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And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is off the hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
Out in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
Yes, you do.
Good evening.
We also have our good friend Jason Scott joining us tonight.
Welcome, Jason.
Salutations.
Well, it's a steamy day here in New York, but we have lots to talk about.
We also have overtime following the show for the first time in a few weeks where you can call us and speak uninhibited as we're prone to do on the radio.
But Jason, since you're the guest of honor tonight, what's new in your neck of the woods with archive.org and textfiles.com?
Sure.
So right now there's a nice little burstlet of news happening right now because a variety of news organizations have started blocking the Internet Archive from crawling them, citing AI reuse and other excuses.
And a lot of journalists and others are taking a lot of issue with that.
Some of the writing is a little bit apocalyptic because they're like, it's the end of the Internet Archive.
And I'm like, yeah, I don't think our hard drives are really thinking it's the end because we're pulling in billions of URLs every couple of weeks.
It's just a variety of media outlets are making this anti-scraping decision.
And to their, you know, to the understanding that they're getting hit very hard by random AI scrapers or their stuff's getting reused, fine.
But the subtlety is lost.
So the archive's been a little proactive, telling people, hey, you know, please don't block us.
I'll give you a little bit of a gossip, which is that the New York Times, they blocked us so hard you can't read the New York Times at the Internet Archive, which I think is like really nose off spite of.
They just look for every IP address ever affiliated with the archive and blocked it, which is a little bit of a blunt force tool, if you ask me.
So we can't even keep news about what we're doing.
So even read it.
If there's an article about the Internet Archive in the New York Times, you're saying that that's the URL is blocked from the New York Times?
We can't read articles at the New York Times.
So if they wrote something about us, technically, we can't read it from the headquarters of the building.
OK, so wait, the New York Times is blocking you or the Internet Archive is blocking you from reading the New York Times?
I'm a little confused.
Sure.
The New York Times is blocking the Internet Archive as an entity, as if we are an invading force.
Like basically, if you go to NY Times from the Internet Archive building in San Francisco, it doesn't resolve because they're blocking it at the router level, which is an example of how subtle they've been about this process.
I don't think they do that for, you know, Russia, Russia or China or, you know, any so-called enemies of our government.
Why?
What are they afraid of?
I think what a lot of them are afraid of.
We're in a we're in a realm right now.
I think we've seen you and I have you and I have lived through this because we're over 3000 years old.
But the situation is when a resource begins to in some way be overused, the response is usually completely disproportionate.
So, you know, like in the old days, it would be like, oh, you use bandwidth at this college and we have to pay for bandwidth.
No discussion of whatever, unless it is specifically for your class, do not use it for recreational, you know, browsing of this Internet, unless it's for your job and everyone over overreacts.
But how much how much bandwidth could you possibly be using by connecting?
Are you playing Wordle or something?
What's going on over there that they're afraid of?
I think what they're specifically afraid of is that the Internet Archive gets scraped by AI companies for data, which if the if the AI companies want the data from The New York Times, they're they're going to get it.
But the idea is that then it's being reused in AI and they want to limit the access of AI to read news.
And we're potentially a proxy.
It's kind of a silly overreaction.
That's what I'm talking about.
If this goes on for more than a month, I will be very surprised.
I think I think we'll embarrass them into just doing it.
But it was interesting to have so many people rise up in our defense.
Well, I think I get a few more tonight.
That's for sure.
Alex, go ahead.
This is insane, Jason.
I didn't know about this until you just mentioned it.
This is like to me, it sounds like blocking the Internet Archive from accessing the news is sort of like burning down the library because you're afraid somebody might photocopy a copyright.
It's like a copyrighted page of a book.
It's totally insane.
It's like a radical overreaction.
Yeah.
But there's a lot of irony here, too, because if the issue is scraping, right, AI scraping, I can understand.
We want to try to prevent AI from training on all of this proprietary information and data.
But in trying to keep AI from training on our collective memory here, what we're doing is actually erasing that memory ourselves.
I mean, this is the perfect irony for the digital age here.
We've built these machines that have the capability to remember everything.
And now we're teaching them and ourselves to actually forget.
I think fundamentally we always see kind of this like the archive has proudly joined libraries and many other things as if it was invented, if it was proposed now, it would not be allowed.
Right.
So it started out before anyone even thought there was an idea about this.
Like Brewster had been kind of thinking about memory and the interaction of information since the 80s and different things he did.
So by the time you talk to him, there's these interviews with him in 92.
Sorry, Brewster's the head of the Internet Archive.
If you talk to him in 1992 and 1993, he's essentially talking about search engines.
And what are we going to do with search engines?
But nobody's what's what's he talking about?
And now suddenly Google.
Right.
Well, the same way, I think that there's this he's he's always believed the way he puts it is let the robots read because it's important to get to information.
So robots help us can be used to help us.
But obviously, this whole AI thing was when I think about how they rolled it out.
Right.
Like and I've been thinking about this a lot because it's like such an interesting study case.
Right. Like if you think back to when, again, some of you may not have dealt with this, but like one year, Adobe announced context aware image resizing.
There's a picture of you and a tree.
You shrink the picture.
It keeps you and the tree in the picture.
Oh, that's so nice.
What a nice effect.
You can have two different versions.
Well, now they're like, you can just make up the tree.
And now people are losing their minds or they're like, why did you spring this on us?
And we're having this like existential fight on the part of business and life and everything of like, what is this technology?
And I'm like, we've been doing this for 50 years, but now it's in the hands of regular folks.
And I think that there's a great debate there.
I think it's an endless good debate.
But we are going to see these overcorrections like, oh, God, stop everybody from reading us, even institutions that fulfill this important purpose.
No, I don't trust you.
And being in the middle of it, like I said, for me, it's a fire drill for people to once again realize that the Intranet Archive does this important utility.
And what does it mean?
And it caused all of these journalists and writers to come out of the woodwork to write essays about like, what are you doing?
This is the dumbest thing you can do.
Why are you doing this to them?
Like, at the very least, I'm sure we could negotiate something with them.
Like, just, but their opening salvo was network level blockage.
And I just think that's just put us on the map for a lot of people this last couple of weeks.
Have they commented at all?
If they've said anything on the record?
No, not yet.
Not yet.
Well, do we know if they're doing this to companies like Anthropic or OpenAI Foundation?
You know, the real AI people?
You know, I have no idea.
And, you know, I have, you know, you look at some of what these companies have done, the big ones.
And they'll, like, again, worthwhile debate among your audience.
But, like, clearly for OpenAI and for Anthropic, no action was off the table.
Right?
They were definitely from the De Beers school of market share.
Or, like, whatever we needed to do, we're going to do it.
Right?
And so I would not think that, like, Anthropic and OpenAI are, like, if you're connected to the internet, I think OpenAI can scrape you if they want.
Like, I just don't see how, like, they've got infinite incentive to do whatever it takes.
But the archive isn't necessarily doing that.
So, yeah, no, I think it'll be a temporary thing.
But in the meanwhile, we're archiving tons of other, you know, things are...
I will say this, by the way, that AI is actually really screwing us in another way, which is the fad.
And it is a fad for the next couple of years about data centers.
I mean, people are going to, like, make these processes more efficient.
But right now, they need a lot of RAM and a lot of hard drives.
And the archive loves hard drives.
We pull in about 150 to 180 terabytes a day of data.
So you can imagine we want hard drives.
And we are being told by vendors, oh, yeah, we're not doing hard drives for people like you in 2027.
Like, we just have no...
So we've been watching that.
This isn't the first time we've had that happen.
Thailand had a fire about seven or eight years ago that changed the market.
We had to do things.
We discovered that Sam's Club was sitting on a bunch of hard drives that had gone through the pipeline.
So we bought them all and shucked out all of the cases and gave the cases away to hacker groups and everything.
And people would see the pictures of us shucking the cases and go, what are you doing?
That's so inefficient.
What are you doing?
You should be doing...
And they're like, no, no, no, you don't understand.
This was the only place to get hard drives.
And our head of admin, she became customer of the month at that particular Sam's Club because she went in with a credit card and bought like 500 hard drives.
So AI has really caused this gold rush or this land rush on hard drives.
This is a terrible time to want to buy a server, a hard drive, a RAM chip.
I'm sure everyone's going to feel it until somebody comes up with a routine where they can do all the work they're doing in one 100th the space like they did with everything else.
And then suddenly we'll have a glut of hard drives and it'll be Shangri-La.
Come on, everybody.
I believe it.
I believe it.
Hosanna.
Hosanna.
You know, Jason, I just had a vision.
I get them sometimes.
And I just had a vision now of something that could happen in the future or maybe it won't happen in the future.
But I see an AI company of one sort or another reaching out to you and inviting you to join in a partnership where they supply you with hard drives and they also give you all the access you need to the New York Times.
Are you ready for something like that to happen?
I mean, I can't speak for the archive as a whole, but my impression is, you know, over time we've talked with lots of groups.
Sometimes it's not been like sometimes people have offered us piles of data and where we can will ingest it if we can verify its provenance.
And other times somebody will offer us like like somebody offered us like a petabyte of disk space, but it was on a very weird form factor drive and we couldn't take it.
But it was very appreciated that they were like, here, you know, here you go.
So to be honest, what I'm more or less expecting maybe is some startup or a data center being like, hey, do you want some five-year-old hard drives?
We don't need them anymore.
And we're like, yes, yes, indeed.
Please give them to us.
Whatever, man.
We'll take them.
I suspect that's what's going to go.
It's going to be a little hairy for a couple of years on that front.
And that's all.
That's all AI and data center hype.
You know.
Mm-hmm.
Fascinating.
Well, you know, I just heard about this, you know, a couple of days ago.
I had no idea this was going on with the times and all these other challenges that AI is sort of causing.
Is it the only challenge going on right now or are there more fun things happening?
For the archive, you know, the biggest challenge that the archive has right now, I guess, is, well, obviously, AI scrapers that are just randomly hitting things at the archive hundreds of times over and we have to block them.
You know, people who are just doing these, like, ridiculous projects and, you know, a lot more hackers come up and want to beat up the old man, you know, show up at the bar and be like, I can shoot you at high noon.
And we're like, ah, we get those all the time.
So people are like, why are you so slow?
And I'm always like, yeah, well, we're slow because some rando in, you know, somewhere in Europe decided that he was going to take us on.
And, you know, we get that.
We get that sometimes.
What I love is that whenever they do it in a public way, that is to say, we've had, like, people who have tried to DDoS us when they claim it, like, you know, death to America.
We're going to take down the archive.
Everyone is like, you loser.
Like, it's just not we're not a target that people go, yeah, stick it to them.
So it's nice to have that positivity.
But, no, I mean, in terms of nothing more or less than we've always had, which is just, you know, we're, you know, 190 or whatever petabytes of interesting data on the Internet.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Just moves on with whatever it is.
I, you know, I definitely still love working at the place, still love digitizing things, getting them up there.
People who use us for accessing old media or browsing the web or playing.
I was just talking just now with you guys about how there's this taper in Chicago named Adam Jacobs, who for like 15 or 20 years would go every night to every club he could in Chicago and record them.
And he was sitting on 10,000 performances and didn't know where he was going to go with it.
And another group said, can we help you?
And he finally said yes.
So there's 2,400 live shows on the Internet from Chicago of the 1990s and 1980s, including Nirvana.
They might be giants and a lot of others that wouldn't have existed and would have probably been locked behind something.
And, you know, for me, that's a Tuesday.
That's a Tuesday.
And I'm still, you know, still happy about it.
Well, if someone ever gives you the spinoff to Mary Hartman called Forever Firmware, let me know, because I've been looking for that for decades.
Jason, for the people maybe tuning in for the first time hearing about the Internet Archive, could you maybe explain its origins, what it stands for, what it's trying to do?
Sure. For the people who don't know about this site, or maybe they do and they don't know they've been on it, which happens more than you would think.
In the mid-1990s, an entrepreneur named Brewster Kale, MIT graduate, had helped create some work in the 80s in technical work after graduating.
And then in the early 90s had created a gopher search engine, which really just all those words, I'm sorry.
But then he moved from that to something called Alexa Internet, which was this idea of browsing websites and coming up with metrics so you could use this service to go, you are the 105th most browsed educational site in North America.
So it was a way of doing metrics.
fight. Brewster was like, oh, man, now I get to be a librarian.
And so he created a bunch of websites that we think of as archive.org or the Internet Archive.
And because he had been part of that company that did what I what I said, metrics for websites, it would capture websites to compare them.
So it had all this hysterical, you know, historical website data.
And he was like, could we have a copy of that?
My old company. And they were like, sure.
And around 2000 or 2001, he just said, wouldn't it be funny if you could type in a domain name of an old website and look at it?
What it used to be like a year or five years ago.
We'll do that.
And at the time, he was like, this could grow to be a terabyte of data.
I have him on tape saying that he's like, we think we're up around a terabyte now.
We don't know where this is going to end.
And that was 25, 30 years ago.
The Wayback Machine, which is the name of that application, is one of the killer apps of the Internet.
You can go there, type in an old URL, be shown captures.
You can go in and look at what Yahoo looked like in 1996 or what Google looked like in 1999.
And of course, people use it to find old websites they used to browse, to find their own work when it's been deleted.
And pertaining our long discussion just now, journalists, writers, bloggers will find work they did that was gone, like off the Internet, and be able to retrieve it or find it or use it for their resumes and say, here's essays I wrote back when I was working when I was 22 and so on.
It's been a wild success.
It is a nonprofit.
It's not for the money.
It loses money every year.
We do our best.
If you don't like us, just keep hitting refresh.
And if there's a killer app for the net, for the history, you know, the archive has become the web's memory.
And then the other side of it, and I'm not as big on this, but I get it.
It's a good gotcha machine.
You know, a politician will say, well, we never said this.
And it's like, ah, here it is.
You did say it, or, you know, I was, you see, I want to be egalitarian here.
Right now, our current administration is kind of known for, like, shifting around the goalposts in terms of describing their own history.
But, frankly, every administration does that.
Like, almost every, you know, administration will have a site, and it'll be like, freecreditforeverybody.gov.
And then a new administration will come in and say, forget that thing.
And they'll delete any record of it ever being on the net.
And then people will say, well, we've never done that project.
And the answer is, yes, you did.
Here it is on the Wayback Machine.
You know, we don't really have a really good way of dealing with history and knowledge on the internet.
And the Wayback Machine is a hack and a hard hack, but it's what we got.
And so, for most people, that's the internet and the internet archive.
