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Thank you.
Do you guys have any thoughts, any experiences?
I know you guys are in the city proper,
so maybe you had some firsthand experiences.
Well, we were in New Jersey for a bar mitzvah,
and we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic
to get back to New York from New Jersey,
and there were all the signs that said,
oh, are you going to the World Cup?
Take public transit.
Take New Jersey transit.
And I was busy yelling at all the signs we saw on the highway
saying, you can't do that.
They won't let you do that.
Stop suggesting that.
That's a bad idea.
This is the thing I don't understand.
We've discussed this many, many times.
I'm not a sports person.
I don't understand sports fandom.
I don't understand why people were busy
hitting school buses with crowbars after the Knicks won.
I don't understand why people got stabbed in the celebration
after the Knicks won.
I'm fascinated by the fact that Scotland
has apparently drunk Boston out of alcohol.
Mm-hmm.
There's no alcohol in Boston right now
because that's where Scotland is based.
Yeah, and we've been trying to do that for a long time,
and they succeeded in finally draining Boston dry.
As a non-fan, I'm not anti...
No, I'm not a sports fan.
So I feel like I've been on another planet this whole week.
People are in shockingly good moods,
which is nice to see.
But at the same time,
it's just something that is so completely foreign to me
that I...
Yeah, I just feel like the whole city is speaking a language
I don't understand.
Well, you know, it's not that hard to understand
because basically when something happens
that hasn't happened in a long time,
people celebrate.
And it turns out the Knicks just captured
our imagination, I suppose.
It's like, you know,
when the Mets occasionally win something,
it's, you know, they seem to be the underdogs.
They seem to be the team that can't quite get it right.
And when they do get it right,
and they get it right in an amazing way
like they have done in the past few series
that they've played.
I mean, being behind by a huge margin
and then just coming back game after game
in the fourth quarter,
it's pretty magical.
And, you know, people are looking for something
to bring them together in these times
when we're so eager to be at each other's throats.
And whenever you have huge, huge crowds of people,
and there were, you know, hundreds of thousands,
if not more people in the streets,
you're going to have idiots.
You're absolutely going to have idiots,
whether, you know, it's a social justice march,
a sporting event, a political rally, whatever.
You are going to have people who misbehave.
Now, it's a mistake, I think,
to categorize an entire event
based on the actions of a few.
Let me compare that to what happened on Sunday
in Washington, D.C.,
which I said I don't want to talk about,
but here we go.
Now, the majority of people were acting like idiots,
and that's different, you know?
That's kind of the theme is,
yes, come here and be an idiot,
and that's something where you have to comment on.
But in the case of the Knicks,
in the case of the World Cup,
people are coming together
and just being positive
and being diverse
and just being happy.
And I think that's something,
even if you're not a sports fan,
it should be familiar.
It should be something we celebrate.
It should be something we encourage.
I don't really see any problem with it.
The World Cup especially,
it is such a beautiful thing.
It really is,
to see all these people
from different parts of the world
who are able to make it into our country,
and, you know,
we'll talk about the people who didn't,
which is, you know, an embarrassment.
But, for instance,
the Japanese fans in Texas
who stayed after
and cleaned up the stadium.
I mean, you know,
these incredible customs
that get shared at times like this.
And that's something to celebrate.
That's something to be happy
to be a part of.
Yes, Kyle.
Well, I also think it's an opportunity
for places that might have been feeling
like it's impossible
to travel to the U.S.
that it actually is
and people that are totally committed
to following their teams
are going to make their way
and travel and spend time in the U.S.
regardless of what the climate is politically
or how people feel about it economically.
They just made it work, you know,
and they're really, you know,
at whatever cost doing it
to make this event,
to go to the games,
to be a part of things.
And they are contributing
to a lot of the local economies
and visiting places
and exploring
and commenting on life here.
And they're going to take that back
to their networks
and share about, you know,
what America's like these days.
Yeah, you know,
there's something about seeing the,
just the amazement in people's eyes
who are seeing something
that you're familiar with
for the very first time.
We host an event in New York City
and it's magical to see people
come to Manhattan
and just experience it
in a way that they never thought they could.
And hopefully we're helping in that regard.
Hopefully we're all helping.
To see that in the eyes of fans
all throughout the three countries
that are hosting the World Cup,
that is something that I think
we should all be celebrating,
something we should all be encouraging.
And something we notice
when we travel places,
go to events overseas,
just how interesting and nice
and welcoming
and accommodating,
hospitable people are.
Well, the same could be true
and is occurring as we speak
with a lot of these visitors here.
So hopefully they're bringing
that impression back to,
I guess, balance out
some of the other stuff
they're hearing about us lately.
And, you know,
to see the happiness in the underdogs
when they score and the fans,
for instance, Cape Verde,
am I pronouncing it right?
I didn't even know where it was
and I'm not going to tell you where it is,
but it's one of the tiniest places
ever to qualify
for this competition.
They played Spain.
You might have heard of them.
And they held them,
a spoiler alert,
a couple of days ago,
they held them to a tie.
You know?
Unbelievable.
Can you imagine what that means
to people who live there?
And, you know,
so few people live there
in comparison.
I mean, I think the number of people
in the stadium
was a good percentage
of the number of people
in their country.
The strong showings
against these powerhouse,
teams and national teams.
It's just right out of the gate,
you have these really dramatic games
from one after the other.
Usually, you'd think that comes,
you know, later in the rounds
where you got stiff competition.
These are great teams
all the way around,
it looks like.
Yeah, it absolutely does.
And, you know,
to see a real spoiler alert here
because it's today's game,
to see the Democratic Republic of Congo
score against Portugal
and Ronaldo
and hold them to a tie today.
That was one of the happiest moments
that that country has experienced
in quite a long time.
To see all the fans in Houston, Texas
reacting to that.
That's one of those moments
you just can't predict.
It just happens.
It's part of that magic.
Yes, Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, speaking of traveling
and whatnot,
if you recall,
I was in Spain last week
and I got back to New York
Saturday night,
back to my apartment
and there was nine minutes left
in the next game.
And as I was heading down 7th Avenue,
I was just amazed
at how many people
were out on the streets.
So I ran up the several flights of stairs
that I have to run up
to get to my apartment,
threw my bags in,
went back down to 7th Avenue
and Lake Gila,
I'm not really a sports fan at all.
I don't watch this stuff.
I don't really even, you know,
know the rules of basketball
and all that well,
but I felt like I wanted to be part
of this thing going on in the street.
So I'm part of this crowd
and the crowd started to get bigger
and bigger and bigger
to the point where it was just
hundreds of people
outside this bar
on 15th Street
in the West Village.
I guess it's technically
Chelsea right there.
And it was pretty extraordinary.
I mean, there was nine minutes
left in the game, right?
But that took almost an hour
to play out
given all of the timeouts
and the commercial breaks
and the penalties
and all of these various things.
And then ultimately,
when the Knicks won,
it was total bedlam.
I mean, people were going crazy,
screaming,
climbing on cars,
climbing on poles.
It was pretty amazing.
It was great to see
everybody was really,
really happy.
But I had this feeling,
you know,
that spidey sense,
that feeling that you get
in your spine like,
OK, I think I need to go home now
because things are going
to get a little bit out of hand.
And I was watching this
from the window of my apartment.
It was just totally crazy.
But I think that,
you know,
part of it is possibly
like most things,
like most ills in the world today.
I think a lot of it
you can blame on social media
to kind of bring it back
to the framing
of this program here, right?
