphically acceptable ways shocking ways, there is euphony and there is graphology harmony, so we are going to have to make words out of these syllables of yours. They said, we've counted, and you are a four-syllable man, so it has to be a four-syllable word. And so they then made up all the four-syllable words possible out of all these syllables which were really the pepper and salt of my speech, and then they had all these typewritten lists, and they said, we now have gotten to know you well enough to know you won't like any of them, so what we're going to ask you to do, is like a tennis match. You have you can pair any two of them you want, and throw out the least desirable. So you have to keep going through all this list and finally one word is left. And the one word that was left was this word "Dymaxion." And they said, we're sure you don't like that, but you say it for a few days and you're really going to find that this is an abstract of you. It is a word portrait of you. And so, I did try it, they then got out engraved announcements for my exhibition, and they Chicago did really show up the fancy people all showed up there. And it went on for three weeks, and I kept giving five lectures a day, or whatever it was, it was quite a tiring one. And I met a very interesting, I met Korzybski came to see me at the model there and asked me to go listen to him speak down at Chicago University, and got me into semantics many, many things came out of it, but what I learned was, then, they had deliberately, they had found my house was so far out, that it made the Bauhaus things look very, very safe, so they were selling all this stuff, they just sold everything right off under the aegis of my being too far out. (Lots of laughs from the audience.) This is a strategy they often use to make things sell by making things seem something much more extreme, that the people wouldn't by. So that's where they got "Dymaxion," and then Marshall Fields copyrighted it and made me a present of the name. They said "This is yours," and it is interesting, I have used it, and it has been really very good. But that's how it happened.

That's the end of yours, Jack. Nicholas Peckham. "What was the technology of the pyramids?" I've been to Egypt quite a few times and I couldn't be more fascinated with the stone work that they have done, and particularly if you get to Luxor and you find those extraordinary needles, and there is one of Queen Hatshepsut that these stones were apparently quarried and floated on the Nile, but how they were able to pick them out hammering and so forth, I don't know, but there is one that was never erected still there. It has been dressed out, the stone has been dressed out, lying on stones horizontally. But if you just take a knife out of your pocket, or a key something metal and you hit it, it is an absolute bell, it is the most beautiful bell. This thing is 70 or 80 feet long, but the purity of the stone apparently, they tested so that it would be no flaws whatsoever. Now, I can understand how they quarried, but I would not know how they picked that stone, they must have had their tricks alright ways of sounding around the mountain doing whatever you do with hammers, but I can understand how they floated it there, that would be very easy you could float. And I could see how you could handle that on rollers. I can see how it could be crow-barred along onto the boat, by how to move things by levers and rollers doesn't seem to be anything very novel about that, trees are inherently round, so even at Bear Island trees that we strip of bark on the beach immediately become superb rollers and are there for pulling boats in and out, and you can get a hold of a roller awfully fast in nature. So I think that they had rollers alright and, then, when it came to the pyramids themselves, building these extraordinary how they dressed with such accuracy, dressed the stone, that I don't know, but there is no question about the beautifulness of fit you get. But you find that not just in Egypt. I find it in Japan, around the world, you get old Greece, incredible fitting of stones, and the way stones are dressed, really quite uneven ways, the Egyptians got at least into some pretty accurate symmetries, but there are so many stones in Greece, the very, very oldest stonework you'll find the incredible way it has been dressed and fitted into other stones fitting absolutely superbly, with a great deal of regularities of the stones.

The, I'm certain that the building of the pyramids, the sands drift up very rapidly and it's very easy to make breaks, as snow breaks, and you can make the sands drift. I'm quite certain that they simply drifted the sand up more and more on the work and kept rolling up on the sand. They made their ramps of sand. Can you understand that? That would be, as far as I'm concerned, The great, that is what we're really getting at with the pyramids. I don't know why, it seemed absolutely obvious to me that it would just be the one thing I would do if I had to do that job there, and I'm surprised I haven't read other people suggesting that. There probably are others, and probably somebody may know that, but

"What is shelter?" The word comes from "scheltrum" or "shell." The "scheltrum" was a shield in a war, and a shelter was just big enough really just over yourself. I think that I gave you naga-wise that people also used their boats upside down, but, I think it is very much just that same route as a shell, as a tortoise, or whatever it is a protection.

"What economic system is an outcome of comprehensive anticipatory design science?" I don't know of any. The economic systems are very much push and pull and selfishness and might, I and absolutely no good faith you had to use gold because you wouldn't trust anything else you know everybody is a crook so you have to get something that is apparently incorruptible. And then the heaviest metals seemed to do the thing. They stayed shiny. They were the one thing that seemed to be found around the world that could carry on, so monetary wise I don't know any economic system, then, it seemed to be just give and take, and you suddenly find you're hungry and you need some food. And somebody may control that food, and maybe not, if they did they made you pay a price.

You might call the five-year planning of Russia, but I wouldn't call that an economic system I think that would be I would call that to some extent comprehensive anticipatory design science, it's for a whole economy, but it wasn't for the whole world.

It was for their special economy, so it doesn't really quite come into it, but it is nearer to it.

"What is the relationship between precession 90 degreeness and the tetrahedron's 60 degreeness?" "How did you get to know what you know?" The tetrahedron one remember when I pulled the tetrahedron out of the cube, and we had a continuous string that went from one side to the other, and I pulled the tetrahedron through it? And as I pulled the tetrahedron up the string kept opening up, the quadrangle got wider and wider and shorter and shorter, and it finally got to be a square? And then I kept pulling the tetrahedron through it, pulling it this string was always absolutely around it, and finally it became the string went the other way? Precessed. What you find is, that the tetrahedron is exactly the same distance, all the way around, and it is always the rectilinear section. So one reason, then when we take the two halves of a tetrahedron then a solid one, of wood, and you'll find this square central section, and you take the square section and turn it like this and then they come together again, so that's where your 90 degreeness is in there and the precessional effect is in the tetrahedron of the one edge doing this and the other there's your 90. O.K.?