And then, of course, there's a little side project where we also have, like, cultural data, you know, scans and music and movies and software and things like that.
And I'm involved in that as well.
So, you can go and read books or watch old films or, you know, that's a significant thing.
And, of course, there's no ads.
There's no pop-ups.
We're not charging you.
But it's dwarfed by the Wayback Machine.
Like, to most people, we're the Wayback Machine and nothing else, you know.
So, it's a great life.
It's a good thing.
I started working there in 2011.
Some people think I've been there since the beginning.
No.
But they keep me around because I'm good at being a hype man.
So, that's my, you know, that's my other good thing in this world.
Hype man.
You are quite meticulous in grabbing all the data and making sure it's all there and sorted properly.
So, we're glad to have you on our side for sure.
Now, Alex, I know that you do a lot of research as far as following domains when they get deleted.
Kind of a different way of checking the archive, the archive of internet domains.
I know you've found some things over the past few months that have kind of quietly been erased that we might be able to find on the internet archive if we look at the right URL.
It escapes my mind what the most recent one was.
I think it has something to do with civil rights or something.
Yeah.
What was the name of that domain?
It was very...
It's very...
They erased it and we've already forgotten.
I know.
Wow.
That's...
Orwell would be proud of that.
You know...
Oh, go ahead, Jason.
I was going to say, somebody uploaded and just...
They randomly uploaded.
And I'm saying this as a private citizen who happened to notice that this person uploaded it.
They uploaded a document that is a list of clearly somebody on the inside decided to put this out.
It's a list of every park placard and historical display they want to take down along with listings of what they said.
And, you know, document, like, clearly, clearly some pretty saucy, like, real, real late stage authoritarian government thing.
A non-zero amount of government employees, when they're told, you know, do this in this direction, will do it and be like, oh, it's a shame I'm being asked to do this.
But they won't stand up and say, like, oh, this is bad.
And, of course, we can have a million novels and television shows about that person, right?
But some people go, I'll do it, but I'm going to keep a copy.
I think I'm going to tell people.
And so I saw that go by, and I was like, yeah, bro.
That's good stuff.
So, you know, there are some very brave people who know that, like, history is now, and they're doing the right thing.
Yes, Alex?
The domain that we saw removed from the zone file for .gov, which is essentially the zone files for top-level domains like .com, .net, .org, if you're not familiar with this, those are the files that contain all of the domains in that particular top-level domain, right?
So the zone file for .com is going to be about 300 million entries long.
.gov is one of the zone files that I monitor all the time.
And what we found, and I think this is what you're talking about, Emmanuel, is a couple of weeks ago, it was around the 26th of March.
So I look for things that pop up in the zone files, new domains that are .gov domains, and also things that are removed.
So if you just reverse the analysis, you can figure out what went away if you're comparing two files.
And there was a domain that was so telling and was so symbolic of what was happening in the United States, especially at that particular time, just a few weeks ago.
The domain that was removed was civilrightsusa.gov.
That's the domain that they took away from the .gov's own file.
So that means, Alex, that means they didn't just erase the website, they deleted the name so that it doesn't exist in any form except on the Internet Archive.
That's correct.
That's exactly right.
I had to go to the Internet Archive to even figure out what it used to be at the time when they took this down.
And I think Trump had wanted to do something with it, wanted to disable this during his first reign as president, and then finally got around to removing this entry from the zone file a couple of weeks ago.
But you know something that popped up today, which was somewhat interesting in the .gov zone file, something new that showed up, was about NASA.
And it was the nasaforce.gov site that came up today, which is all about kind of recruiting for NASA, which is, you think, oh, that's kind of interesting, right?
But there was something weird about it, too, because if you look at the WHOIS data for nasaforce.gov, normally the registration information points to CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency,
and they're generally the registrant for all of these domains.
But for some weird reason, the registrant today on nasaforce.gov was the executive office of the president.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, that's an odd one.
I don't know what's going on there, but that's certainly an anomaly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, NASA's the biggest threat to NASA right now, I think, is Trump being enthused by it and trying to make it his.
But let's try to think about that.
We'll keep our eyes open for sure.
Jason, go ahead.
For your group that cares, obviously, I'm on Blue Sky primarily now, but there's an account called Federal U.S. Domain Bot, and it posts whenever a domain is added or removed to .gov.
And I just kind of keep it running.
And, yeah, like the little stories that go by when you see one, like you'll see one go by and I'll go look at it.
You know, I'll see one, like, what is it, techprosperitycore.gov was registered.
And I'm like, oh, another dumb program or whatever.
Or there'll be another one that's taken away.
And, you know, you look at some of them and you're like, okay, this thing is an honest case of like, yeah, this is probably some long dormant whatever.
But other ones, it's like the most, I guess, what do you want to call it?
It tells a little story in its own little way, right?
There's one that says productofusda.gov has just been registered.
And I'm like, I just don't imagine that website's going to be very inspiring.
I just sense there's going to be something very, very propagandistic about it.
But, yeah, I definitely, this has been, this is, this has been, it's been a tough decade, man.
Yeah, it ain't over yet.
It ain't over at all.
And, you know, it's been interesting because I think, you know, the work that we've seen with 2600 and other, you know, events and hope and DEF CON and others is like they sound alarms.
And they, they look at the current situations and they say, this could go very wrong.
And they, they talk about like, be aware, be, be functional, be knowledgeable about these situations.
And then it's like, well, it's here.
Like the thing you've been warning about is here or the potential issue is here.
So now what do you do?
Do you just boot up Call of Duty and forget about it?
Do you not go out in the street?
Do you not talk to people?
Do you not, you know what I mean?
Oh, no, no, no.
Someone mainstream has to come in and take credit for it and then turn a profit.
Well, that's, yeah.
Like buy a shirt.
Are you going to buy a shirt?
You're going to, you're going to, you're going to have a printed, you're going to, you're going to make a, you're going to, you're going to issue a crypto coin with it as a theme.
Is that your, is that your approach?
So, yeah, I mean, people who read, people who read, you know, a certain realm of literature, I shall say, where they read it.
And the thing, like one of the thematic things is don't take life for granted.
Don't take structures for granted.
Don't take the world for granted because things can shift very hard.
And it happens to have been in the past few years, we've gotten like almost a cartoon level.
Like you're taking a test required by work.
Like, so say you're at work and five armed guys come in and demand to find your shipping manager.
Do you, A, ask for a warrant?
B, let them through?
C, help them find your guy?
Or D, you know, whatever.
And it's like, you know, like normally that would be in a handbook.
And now it's like, well, that's, that was Monday.
And so anyway, I'm going off on a certain rail.
I, I, I just, uh, I just think about like, it's cool that we have a memory of the web and it's cool that we're aware and can do technical work to find and see domains being added and removed.
And it's great that we can point out that somebody used to say something and now they claim they never said it, but that's just the first half.
That's the awareness.
That's not the action.
You didn't do anything until you do something.
That's all I'm saying.
Right.
Right.
Well, you know, um, you talk about the various forums that we have, uh, the magazine, the conference, the radio show.
I mean, we have been doing this since 1988.
Uh, and, um, I have to say we've been warning people an awful lot about the negative uses of technology, how things can be abused, how in the wrong hands they can be nightmares.
Uh, it doesn't give us pleasure to say we told you so when these things come true.
Uh, I just hope that people learn how to be a little bit cynical about, um, uh, the portrayals of how this new bit of technology is going to, um, uh, be the second coming.
Uh, and, and, and just think about ways that it could be used in a bad way because every bit of technology can be used for good or for evil.
Uh, you know, we're, we're, we're not advocating, not researching, not developing, not learning, but at the same time, following blindly is about the worst thing that, that anyone can do with regards to any bit of technology.
So I, I, I think, you know, BAI listeners, uh, have a healthy amount of skepticism when they hear anything, whether it's, you know, the, the latest news, latest technology, or even me saying that.
But it's time to support the radio station.
Yeah.
Because how else do you get to hear these things?
We're in the middle of a fun drive.
We are at, uh, $73,635 we have raised so far.
Our goal is 120,000.
If my mathematics are correct, that's 61%.
Uh, and, um, uh, we need to make that goal by the end of the month.
In fact, we need to exceed that goal.
I think we can.
There are, uh, ways that you can be a part of this.
You can, um, uh, become a BAI buddy, which means pledge a small amount every month.
And over the course of a year, you're pledging, um, a good amount that helps us quite a bit.
Uh, go to give to WBAI.org and, uh, look at all the options there.
Uh, or, uh, simply, um, um, buddy.wbai.org.
I don't know if we have any other, uh, contact, uh, uh, methods available.
I'm seeing a lot of blanks there, so I don't think so.
Um, but, uh, give to WBAI.org, uh, is, um, is, is the best way to reach the station and
support the station because WBAI has been on the air since 1960 without a single commercial.
And, um, we don't answer to anybody except our listeners.
So we're able to criticize, we're able to criticize corporations, governments, policies,
you name it.
Uh, and we're able to, uh, open up phone lines and have listeners, uh, say their piece
as well.
So if that matters to you, if that's something that you feel is unique and valuable, please
keep it going.
And you keep it going by supporting it.
That's, um, that's all I have to say.
If anyone else has, yes, Rob, go ahead.
Yeah.
The, um, so you can go to buddy.wbai.org and, uh, throw in your support.
If you'd rather do it over the phone, you can call 833-922-4692, which spells out 833-WBAI-NYC.
Thank you.
Uh, that's the, that's the phone number for you to, uh, throw in and, uh, help us do
what we do telephonically, um, over the web, buddy.wbai.org.
All right.
And, uh, hopefully, uh, we get a strong showing.
Hopefully we make that goal.
Hopefully we keep the station on the air for another 66 years, however long it's been.
Boy, it's been a long time.
Wow.
Uh, anyone else have, uh, any other news they'd like to share?
It's been a while since we've all been together.
I've just been, uh, since, uh, since you brought up that civilrightsusa.gov domain, um, I've been
poking around on the internet archives, uh, captures of it.
Um, the latest one was from 2017, which is a red hat test page.
Um, so there was no content on the site whatsoever, just, uh, just an error message from the server
software.
Um, before that, it was an unfinished site.
Uh, it was a site to transmit complaints.
If you think your civil rights have been violated, um, a lot of the stuff on the 2016
version of the site says coming soon.
Um, it was not put together.
It was not, uh, it was not a functioning.
That was an unfortunate year to start that project.
Right.
Um, it wasn't started in 2016.
It was actually, there, there are captures of the domain going back to 2011, um, when it
was started, but it just, it was started in 2011 and then kind of, uh, let rot on the
vine.
Um, nothing was, nothing was really done to get it up and running.
Apparently.
Interesting.
Um, it's, it sat in an unfinished form until 2016.
And, uh, in 2017, it was pulled off the net for good.
And now the, uh, domain has been shifted down the memory hole as well.
Well, I'd like to see a record of the conversation that led to it being deleted completely.
You know, somebody, somebody spearheaded that.
And, uh, I just kind of like to know the rationale behind it.
Uh, it's too bad it wasn't developed in the first place when it started.
It seemed like, uh, something that we could definitely use.
I have a, I have a terror.
I will.
I'll say two things to that.
First of all, um, one of the really nice things is, um, you know, there's a lot of people
who to fill up space on their broadcasts or their podcasts or otherwise will take this
situation, the civil rights website and devoid of any knowledge will say, clearly there was
the greatest overview of the history of civil rights in the government at that site.
And they took it down.
And then when it's revealed, or if it's ever like that, that wasn't true now, everything
coming out of them, even if it's a valid criticism or observation looks suspect, but by having
these records, even of a negative, you are able to say, oh, they thought they were going
to do a project and then they didn't.
And there's a story there.
Why?
Why?
Who thought that was a good idea?
And then for some reason it never, never came through.
So like, to me, that's the first, um, educational, um, thing there.
And you, you find these things by watching, by doing what you guys are doing, uh, and just
keeping track of something that exists and then doesn't exist, you know?
Right.
And I think that's, to me, that's like, that's fundamentally one of the important things here
is just like having a, like, not everything has to be a conspiracy.
Not everything has to be this straight line example of, um, you know, authoritarian ruthlessness
or undoing the work of others.
It can just be evidence of what came before so that we know.
And I think that's also just as important because it helps us focus on what the real
issues that we care about are instead of chasing shadows, which can happen a lot when you need
the evidence, you need the pieces.
Otherwise, you know, what are you going to do?
So, so I'm, I'm happy that we play a small part in that, uh, being able to give people
those citational, uh, efforts.
Um, there are also like a lot of websites that are out there where you say, did that
really happen?
Okay.
Uh, a really good one for me.
The one I always prove to people is, uh, rides of glory, which was a blog entry done at
Uber, um, years ago.
And it was, it's, to me, it's always been an important shot up across the bow.
One of their data scientists posted a blog entry.
And what he had done was he had analyzed multiple cities to find cases of people who were taking
Uber drives in the morning on Sunday mornings that they had never taken before to be able
to infer the aftermath of one night stands.
And then to report what sections of which cities had the most one night stands.
And it got a huge response from people, obviously, and then Uber pulled it down, but not before
it was found.
And I think that particular blog entry shows the danger of what happens when tech runs
unfettered through its technology with like no ethics training, no humanities training.
You just say, wouldn't this be funny?
It's not funny.
Wouldn't it be neat to do sort of neat, really intrusive.
And now I'm going to share it with the world.
Oh, so there's no gatekeeping or even any sanity checking in your organization.
What are you doing with a, B and C then?
Like, will you just give our information to the cops?
Like that blog entry, all the evidence of it is gone except for the way back machine.
Like that example of early, let's just say short-circuited tech bro reductive thinking,
which is the unfortunate, dangerous outgrowth of hacker culture, is you can have somebody
say, like a good hacker says, how does that, what happens here?
What does this mean?
What do we do?
A bad hacker says, oh, it does something terrible.
I'm going to do that terrible thing now at scale.
And so I'm glad that exhibit exists, even if it's a negative one.
I assume they never tied it to actual identities.
No, they didn't.
But the problem here is you start like you don't think you are.
Like they don't have names, but that's, you know what I mean?
Like that's one step away.
You know, you're adding metadata about things that can really, and like every single one
of it, every single one of it, you just have a question of like, was anybody, did you show
this to anybody?
Did anybody weigh in on this?
Like those kinds of things where you just say, oh, so when, you know, like that's what
we just, we, we saw it's, um, it's, it's, um, not ancestor.
Oh, it's descendant in the, uh, the Grok, um, uh, reduced clothing scandal.