Where you get people
acting out in crowds,
trying to be the person
who gets the most attention on them,
trying to be the coolest person
that they can post
some kind of stupid reel
or something on social media.
But I think there's a lot
of reasons for
for why people do this.
I think that in crowds, too,
especially when there's
there's something like this
and the crowds are this big
that you have this diffused
sense of accountability, right?
So nobody's really
the main character
in a particular crowd.
So you have this
this notion of risk taking
that begins to spike as well.
But then from another perspective,
the whole notion of sports
already frames the struggle
as the world against
whatever the team is, right?
And then that kind of spills
into this notion
of real world tribal behavior
that you begin to see
out on the streets.
And this was a massive tribe
in New York celebrating.
It was a happy day.
I'm not saying that, you know,
there was anything
overtly primitive about this,
but it was a very,
very tribal thing to see.
And it was a cool thing to see.
I was happy about it.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, I mean, I'm also
not a sports person.
I mean, thank you for mentioning
that it was the Knicks who won
because I hadn't heard.
But the whole idea of a fandom
is something that I understand
very well.
I don't care about sports,
but, you know,
every time Doctor Who
beats the Daleks,
I'm out there turning over
taxi cabs in a celebration.
But seriously,
the thing that I'm thinking about
is I have,
over the course of my life
in the city,
enjoyed going out to
things like, you know,
spontaneous street parties,
unauthorized happenings,
raves, things of that sort
that you used to see
a lot more of back in
like the 90s, 2000s.
And they always had
this element of like,
we're all going to go out
and do something.
And, you know,
an element of danger behind it.
But it was like everyone
who was there
was there for the experience.
And that could be a lot of fun.
And, you know,
when people acted responsibly,
it was.
But over the years,
as social media
has taken more of a hold,
there has been this element
to things like that.
And I include even protests
in this sort of thing
where people go in there,
there is a significant portion
of the people
who are now there
not to experience it,
but to show people
that they were there
and to get clips
and, you know,
videos and things
to post online after.
And so there,
I think there is more
of an element of like,
let's spark something idiotic
so we'll have that footage
of the idiotic thing
and we can say we were there.
And it's,
I think something
might be a little,
might have been lost there
in the sense of
just going out
and doing something fun
and doing something weird
with your local community.
I don't know.
You know,
I think people have always
had a contingent of idiots
in massive crowds.
I don't think you need
social media for that.
Maybe social media
makes it a bit worse,
makes it a bit more viral.
But I don't think
it's the cause.
I think that's just
who we are
when we gather
in massive crowds.
You know,
that said,
the massive crowds
that formed
in the streets of New York
and we'll see
what happens tomorrow,
I don't think it was,
it was,
I mean,
yeah,
it's not good
to burn school buses.
I don't know
what that was all about.
But it,
you know,
that was a minority
of people,
very,
you know,
small.
And for the most part,
for the most part,
99%,
if not more,
it was peaceful.
And when you consider
how many people
were in the streets
and how jubilant
everybody was,
that's a good thing,
you know?
And I don't think
it matters
if you're a sports fan
or not.
This is about humanity.
This is about people
having a moment.
And we certainly had
a few moments
over the past week
that deserve
to be acknowledged.
And perhaps
we can learn from them.
Perhaps we can have
more happy moments
together
in various contexts,
whether or not
we're experts
or connoisseurs
of the particular thing
that's being celebrated.
It's just important
not to ignore it,
not to condemn it,
not to think
you're above it,
but to try and understand
and be a part of it
because these moments
don't happen very often.
And I think
that's one of the things
that drew so many people
out into the streets
because when's the last time
we had something
to celebrate
that much about?
It might be meaningless
to a number of us,
but, you know,
just like the goal
that Democratic-Republica
Congress scored today,
you take what you can get
and find joy
in the small things
because sometimes
those are the most
important things.
Yeah.
Okay, well,
another thing that happened,
which I thought
was kind of funny,
was that, you know,
after the whole
hissy fit
that happened last week
with Charles Dolan
and Madison Square Garden
and all that,
for those who don't know,
he got mad
that he didn't get
a permit
for 10,000 people
to have a party
outside Madison Square Garden
on, I believe it was
last Wednesday,
a week ago,
for Game 4.
Yeah, I think that was
Game 4
that they were playing.
The funny thing is
he never applied
for 10,000
a person gathering.
He applied for 999
and it was granted
and this is all documented.
This is all,
you know,
people have seen this,
it's been displayed.
That's the only thing
he filled out
and that's what he got
and he was mad
that he got that
and didn't get something
that he didn't apply for.
And so he canceled
the watch party
that was going
to take place
outside Madison Square Garden.
And by the way,
Kyle and I walked by there
last time we were
inspecting the hotel
that Hope is going to be at.
We walked by there
and there happened
to be a Knicks game
being played
and we saw
how big it was.
There couldn't have been
more than 1,000 people there
so I'm not sure
what he was asking for,
where that was going to be
probably surrounding
the entire area.
The funny thing is
that he accused
the city
of basically
hosting a police state
where people
were forbidden
from being out
on the street
which is not
what was happening
at all.
But to hear that
from Charles Dolan
of all people,
this is the guy
that will have you
kicked out of
Madison Square Garden
if you are part
of a legal firm
that has ever
had any kind
of legal action
against
Madison Square Garden,
the New York Knicks,
the New York Rangers,
the Spear in Las Vegas,
Radio City Musical.
He owns all of this.
It's just
it's insane
how much this guy owns
and he will have you
thrown out
because of facial recognition.
They will find you
in any of these venues.
It doesn't matter
if you have a ticket
and this is a guy
who is claiming
that it's a police state
outside
because he didn't get
what he wanted.
It's just
it's an incredible story
but what happened
afterwards
was that Mayor Mondani
basically commandeered
130 Link NYC kiosks
across the five boroughs.
Well, he didn't
actually commandeer them.
He worked with Link NYC
and brought the games
to or brought the game
to Link NYC kiosks
so people could gather around
and watch it there
which I thought
was really funny
and kind of ingenious.
He said the Knicks
belong to all New Yorkers
whether you're watching
from the garden or not.
Earlier this week
New Yorkers gathered
around Link NYC kiosks
to watch one of the
greatest comebacks
in basketball history.
This weekend
we're running it
running it back
more than 100 kiosks
will turn our sidewalks
into watch parties
and our streets
into celebrations
Knicks in five.
This is the guy
that Charles Dolan
said is not a true
Knicks fan.
Yeah, whatever.
This is how you do it.
This is
you take over technology
you figure out ways
to bring it to the people
and I'm glad
the mayor did it
so that hackers
didn't have to do it
you know
because I would have
been all in favor
of this
having something
being displayed
in you know
streets all throughout
the city.
You have these
massive screens
well let's use them
for something good
and that to me
is a great use
of that.
Thoughts?
