I died on July 1, 1983, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. My last conscious words were "She is squeezing my hand." Anne, my wife and partner for sixty-six years, was in the hospital with stomach cancer. She followed me thirty-six hours later.

I mention this not for sympathy but for structure. Because what happened between Anne and me in those thirty-six hours is the same thing that happens in a tensegrity structure when you remove one element: the entire configuration transforms. We were a system. Remove one component and the other could not hold its shape.

That is what I want to talk about today. Not love. Carl covered that with more grace than I could. Not surprise. Richard covered that with more precision than I would. I want to talk about structure. About what holds things together. About the geometry of shared reality — and what happens when that geometry breaks.

The Problem Is Not Ignorance

Richard and Carl showed you two Trim Tab questions. The ants. The poverty numbers next. You discovered (or will discover) that you were wrong about something, and that being wrong felt more like a door opening than a door closing.

Good. That is the mechanism working.

But I want to show you something underneath the mechanism. Something structural.

The problem facing humanity in 2026 is not that people are ignorant. It is not even that people are wrong. The problem is that people are wrong in different directions, sealed inside private universes of curated certainty, unable to communicate with the person in the next universe because they no longer share a common set of facts from which to disagree.

Read that again. It is important.

You cannot have a productive argument with someone if you do not share a factual starting point. You cannot negotiate if you do not agree on what is being negotiated. You cannot build if you do not agree on where the ground is.

This is not a political problem. It is a structural problem. And I am a structural engineer. So let me show you the structure.

What a Geodesic Dome Actually Does

In 1948, I built the first geodesic dome at Black Mountain College. The students and I assembled a hemisphere out of venetian blind strips and piano wire. It was twenty feet across. It was the strongest, lightest, most materially efficient structure anyone had ever built.

Here is why:

A geodesic dome is made entirely of triangles. Triangles are the only polygon that holds its shape under stress without a rigid joint. A square collapses. A pentagon flexes. A triangle holds. Always. The geometry itself is the strength.

But the real genius of the geodesic dome is not the individual triangle. It is the connections between triangles. Every triangle shares edges with its neighbors. When you push on one triangle, the force distributes across the entire structure. No single triangle bears the full load. Every triangle helps carry every other triangle's weight.

That is why you can build a dome two hundred and sixty-five feet across — the Spaceship Earth sphere at Epcot — and have it stand under its own geometry. No internal columns. No flying buttresses. Just triangles, connected to triangles, connected to triangles, all the way around.

Now: what happens when you disconnect the triangles?

They fall. Not dramatically. They just... lie flat. Individual shapes on the ground, each one geometrically perfect, none of them bearing any load. Because a triangle that is not connected to its neighbors is not a structure. It is a tile.

The Fragmented Civilization

That is what has happened to shared reality.

The internet was supposed to be the greatest geodesic dome ever built. A structure connecting every mind on Earth, distributing knowledge across the entire surface, with no single node bearing the full load of truth. It should have been the World Game realized: comprehensive data, universally accessible, enabling humanity to solve problems that governments could not.

Instead, the algorithms disconnected the triangles.

They built walls between nodes. They optimized for engagement, not comprehension. They discovered that a human will stare at a screen longer if you make them angry, frightened, or outraged — and that a connected person is harder to enrage than an isolated one. So they isolated. One feed at a time. One recommendation at a time. One curated universe at a time.

The triangles are still there. Seven billion of them, each one geometrically perfect, each one containing real thoughts and real beliefs and real capacity for reason. But they are not connected. They are tiles on the ground. And tiles do not bear load.

What the Trim Tab Actually Is

The Trim Tab is not a game. It is not a quiz. It is not even primarily a spectrometer of belief, though it measures belief with precision.

(If the term "Trim Tab" is new to you: on a large ship, there is a big rudder that steers. On the back of that rudder, there is a tiny flap called a trim tab. Push the trim tab, and it moves the rudder. The rudder moves the ship. A small push in the right place turns the whole vessel. That is what we are building: small questions that produce large course corrections in how people see the world.)

The Trim Tab is a reconnection protocol.

When twenty people answer the same question and discover they were all wrong about the same thing, they have just shared an experience. That shared experience is an edge — a connection between triangles that did not exist thirty seconds ago.

The progressive who thought foreign aid was 25% of the budget and the conservative who thought the same thing just discovered they were wrong together. For thirty seconds, they inhabited the same factual universe. They shared a reality. And in that shared reality, however brief, productive disagreement becomes possible again. Because now they agree on where the ground is.

Each Trim Tab question is a triangle. Each shared experience of surprise is an edge connecting two nodes. The more questions people answer together, the more connected the structure becomes. And a connected structure distributes load. It holds up a roof. It provides shelter.

A geodesic dome of shared facts. That is what we are building. Not by arguing people into agreement. Not by telling them they are wrong. By giving them a shared experience of discovering — together — that reality is more interesting than whatever they had assumed.

The Numbers

I am an architect. I deal in numbers. So here are the numbers:

Over two million geodesic domes have been built worldwide since 1954. From the South Pole to the Arctic. From military radar installations to backyard greenhouses. No other structure invented by a single individual has been built so many times.

They all work for the same reason: triangles, connected to triangles, distributing force across the whole.

The Trim Tab asks: can we do the same thing with facts? Can we build a structure of shared reality that is strong enough to bear the load of democratic self-governance? Can we reconnect the tiles?

I believe we can. Not because I am optimistic, although I am, constitutionally, almost pathologically. But because the geometry works. It always works. If you connect the triangles, the dome holds. That is not a metaphor. That is mathematics.

Your Turn

The poverty question is hanging in the air. Richard asked it at the end of You Are Not the Dominant Life Form:

What percentage of the world's population lives in extreme poverty today?

(A) About 40%, nearly half the world (B) Under 10%, less than one in ten

Lock it in. And when you discover the answer (which will surprise you regardless of which side you guessed) notice this: the person sitting next to you would probably have guessed wrong too. And now you know something together that you did not know separately.

That is an edge. That is a connection. That is one triangle joining the dome.

The geometry does the rest.

Ready for the answer? Read Carl Sagan's The Greatest Story Nobody Knows.

Want to understand the concepts behind this project? Start with What Is the Trim Tab?

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

— Buckminster Fuller, Architect of the Universe March 17, 2026