We'll call it right.
Where people are using Grok to undress people like that's again, unfettered, no gatekeeping
break things and break things more kind of thinking and acting like that's the first time
it's happened, I think short changes the danger of like human nature to just try whatever.
So, yeah.
Wow.
We're speaking with Jason Scott from the internet archive.
As you can tell, we can, we can talk all night long about these things.
Uh, Jason, you're also involved with textfiles.com.
Anything new going on there?
Scrapers again.
Um, but you know, like what's nice about textfiles.com is, uh, it's a site that I have bulletin
board system text stuff on.
It's all text oriented.
I had a guy, let me know that the Emacs web browser seems to be having trouble with one
of the pages and we've been trying to diagnose it because I try to have it work all the way
back to like the first web browsers from like 92 and 93.
And one of them seems to be choking on a certain page.
Those are the kind of technical support issues I have to deal with at textfiles.com.
I mean, people download stuff all the time off it and that's fine.
Um, and it gets scoped all the time.
Um, I'm just glad it exists.
Um, I have a couple anonymous donors who just pay for it to keep up like just on principle.
So it doesn't, it's not very painful for me to run it.
Are you still looking for material from the past?
I mean, I'm always looking for material, but I mean, in terms of, you know, um, did I,
have I been here?
I mean, yes, I have.
I've been here since disc master, right?
Like, like not sure D I S C M A S T E R disc master dot text files.com is a project I didn't
create, but the person who created it was terrified of being bothered by the world.
So I'm, I'm in front of it cause I don't mind being bothered by the world.
Um, and what it is, is it's analyzed 35,000 shareware CD ROMs for all of their data.
Analyzed it up to 700 different formats to make them playable in the modern browser and
lets you do semantic searches of hundreds of terabytes of data.
So all of that information locked away on CD ROMs that were scooped up from the BBS era
and the early, like it's all searchable now, like looking for clip art or looking for old
people have found beta versions of browsers and quick time and, and emulators that were
on one magazine in 1996, you know, for one month or things like that. Um, along with a bunch of
old FTP sites and stuff, that project to me is the most important revolution in computer historical
work currently on the internet. So that's the other thing going on. How about that?
If you have a garage or basement full of a 3.5 inch floppies, is there any hope?
Yeah. I'd love to talk to you. Uh, Jason at text files.com. I love now. Traditionally,
whenever I appear on off the hook, I give out that email address and somebody mails me and I lose
between four and 17 days of my life dealing with a weirdo. And that is fine. I adore all weirdos,
even the ones who are weird beyond all recognition. So bring it on kids. I get it.
Is it one of us or is it, I mean, you know who we are, right? Do you know all of our names?
Yeah, no, I get, I get, um, um, yeah, no, there was, there was, there was one that you don't,
don't give out anything that might lead to even more emails.
Ah, it's okay. He has passed on, but, uh, boy, did we have a, did we have a fun time? But you
know, the thing is, is, and this is, I think I'll, I'll say this because I always think life has
lessons. You have to do that. If you try to avoid any friction or strange situations or awkwardness in
life, then you're not alive. You're sitting at home, you're watching streaming shows. Go ahead,
watch all, all the seasons of euphoria. That'll never, you know, that won't bring up any awkwardness
or weirdness. You're just watching shows on TV. But if you insist on talking to people,
they all live different lives. They all come from different walks. It's okay to lose 45 minutes
on a disjointed conversation in a hallway at a conference like hope it's okay. That means you're
a human and you talk to human beings, you know, some of my finest disjointed conversations have
happened to the hope and I have loved every single one of them. Well, I think, uh, uh, we'll have fun
this, uh, this summer, uh, back in Manhattan. Uh, and, um, hopefully, um, uh, there'll be, there'll be a lot
more data coming your way from various sources as well. Uh, how do people reach you again?
Jason, J A S O N at text files, T E X T F I L E S.com. Or if you're feeling funny, you can also reach
me at beef, B E B E F at cow.net. If for some reason you want to be funny, both of them work.
Okay. We are going to be continuing the conversation on YouTube at eight o'clock,
go to channel 2600 on YouTube, or just click on the link that's on top of the 2600.com webpage.
And, uh, you'll be able to continue talking with us and, uh, maybe even call us if, uh, you're,
you're quick enough. Uh, we still have about two minutes. So if anyone has anything else they'd like
to add other than please support WBAI and keep this radio station on the air, strong, filled with,
um, uh, all kinds of, um, um, controversial topics and discussion and debate and all the things that,
uh, Jason has been encouraging us to get involved in because, uh, what's, what's the point of living
if you don't have those uncomfortable moments where you have to, uh, uh, talk to somebody who has a
different view or defend your views or learn. Yes. That's what life is all about. Life is not read
only. It is read, right. And you just got to take it. And there's a few bad sectors out there,
but there's a lot of great files too. So definitely come on, get, get involved,
take a walk, enjoy the day. Rob, can you give out that information again on how people can
support the station? I certainly can. Uh, you can give us a call at 833-922-4692. That's 833-WBAI-NYC.
Or you could, uh, point your web thing over to buddy.wbai.org. Um, make sure when you're
putting through your donation, you, uh, say you're giving it and, um, in honor of your favorite
show off the hook. Um, I hope that's your favorite show. It's my favorite show. And, uh, let us know,
let, let us and let our station know that, uh, you appreciate what we do and you appreciate our
existence and you want to help us do what we do. Also, I just used diskmaster.textfiles.com
to find a piece of, uh, shareware that I was telling Gila about recently, which is a Klingon
clock, a little talking desk clock, desktop clock for windows 3.11 that, uh, tells you the time in
Klingon, spoken Klingon. So, uh, thank you for that. At last. Okay. I can hardly wait to get that
installed. Uh, okay. So we are at a time again, uh, right to us, OTH at 2600.com. That's our email
address. And, uh, please send us, uh, anything that is of interest, questions, uh, comments,
experiences, suggestions, all that sort of thing. Uh, somebody sent us, uh, music, which is always
nice. Uh, we, um, uh, we, we, we, we had a conversation, uh, a while back about, uh, uh,
some, some hackers that were up to, uh, some skullduggery. They, they were a hacker group called
the gay furry hackers, I believe. And, um, some music came out of this. This comes from an artist known as
Sir Hard Disk Drive. And we're going to listen to this, uh, this, uh, particular tune. Enjoy. See you next week.
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay pre-hackers
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay pre-hackers
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay
you find that funny rob cat girls i don't think cat girls appreciate being laughed at this
Well, I don't want to read a message, or a fucking alert, and if thanks for whatever
is, um, you have reached his parents, his parents, and, uh, uh, no, no, no, no, no, we check.
How can I, uh, just send me, um, but you're getting like five?
Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, furry packers, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, furry packers, gay,
Rawrackers.
And maybe that's why they want to encrypt the radios.
Because, you know, a recording of federal agents or cops saying,
OK, we're on the Gay Furry Hackers now, you know, that could be used in some kind of a musical track
and repeated over and over again to the embarrassment of said agents.
So there you go.
Thank you.


And welcome everybody to Off the Hook Overtime here on YouTube.
This is Emmanuel, there's Kyle over there.
Hi everybody.
Out in YouTube land, or actually Signal land, eventually getting to YouTube land, is Rob,
Gila, Alex, and Jason.
You all there?
I am.
We're here.
Sounds like everyone's there.
Good.
We hear the van is here.
We're actually on YouTube this time.
Ready and willing.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Then we simply have to connect with our listeners.
But before we do, any other lingering commentary people want to share?
Well, once again, you brought me on, and I was a complete wall of text.
And I always try to make sure that everyone else gets a word in edgewise, but it usually
works out to a word edgewise.
You asked a really big question there, because watching the archive blockage story explode
like it did, like 30 or 40 outlets have covered it, and we're getting all of this interest.
It just completely, it wasn't supposed to be that way, and it's just huge.
And it's caused a lot of people to litigate, like, what is the purpose of an internet archive?
And like I said, the only thing I take issue with is they're like, this could be the end
of the internet archive.
And it's like, no, we're fine.
But it's like an issue.
It's a weird issue.
And anyway, that was big enough for people.
And then, of course, this AI thing is going to be endless forever.
Go ahead, Kyle.
I've recognized that in the conversation, for sure, just with a lot of the projects I do.
I think a lot of listeners probably feel the same way, especially when things, certainties
in the world aren't what they were.
And, you know, I think what we've been trying to talk about is our own institutional memory.
And we've talked about this in past conversations, but also what is our purpose?
This, you know, what kind of just reevaluating some of that, even without external prompting
as you're talking about, like, yeah, speculation and so forth.
Yeah, I mean, my job since the mid 90s, right, is like recognizing things that are in danger
of being gone.
I just ended up going to the big, biggest clearinghouse of trying to save things before they're gone.
But I had been doing it for decades before.
And it's hard for people to get into that mode.
And so, like, in 2021, somebody put up a ROM site.
And the ROM site was called Muriant.
And it's out of Russia.
And people, I guess, were using it.
And then they announced a month ago that they were closing.
And, oh, my God, talk about I'm 55, right?
Like watching these kids lose their minds over losing that beloved four-year-old institution
and watching them grapple with the existentialism of online life and how things are going.
It was like they lost their first goldfish.
They were, like, losing their minds.
So I went on their Discord and said, OK, kids, give me a channel.
And a lot of them are like, who are you?
And I'm like, go read the Wikipedia page.
OK, give me a channel.
And I just kind of tried to inspire, like, because there were, like, 7,000 people on this channel.
Oh, my God.
With nothing to do.
Like, nothing to do.
And I'm just like, ask me questions about preservation and why we do this and what's it about.
And so some good lessons came out of it because the actual thing was dumb.
But the emotions were real, which is people go to a website or visit a family member or go to a favorite bar.
And they don't give any thought to, like, what's keeping this whole?
And can I be part of what keeps it whole?
Like, that's a tough lesson.
And sometimes people learn it a little bit late.
And if it took a ROM site in Russia for these kids to learn it, so be it, you know, I think that lesson.
And so the archive is that lesson writ large all the time.
Oh, my God.
I loved this blog.
The guy died.
His family didn't keep it up.
You know, there's actually you remember you remember Ripco of Ripco BBS.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I remember that in Chicago, right?
Yeah.
So Ripco, like, got divorced and was living alone and had a Ripco.com kind of ISP.
He was running very poorly.
And so when he died, it went on autopilot and then closed, you know, with no warning.
Like, it was, like, running without him and then it collapsed.
Right.
And all these people who were using that service essentially for free disappeared.
Like, they suddenly found their stuff was gone.
I got warning that this might happen and I found some sites that he had uploaded and I called it Ripco.
It's on the archive.
It's called Ripco's Last Stand.
And it's a bunch of, like, weird little hacker video and, like, a young Ripco being, like, a funny guy and just, like, capturing a little bit of his spirit before it was gone.
Like, for those people, Ripco.com was their email and it just disappeared.
Like, it just disappeared.
It was, like, yeah, because your ISP is a weird guy in Chicago.
You get exactly what you deserve, buddy.
Yeah.
Jason, Kyle and I were talking about this earlier today, just basically about ways of communicating and saving the communication so that you can refer back to it.
And we find this, especially when it comes to, you know, helping to organize a conference, you want to be able to communicate with people and then refer back to the conversation maybe a year or two later because, you know, why reinvent the wheel every time?
It's good to, like, know how you solve certain problems that come up again.
And we find that there's this kind of pushback against using email these days.
People don't want to communicate in email, they want to communicate, dare I say it, through Facebook or private chats through various social media outlets.
Is there something that you find that is most effective for saving history, for saving conversations, something that won't disappear if a company goes out of business, something that you don't have to sign up for another service in order to even be able to communicate?
Is there something that you found works?
There's something that I know exists, which is an option.
Here's the problem, right?
And we know this because this is the bread and butter with hope and stuff, right?
Which is convenience tends to trump function, longevity, and cost.
And so people will just, like, everybody is using Discord, but, like, I see, you can see it, you can see all the ramifications, right, of using Discord.
And you're like, hey, you know, that's just like some crazy VC-funded company that is just opening up servers and is going to inevitably do a cost-cutting measure and half your stuff's going to go away.
Like, you know that's coming, right?
Like, you've set up your business inside of a nightclub, right?
Like, you do know that, right?
Like, the DJ is going to be like, bye-bye, and that's going to be the end of it.
And to do actual structural setup takes work, and it takes maintenance.
So, for example, Mattermost, in its open source functionality, is, like, a very good persistent chat system that you could run locally on a server and maintain what's coming out of it.
And with a little bit of discipline and control, like, what you don't want to do is fall into that trap of let's have our discussions on this server.
And, man, isn't it great that the end user people believe in us and want us to do things?
So, let's invite 7,000 people onto our private entertainment system here and work on what it's doing because, yeah, then you're going to get hacking and weirdness and spamming, and now you're spending more time moderating than getting work done.
But, like, there are these open source alikes that could do the job, and you could have a local LLM that you control that's locked down that looks at reams of transcribed text or transcribed whatevers and produces summaries and functions as a search engine instead of going to a centralized website run by God knows what.
You could do it. You could do it. It's just work. It's just work. And having somebody who has the skills to, like, work with the group, you know, sure, video cameras are cheap, recording devices are cheap, but the people who will run those during a conference or a presentation, they're priceless.
Like, the people who will do that work and keep it up and then make it available to you and not put it in there. Yes, sir.
And in the case of Discord specifically, like, I know Discord. I use it. I have a couple of very tight circles of friends who that's their main congregating thing, so I'm on there.
But at the same time, you think of open source alternatives to things. Discord, the bones of it, is IRC. They put a shiny shell over IRC, and that is the new hotness somehow.
But nobody there is going to consider jumping over to just plain IRC that's been running for 40-some-odd years because it's just not cute, and you can't, like, pull up GIFs on it.
But it is there, and those of us who were, you know, old enough to be there when the ancient magics were written want to send emails and want to use these, you know, ways of communicating that were built to be decentralized, that were built to just be usable and there.
And the entire sense of the Internet, like, I don't know if the vibe actually fits that being much of a thing anymore.
At least the social Internet.
Yeah, you know, it's frustrating because, you know, in the end, what a lot of people want to do is simply communicate ideas back and forth, not necessarily videos or GIFs or all kinds of other things, which are distractions.
You know, I read my mail through much, okay, on a Linux system, and it works just great.
And what bothers me is when people insist that I differentiate the blue from the yellow and what they've written.