Yes Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, look
I don't disagree
with the fact
that I think
that that was
a particularly
ingenious use
of Link NYC
chaos
that are usually
pretty awful
but the whole notion
of this
the principle
of it
I completely
disagree with
I mean
I think
this is really
dangerous
I think
we should be
really concerned
about the government
commandeering
and repurposing
all of this technology
a kiosk network
that's supposed
to be built
for some kind
of neutral
civic access
that then begins
to be used
for state controlled
broadcast channels
used by the government
this is exactly
what we're talking about
you are
you are distorting
things
no I'm not
I'm not distorting
can I quote
this is exactly
what happened
can I quote
the CEO
of Link NYC
okay they know
something about
their technology
go ahead
it was built
to connect
New Yorkers
to what matters
most
and few things
have united
this city
quite like
this historic
Nick's run
Link NYC
and Intersection
not sure what that is
are proud to work
with the city
to integrate
live content
into public spaces
and transform
digital infrastructure
into a platform
for community
culture
and connection
what do you find
problematic in that
I'll tell you
exactly why
and I think
I think you're
doing a disservice
to our listeners
in not bringing
this up
because if it was
any other political
party or any other
politician who was
controlling the screens
we would be
criticizing them
that's not
when the city
when the city
Emmanuel
it absolutely is
think about this
it's very Orwellian
if the city
or the government
controls
it's a basketball
game for God's sake
it's not a political
speech
it's a wider issue
you just hate
Mandani so much
that anything he does
no I don't
well then say
Emmanuel
one good thing
it doesn't
look if this
I just did
if this had been
Cuomo doing this
you would have been
bowing down
and praising him
for doing it
are you kidding me
I'm not a fan
of the sex pest
just because
it's Mandani
doing it
or being involved
in it
it really was
Lincoln
that did it
Emmanuel
I already said
something nice
about Mamdani
I said I thought
it was a particularly
ingenious use
of these kiosks
I did
it's the wrong use
it is extremely
dangerous
because when the city
or the state
controls the screens
they control
what we see
they already do
yes but they
should not be
allowed to broadcast
any kind of message
that they wanted
to commandeer them
at any particular
time
at any moment
they didn't
commandeer anything
they worked out
a deal
with LinkNYC
what's the issue
that's commandeering
that's controlling
the screens
all around the city
if they control
what we see
they control
the story
if you use it
for a sporting event
you can use it
for some kind
of propaganda
event as well
tell me the difference
between having it
on TV
where people can
watch it
on their television
is that bad too
because you're
choosing to watch it
you're not walking
past it on the street
it's on the street
they're choosing
to look
just like they're
choosing to look
on the side
of a building
where somebody
is projecting it
is that
it's an advertisement
are you condemning
the people
who are projecting
it onto the sides
of buildings
it wasn't
so I don't think
you're going to
condemn it
if you're projecting
it on the side
of a building
you're doing that
as a private citizen
I object to the fact
that the government
can take over
these kiosks
and project
any message
that they want
at any particular time
you're totally
distorting this
they did not
take it over
they worked it out
with LinkNYC
they worked out a deal
they worked out a deal
to take over the kiosks
not all of them
not all of them
what do you think Rob
I'm curious
as a neutral operator
in this
I didn't think
this was what
we were going to be
arguing over
really
this was
this was a good thing
that helped
calm people down
people who are already
in the street
and why do you think
they were in the street
just out for
a breath of fresh air
they cared about the Knicks
this is a great way
for them
to be able to see
what they want to see
how do you find
something bad in that
well
since you asked me
the LinkNYC kiosks
for those unfamiliar
these are what
popped up
where payphones
used to be
and the payphones
were a public utility
but they were
you know
privately owned
and run in contract
with the city
LinkNYC runs
the same way
it's got a bunch
of owners
it's part owned
by Qualcomm
part owned by
Intersection
which is the name
of the company
it was a merger
between Control Group
and Titan
Titan used to
run the payphones
and so
the whole thing
with them
is they have
always been
an advertising
delivery service
and I'm
pretty anti-advertising
I think there's
way too much
of it about
out in the world
especially here
in the city
and for those
you know
brief moments
I guess
I'm not against
them being used
for this
instead of
telling people
what brand
of sneakers
they should
buy
or some
crap like
that
but I
also think
that
you know
maybe
there's
I mean
there are
there have
always been
concerns
since the
start
of these
things
being loaded
with cameras
and these
things having
all sorts
of antennas
besides the
ones broadcasting
their own
Wi-Fi network
and so
you know
the privacy
and you know
security
implications
of that
have always
sort of
been in
question
so
them being
used for
something like
this
I don't
necessarily
think it's
a bad
thing
but you
know
I'm still
not much
of a fan
of the
things
as they
are
I think
this was
a more
useful
thing
than they
usually
do
and it's
not like
the city
runs
what's on
there
right
it's a
it's a
project
of the
city
the city
is not
coming in
and
commandeering
anything
they're
responsible
for a
lot of
the material
that's
already
there
and I
think
we can
all agree
that the
link
NYC
system
has
kind of
if I
could
borrow
a phrase
gone over
like a
burp
in church
and this
was the
first really
useful
thing
I can
think that
they have
accomplished
because it
allowed people
to spread
out more
and to
create 130
small outdoor
watch parties
around the city
for people who
are invested
in that sort
of thing
I think
was probably
a really
good thing
and
I
again I
think this
is a
better use
than
like
so much
of what's
already
there
go ahead
Alex
to me
it's the
precedential
aspect of
this
a single
use case
that is
is great
when the
Knicks are
winning the
playoffs
okay that's
all well
and good
that's fine
but we're
not talking
about a
single ad
or a
single
incident
or a
single
alert
once
government
begins to
claim
public
technology
as its
own
communications
tool
that's
when every
one of
these
kiosks
can become
some kind
of policy
channel
that's a
lot closer
to a
soft form
of control
than it is
to a
public
service
and if
we allow
this to
happen over
and over
and over
again we
get used
to it
and these
things become
a communications
layer for
the government
for the
office of
propaganda
for whatever
the hell
it is that
they're going
to be pushing
out to us
at any
particular
moment
so I
think we
should say
okay this
was a
great idea
it worked
out well
everybody was
partying and
watching the
game but
let's make
sure that
it's not
abused in
the future
as Gila
said this
is already
controlled by
the city
you see
3-1-1
being advertised
on there
constantly
you see all
kinds of
public service
announcements
from the
city on
link NYC
why is the
Knicks game
the line
I don't
get that
this is
something that
actually was
brilliant as
far as
crowd control
and keeping
people from
being frustrated
by not being
able to go
to the watch
party they
want to go
to or get
into the
game itself
and you
know it's
a good use
of these
things that
we always
are complaining
about
so
I'll tell
you why
there's a
big difference
between running
consistent or
continuous ads
or a subway
schedule on
the particular
platform and
that's a
commercial
arrangement that
has worked
out well in
advance that's a
lot different
than commandeering
the network
for a particular
broadcast of
certain types
of information
if we allow
that to
happen if we
allow the
mayor's office
to continually
commandeer these
kiosks and
broadcast whatever
they want to
broadcast whether
it's a press
release whether
it's some kind
of political
rally what if
we had Donald
Trump broadcasting
a Trump rally
across these
kiosks
I'm glad you
brought that
up because
it's black
and white
how Trump
would do
this versus
how Mandani
would do
it all right
Trump would
in fact have
his face on
there preaching
to us and
and and and
basically spreading
propaganda and
and you know
ultimate fighting
or whatever else
he's into all
kinds of things
being forced down
our throat as
he has done in
many instances
that is not
what happened
here this is a
game being shared
with people in
the streets as
a public service
which is what
these kiosks are
supposed to be
and you can say
commandeered as
much as you want
he did not
commandeer anything
he worked out a
deal with the
company that runs
these things it
was a good thing
to do it was a
positive thing to
do I'd like to
move past it
because we have
other things to
talk about here
well we can
disagree I think
I think the
effect was positive
the precedent was
bad and I think
your reach
rivals that tall
guy in the
San Antonio
Spurs and you
might want to
look into trying
out for a team
with that
very funny
it's very funny
okay so this
is something else
that happened
over the past
few days
the UK has
announced a
social media
ban for
children
what are
children you
might ask
they are
creatures that
are 16 years
of age or
younger
oh boy
so we all
know that
labor is in a
lot of trouble
over in the UK
and Keir Starmer
I think basically
is desperate
and is trying
to get the
parents on
his side
because most
parents seem
to support
this kind of
thing
I think it
was 75%
are in support
of banning
social media
for kids
as high as
90% I've seen
in some polls
now Starmer
said the
government would
introduce the
new regulations
in parliament
before Christmas
and bring a
ban into force
in the early
part of
2027
these measures
will include
restrictions on
game platforms
and live streaming
apps with more
details expected
to be announced
in the next
month
I am not
prepared to
compromise on
the safety and
happiness of our
children and that
is why this ban
must happen
I would ask the
children if their
happiness is being
respected by
banning social
media for them
now what's
interesting about
this is that
what's included
in the social
media ban
apps like
snapchat
tiktok
instagram
facebook
twitter
and youtube
yeah that's
right youtube
can you imagine
telling your kid
you can't watch
any youtube
videos
you're banned
from youtube
until you turn
16
messages like
whatsapp and
signal are not
going to be
included in
the restrictions
the government
said it also
planned to
block children
under 16
from live
streaming
and from
communicating
with strangers
on a wider
range of
online services
including game
sites
the government
said it would
also be looking
in more detail
at overnight
curfews and
breaks in
infinite scrolling
for people under
18
now not all
parents favor a
ban some
experts have
pointed out that
most young people
with social media
accounts in
australia have
continued to use
the platform since
despite a ban
over there
others have
criticized the
announcement as
rushed coming as
mr starmer faces
threats to his
leadership from
within his labor
party after steep
losses in local
elections in may
what do you guys
think about this
good idea bad
idea rob go
ahead i i am
fascinated by this
because you know
think of the
children think of
the children won't
somebody think of
the children that's
always always been
used as uh just
this way to get
people to accept
that a new
regulation or rule
or restriction of
some sort is a
good idea but um
the practicality
behind it is
really troubling in
this situation
because you can
say it's illegal
for children to
access this sort
of site on the
web but uh the
web is not built
like that the web
is built to rat
around damage to
rat around blockage
and uh the i think
the the end result
of this is um to
try and push for
age verification
tools which lead to
identity verification
tools for everyone
sitting in front of
the damn net um and
age verification tools
right now don't
work very well um
but the fact that
they don't work very
well now should not
be used as a way to
just let uh um some
sort of implementation
of them through
because you know one
day they will work
better and the
internet will be
screwed up for
everyone yeah thank
god they don't work
very well you know
yeah can you imagine
if they did but but
they will and the
troubling part is um
say this succeeds and
say by some magic
stroke um the age
verification thing works
perfectly no mistakes
no errors um kids
will just uh say
okay i'm not going
to use these big
social media sites
that everyone's
talking about it's
going to drive them
deeper into uh you
know they'll they'll
be on the dark web
they'll be on isolated
forums and things in
places um like things
used to be which maybe
isn't a bad thing but
on the other hand it's
going to drive them to
sites that are under
less scrutiny and uh
you know i don't i
don't uh think driving
kids off of facebook or
instagram and on to
you know whatever the
next 4chan is is uh
perhaps the best idea
in the world for
their mental health
yeah you know i don't
want kids to be using
social media as much as
they do i don't want
you know adults to be
using it as much as
they do i think it's it's
a cancer something that
is really really hurting
us and we need to
address that this is not
the way to address that
by demanding everybody
prove how old they are
no that's that's a way
to uh to to uh um get
rid of anonymity and uh
have have you talk
about big brother
watching us that is
how you achieve that
it's a very very
unhealthy step to take
and it's not the right
way to deal with what
is in fact a problem
for for many of us
but the other thing to
consider is that there
are a lot of positive
aspects out there on
the internet on social
media you know
marginalized kids who
might not realize that
there's anybody out
there who understands
them who is like them
this is a lifesaver in
many regards and it
should not simply be
uh categorized as
something that's harmful
to people under a
certain age that is
incredibly stupid
alex go ahead
yeah i mean maybe
there's a a contrary
way to look at this
in in a way so i mean
if you think about this
somewhat perversely
right um from our
perspective nothing
really protects children
more than giving them
a gigantic incentive to
become better hackers
right that's what
they're doing right
they're telling children
hey you want to get
around this this idiotic
velvet rope that we're
putting around a flood
right that like there's
just no way you can keep
a flood in with a rope
that's what they're
trying to do here
but they're going to
teach children about
vpns they're going to
force uh kids to learn
about virtual private
networks and proxies and
routing ip addresses and
um they're going to
learn about packets and
all kinds of fun things
when they are
circumventing these
idiotic laws that the uk
are putting in place and
and somebody who went to
school in the uk who
teaches law in the uk and
lived in the uk i also
have to say i am not
surprised that the united
kingdom looked at the
problem of social media
and said you know what
what if the solution here
was actually to create
more paperwork that's
kind of what they do
this is the mentality of
how they solve problems
over there so it doesn't
surprise me in in many
ways but i think the
forcing kids to learn
about the internet and
how to circumnavigate
these idiotic rules might
actually be beneficial in
the long run well yeah
i guess but uh you know
it's it's going to um
basically teach a lot of
kids that this is normal
having to um identify
yourself at every level of
participation online uh
anonymity is uh tantamount
to criminality um and
it's eventually going to
come over here as well it
has already in many
regards um we need to
fight this we really need
to battle against this
because there are a lot
of values that are under
attack here and a lot
of uh positive aspects
uh that are being
disregarded yeah i mean
the the thing i keep
thinking about is i've
often looked at the
modern social media
environment um that is
evolved and how um even
young people can find
their own community find
people like themselves
find information about
themselves um and uh and
find and exchange this
info freely and learn that
uh say if you're if
you're not hetero if
you're not cisgender um
you're not you know
maybe you're not getting
uh enough support about
that in your real life
but uh you can find
online community and
realize hey there are
other people like me out
there maybe i'm not some
kind of freak and you
know this is this is an
excellent thing for
mental health um but uh
you know a ban like
this and when they start
uh when they start using
this to ban sexual
education materials or you
know alternative political
philosophies or any other
sorts of things that uh
the powers that be might
say oh no not for kids
and um you know then then
those kids are feeling
isolated and or they're
coming up against this
block and whether or not
they run around it they're
being told by the system
that what you're interested
in or what you are or
what you're feeling about
yourself is wrong and that
is not uh that is not how
to take uh care of your
of your children that is
not a way to good mental
health and let's not
mistake what's what's
happening here uh in in
many places where parents
are um uh basically trying
to keep their kids from
learning that hey being
gay is normal being trans
is normal you know uh being
different is something to
celebrate and and and keep
them under um uh the
control where they can feel
shame in all the right
places and follow the
religion that that they are
brought up with and
everything that parents
want their kids to be uh if
they want total control
over their minds uh so
there are a lot of parents
who who celebrate this
kind of thing who say yes
finally little little bobby
will be able to be uh you
know a normal kid and
won't ever learn that there
are other kids that you
know share his um his
perspective that will soon
snuff out it's it's it's
sickening what you hear
sometimes from parents who
uh who celebrate this kind
of thing and that is
something that we don't
want to encourage we don't
want to encourage this kind
of thing uh that i think
um is a part of it yeah
and i i've often said and
uh damn it it's pride month
and i will say this out
loud on the radio that uh
you know growing up as a
queer person who um i was
very very fortunate to be
able to find community and
be able to find people i
could talk to about this
um regardless of whether
um certain authority figures
in my life would have
wanted me to be talking
about these things or
learning these things um
that is why i'm here and
you know able to talk
with you now i don't think
i would have survived it
had i not been able to
find that sort of
community and so like
any anything that uh you
know i've i've looked at
generations after me and
how much um easier this
could be for them and now
i'm looking at a generation
long after me thinking oh
it's about to get worse
alex go ahead yeah i i think
one of the biggest issues i
have with any types of age
verification laws is that
they tend to corral everybody
into some kind of centralized
system and if you're building