I don't see it that way.
I just see the text that, you know, is coming through the email.
And it serves me fine.
And I resent being told that I don't get it because I'm not doing it their way when it works just perfectly well.
Right.
So, I don't know.
I find that happens a lot in various places in technology.
Well, there's a big difference between discipline and elitism.
And I think that, like, sometimes people conflate them.
So, if you have the discipline of running a community and you're like, look, we're going to do this and we're trying to make it persist and we're trying to make its information useful and productive.
And we want to cover topics that are meaningful and not just brain rot each other into oblivion.
And, you know, that takes some discipline.
But some people might be like, oh, you're so elitist.
I can't even post stupid junk here.
And it's like, are you suffering for places to post stupid junk?
Like, is that your problem?
Are you starved to do that?
And I do think that, like, technology has changed people.
And I think we're seeing that already.
We're seeing that with AI where people are not necessarily giving up on analysis and things.
But it's very alluring to speak in full sentences to a machine you think understands you.
Like, that turns out we like that as people.
And with social media, it's very exciting for there to be a little number with a little star after you write something in the world and see a rating.
Like, oh, my God, you got five likes.
I got 13 likes.
My thing is probably much more funny.
I bet you I can tune the way I talk to you so I get more likes every time I respond to you.
And it leads to a very certain kind of populist writing in your communication.
You know, when I write blog entries, I do it in a very specific way.
And when I do my podcast, I do it in a specific way.
Not for everybody, but for the people who care about it.
They care about it a lot.
But as a result, well, actually, that's not entirely true.
But I was going to say, like, as a result, it's not that successful.
But it is a successful podcast for what it is.
It's fine.
It helps pay rent.
But it's not like I'm not also chasing like the again, I'm not going to mention the one person who does a podcast who has said the worst things about the archive based on scant threads of information.
I don't want to get his audience's ire.
But boy, can that guy can that guy find like an eighth of a jawbone and an iron nail and tell you how the entire society lived from it?
Like, oh, my God, he just gets the most like work.
But but like it he phrases it in ways that make his audience be like, yeah, I'm learning.
And it's like, no, you're not.
So getting back to like functionality, your problem is always going to be that conferences require a lot of youthful energy.
Somebody's got to move a lot of chairs.
Somebody's got to watch a lot of doors.
And so you get people who are younger.
You can't just get a bunch of us 50 year olds together and expect us not to be on the floor screaming for Advil within a day or two of making things happen.
And as a result, you try to figure out how do I find people to communicate with us who can help get things done and have this responsibility and so on.
And if they've never run it before, I mean, the closest I can think of is a be inclusive where you can.
But also, like, I spent a lot like that's one of my big jobs, by the way, is like scaring up volunteers.
And it's, you know, you try to afford respect to volunteers, but you can also tell that there's a certain phase of people who are just in it to cause a mess because that's what excites them.
And they're never going to be productive and they're never going to be a part of it.
And they're going to drag things down.
And somebody has to be the hard ass to say, look, it's not working with the two of us.
It's not working.
You've got you're good at what you do, but you you you you kill the oxygen and you really don't get back to us when we need you.
And that's the tough, gritty that people don't really understand about organization and work.
And hello, Gita.
I looked up.
Yep.
Yep.
Just wanted to jump in really quickly.
Say hello to the 40 some people who are with us right now.
We're good with that.
That's a small number, but, you know, we don't live for huge numbers like a lot of these podcasts do.
I'd be very uncomfortable in that kind of setting.
I don't know how you talk to 7000 people in a channel.
I don't know how you do that.
How do you hear anybody?
Discord had a setting which I requested called slow mode where no one person could ask a question more than once every 30 minutes.
And they learned very quickly to form their questions over that time.
How are you not still reading it now, though?
7000 people slow mode just seems like it would take forever.
You know, like Jackie Chan, when he ends up in the bar and like 400 henchmen are attacking him one by one.
Yes, that's what it looked like for about four days.
People were like, oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
He's just still answering.
And I'm like, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So watch kids.
I can do 60 words per minute and I've got nothing but words to say.
Do they line up as neatly as they do in Jackie Chan films where, you know, they don't hit you two at once.
So basically, OK, I'll wait for my turn and then I'll try hitting you.
Does that get my ass kicked?
Yeah, it was it was pretty it was pretty hairy for a while.
What I would do is when a person asked a question, I would put a response emote on their thing with a checkmark and then say reply.
And I would reply.
So when I was scrolling back going, did I miss anything?
I looked for missed checkmarks.
Oh, wow.
Now they've tired out.
So they only ask me a question about once every day or two.
It's still going on.
Sure.
Oh, my God.
OK, I didn't know that.
I mean, it's very funny.
You know, they'll be like, what do you think, man?
Cheese or milk?
Like some of this stuff is like absolutely low grade, like whatever.
But other ones will be like, how do you deal with the emotional weight of knowing that you won't save everything?
And I'm like, oh, well, this is what I've thought about that.
But a lot of the questions are pretty easily answered.
Like, what's your what's your home set up?
Or do you have a movie that really changed your look on things and stuff like that?
So some of it's like weird little fanboy questions.
And some of it is like, you know, interesting.
Like, I'm truly grappling with this and you sound like a guy who could have some insight, which is why I did it, because when you're 21 or 22, the first time, like, obviously, like I said, goldfish for some people, a pet, they lose a pet or they lose a family member.
But when you lose what feels like the immutable realm of an online site, it can be equally traumatic.
Like, you know, 2600 goes down.
That will be a hole in people's lives.
And if you lose Google, that's one thing.
But if you lose, like, you know, Jimmy's fishing shack, even if you haven't been on it in eight years, it was a part of your life.
And now it's gone.
And well, think of GeoCities, you know, yeah, GeoCities.
You know, there's been a lot of like, I mean, obviously, it's because I work for Archive Team and watch those things go by.
We get messages from people going, this is going down.
Can you do something about it?
And I'll be like, really, that's important to you?
OK, we'll grab it.
We'll get a copy.
Yeah, no judgment.
Yeah.
People have very deep attachment to a bunch of things.
And, man, I have been living in this angel of death standing at the door between permanence and oblivion of the web for so long that I understand now it's more an emotional thing than a technical thing.
Like, I've turned into a counselor more than a technician.
Wow.
Geo, I'm totally sorry we interrupted you.
No, it's just checking in.
The, my apologies, the chat has been very lively.
People are talking about their old messaging systems, people responding to what Rob was saying about Discord and IRC.
And Jason, very specifically, someone, Sarah, said, I wish more people I work with spoke this way.
My gosh.
That's nice to hear.
Well, the fundamental question is, what way do you think, what's your definition of that way?
You know, it's like, oh, I wish more people used multiple sentences and were not absolutely trying to show me brain rot 25.
I found it.
Now, I will say, I actually get some very interesting information off of TikTok, but it has to be in, like, you know, you find a person who is using it to create essentially one-minute essays that are informative.
So, it can be done, but, man.
That is something that we are definitely looking for to help with the conference, is somebody who gets TikTok.
Because I don't think anybody in the main coordinating team is either a fan or has much experience with that particular platform.
And I think we all know it's important.
It does reach people.
So, you know, people look for ways of helping.
That's definitely one way to help is if somebody understands that and can make it work for getting the word out.
Yes, we currently do not have anyone that is really adept at that and are looking for a little bit of expertise and trying to, like, make some of what we do and what we've tried elsewhere work in that medium.
Yeah.
And it's something that, you know, somebody that is interested in it and passionate about it because a lot of people don't use that and haven't needed to for many reasons.
But the thing is, you know, getting TikTok isn't enough.
You also have to get hope.
You have to get what this particular part of the hacker community is about.
And if you're into that and you get TikTok, then that's definitely something that I think can work out well.
Because we've done short-form videos of past talks, for example, and highlights, sort of that kind of stuff.
So, I mean, we've played around with it.
We've done pranks.
We've done fun stuff.
There's only so many hours in the day, though.
There were so many different things.
The things there move very quickly.
The fickle, right?
Like, the trendiness kind of.
It's a pretty brisk environment.
Gila, go ahead.
We got confirmation from Sarah, who says that what she was talking about was in response to being reasonable and skeptical about, quote, unquote, AI use.
I did also want to point out that YouTube has been kind of harsh on content holds this evening.
What does that mean?
Found out that, well, YouTube does not love the phrase gay furry hackers.
Oh, they can fuck off.
How about that?
They would like that phrase?
Well, I don't disagree with you there, but.
Gay furry hacker, gay furry hacker, gay furry hacker.
Yeah, come get me.
But a lot of people were responding to it in the chat, and we got a comment that said the gay furry hacker chef really cooked with that one, and that got held for content review.
What does that even mean?
Very nice.
I don't understand what that phrase is.
That's a compliment.
Is that a compliment?
I don't know.
Yes, that is absolutely a compliment.
And then someone had a question for Jason, which got content held because of an unfortunate typo.
Jason, the question is.
Would you rather fight Jackie Chan style a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
Oh, man, those keys were so close to each other.
Since when does YouTube care if you cuss?
YouTube.
Okay.
You remember how YouTube won't caption when we swear?
That's true, but I didn't know they would hold comments completely.
Oh, they hold stuff all the time.
I mean, they hold it for moderator review.
Why is Google such a bunch of prudes?
I don't get that.
I don't get that.
Isn't that some of our own preference, like, so we can at least look at it for a second?
I mean, wouldn't you want to?
I don't know if we have that.
We're on slow-mo, definitely.
Oh, okay, okay.
I think.
Jason.
I think that the fact that, as it's been announced, that I think it was in two years the Oscars will stream on YouTube exclusively instead of being on ABC really shows you that, like, they're really trying to position it as another network.
And as a result, they are more and more finding themselves kind of, like, how do we set up channels?
How do we set up whatever?
Because, obviously, YouTube TV is a product that they want.
And I think what you see here is what happens when you let a company like Google, which was never meant to go into this area.
Like, this has always been the problem.
Like, there was that golden era.
And I'm so glad I got to visit Google during it, which was there was a period of time for the young ones, may not know this, between, like, 2000 and 2000.
Well, let's say 2001 and let's say, like, 2004, 5, it felt like Google was moving into unusual places, doing things as if from space in a way that felt like it was going to advance humanity.
So I'm talking about, like, Google catalogs, where they had, like, basically started scanning every catalog out there.
And you could just do a global search of every catalog that had come out in the last month or Google doing books in a way where you could search for snippets and find like it all felt like, wow, they're really they're really going in a new direction.
Well, I liked how, you know, their their search page didn't have any advertising on it.
And I realized, wow, finally, here's a company that's not obsessed with ads.
And boy, that did not work out well, did it?
No, because what happens is and I learned this from a friend who worked at Google.
There was a thing where I would go, hey, why do you think this service went away?
It would be something so simple, like whatever.
I don't know.
I'm gonna make it up Google fridge that like you could go to Google fridge, type in something and see a fridge.
Like, I'd be like, the service is so easy.
Why did it disappear?
Why was it decommissioned?
It's so simple.
And they said to me, ah, the person who shepherded and wrote that site at Google to get promoted, got promoted.
And they had no plan.
And yeah, so there's no longevity idea, right?
I pretty famously, famously, semi famously, I think I just I haven't gotten rid of the site yet.
I really have to do that.
The day that Google announced Google Stadia, their streaming game product.
Oh, yeah.
I registered a website called Stadia Countdown, where I said, so Google usually kills their products within four years.
So here's a countdown.
How long before Stadia dies?
Like, I knew nothing about Stadia.
I'm just like, Stadia is gonna die.
So just visit Stadia Countdown.
And they died three and a half years in.
And I changed the website to say, hey, they shipped early.
They're down.
And that was it.
And that's when I found out one of my best friends from high school was one of the guys behind Google Stadia doing work for them.
And he's like, yeah, that site kind of always irked me a little bit.
And I'm like, but it was true, wasn't it?
He's like, yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
Who remembers Google Wave?
Remember that?
Oh, you see, Google Wave is so fascinating to me because I would like to understand more the theory that the brothers had.
The two brothers who worked on Wave, the two Irish brothers.
Well, what is it?
Well, that's what it is.
You missed it, Alex.
It's over.
I know.
So, like, the first time you use Google Maps and you press a pinch and you're able to zoom in and you discover that the whole site is live and that you're able to move it around and everything else.
And, like, that incredible power was the work of these two brothers who had been work for Google.
They had been working on this product and it joined Google and CIA project, by the way.
And it was like, wow, these guys are wonderkins.
They can do anything.
So, after they kind of pushed Google Maps into the world and we got Google Earth and all that, they went off and they were going to create the next paradigm in information awareness.
And I'm trying to think of, like, imagine in 1985 you're trying to create the iPhone interface.
Like, all of the ways that's really insane.
Like, all of the baked-in knowledge that you need for people to have gotten to that point of, like, press on a thing and the keyboard is on the screen and all that.
And it was going to be, it was, this kind of integration of events and communications and access to information such that you were creating in real-time communication streams with people.
Now, if you look at how Apple approached this or you look at how HP or the phone company approached this, you live test it to within an inch of its life.
So, for example, they used, I think it was like 1 million people, was it, to figure out how long a touchtone should be pressed to register as a touchtone on a phone.
They analyzed like a million people and had them experiment all over the country to go, human beings, when they press it this much, that's what they mean.
Like, that's how exacting you were.
Google Wave was not ready for the panoply of humans.
And so they dropped this product, and they didn't just drop it, but they dropped it with an ice cream, Irish cream, whipped cream topping of this is the new way we do things.
This is the world.
This is how it's done.
And the best reductive criticism I ever heard of it was it was a simulator to make you feel like your grandparents feel when they use email.
Like, it was baked with so many weird UI things that were brand new.
Like, you remember the first time on a cell phone that you drag it down to mean refresh?
Like, that's a thing that had to be introduced and then get response.
But they did, like, 50 of these.
So within, like, six months, Google Wave support disappears.
Google gets cold feet.
Google kills the whole product, leaving an entire world going, what was that?
Like, there were people who had, like, written books on how to use Google Wave who were giving lectures because they saw the potential.
Google, but it was like, so to me, it's an amazing study.
Like, a product came out that in maybe 20 or 30 years will be like, oh, yeah, that's what Google Wave had.
Oh, yeah, that's what Google Wave had.
But we just weren't ready.
And it wasn't refined enough.
It wasn't worked with, you know, because Google wasn't really working with real people yet.
But they weren't good at that.
Yeah, people are talking about Google+.