a system that is designed to
keep children out you're also
building a system that logs
everything and can log you in
and log you out as well so in
the name of protecting children
we wind up surveilling adults
none of it works particularly
well it all seems really
idiotic um and if you look at
the cost benefit analysis that
we have here um and i i don't
necessarily uh agree with the
the premise that you know
social media has all of these
positive benefits i know that
people find community and
various things and social media
platforms i do think you know
we shouldn't discount the the
real world harm that comes from
a lot of these all you know
these unlimited scrolling
attention grabbing identity
sorting tribal kind of politics
that kids are are subjected to on
social media platforms i do think
on balance they do more harm than
good i think if we had more
federated more decentralized social
media places that were beyond the
centralized control of either one
company or one particular
government like the internet is
supposed to work god damn it
then i think we'd all be better
off and we'd be able to find
these communities where we can
support each other more easily and
without having this type of dating
function that winds up doing a lot
more harm than good god's sake
alex
what what is this close your damn
window
all right this is manhattan man what
do you expect you know this is uh
yeah yeah i'm surprised you could
hear i thought the noise canceling
would be more effective but i guess
not i could hear that in jersey come
on uh look i i i disagree with one
thing though i you say it doesn't
work particularly well i think it does
work all too well i think you know uh
it doesn't work to achieve the desired
effect of keeping kids safer but it
works brilliantly as far as as keeping
track of all of us who we are what our
politics are you know where we live
what our age is all these things that
we have the right to keep to
ourselves but if we're told over and
over again no this is something that
you no longer have the right to keep
private and you must reveal all this
information a lot of people aren't
going to object a lot of people aren't
going to know they can fight back
against this sort of thing and you
know we're here to tell them that is
not true you have every right to be
private you have every right to be
anonymous it's not a bad thing it's a
healthy thing yes people use it for
evil people use it for all kinds of
nefarious purposes that doesn't make
the desire to be anonymous uh and any
uh and any less of a of a good desire
you know i there are so many places
where i am not who i am on my birth
certificate and that's fine it's not it
doesn't cause any problems is it a
problem if somebody is constantly online
and subjected to algorithms directing
them to all sorts of unhealthy things of
course that is what we should be
attacking what if we attack the
algorithms not the ages so much make it
so that things are more like mastodon
where there isn't an algorithm uh and and
and work with that imagine if every kid
under 16 or under 18 uh not that i'm
buying into this um could only use
mastodon and became an expert on how
that worked and by the time they got to
facebook age um they didn't want it
anymore because they had lived their
lives with something better how about we
all live with something better wouldn't
that be nice
yeah i mean think think back to this
like this wouldn't uh this wouldn't have
ever worked on bbs's right i mean because
they they all we all ran on individual
people's computers you know you'd have to
get into every single bbs's hard drive
and uh and and find them all and you know
uh yeah i i take your point don't think
there weren't people who wanted uh control
over that who wanted every single bbs to
log who uh was connecting to it their
ages get a copy of their license etc etc
there are always people who want that
level of control and it never is the
right thing okay what what is this crazy
story that uh i've been seeing kyle about
um peter thiel's uh secretive dialogue
society uh information on them being
leaked according to wired a trove of
internal records from a secret society for
powerful figures in u.s politics finance
and tech was left exposed online according
to wired naming participants uh in its
events and revealing sensitive personal
details they were assured would stay
private wow you're you're foolish uh the
group is called dialogue if you can believe
it or not yeah that's a that's a great
name to have for a group that no one
apparently had before uh it's a private
invitation invitation only organization
co-founded in 2006 by the billionaire
tech investor peter thiel uh it uh
convenes u.s officials foreign government
figures silicon valley executives at off
the record annual retreats dialogue has
spent two decades declining to disclose
its members well those two decades
apparently are over because uh its
members have been exposed a directory in
the website's code was first revealed by
the swiss hacktivist um maya arson uh
crimu and i'm probably pronouncing that
really badly uh known for exposing the u.s
government's no fly list and breaching the
surveillance camera company of recata uh
crime u tells wired the directory surfaced
via an anonymous ftp oh i love it they're
using 1990s technology to uh to get all this
information the source separately provided
wired with the registration list uh for
dialogues 2026 retreat um which oh this
is interesting it's happening the same
weekend as hope do you know that yeah i
saw that oh my goodness wow it's happening
august 12th through 16th at a venue near
dublin ireland uh okay that's okay now we
just have we have a new uh workshop uh i think
so i think a remote uh workshop we'll have
some of our our session leaders visit and um i
just saw this as i was reading that yeah
that's that's okay well anyway they named
222 people on records uh i'm sorry records
what the list describes as east registrants
membership status and attendee type
including active member and guest um
wow any thoughts guys on this this is this
this is fun oh it's it's a lot of fun and uh you
know i i guess uh i guess you know elon musk is
going to have to make a choice which which event he
wants to go to since they're competing
um but uh the the funniest part about this you you
had mentioned they're using ftp and they're using
ancient technology and you know security through
obscurity and um it uh it all falls to pieces but
you would expect like sort of the not greatest but richest
minds on the planet um would i don't know come up with
something a little better the uh documents show an
extraordinary convergence of power the registration uh
records list um general alexis grinovich
nato's supreme allied commander well yeah we we didn't get them
that's for sure uh the head of u.s european command who took
the post in july 2025 um and has attended dialogue
gathering since 2021 the website directory
named sitting trump administration officials two u.s senators
six members of the paypal mafia a former middle east chief of
intelligence and a sitting ambassador to the
united states along with the founders and directors of many of the
country's largest surveillance data broker and advertising
data companies wow it's still going to be a better
conference in new york i think than this my god um
those executives appear side by side with senior u.s officials overseeing their
their industries there's all kinds of names here but
boy what a what a story go ahead alex
i mean this this seems to me like on on the one hand
people can gather with whomever they want in a private place and have a private
conversation and and we shouldn't really fault them for doing that
in some ways right but but it's quite obvious given
the types of people who are gathering and the political influence that's there
that it's it's different it's a different
kind of gathering it's not just a difference of degree it's a difference of
kind here and i think the difference is that
this begins to look a lot like some kind of secretive
governance layer here where the point is almost like the opposite of hope it's
like the opposite of a hacker conference for elites because the the product is
influence that they're peddling here they get to meet in private workshop these
ideas about what they're going to do in public life and then emerge with with some
kind of consensus among the elites about those particular types of ideas and they
do it secretly they don't do it openly they don't do it with a live stream from the
internet society pushing this out like we do they don't do it where anybody can buy
a ticket and show up to the conference it's an invite only secret governance
layer it's the type of stuff that conspiracy theorists
run amok with absolutely yes we're going to continue this conversation on
overtime because we are out of time right now but you can write to us here at
off the hook oth at 2600.com uh and i want to close off with uh this um
brazilian song uh by hori men your from his 1976 album it's all about uh uh an
african striker and i think it's um it's a particular apropos today after seeing
the game with democratic republic of congo in the world cup uh it's been described
as possibly one of the best songs about sports ever written and um not a word of
it is in english so uh well enjoy the melody at least and uh visit us over on
overtime we're starting that conversation at 8 p.m uh go to channel 2600 on
youtube or simply click on the link on 2600.com see you next week


And welcome everybody to Off the Hook Overtime, where we are hopefully broadcasting over, what is it, YouTube? Yes, to the internet and the world and to history and all that kind of thing.
Emmanuel, here in YouTube land. Kyle, are you here as well?
Hi.
How you doing?
Fine.
Rob, Gila, Alex, you all make it?
Yes, I do.
We are here.
And are we on YouTube, in fact?
We are.
Well, cool.
I think the volume seems a little bit low, but we are there.
How's this?
Whoa.
No, I want to blow out the equipment.
We're just, well, you know, soft-spoken.
Are we low, Kyle?
Is there anything we could turn up?
We're fine.
I can increase it.
You want me to?
Okay, I'll bump it a little bit.
Yeah.
Feel free to talk, people.
You know, it's a talk show.
Sorry, the delay is still licking me out a little bit.
We're listening to how we...
Well, don't listen in delay.
Why are you listening in delay?
Listen...
Well, and that's how we knew we were a little soft.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Well, you know, you can look at levels, too.
Well, I'm glad we're all here.
Yes.
Thanks.
Hi, Kyle.
How's the chat?
We've got 28 people with us so far.
I would like to point out that, you know, we don't really technically open the chat until
the show starts.
I was gone for one week and everyone forgot everything.
I would like to thank Rob for covering last week.
I hope everybody was good to him.
And...
People forget if Rob was covering things.
Oh, how we roll?
How do we roll?
But she just said it.
She just said it.
It's not that difficult.
It's like, you know, we talk, people call us, and, you know, we have a conversation.
All right.
Well, the chat's ready.
The chat's ready.
And...
Zap says he blew out his ears.
Well, you know, somebody said we were too soft, so that's what happens.
All right.
Any further commentary without any language restrictions that we are subjected to on the
radio?
I like to say shit right away because my phone just ruined the game I was halfway through.
I checked to see if there was any messages.
You know, this is another reason not to have a phone by your side all the time.
I don't want to know this final score.
At least wait a little while.
Wait a little while before you break it to everybody.
You know?
Now, what's the point of even watching the next half?
Yeah.
I know how it ends.
You know, there was a big announcement recently.
You remember the old brand Commodore from...
You mean the...
Ah, I saw this.
The computer company?
Commodore 64?
Yeah.
I kind of dimly remember them.
Yes.
Yeah.
Technically, the company that's currently doing business under that name is not a direct
descendant of the original Commodore because the trademarks and everything have gone through
many hands over the years.
But the folks who own it now just announced a new product.
And this product is a flip phone.
It is a dumb phone.
Well, not a dumb phone because it's still smart.
But it is a flip phone with the old 10-key keypad on it.
And the outside has no screens.
It's just a little digital display of the time.
There are some LEDs that blink when you get certain kind of messages.
And it has, according to this announcement, banned web browsers and social media because it is
meant to be a phone that takes you back to the way things were before the entire internet
was in your pocket giving you agita.
And the announcement has been going around.
And, you know, the name Commodore certainly raises a lot of eyebrows around this.
And the phone is hugely expensive.
They're announced prices like something like over $500 for a phone that is significantly underpowered.
No 5G.
There is a screen on the inside.
And it does have WhatsApp pre-installed.
But they say other social media is banned and other web stuff is banned.
Why does WhatsApp always get a pass?
I don't use WhatsApp, so I don't really know.
There have been speculation that it is because it is a European thing and WhatsApp is much more
of a everyone-uses-it thing over there.
But, no, so the idea is that it's a tiny little clamshell phone like the ones we used to have.
But, you know, with Android guts in it and you're not allowed to be as productive on it,
but you're also not subjected to the firehose of everything that's going on on the goddamn net.
So it's going to be very interesting to see if this succeeds or if things like this succeed.
They're definitely aiming it toward younger people who are kind of over all this shit anyway.
So we'll see how it goes.
I'd like one if anybody wants to gift us.
I signed up for the announcement list, but, yeah, it's pretty cool.
I like the confluence of different components, like a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
stuff like that.
And I agree with Rob, like seeing projects like this.
I've seen them at other events.
People using components that worked on other devices to build open or new devices that, you know,
feature the best of those components, but aren't attached with all the manufacturers' built-in things that you would have had to settle for in owning it.
So I think that's novel, and especially if you're introducing it to younger hackers that want to know how things work and want to,
but you want to kind of, you know, steer them to the communicating part instead of the sort of anti-social consumption and like ad lock-in that we're kind of trying to avoid.
And I think it also had support for signal, had a good camera, great project.
I'd love to see more projects like this.
The one thing that broke my heart about the announcement is the video that they used to announce this full of AI slop.
So, you know, they couldn't get real animators or videographers to make them an ad.
It is just such an AI slop-filled ad, and that is disappointing.
I didn't see that.
I just thought it was sort of...
But to be clear, this company has no connection to the Commodore company that made it.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's just basically using a lot of the branding, and I think it also runs an emulator.
It can play a bunch of the older games from that era.
But this is like a similar kind of spirit that other retro, futuristic projects that have come about have done is borrowing some of the older graphical interface or kind of remixing it into something based or at least inspired by the original products.
Interesting.
And you can swap out the battery on this, according to the specs.
You can actually change out the battery, which is something we lost the ability to easily do in the smartphone era.
All right.
Fun fact.
The musical group, the Commodores, not one of them ever owned a Commodore 64.
Think about that.
How do you know?
I looked it up.
Word up.
How do you think I know?
I looked it up.
That includes Lionel Richie, by the way.
All right.
Yeah.
So what else?
What else do we have?
What's this?
Okay.
There's a story from Estonia we didn't have time for on the show.
Who found this?
Who wants to talk about it?
Estonia is doing something really weird.
Oh, yes.
The Estonia story.
This came up on Bloomberg, and the title is Estonia to Grant AI Bots Digital IDs to Control Access.
And this seems to be connected to a scheme where Estonia is assigning personal ID numbers to AI assistants in an effort to hold them accountable for things they do.
How?
How do you hold AI accountable?
Are they going to send them to jail or something if they do something bad?
You do not.
There is absolutely no way to do what they've announced they're trying to do here.
The premier of Estonia, Kristen Michal, said that it cannot be the case that a person is forced to give their AI assistant access to all of their rights, services, and data.
Agents must have limited controllable and auditable authorizations.
But the huge flaw in this seems to be that they are treating AI assistants as entities that are doing any sort of choice-making or conscious deciding on what to do with things they have access to.
An AI blob is not a person.
An AI blob is not accountable for what it does.
It doesn't hope to get better.
It can't be disciplined.
It can't get pissed off.
It just runs programs.
You know, it's just code.
And this is like, there is such an air about this announcement that is like, well, these are people now.
We have to treat them like such.
And it's kind of troubling.
Alex, go ahead.
Well, I think this was one of the most fascinating stories.
I'm sad that we didn't get to it on the air because I think it's really, really neat in the sense of you have Estonia, which is this really forward-looking, digital-only nation.