Google+, was the same idea.
Oh, wow.
Like, we're going to do a social network.
But we are the most antisocial company on Earth that's not directly involved in the military.
Like, Palantir makes a social network.
That's basically what Google+.
We should conspire on all of the Google things that have stopped and put out a book.
I think that would be - someone's probably already done it, but I think that would be great.
Especially -
There's something called the Google Cemetery where you can go and walk among the memorials of all Google products.
I went to the Ben and Jerry Cemetery up in Vermont.
Have you ever been there?
That's kind of creepy.
It's the Flavor Cemetery.
The Flavor Cemetery, yeah.
Some of them came back to life, too, which is also weird.
Rob, go ahead.
On that subject, there are actually a few different sites that catalog things that Google has killed off.
And they all do have sort of a graveyard theme.
I said book, not site.
Well, there's one called Killed by Google.
It's killedbygoogle.com.
And there's just a little - a whole row of - or a whole column of tombstones for each one.
And the dates, when it started and when it ended and how old it was and what it was when it was killed.
And I don't remember most of these, I've got to say.
And it's kind of fascinating.
Got to pay attention, Rob.
They go fast.
Kyle, go ahead.
I just think, going back to the example with organizing and stuff, it's really, really important to try to translate why writing and composition and participation, especially with things that are a little bit older, like email, that are useful for record keeping should be kind of - I don't know how to teach it or make it cool, per se.
But what isn't working is when we try to get activity through those methods and we like there to be like self-direction and people doing what's comfortable.
And we know that it - and this is what I was going to say in our conversation earlier at the outset, that it's a natural thing.
People naturally will text, hey, did you get the email about something?
Like usually it's an additional layer of conversation that helps with organizing and uptake.
And there's another point I want to make about churn.
But to that end, like it's okay, but we don't have a way easily.
And this is also something that is designed into a lot of products.
We don't have a way of interfacing with that or pulling logs of it because, well, like with Facebook and many other examples, like it's just not in their interests anymore to have that kind of interoperability.
But then - and then like what's even funnier is that people will embrace a method and then it's a feature that things are disappearing, which is something I think Slack started doing, which is great for like privacy because everything is so vulnerable.
So it's like these paradoxes layered on paradoxes with like crappy business models too.
And then we're still saying they're like, okay, but like how do - what activity there was was like nil because everybody was doing something on something else.
And like we just want to search and figure out like what X, Y, or Z was going on with this person that moved on because they had to go do their graduate program.
They had to go move on in life because, again, we have - we understand people have lives outside of hope and it's at will volunteerism.
Like we get that and that's an important part of it.
But that ability to go back on our spool and look at what was said in text and have it be searchable is brilliantly like wildly valuable even if at the time it isn't to the people involved.
And emphasizing that is just super hard.
Hope is just one thing.
This holds true for almost every aspect of my life I can think of.
You know, it's great to be able to refer back to a conversation from years ago.
Did you already talk to that person?
You already asked them the same question?
It's good to look.
Look at your records.
Can you do that on Facebook?
No, you can't.
I can't find anything on Facebook.
I can't find my comments.
If there's a way to do it, someone tell me how to do that.
Same thing with, you know, when people use Twitter private messages to communicate.
I don't know why they did that, but they did or anything else that requires you to be a subscriber to a particular company and you have to stay with that company.
Look, you could use Gmail for your mail and that's great, but you can you don't have to use Gmail for your email.
You can use something else for your email.
You can you can pick and choose there are all kinds of different methods and you don't have to subscribe to just one thing in order to use that service.
So you have the record keeping and you have the accessibility where you can communicate with people without having to be a member of a particular customer for a particular company.
And I just think it's a big mistake to to make that a condition for communicating.
And I think that explains why it's so hard for us to communicate with each other.
You know, I've been invited to weddings on Facebook.
I didn't find out about until five years later because I don't check every day and because it gets lost.
And that happens on a lot of services.
Rob, talking of talking of old school ways of communicating.
I would I would love for us to open up our phone lines when we can to to get people calling in and communicating with us.
Imagine if the phone number wasn't the same for everybody.
Imagine if you had to get a different phone number because you're using a different phone company and we had to give them all out.
You know, it would not just one phone number.
Yeah.
I'm hearing two different things out of you.
Oh, good.
OK, tell me.
Two things, Mr. Goldstein.
Yeah.
Number one, you are frustrated at the degradation of the intro, intro group communication methods that we have and how quickly people are running to disparate commercial platforms with an absolute lack of understanding of the ramifications of that.
Like you have this anti-corporate pro communication, old school printed magazine you run and everyone's like, cool, where's your discord?
So I get that.
But the other one is there's definitely and I hear that from Kyle more is like there's also like the mechanisms and concepts of organizing.
Which you can like I was just dealing with another person talking about he's been doing some study of like civil rights groups trying to talk about universal or guaranteed minimum income and a bunch of other social issues.
And at one point he saw that like John Lewis had mentioned, like when groups joined the Selma marches and others, he's like, we made sure they read the handbook.
And he was like, what handbook?
And he found it.
He found me a link and we found it on a government.
It's like, here is this like two or three page written sheet that just says, here are the basics of our organization.
Here is what you are expected to do.
Here is what you are welcome to do and what you are not welcome to do.
So they knew literally everybody was on the same page before they moved any further.
It would be like literally like I want to help 2600.
I want to be part of hope.
You go, cool.
Here's a PDF.
Like go read the PDF.
Okay.
And if you have an issue with anything in this PDF, we're not the group for you.
And I'm sorry, as opposed to we find out 17 days down the line when you flip out because you and I didn't understand a basic premise.
So this has always been a problem in large organization, regardless of high or low turnover, regardless of underground versus corporate is like if people are not ramped up.
And if you don't have interns who maybe just study and learn and then move on to the next project, having observed how things work, that's when you find that people are constantly making the same mistakes over and over and over again.
And it's just a powerfully difficult thing to do.
And I think the science of that fascinates me.
It just feels like we're missing by a mile now because you can try talking to somebody and they will never be aware that you're trying to reach them because you're not on their platform.
Whereas before, you could always send the postcard or something or show up at a meeting.
And at least if you didn't connect, you were there and you could do that in person.
But now it's, you know, if you're not on every single platform that's out there, you risk not reaching the people that you want to reach.
And it's extremely frustrating.
And Kyle, you had something.
Go ahead.
Well, yeah.
And I just remember a conversation we had once and Gila was talking about having a Bible or like a standard operating procedure.
Right.
And that is something we've been trying to do.
And we've had a lot of really just phenomenal support and worked on things that have carried over.
And, of course, with the organizing we're doing happening more frequently, it's helped in a great deal.
But places that we can point to on our own site or our wiki site, which need work.
And I remember when I first started getting involved, a story about going through our forums and realizing, like, wow, there's a lot of, like, superfluousness here.
And just trying to, like, straighten it out to get ready for the next event.
And people got mad that, like, some of the extra conversations were disappearing.
And I was like, well, we're trying to improve it and get it ready for, like, rename it, you know, like, get ready for a fresh start.
But you have to be kind of careful.
And you realize, like, when people are using something, you have to kind of guide a lot of that and have that kind of layout of this is how we work.
This is how we communicate.
And then something that we've also talked about and are trying to translate a little bit better is finding out where people want to put their energy.
Because there's a lot of, like, enthusiasm and we want to, like, get people to the right places.
So having that communication is all part of it.
And if people are chatty enough, we can actually channel some of that enthusiasm and have it benefit others who participate or come to the show.
You know, I just realized we're so bad at this.
We haven't even talked about the specifics of the conference.
So Hope Conference this year is taking place August 14th through 16th.
We're back in Manhattan.
We're in New York City at the New Yorker Hotel, finally a more New York name than that.
It's two blocks away from where Hotel Penn used to be.
So pretty much the impossible has happened.
When we lost a hotel back around COVID, we didn't think we'd ever make it back to Manhattan because, well, we just couldn't pull it off financially.
And now with the combination of the nonprofit and just a lot of hard work and a lot of dedicated people, we're able to pull this off.
But the only way it works is if people band together and make a successful conference and get the word out.
That's part of the frustration we're feeling is that the word isn't getting out as much as we want it to be.
It's getting to the people that we know.
We need it to get to the people we don't know.
And I think that's where everybody can kind of help out.
For instance, this month, April, 10% of our ticket price is being donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The EFF will get 10% of every ticket sale from now until April 30th.
And I want that to be huge for them.
I really do.
But in order for that to happen, word has to get out to lots and lots of people who we don't know.
Because so many people have not heard of Hope because it's hard to reach thousands and thousands and thousands of people when you don't know what it is they're reading or how to access their particular social networks.
Everyone has a different method of doing this.
So if we all help out and get the word out, then we're set and we can do this every year.
And I really think that this is a turning point.
This is something that we can make a tradition in Manhattan, have amazing speakers.
The conversation we had tonight is just a taste of the kinds of things that we present at Hope Conferences.
So it's a new era, but we have to work hard to keep it going.
And I'm optimistic.
Might not sound optimistic, but I am.
One thing that comes to mind in the conversation is getting the word out about a particular activity.
I was talking about the wiki earlier.
We want to have that be accessible so that people that are self-organizing and planning on having meetups around the event,
that they can share that information with people in a particular place.
Because that tends to swell as people anticipate showing up and hanging out and stuff like that.
And, yeah, I just think that that's an important place to coalesce.
And what was the other thing I was going to say?
While you're thinking, I'll give out the URL, which is www.hope.net.
And all the information so far is there.
More information is being added all the time.
And we're going to be adding all kinds of info on things to do in the area.
We had, if you were at the conference last year or the year before that, we were at St. John's University before they kicked us out.
And, you know, that alone right there, that's one hell of a story.
I would like to see some magazine and newspaper do a story on that, of how, you know, having an anarchist pamphlet got the whole conference kicked out of the university.
But it resulted in us finding a better place in Manhattan, which was awesome.
But if you've been to the conference in Queens, one of the biggest complaints was, what do we do at night?
Where do we find food?
You know, there were places.
Chinatown wasn't that far away, but it wasn't right next door.
Well, now it is.
Now it's 24 hours.
It's right downstairs.
It's all over the place.
The city, you can walk to Times Square.
It's going to be awesome.
It's going to be amazing.
It's going to be a great time.
And I hope all of you listening can make it.
So hope.net is all the info there.
Anyone else have anything they'd like to add before I open up the phones?
Kyle, you were finishing your thought.
Yeah, yeah.
I was just thinking of the ideas that are going to come out about it.
Just once we have them, like I was thinking about creative stuff like art, a call for art and participation.
And I was also going to issue kind of a design throwdown and some challenges and maybe do some other fun stuff around the event.
But where do you talk about that, that you would get participation?
And of course, we have a lot of outlets for that.
So I would just say, like, spread the word and we're going to continue to get our announcements out and have things to talk about and let people participate in the kind of fun stuff and the ideas and themes that we're working on.
And you can join the announcement list at hope.net.
There's a link to do that and get announcements whenever they come out.
Anyone else have anything they'd like to say about Hope before we open up the phone lines?
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, just to contradict you, as I usually like to do, Emmanuel, I wouldn't suggest that anybody walk to Times Square, you know, from the New Yorker Hotel.
I mean, who wants to go to Times Square, right?
But you do have Chelsea right there, which is kind of amazing, right?
You've got all the art galleries right around the corner from you.
You've got the West Village right there.
You've got 23rd Street.
You've got the Chelsea Hotel around the corner.
You have basically like the best of Manhattan right around you at the New Yorker Hotel.
It's super cool.
And it's really easy to get to from New Jersey as well, right?
Like you're right off of the Lincoln Tunnel.
So hang on.
Hang on.
What about New Jersey Transit?
The train goes right to Penn Station right there.
Right there.
And the pass train.
You have two different kinds of trains that go across the street.
That's incredible to me.
Yeah, no.
And yeah, the buses too.
The buses up in Times Square, by the way.
That's where the Port Authority is.
Yeah, I still wouldn't.
Take an Amtrak.
Yes, again, Penn Station.
Take Amtrak from anywhere in the country.
Right there.
Yeah, it could not be more convenient.
It really couldn't be.
No, it's amazing.
This is going to be, this is one that I think is definitely not to be missed.
I'm really excited about this one.
Get used to that sound because that is the sound of Manhattan.
That's it.
Yep.
But yeah, of all the mistakes to make, going to Times Square is a pretty good one, though.
Like, it's a great mistake.
It's a great mistake to make once.
Well, I mean, look, there are Broadway shows.
There's all kinds of cool places to eat and just wander around.
People come to see this.
You know, we spent the last few years trying to get people not to do that because we wanted
them to stay in Queens and be at the conference.
But, you know, people who are traveling from far away, they want to see those sites as well.
Now you can.
It's right down the block.
You know, one of the things, so I did that talk last year where I talked about a guy and
his passing.
And I invited his daughter, who is not of means.
So I flew her in and I basically put her in a Times Square hotel because she had never been
to New York City.
Oh, wow.
And I knew I would pick her up and I would take her to Queens for the event, which she
was there for the day and she enjoyed it a lot.
But I also knew, like, it was also a, like, this is for you, Dad.
You never got to have me come to New York City or see it.
And for her family who were still back home, who were like, what's it like?
And so she, like, sent me photos from Times Square going like, I made it.
I made it.
But she also, you know, took her to Viselka so that she could have a great meal there and,
you know, like saw the city.
But it was interesting because she did want to see Times Square just because she could
bring it back home.
But I made it very clear.
There's a lot here.
And I think she really, like, got a lot out of it.
That was, like, a really nice part.
And taking her to Queens gave her perspective because going from Queens to New York City,
you pass through the tunnels and you pass through the, you're like, oh, this is all part
of a incredible, weird place in all these different ways.
So anyway, it was a good.
That was so sweet of you.
That was so sweet of you to do that.
And I think it's important, like, family members, when there's a, if you can afford
it and you have the means and you can do it, if you're going to build the central thesis
of your talk around the life, you should have the family enjoy watching you do that.
Like, she really liked sitting up and taking photos from her chair in the theater of like,
oh, they're discussing my dad.
And it's in the context of, like, the great work he did, which is not something he got
a lot of before the end of his life.
So that was like a great thing and fun to do.
So if he, I don't know, I try to leave things a little better than how I found him.
I don't always succeed, but I try.
And you succeed more than you know, believe me.
And Jason made reference to Veselka.
Veselka is, for those who don't know, a Ukrainian restaurant downtown in Manhattan.