I mean, you can even get some kind of, like, digital identification from Estonia, even if you're not an Estonian citizen, and use it to register a company.
And, you know, they've really gone all digital, and they use a lot of encryption tools and things.
And so, you know, they are very much one of these early adopters of all these different types of tech.
And I can understand the problem that they're trying to solve here, right?
I mean, they're solving a very interesting problem where we know that all of these agents are going to be running around on behalf of all these people and have no accountability, right?
And they're going way back.
You can go back thousands of years to Roman law.
And there's principles of Roman law that essentially say an agent working on your behalf is the actions, rather, of an agent working on your behalf.
Well, you're responsible for the actions of your agent, right?
Agency law is a Roman law concept.
It goes way, way, way back, right?
So they're saying, look, if you've got these agents running amok on the Internet, we're going to issue some kind of identification to them.
It's going to tie them back to whoever authorized that agent.
We want to have this become some kind of auditable log of their particular type of activity.
Now, great.
Okay, cool.
Let's issue these agents' IDs.
Let's give them some kind of rights.
And they're doing this essentially consistent with what we would know in the security community as least privilege, right?
You don't want to give any kind of system or person more access to data than you would otherwise want them to have in order to be able to do their jobs, right?
You shouldn't have to give your agentic AI access to your entire bank account in order to book a flight on your behalf, right?
So they want these things to be properly scoped, properly audited, and properly trackable.
The problem I have with it primarily is that they're solving all of this with what's essentially a centralized tool.
They're centralizing this gigantic database of agents associated with people.
And by centralizing that information, it's just like we were talking about with the age verification story.
That's essentially a gating function to grant you or to deny you access to the Internet on the basis of your agents now, right?
So now they're not going to be just tracking you.
They're going to be tracking your agents and everything that your agents do.
It becomes a tool of surveillance.
It can be misused by the state.
But primarily, I think what they're doing is already solving a problem that has been solved and doing it in a centralized way.
I mean, really, what they're looking for, what would solve this whole thing, right?
And I know you guys will push back on this, but imagine if there was something like an append-only log, right?
You could only add to it.
And all of the data that was on this log was completely immutable.
It could never be changed.
So if something happens, you know, it's logged on this particular spreadsheet, right?
And you can only add to it.
And so only actions of an agent that can add to it, right, are placed on there.
You can never delete what happens on this particular log, right?
That's what they're asking for in terms of the auditability layer of this particular technology and what agents are doing.
And we already have that.
It's called the blockchain.
No, except there's a huge difference here, though, in terms of sovereignty.
Because if you have your name and your identity or your agent's identity stored on chain, let's say issued by something, I don't know, like ENS, the Ethereum name service, right?
So if I own alex.eth, agent.alex.eth becomes my subname and I own it.
It belongs only to me.
Nobody could ever revoke access to that name.
Nobody could ever change its permissions except me.
So we already have this existing in a decentralized way across the world.
And Estonia is just replicating this in a centralized fashion.
Wow, okay.
Well, you know, I'm not going to push back on that because I just have so many hours of my life.
But the coolest thing about Estonia, the top-level domain, you know what it is?
Oh, God, I should.
Is it?
No, it's not ET.
That's Ethiopia.
It's not ES.
That's Spain.
Keep telling us all the ones that it's not.
We'll get there.
It's not.
It's not IS.
That's Iceland.
It's not MX.
That's Mexico.
It's not DE.
That's Germany.
Why would it be .MX?
In any world.
You just keep telling us.
I'm just going to keep naming CCTLDs.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
What is it?
It's not EE.
Thank you.
EE.
Yes.
Oh, cool.
EE.
I like that.
Go ahead.
I'm apparently just going to be doing that for the entire rest of the evening.
Also, did want to mention a couple of fun chime-ins from the chat.
But Sarah says, why doesn't Estonia just invite more people to move there?
I know they're hurting for humans, but sheesh.
And we were just there.
We were there in December.
They tried to get us to stay.
See?
Yeah.
They were very insistent.
I was thinking about it.
What if the AI agent decides to play a basketball game on one of those kiosk thingies?
How do you want an answer to that?
I would love one.
The thing I'm thinking about this, though, is, you know, if Gila here, you know, we have
a very healthy household, you know, not violent at all.
But if you decide to snap one day and strangle me with a scarf, no one's going to arrest the
scarf.
And so why is an AI agent being given its own accountability?
If this is a tool that somebody is using, why is it not just the person using the tool
who is accountable for any stupid thing this thing does?
What if it's a design flaw of the scarf and you weren't intended to be strangled?
Yeah.
You know, you were strangled because I got caught in a doorknob or something.
I don't know.
I don't know why we're talking about this.
But what if the scarf achieved sentience, sentience?
Or what if people kept claiming the scarf was sentient to keep a bubble going, but it
was no such thing?
What if we open up the phone lines, get us out of all this?
I love this plan.
I'm excited to be a part of it.
Yes, please.
Let's do it.
Our phone number.
Who wants to give it up?
You can reach us at U.S.
Phone number 802-321-4225.
That's 802-321-HACK.
It is up on your screen if you're watching us on YouTube now.
And you can also get us toll free at 833-755-2600 within the U.S. if that is your jam.
All right.
And we're just going to wait for the phone to ring.
Or maybe for someone's AI agent to make the phone ring.
The phone is ringing.
And we're going to pick it up.
We know who it is.
I'm sure we do.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure we do.
But yeah.
Why not?
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Over time.
Go ahead.
Hold on.
Hold on, Emmanuel.
Okay.
He's already playing recordings before he even says hello to us.
I guess that saves time.
Okay.
Emmanuel?
Yeah.
I'm here.
Obviously, I'm here.
You don't have to.
Okay.
I'd like to mention, just though we're talking about AI, I'd like to mention that you were
talking about things that, like, anyway, I've been noticing about AI that when you call
something now, or customer service, they play background noise that makes you think that
you're in an office, and it's an AI thing.
Well, I wouldn't say it's an AI thing, Rebel.
I think it's just something to give you the, you know, what is the right word?
Verisimilitude?
You know, all the trappings of something real?
That would happen a lot when, do you remember, you probably got these calls from the political
action committee seeking to raise money for police and asking for your support.
That was a classic one where you would hear the din and chatter in the background of somebody,
and then it would stop and allow you to talk, and then it would respond.
I don't know if that's necessarily AI, it's more just creating all of the trappings of it
being an actual person.
I think it predates AI.
They're typing on the, they have sounds of people typing on the terminal.
Listen to what I, this is Sherry.
This is like a finance, like a lending company, I guess, like a pay-by-now, pay-later company,
and this is what happens when you call them.
Let's see if this will work.
Hello, this is Thomas, your personal virtual assistant.
Thank you for calling Sherry today on a recorded line.
How can I assist you today?
Thanks for reaching out about your payment plan.
Just to keep the account secure, could you share your date of birth or the last four digits of your social?
Hear the background noise?
I mean, you may not be able to hear it.
Why aren't you talking to this guy?
It's very rude.
Yeah, we can hear the background noise.
Thank you for letting me know.
I'll do my best to assist you regardless of any background noise.
He's doing his best.
When you're ready.
I'm ready.
Could you please share your date of birth?
Okay, but the point is that, you know, you talk to, and there's no person to talk to.
Now, listen to what happens when you call, remember the 9901 numbers?
It's like 718-225-9901.
It says, welcome to the basic central office or 5DSS or whatever.