And we just got word, actually, a couple of days ago that they are reopening 24 hours
a day on the weekend.
So that means during the HOPE conference, you can go down and get Ukrainian food down in
the village.
And it doesn't matter what time of day, they'll be open.
So that's pretty damn awesome.
Perogis and beef stroganoff at three in the morning.
What's more New York than that, than wandering out into the street?
You know, and here's the thing, too, right?
Like people, I mean, I would, it would be really disappointing to me when to think that
somebody would think about not going to HOPE because it's in New York City, because they're
under some impression that they could not possibly handle it.
Like New York is actually really easy to handle.
Like it's an incredibly diverse place.
It's got all sorts of interesting things happening.
You can have an egg wrap in 10 seconds going into a store, pet the bodega cat, go outside,
see somebody, you know, next to a speaker singing New York State of Mind by Jay-Z, followed by
going down a street past like one of the most incredible museums in the world and have it
be open for free on a Friday.
Like, it's just such a calvacad of just amazing things, just all there.
And for someone to think that it's like a war zone or that it's too loud and scary or that
they will be unable to navigate it, that it'll be so hard.
I'm like, please come to New York.
Yeah.
It is so, it's such a jewel.
It's one of the friendliest places on earth, too.
It really is.
You just have so many really great encounters, whether it's on the subway, on a bus, in the
street.
Just everyone has a different experience, but almost all of them are extremely positive.
Wear comfortable shoes.
You know, good footwear.
Some running shoes are nice.
Yeah.
Every time I go into Manhattan, I just, I'm walking all the time and you never want to
stop.
There's a book by Nathan Pyle that's called New York Etiquette.
And it's basically this wonderful introduction to, like, the city.
It'll just be like, you know, this is the shape of the Empire State Building versus the
Chrysler Building.
So you can navigate, you know, so you know this one's on the West.
This one's on the East.
So you know where to go.
And it's all sorts of things, like, if you can get up at six in the morning, the city
is yours.
Like, you can jog and there's nobody on the street because the city doesn't wake up.
And there's all sorts of that.
But there's one in there that always makes me tear up.
And it just goes, New Yorkers will help.
And it's just got, like, it's got, like, an older guy, like, on the ground.
And people are all standing around going, are you fine?
Do you need help?
Are you doing something?
And I'm like, yeah, that's the place.
Like, people will help each other.
They will get involved.
All the time.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And the other thing to remember, it's open 24 hours.
Unlike any other city that I know of, you can get on, any subway line is open.
You can, you're never stranded.
You're never not able to get somewhere via mass transit.
And, you know, if you prefer cabs or Ubers, yeah, of course, they're everywhere as well.
Yeah.
But it's, you know, it's just an incredible place if you've never experienced it.
And if you have, it's still incredible.
Yeah.
But just don't do the pedicabs.
Because the pedicabs are amazing and wonderful.
And they charge you by the minute.
Yeah.
Avoid those guys.
I don't think we've ever recommended that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The first time somebody gets their little bill and the guy's like, yeah, you owe me $108.
And it's like, what?
It's like, dude, the guy was standing outside of a Broadway show with a Christmas light lit up pedicab trying to convince you to drive with him.
What do you think that, how was that story going to end?
What do you think it was going to end with?
$5?
So anyway, other than that.
You can get ripped off for sure.
But, you know, there are so many things you can do for nothing.
And it's just.
Nothing.
It's amazing.
You can go to Soho and you can walk through all these beautiful luxury stores and see amazing things for sale.
Like sneaker stores where they have those upmarked collector sneakers and just sit.
I went to a sneaker store once and they have them up behind a little display and they've got them like kind of behind a plexiglass for the thing.
And there were these two kids near me and there was one sneaker and it said $1,000.
And the kid's saying to his buddy, like, I'm going to touch it.
I think I'm going to touch.
I'm going to touch the sneaker.
And they looked at me like I was a cop.
And I was like, touch the sneaker.
And the kid was like, touch the sneaker.
Like just a little bit of joy.
No, just a shared moment.
You know, like there's a thousand of those a day in that city.
It's wonderful.
Absolutely.
But, of course, you'll be spending all your time at the conference because that'll be so captivating that you won't want to leave.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Get a plane.
Get your delivery.
This is an old hand talking.
Get your travel for Monday, not Sunday night.
Yeah.
Because Sunday night is when all the friends you made and they're all like, hey, let's go to whatever.
And next thing you know, you're in a diner with all the people you made friends with at the event and having a good time.
So leave Monday.
And if you give, actually, our early submission for talks and workshops is the end of April.
We're still accepting after that, but this is for people who want an answer, yes or no, early.
And we will do that shortly after the end of April.
So if you have a talk idea or a panel idea, get it together now.
You have a couple of weeks.
All the details are on the Hope.net website.
And, of course, you get free admission to the conference if you are accepted.
So, OK.
We've, you know, when we talk about Hope, look what happens.
The whole hour goes by.
That's right.
We haven't opened up the phone lines yet.
So let's try and do that and get through some phone calls in fairly quick succession.
So if you're planning a lecture, this might not be the best night for it.
Let's try and make them as quick as possible so everybody gets a chance.
The phone number, as soon as I say the last digit, will be open, 802-321-4225.
And that means the phone lines are now open.
And we will take the first call as soon as it comes in.
There are no restrictions on what you say or what you talk about.
You may cuss.
We may cuss.
We will cuss.
You don't need to only do that.
You can just share your thoughts.
If there is a news story, something that got hacked, something that you're following,
something interesting that we've said that conjures up an idea, please share that with us.
Something's happening now that we need to know about.
Because, you know, we've been in the studio.
I don't know what's going on in the world.
We could be at another war now.
We could have insulted some space-faring race that's pissed off at us now.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't want to know what's going on.
I see one of the chatters is giving all sorts of New York advice.
And I'm just like, you know what New York's good for?
Advice.
Lots of advice.
Lots of advice.
He's anti-pet the bodega cat.
Pet the bodega cat.
Oh, you have to.
If the bodega cat allows it.
Right.
On their terms.
Yes.
With consent.
For what it's worth, the tips are all coming from Rebel, who is frequently the most confidently wrong person I've ever known.
Wonderful.
So, take those with a grain of salt.
Yeah.
If you want to learn more about New York interactions, track down some columns called Metropolitan Diary that come from the New York Times.
And they reprint them all over the place.
But you just see these little snippets of interactions.
They've been printing this since the 1970s.
They're all gems.
Absolutely.
That's like the best action.
And look out for them, too, when you're going about your life or if you're there for a visit or whatever, because it will happen.
You'll realize, wow, these moments are occurring.
Yeah.
Like, I was in the subway and I was watching a rat and there was another, there was a young woman watching a rat and then it disappeared and she, like, turned around and I was, like, looking at me.
Like, we both realized we were witnessing this, like, you know, rat going about its life and then we disappear.
And, like, you know, you never talk to...
This is a real story?
Are you...
Yeah, like, there's so many weird little moments like that.
This happened to you?
Yeah, like Jason was describing.
I didn't tell you about it, but it was just while we were moving from one train to another.
Those are all those kind of slices of life.
But Metropolitan Diary, it just so wonderfully encapsulates it.
Yes, there are rats, but they're not everywhere.
We have a call.
Yeah, we have a call.
Good evening.
You're on Overtime.
Go ahead.
Yes, I have a question for Scott.
Rebel, well, his name is Jason.
His last name is Scott.
But let me just clear up a couple of things.
We banned Rebel last time we talked on WBAI, and that was overturned on appeal because we
looked at the logs and it seemed like somebody called in and faked Rebel's voice.
So nice try.
Yeah, AI is doing some, yeah, some nasty things.
So Rebel, even though it wasn't you we found, you're still on notice.
Right.
Okay.
I just want to know, I use the Internet Archive a lot, and I like to, like, look at things
like that happened before, like, let's say, before a building was built or what was here
because the city's landscape is changing so much.
Like, I just like to know what was here before and what website, like, what this website was
in, you know, 10 years ago or whatever.
And that's what I like to use the Internet Archive for.
And also you were talking about different sites to communicate, like people asking, oh, do
you have Instagram?
Oh, no, I don't have Instagram.
I have Facebook.
I could check, oh, I don't have that Facebook.
You want, oh, do you have VK or whatever?
I have VK, but, oh, I don't have that.
Or I don't have TikTok.
Or maybe this person does have TikTok and I don't have TikTok.
Right.
It's no one, you know, it's like different company.
You know, when you have the telephone, you could call anywhere, call anyone, you know.
It's not like, you know, social media where you have to have this particular social media
app or website or...
You've demonstrated that to us.
I mean, we gave out the phone number and there's no stopping you from calling us on that
phone number because you have the phone number and everybody can call us on that phone number.
You know, there's no way to say, well, Rebel, you have to use this particular service.
And if you don't use this service, well, I'm sorry, we can't talk to you.
There's no stopping you.
You will call us on the phone number because the phone number works for everybody.
That's true.
And that's what's good about the phone.
And that's what's good about, you know, the old way of doing things, you know, call a
telephone.
Everybody knows telephones, you know, pick up a phone, dial it up, send it your number and
you can communicate with basically anyone.
You have a phone number, you know, or, oh, no, I don't have a phone.
And go to my Instagram or go to WhatsApp.
I mean, you know, with WhatsApp, you have to have a phone number anyway.
All right.
Well, thank you.
We're going to leave it there because we want to keep the phone lines open for as many people
as possible since we blabbered on for so long over the last hour.
But thank you, Rebel, for calling.
Let's have a longer conversation next week.
And let's open up that phone line, 802-321-4225.
Yep.
While we're waiting, I did have an interaction with somebody recently at my day job, and I
won't go into specifics, but this person is an older person who very vehemently does not
use email or a cell phone, just their landline at home and written letters.
And this person was describing this to me with such relish because they're someone who used
to have to use computers for work and is long retired and old enough where they, quote,
don't have to put up with that stuff anymore.
And I was having a nice conversation with this person and realized on some level, like,
I love technology.
I love so many things we do with it.
But I'm almost a little bit jealous.
Yeah, but people are entitled to live their lives however they want to when they are given
the opportunity.
And some people despise things that others love.
So people who are like, it's tangential, but there's a friend of mine who, when he was
34, one of his friends has a, you know, he was visiting somebody and they were like, he's
like, wow, you have a motorcycle.
He's like, yeah, have you ever been on a motorcycle?
He's like, no, I've never been on a motorcycle.
And he goes, oh, well, let me just show you how it works.
Why don't you just drive down to the end of the street carefully and come back?
And he said that he drove on the motorcycle, got to the end of the road, drove back, and
he was crying because he had realized he had missed out 30 potential, you know, whatever,
10 years of being able to drive a motorcycle.
Like he regretted that, oh my God, I've never thought I would be a person for this.
And so for him, it was like, I lost this opportunity.
Whereas somebody who might say have driven every day for their job, nothing would be more
pleasurable than never leaving the house and sitting on the backyard.
Like that's, we get to live our lives what we want.
The problem we run into is then saying, well, because I live this way, you all have to live
this way too.
Otherwise there's something wrong with you.
I totally agree that I have chosen a lifestyle where I am profoundly available and online.
And I have paid some prices for that.
And I've gotten some absolutely priceless treasures.
And in the tech world, there is that danger that someone says, well, of course, everybody
wants an email address.
Of course, everybody wants a phone.
And some people just, they don't, they don't.
And it's like, your job is not to evangelize them that they are wrong.
Just do it.
But if you need to reach me, I get it all the time, all the time.
And I live that way, but I choose it.
Anyway, so philosophy chat.
Probably a great time to give out your email address.
Jason at textfiles.com.
T-E-X-T-F-I-L-E-S.com.
There's nothing you're going to send me that I haven't seen.
And there's nothing you're going to make fun of me about that I don't already know is
my problem.
So go ahead and do it.
But the, by the way, the weirdo who you guys got me hooked up with, it was a great summer.
Um, I had a good time.
It was good.
It was actually really, it, I learned a lot.
I actually did a podcast about him because it turned out his thing was to tell people
that he had a story to tell.
And then when you tried to help him tell the story, he would tell you how you were getting
it wrong.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
And I was able to find three other people over the course of the previous 20 years who
had tried to, who had been through this with him to write newspaper articles, to do a documentary.
And that was his deal that like, no, the world isn't listening to me.
Nobody cares about my story.
And then when you helped him, he would go, you got my story wrong.
Right.
You're just part of the problem.
And then he died.
So, and it was, so it has a happy ending.
And also at his, and you know what, I think my most fascinating thing about him was that,
uh, he was in Queens and he had had some altercation with the city and they had shut off his
power and his water.
So his house was nothing but flashlights.
And, um, uh, he was using a bathroom with the gas station down the street.
And I was like, you go like you, you, you stick into your guns.
I don't think you should, but you are sticking to your guns, bro.
Living your best life, doing you.
That's, uh, that's what it's all about.
That's all he wanted.
All he wanted was life on his terms.
And he got it all the way to the end of his life.
Okay.
Like, could we ask for anything more?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
He went, he went into the ground exactly the way he wanted to in obscurity with everybody
else wrong.
So, you know what?
Go ahead, buddy.
And you got that relationship through us.
You said through you, he called you and like, he called us and said, Jason is the one that
could tell my story.
Except you couldn't because you got it wrong.
Except I couldn't because it's like the Kobayashi Maru.
You can't actually tell his story.
There is no real story to tell.
It was, it was fantastic.
I learned a lot.
I learned a lot about like, there are limits.
Not every story can be told.
Sometimes people are assistants to their own oblivion.
He had done some very amazing things earlier in his life, but he had driven away all of
the people in his life pursuing his rule of like how it was going to be told.
So his, he was estranged from the family.
And like I said, I talked to this newspaper reporter and I talked to a documentary filmmaker
and all of them were like, oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Did he show you the bike?
Okay, good.
He showed you the bike.
Cool.
Cool.
He did the thing.
Yeah.
Cool.
All right.
Does this every few years.
Wow.
And I guess, but you know what else he was besides that?
A off the hook listener.
So, you know, he had some redeeming quality.
I'm glad we were all able to sort of enhance his life a little bit, whether it's through
radio or conversation.
It's amazing.
We brought him his version of joy.
We have a very patient caller who has been sitting on hold for a while.
Bless them.
Or they might not be anymore.
We'll find out.
Good evening.
You're on overtime.
Go ahead.
Hey, Manuel.
Thanks.
It's Jim.
I got to say, mentioning off the hook as a staying force in our lives, I could easily
have been sitting on a call waiting to talk back in 1996 after failing to be rebel to
be first to the phone.
So, you know, it's amazing how much has not changed in my life and how much has changed.
I'm really excited about the conference this year.
I got to say, I haven't been to a HOPE conference since 05.
Oh, wow.
I had my first child the following year.
And so it was almost like there was always a birthday.
I didn't say I was going to be a bad father if I missed, so I didn't.
And now you moved it to a couple days after my anniversary, so I don't have any reason
to miss it.
Yeah, we checked.
We checked to make sure it's convenient for everybody.
So, you know, I'm glad it worked out.
No, it's perfect.
I'm looking forward to being in Manhattan.
I'm the guy who called in from the Olympics a few years ago.
Oh, I remember.
I remember that.
That was awesome.
Yes.
I meant to call you from Italy, but the six-hour time difference is a lot harder than the 13-hour
time difference.
Go figure.
Wow.
So it just didn't work out.
But really looking forward to getting there and seeing you guys.
Make sure you introduce yourself so that we know who you are, because we definitely have
a lot of stories to share.
Yeah, I'll do it.
We knew each other.
I've been on the show before.
I was Crowley's friend from Globix back in the day.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we'll catch up.
Sounds good.
That was beyond hope.
So, wow.
And you haven't...
Yeah, it was beyond hope.
The last hope you were at was, if I'm correct, 2004?
Five.
It was the fifth hope.
I thought it was 2005, but it might have been 04.
Yeah, it was even years.
It was Waz was there.
So I got Waz's phone number, and that got me some cred with my kids later in life.
But, you know, I'm looking forward to getting back.
Wow.
Okay.
Looking forward to having you there, and we're all going to have a great time.
Yeah, thank you.
All right.
You take care.
You too.
802-321-4225.
I have time for a couple more calls.
That was a good call.
Wow.
I remember him calling in from the Olympics.
I do, too.
Yeah.
He was working for a broadcaster of one sort or another, and all kinds of technical setups
and things.
Cool.
That was fun.
While we're waiting for that call, Jason, I saw you posted about a month ago that it
was the 15th anniversary of your employment at the Archive.
Yes.
So belated congratulations on that.
I like how you posted your offer letter from them, which noted that, you know, employment
at the Archive is not for a specific length of time.
It's at will.
I guess you could have taken that as a warning that, you know, we're going to keep hold of
you for at least 15 years.
You're going nowhere.
The one that I really liked about that whole thing was like, I found out later that like
when it was announced that like, oh, Jason Scott's working for the Archive, somebody wrote
in and said, you should not be hiring him.
He is a real danger and he could be really detrimental to your organization.
And the way I found out was like a year and a half after that, I was talking about something
and I said, well, it's not like anybody really complained about me.
And my manager was like, oh, no, no.
People wrote in and said, you should not be hired and you should be fired.
And I said, really?
Why didn't you tell me?
They're like, why?
It's bullshit.
And so that was a good one.
Um, the other one that impressed my coworkers was when somebody, somebody sent in a death
threat and they gave it to me and I put it up on blue sky and they were like, oh my God.
And, but, but it was such a great death threat because in the death threat, they said, Mr.
Scott should really learn to watch his mouth because one of these days he's going to be
walking along a street and bam, he's going to get hit by a truck and I'll be home watching
TV with a perfect alibi.
And I was like, this implies a truck assassin.
Like this implies there's a guy you could hire and he'll make sure that you have a rock
solid alibi.
And like, really?
That's your guy?
And I'm like, what kind of truck assassin is this?
And we were looking up all those cars, like the ones they have in the car crushing events,
like the, you know, like, like the black with the skulls and the wings and everything.
Like, I guess that's the truck.
So you'd have to, you know, you have to cross the street, obviously.
And he has to be on the street that you're crossing.
It's a lot of coordination involved.
It's not as easy as people think.
It's a nightmare.
If the whole point, if the whole point is you have to get flattened by a truck, it can't,
it can't be most convenient methodology.
No, and he limited himself by saying it's got to be a truck.
I mean, why not just a vehicle?
Why does it have to be a truck?
Right.
When he was a kid and he ran somebody over and got that taste for blood and said, I could
make a career out of this.
He also was committing to an oath and the oath was truck or nothing.
And, you know, you can't just, you can't just switch assassin methods midstream.
Don't switch horses mid assassination.
That's all I'm saying.
Not if you want to keep your respect.
No, they won't take you seriously.
Right.
We have a phone call.
We have a phone call.
Okay.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Govertime.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
We hear you fine.
We hear you great.
Okay.
Yeah.
The gentleman that called, that just called a few minutes ago?
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting that, that, uh, that show where he talked about, uh, being
at the Olympics, that was literally the first time I'd heard your show off the hook show.
So I remember him because that was the first time I listened to the show, you know?
That's amazing.
Yeah.
I thought it was interesting when he said, yeah, I'm the guy that called on the Olympics
because I remember that call.
That was, that was a while ago too.
Yeah.
That was a while ago.
It was the very first time I ever listened to this show off the hook.
That's incredible.
But, uh, I wanted to ask, uh, I'm going to be coming in from Florida to, to, uh, to
Hope.
Okay.
Do you have any idea if that hotel offers any kind of discount for Hope?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, uh, it's on the website.
Uh, there, there should be a link that goes right to it.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
And let, let us know if, if, uh, it's sold out.
Cause I know that a lot we're going.
Yeah.
Ah, okay.
And if it is sold out, we, we can probably get more, uh, but we have to know.
Okay.
Actually, I will jump on that.
All right.
Thanks.
That answers my question.
Thank you so much.
All right.
We'll see you in August.
Yes, definitely.
All right.
Take care.
Wow.
It seems like everybody's coming, which is great.
You definitely can do like New York is a very, like New York has a lot of variance in terms
of hotels.
And yes, your best bet is to be in the con hotel, but if you can't be in the con hotel
and you have to be somewhere else, people should be aware.
I mean, if you're going in cold, it helps to book ahead of time.
It does not, there's no sudden discount the week before a hotel room is available.
And also bear in mind that it has one of the best public transportation systems in the
world.
So if you really, really, really, really, really have to, you can get rooms elsewhere
on the island or in a neighboring area, hop on and take like a 40 minute trip or less,
depending, and be at the hotel where the con is.
So don't, don't let the prices guide you in terms of like, don't go to like the crazy luxury
hotel down there, look at a thousand dollars a night or something and be like, oh, they're
all expensive.
Yeah, there's lots of choices.
I personally, whenever I shack people up at the, I always try to put them in Yotel just
because I enjoy Yotel.
What is Yotel?
Yotel is this like, it's this British chain.
They have one in Times Square and they try to sort of imitate a capsule hotel, but it's
more or less just compact rooms.
So they're cheaper and they've got like, it's just got a weird vibe.
Like there's a, there's a robot that will store your suitcase for you.
So you put your suitcase on a little thing.
You'll see this big robot, like grab the thing it's on and like move it up into like a, it's
a weird place, but the prices are usually okay.
Those are not, those aren't bad.
I mean, that sounds a lot like City Box.
There's, there's a lot of these like unattended hotels that we noticed when we were traveling.
So yeah, be creative people.
There's a lot of ways to work it and still have a really, really good time.
Our hotel had Nikola Tesla living in it.
Beat that.
You can't, you know, another thing though, that I discovered was kind of cool is you
can take a train to Penn station and if you do it right, you can, you can walk down the
tunnel and emerge out of a subway entrance right outside the door of the hotel without
ever going outside.
You can do that.
Okay.
If you want to do that, it takes practice.
Yes.
Really quick.
I was just on the website.
It does look like our block may be sold out for Friday and Saturday nights already.
Oh boy.
Okay.
Well, we have to talk to them then and maybe, maybe get some more.
Thank you for telling me that no one else did.
So we'll see if we can get, get more rooms added.
Even without the discount, it's not a bad deal, but we can, we can, we can try and get more
and we'll update people.
So look for announcements on that.
Uh, okay.
We have a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Hello.
Good evening.
I'm from San Diego and I wanted to give you a really good, that's right.
A really good autumn, that's right.
Okay.
Can you, can you turn down whatever is on in the background?
Cause we're having a little trouble hearing you.
Oh yes.
I apologize.
Okay.
Oh, it's cutting out.
It's cutting out.
I'm sorry.
Goodbye.
No, we, we, we hear you.
Okay.
I don't know what all that was about, but it sounded like they had something to say.
And, um, well, I think they were from San Diego.
So clearly, clearly the truck assassin, somebody on the chat is somebody on the chat is going,
is this a two hour special, which to me is like asking a question.
Like, is that a second slice of delicious pie?
I not, I, I think, uh, perhaps over 50% of us don't have a two hour special in us tonight.
Speaking of pie, speaking of pie, the TikTok diner is attached to the hotel.
You don't have to leave the hotel for that either.
It's open 24 hours a day and they have pie.
Let me just tell you, they have amazing pie.
A full bar.
They have a full bar too.
Boy, that's going to, that's going to be something.
And they have a, a burger that comes with like a big fried piece of cheese.
They invented disco fries.
They'll make it with a veggie burger.
They invented disco fries.
I don't know.
I'm just putting that out there.
Okay.
They have disco fries.
I know that.
And that's not all too.
There's an Italian place.
There's a steak place.
They're all like part of the hotel, but you know, you can walk around outside and even
without crossing the street, you'll find a ton of things.
Uh, it's, um, it's just so amazing.
I might never want to leave.
Shall we try one more phone call?
This will be the last phone call.
We can handle, yeah.
802-321-4225.
We're, we're, we're sitting here waiting, but, uh,
I sense we're getting tired because we've been on for a while.
You're all getting tired.
I'm the one with the infinite energy.
You know, I, I actually, um, for the people who, whatever, track all this stuff, I am officially
on a GLP.
So it's worked out for me.
It's not for everybody, but we decided it was important.
That was my remaining health thing.
And I have lost 35 pounds in the last two months.
And you look fantastic.
I wasn't going to say that on the, on the radio, but you do.
I was trying to like, I'm now to the point where I'm like, look, the heart stuff's pretty
good.
What else is there?
And I went to Korea and did medical tourism where they do like 70 tests in 33 hours to
find anything wrong.
And all of them were like, you should lose some weight.
So I went and tried naturally.
It wasn't working.
And we went to my doctor and 35 pounds down and dropping because I am trying to, um, I'm
trying to live a good, not just a, a life, but live like a healthy, good life to work
on things.
So my energy is way higher than it is because I've essentially taken a bag full of basketballs
and thrown it off me.
So I'm feeling pretty, I'm feeling pretty good.
That's not for everybody.
It's not, it's not, you know, I would never be like, Oh, and you all have to do this.
It's like this.
What's more important is that you look at your health and say, can I, can I do things
to improve my health that I can and within your context.
And that that's just as important as other knowledge.
I think we can all do that.
And we can all, uh, basically be our own advocates.
You know, if you're, if you're told to pursue a certain type of treatment, look into it, make
sure it's right for you.
You're not always told the right thing.
Uh, and, uh, and, and, and just know.
What's going on.
Don't, don't accept anything.
Yeah.
That's great to hear.
Take care of yourself.
And, and, you know, because regardless of what some people may think, there's always
people who want you around a lot longer.
So definitely do it.
Uh, Kyle, we do not have a phone call or we do.
The line is open.
It's open.
Okay.
So we're going to give it one or two more minutes, 802-321-4225.
Uh, give a call to that number, country code one, if you're calling from overseas, uh, and,
um, write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
If you, uh, uh, does Jason have the number for the truck assassin?
That would be a 1-800 truck fuck, which, um, I believe is, uh, popular probably truck
fuck.com.
Um, probably don't go there.
Maybe they're selling other things.
Um, and the other person was like, all I heard is Chinese peptides.
Um, my recommendation is not to go for the Chinese market for peptides.
That's my personal recommendation, but, um, we each have our limits, but my personal limit
is I want a chain of custody for stuff I inject.
That's where I, that's my line.
That's my line.
Everyone's got a line.
That's a good line.
That's a good line.
I thought it was a pretty good line, but some people, I get it rocking a hard place, you
know, but, uh, but yeah, don't, don't, yeah.
I, I, I've been fascinated learning about the whole peptide thing and about how different
stuff is happening.
It's a shame this country decided to lobotomize itself recently because we're on the cusp of
really, like, I think about the fact that like, there are now drugs entering that my
aunt who had diabetes could have had her life so utterly changed.
Right.
And that there's kids right now who are five or six and their parents are going to find
out that they're diabetic and there will be other, it might not guaranteed, but now there
will be other choices on the menu to say, and if we do this, we can really help.
And I think that's amazing to, uh, you know, we lost a dissent.
This is going to sound like I'm making this up.
We have lost so many Detroit house and techno DJs to diabetes, like the guy who originally
created all your base or belong to us, that song.
Um, and there's a bunch of other famous ones there in their fifties from diabetes, diabetic
related issues, because the healthcare is not, um, it's a not evenly distributed, but B the
therapies weren't there and now they are.
So I think of all the lives that'll be saved going forward.
And, um, it's, it's, it's a changing world.
Every, every few years we get more and more options.
I feel like, um, we're learning that science is good and not the enemy.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm, I'm also thinking that's where we really, we really are now with this.
Like people should know it turns out science is actually can be your little buddy every
once in a while.
It comes up with a pretty dumb idea and you got to tell it to like, go back to the drawing
board, but other times.
So if you hear somebody telling you science is the enemy, uh, tell them where they can
go and we say, no, no, buddy, buddy, buddy.
We have a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Hi, it's Bobcat.
I have a question for Jason, um, about the hacker halfway house.
Okay.
Does he, does he recall this?
I do.
Okay.
There was a thing that had a webpage and it said something about you and I don't know what
their beef was with you.
And I'm just hoping you could, uh, elucidate that.
Well, I know the, okay, so I know the hacker halfway house and I know, you know, some of
the plans of what they were working on.
Right.
And I had been to it a few times.
I don't recall a particular issue with anybody on the thing, but one of the problems that
I encounter, and this sounds way worse than it should is the famous street fighter scene
where he goes like, I'm sure this was the most important thing to you, but for me, it
was a Tuesday.
There's like a real, and I mean, Eric, I know you get this and I know others do, you know,
it's like ambiently people derive mythology from interacting with a person who has a high
profile.
And to them, they're like, oh, this happened.
They didn't get, you know, I wrote to them and they never got back to me.
And I'm like, oh, is that the week that I handled 400 emails and I just didn't see yours
because it went into spam and I didn't check spam or.
Yeah, that happens.
And the thing is, you say high profile, the profile is so not that high, you know, it's
just a slight, uh, you know, a slight bit may be higher than you think, uh, you know,
is, is normal, but it's really not that high.
I can only imagine people who are truly famous.
Right.
What they have.
I mean, I've talked to some of them and boy, they live a life of hell.
Yeah.
And by that, you mean like any notoriety at all?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, you can't walk down the street or you just, you know, anything you
say is given all this, this gravity and, uh, any interaction is something like you say,
it's a Tuesday for you.
Uh, but all this, all this mythology is, is, is attached to it.
So what, what, what, what of my favorite, like celebrity aspects is most is like a certain
level of celebrity limo has a portable toilet in it because you can be the kind of celebrity
where leaving the venue and going to the airport to your plane, you can't stop anywhere.
You can't, so they have to have a small portable toilet in the, in the backseat of the limo because
they can't pull over.
Cause you will cause an effect.
Thankfully, I don't have that.
I do get recognized in the street, but luckily not enough, but yeah, just enough, just enough,
enough that it's fine for me, but man, I have nothing but sympathy for people who not necessarily
famous for a bad thing, but like people who maybe were really talented or achieved maybe
against their will, a certain level of notoriety.
And now all of their life is, I, I gave this advice to Joe grand, the hacker who does the
badges and the crypto and everything.
He had just gotten a contract to be on prototype this, which became like the television show of
engineers.
And I gave him multiple pieces of advice, but one of them was, you're not an engineer
on this show.
You're playing an engineer.
So don't get twisted up about the fact that you're playing one.
So don't be surprised if they make you do shortcuts.
And the other one was go to take your wife.
They had two kids at the time.
Take your wife to every place you ever talked about going on vacation, because it won't be
the same for you anymore.
Like, cause if you go to like the Eiffel tower, or if you go to, you know, the Taj Mahal or
something, people will now recognize you because you were on the TV and you won't be able
to enjoy yourself.
So get it, get it now, get it under now.
Like that's the kind of advice I give people.
Yeah.
And if you're thinking of, of embarking on a life of fame, think twice because, uh, you
know, based on, you know, unless there's something really in it for you, uh, it can
be a life of hell as well.
So I will say though, that the hacker halfway house was one of multiple hacker, um, uh, hacking
spaces in the New York city area that I've been to.
And, uh, like all of them, they are composed of a bunch of people and sometimes they will
discuss like taking it to the next level.
And sometimes they can't take it to the next level.
And other times they do that.
Sometimes you'll have cases like Brie Pettis with, um, I forgot the name of the, uh, which
one was it that he was affiliated with, um, resistor.
Yeah.
Resistor.
Oh, NYC resistor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, well, we're, you know, like Brie went on to a level of notoriety and infamy and running
a CEO thing, but he had been part of NYC resistor.
And I'm sure there was a lot of, you know, drama and or resentment as one of its members kind
of leaves the space, having done work that has gone on to some level.
And that's just the nature of when you have a bunch of humans thrown together who are only
there for one specific theme, say exploration or technology.
I have nothing.
I cannot, I'm not being coy here.
I can't think of a hacker space that I hate or one that I don't like because it's never
the hacker space.
It's always maybe one or two people in it were a little extra, or maybe somebody wanted
to turn it into a business, but the place that, however it existed, you know, six months
or 60 years, it's a blessing when we have these spaces out there that are these, you know,
that however long they last, they are, they're little miracles because it's so hard to have
a bunch of people together in a rented space survive.
And, um, I have been to like, I mean, you've been to a pile, I'm sure I've been to like
20 or 30 and it's always, some of them are very corporate.
Some of them are like four people.
Some of them are like, they're like, they feel like a man cave.
Other ones feel like you're in a school.
Um, the CT hacker space feels like, uh, like an almost like youth group slash old person
man cave feel.
It's like pretty cool.
They'll have classes for the kids, but they'll also have nights where they're like drinking
and soldering and, and, and it really feels very homey.
Uh, anyway, so hacker didn't, I believe hacker halfway house was the one that was trying to
like stitch together seven shipping containers to like weld them together, to make a building
in an open space, in a triangular space in Brooklyn, which is a very fun dream.
Um, I don't think it ever happened, but like, you know, if you've been to like a few places
in Germany, I think of, and others where you're like, yeah, that could happen there.
You could come down one day and there's nine shipping containers with ladders among them.
And it's like a tree house gone to whatever.
In Germany, they can just do that stuff.
It just works.
Yeah.
So, so I don't know if they had a page about me, I don't remember it, but if, I mean, they
wouldn't be the first and they will not be the last.
I think we might've had the first hacker space in New York city at not work, which you probably
never were at.
Uh, and that was in the mid nineties.
Have you guys, has any one of you been to not work?
I went, I went there once, uh, with a crowd and I was there.
Okay.
Was there many times?
Rob, you too?
Yeah.
I, I, I just ended up there once with, uh, with a bunch of the crowd, the, the usuals
and, uh, it seemed like a really cool place, but I didn't make it back before it, uh, stopped
being.
Uh huh.
Yeah.
It was, it was an entire floor of an office building on 29th street in midtown Manhattan.
And I still can't believe we were able to pull that off, but you know, it lasted for
a few years.
Uh, then we donated the space to the indie media center in, uh, in New York city and,
uh, they used it for a few years and then it just turned into something else.
So on, on archive.org, if you look for two hands project, there is, so, um, this is a
weird thing, but like jet blue, the airline did this promotion in 2009.
And then in 2010, where for $600, you could fly as many times as you wanted to in a month.
Okay.
And it was just some weird promotion.
I did it.
I did it in 2010, but another group of guys who just assembled did it in 2009.
And what they did was they bounced around North America and went to as many hackerspaces as
possible and recorded a poorly filmed, bad sound interview with a lot of people you would
probably recognize, you know, everybody from Brie Pettis to, uh, Adafruit to, uh, the quartz
lab and remake lounge and hack DC.
Like they went to all these places and they'd get one or two people and just interview them
for an hour about their hacker space.
So that's from 2009 and it's, it's a pretty amazing compilation.
And then, and then of course, like they couldn't really kind of bring it to bear.
And I said, look, just give me the footage.
And I took the footage.
I was going to possibly edit it, but it was like way too difficult because it was in such
bad shape, but I then took it and took all the footage, you know, all whatever it was,
40 or 50 hours.
And I put it up on archive.org.
Like, so it's just, you know, um, you, you would recognize quite a few people in there.
I think, um, trying to think of some of the people, but like, you know, like all the people
you would expect, Mitch Altman is in there at one point, uh, um, uh, you know, well, he's
been to every hacker space that's ever existed.
So you would definitely see him at some point.
Yeah.
Noise bridge for the time that it was around.
And so hacker dojo, like all these places that were very, you know, persistent for a small
period of time and they got them.
And it was just like, like they didn't make the movie, but they did the ethnography.
And that's just as important to me.
It's like, here's what, here's what people were thinking hacking spaces were going to
be in 2009.
And it was, it's nice.
So it's on the archive.
It's free.
I think it's open licensed.
How do you find it?
How do you find it?
Just go to archive.org and type two hands project.
Okay.
And you will end up, you'll see immediately like, you know, you'll see the collection
of 45, uh, tapes or 45 sets of tapes that they did.
Um, again, don't, don't expect a 4k red, you know, camera production with, with, with
moving camera, a lot of echo, these three guys, they didn't know who they did not know
each other.
Right.
So it's like your crew is literally three people thrown together on a road trip for 30
solid days bouncing between, um, hacker spaces.
Now I have to see it.
I really do.
You'll, I mean, I think you'll see some voices in there.
I mean, I don't know how many are still around or not around in terms of people, but
uh, you will definitely, I, I know that you will.
And Kyle will be like, Oh, it's that one.
Oh, it's that person.
Oh, look at that.
Oh, neat.
You know, a lot of, a lot of hair that isn't quite gray yet.
A lot of shots of like monitors that are still pretty, uh, chonky, you know, a lot, lack
of flat screen monitors.
I just pulled, I just pulled this up on the internet archive and the two hands project footage
archive.
I'm just looking at these thumbnails and recognizing like a dozen people already so far.
Yeah.
It's just, it's like a good example of just like this random bit of interesting, you
know, just out there.
I love, I love these things being, uh, found.
Right.
Um, and, uh, yeah, just, I, I'm just like a real fan of record people while you have them
and just, you know, bring that out.
And this just happened to stumble backwards into it.
No movie came out, but something came out anyway.
Sorry.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm engrossed in this.
That's a great little, um, time capsule.
And it's, it's a really interesting period, um, because a lot of the tapeless and, um,
a lot of digital photography was changing and emerging is like pretty affordable then.
So people taking these little adventures and, and then, um, you know, doing something or
not with it is, is pretty incredible because we get to look back and, uh, marvel at it because
we would have perhaps been in an audience for it, were it to emerge as a completed sort
of thing to consume.
But yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I'm looking at this thing and, um, I did run our automatic
voice detection on it.
So there are in fact, um, there are in fact ways to like, you know, get captioning and all
that.
So you're able to look at like all the captioning.
I sometimes pump captioning into an LLM and say, summarize what's being discussed and blah,
blah, just to see what subjects are being covered and see what's there.
And it's some pretty good stuff.
You know, someone could definitely make something of this.
This, this does not look bad.
I think that, I think that if a person committed to it, they could do it.
But I was like, this will be a lot of work and it's not, it's not telling something super
new, it's just providing evidence of something that was that I just didn't want to, as me
as a documentary guy, I didn't want the footage to disappear, but B for me to sit down and
do a story.
I'm going to be like, if I don't do this, if I don't edit this together, this tale will
not be told.
Yeah.
This is not that this is a reference doc.
That's a trap though, to, to tell yourself that, uh, what you, what you did is the right
thing where you let the material be available.
And if somebody wants to pour themselves into it, they have that ability.
Yeah.
If somebody wants to do a MakerBot documentary, well, here's some footage of Brie Pettis before
he, before MakerBots were even a gleam in his eye.
And what was he talking like back then?
And what was he covering and what was important to him?
Or, you know, I know that the head of the Connecticut hackerspace died of COVID.
Um, there's footage of him in here that we would, you know, you wouldn't have so things
like that, you know, you definitely benefit.
And some of these, um, you know, like noise bridge, noise bridge was like, you know, they
went through a whole bunch of iterations and work and had a whole bunch of figures involved
and gone, right?
Like just gone as a entity.
And so here's recordings of them during that period of time, the logging capability is really,
really, really cool.
Um, when I was in school and, and starting out interning and stuff like that, something
that you would do is log tapes and help find bytes, like sound bites and things to use.
And that's a big part of the attitude.
Uh, I think we have with a lot of the photography and things we've captured over the years.
If we, even if we don't know what the story is or what to do with it, um, and we've amassed
a fair amount of stuff like that.
But the other thing is just material in general from the past 40 years.
Um, and, um, some of the stuff that, uh, you Emanuel have done privately has bits and pieces
of, of things that would work for different stories, but there's alas, so many different
stories.
Um, it would all be wonderful source material and it's just great to have access to it.
Um, even if it hasn't been presented yet, but, um, I think we're still figuring out what
those stories, which stories, uh, haven't been heard and which stories are relevant because
a lot of this stuff is still ongoing.
Like it's still emerging.
Yes, absolutely.
There's a documentary on New York public access television.
That's, that's, that was playing a Sundance.
I think it was.
Uh, so like that's piled up with like all of the crazy public access shows of New York
city.
Oh, wow.
The, all these unusual shows and the footage is in such, such.
rough shape.
And you're just like, yep.
Even though it's in rough shape, there's a story here, you know, it's some of the worst
quality footage you'll ever see.
And you're just like, which somehow adds to the magic, by the way, uh, Jason, you've
sort of moved away from your microphone.
We can hear you like you're on the other side of the room.
I have a, I have a microphone that is not, that could be, it could stand like this microphone
is just on the edge of, uh, falling apart.
And I, uh, but when it works, it works so well.
So really it's, it, you know, it's like one of those older workers.
Oh man, when he's lifting is great, but, uh, he'd rather be outside getting the smoke.
Uh-huh.
All right.
Well, the workers, we're going to have to wrap this up.
Yeah.
I figured somebody was going to say that soon.
Uh, so, um, uh, Jason, I want to thank you so much for, uh, spending so much time with
us.
Fascinating as always fun.
As always, I am very much, uh, I'm very much happy that you guys are continuing all
the work, all the work that you're doing.
And I am very pleased that you are, you don't take things like, uh, being unfairly kicked
out of a venue flying down.
That's pretty amazing.
And I'm also very happy to be just to see you all persistent, just making the world better
and doing the things that's, I acknowledge that all the time because I've just seen so
many people where you see them one week and they're gone the next.
And it's just like, you just got to acknowledge like, man died doing what he loved being on
public radio.
Yeah.
I'll have you a good show.
Um, thank you, Jason.
And, um, uh, we'll, we'll talk to you again real soon and definitely we'll see you at hope.
See you later.
All right.
Good night.
And, uh, everybody else out there, we are done for the night.
Boy, this was a long overtime.
Holy crap.
An hour and 45 minutes.
So, uh, we're, we're sorry to everybody who stuck around.
Uh, and, um, we're, um, uh, grateful that you did stick around, but, uh,
See, your position is way different than mine.
Cause for all those people, I say you're welcome.
Yes.
Yes.
Um, any, any final words guys?
It's time for bed.
It's 945 at night, Alex.
What do you need?
It's time for bed.
Keep.
Big days.
Long days.
We're all going to be cranky in the morning.
Keep being.
You're cranky now.
Just keep being the best hacker radio show in New York City, folks.
Well, that's, that's a fairly low bar, but thank you.
Um, do your best.
Yeah.
Do your best.
All right.
Thank you everybody for listening again, right to us.
Uh, O T H at 2600.com.
And, um, thanks for hacking and hyping and Jason.
Thanks for hyping.
What the hell does that mean?
Yeah.
Oh, I said it, but, uh, do that.
No, I didn't, I didn't mean it like that, but you can, you can take it that way.
I'm told you can hype like, uh, channels or you can hype programs on YouTube and it somehow
helps them.
How is it going to help us?
Spread the word.
Hype hope.
Just, uh, uh, keep, uh, misbehaving out there.
We don't monetize.
We don't do any of that crap.
And thanks for listening.