This is what happens now when you call any number plus, well, not, I mean, a lot of numbers, not all, but a lot of areas.
Just show us.
Show us what you're trying to demonstrate.
Yeah, we got it.
We got it.
No, we get it, Ro.
Look, instead of giving you the central office of where it's located, this is what happens now.
No, no.
Wow, fast busy.
That's fast busy.
Try again, try again, try again.
Yeah, let's see something strange.
Yes, no, no, no.
It used to tell you.
It used to tell you what kind of switch you were using.
Let's do something else.
I just worked before.
Uh-huh.
And the exchanges.
Yeah, it would tell you the exchanges of the local central office that you were calling.
Hello.
We can help you find another business in the area.
Since the number you called is not in service.
I'll look for you now.
What the hell is that?
That noise?
That's kind of...
That's what happens when you do 229-9901.
It kind of sounds like typing, but it's not really typing.
It's sort of like the machine is doing something.
It's like a toddler banging on a keyboard.
But it does...
When you call 9901, instead of giving you the central office, like the president of the recording, saying what central office you reach, that's what you have.
And any disconnected number that, you know, any disconnected number that you, you know, that you may call a lot of them, now you have that.
Okay, so the question is, does it actually give you information if you ask for it?
Well, let's see if it does.
Yeah, ask it what central office it is.
Let Rebel work.
Hello, we can help you find another business in the area, since the number you called is not in service.
I'll look for you now.
Press any key to continue.
I'll press zero.
It doesn't seem to be working.
So, yeah, if it worked, it would be free information, wouldn't it?
Because information costs money.
What happens if you press one?
I said I'd press any key.
You said any key.
You pressed any key.
Yeah, any key should work.
Yeah, I pressed zero.
Maybe I'll press one.
Let's try that.
Yeah, let's go through the whole keyboard.
I'll look for you now.
If one doesn't work, then I'm not going to, you know...
Press any key to continue.
Are you looking to save money on your cable or Internet services?
Connect today to compare rates from cable and satellite providers in your area.
Press the star key now.
I'll press the star key.
This call may be recorded and or monitored for quality assurance purposes.
Hello, I dial 718-229-9901.
Thank you for calling.
Press 4 to continue.
Press 4 to continue.
I mean, it hangs up on you.
Did you press 4?
Oh, 4?
Wasn't that what I was asking you to do?
No, star.
Oh, star.
I don't know.
I can't read that dialect.
All right, you know what?
I didn't have to be...
All right.
Hello.
We can help you...
Let's try this again.
All right.
Let's...
Because the number you called is not in service.
I'll look for you now.
Press any key to continue.
I pressed 1.
Again, press any key to continue.
I pressed 1 again.
I'm not hearing a 1.
Goodbye.
Rebel, you fucked up.
What the hell?
You were supposed to press 1.
That's all you had to do.
Maybe you had to wait till she stops talking.
Yeah, maybe.
For once, wait till somebody stops talking before you override them with touch tones and voice.
That's the number you called is not in service.
I'll look for you now.
God, I hate this.
Press any key to continue.
Okay, I'll press 1.
There.
Are you looking to save money on your cable or internet services?
Connect today to compare rates from cable and satellite providers in your area.
Press the star key now to deconnect.
The star key.
All right.
Press the star key.
This call may be recorded and or monitored for quality assurance purposes.
All right.
For customer service or billing questions, press 1.
To think of an agent about new cable, satellite, or internet service, press 2.
Oh, press 2.
For all other inquiries, this call may be recorded.
Press 2.
Thank you for calling.
Better internet starts here.
If you're calling to check out new internet service options from different providers, please use your keypad to enter your zip code now.
All right.
I'll enter my zip code.
We are connecting you to a certification specialist now.
If you are calling for anything other than getting new service, please hang up now and call your current provider.
Thank you.
How many phone calls has this thing made?
Thank you for calling.
A sales specialist will help you in less than 30 seconds.
We have great promotions to help you save money on internet, TV, and...
Now, this is when I called 9901, so...
Well, let's see where this goes.
...one of the current promotions in your area.
I don't think this is, like, a Time Warner cable or a spectrum or anything like that.
I don't think it's any cable, but we're a few seconds away.
We have great promotions to help you save money on internet, TV, and mobile wireless plans.
You'll be connected to an agent shortly to determine what are the current promotions in your area.
But you said within 30 seconds.
I think it's been past 30 seconds.
Why does it sound so crappy?
My God.
Why do I...
Why do I...
Why do I...
Why do I...
It sounds awful.
It sounds so crappy.
I don't know.
That's...
That's...
That's the thing.
Hold on.
Oh, there's another nap, man.
Robo, wire this plant.
You will be connected to an agent shortly to determine what are the current promotions in your area.
Robo, I don't think this is ever going to go to anything.
I don't know what the purpose of it is, but it seems to be to keep people occupied while something else is going on.
That's...
This is insane.
It just keeps connecting.
Connects you to one shitty phone call after another, and that never ends.
I'm not going to bother with that.
I mean, but that's what happens when you call a number that's disconnected now.
That only didn't have that recorded.
The number you have reached.
Why, if you're calling a 9901 number, why would you be looking for a particular business?
It doesn't make any sense.
I don't know.
Any number that's disconnected, like if a business closes and they disconnect their phone number, you don't get the number...
The number you have reached, 751-2600.
Stop it.
The number has been changed, or whatever, or a disconnected...
Stop making that noise.
Ugh.
All right, Rebel.
So, here's your assignment.
Yeah, thank you.
Now you've got him doing it.
Rebel, your assignment is to further research this, and next time you call, give us information above and beyond what we already have heard here.
You think you can do that?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, good.
I'm glad you have that kind of confidence.
And a really good impression of that sentence.
I did call this number before, and you get somebody in India that, you know...
That's what I was going to say.
You're going to get, like, someone work from home, like, their cell phone rings, and they're going to sell you more, like, I guess, modems or something.
The goal here is to have a charge show up on your credit card from calling that 9901 number.
Can you do that?
Oh, I don't think that's going to happen.
Because I'll just call from, like, a New York City link kiosk or something.
And you can watch the game while you're doing it.
Yes, and charge it to Mondano.
Yeah.
And you're also getting texts.
I'm getting a text right now from area code 571-788.
Don't give out a phone number to somebody texting you.
You don't know the circumstances behind that.
It's like telemarketing texts.
Why not?
Because we don't violate the privacy of telemarketers here.
All right.
It says area code 571-781 number.
Okay.
Wow.
That's a real legitimate exchange there.
571 area code.
Imagine growing up in the 571 area code.
All right.
Let's tell you where it is.
You know, here's something I thought of recently.
You know how people identify themselves by the area code they come from.
In fact, you know, even rappers do that sometimes.
You know, I'm from the 818 or, you know, various area.
We've all heard this, right?
I'm not crazy.
Everyone's looking at me.
But I yet heard that.
Yes.
All right.
But now area codes don't necessarily mean geography anymore because you carry it on your cell phone.
Because you can have portability and get the same phone number, follow you around for life.
So it doesn't mean anything anymore.
But you know what does mean something?
The first three digits of your zip code.
Why does nobody use that to identify themselves?
You know?
Yes, Kila.
We have had a few people in the chat mention a few things.
Wait, you're just going to ignore my question?
Okay, fine.
Yeah, sorry.
Typical, typical.
Yeah, usually yes.
Okay, so Beans points out that this could be a spoofed caller ID.
And that is also something to keep in mind.
Also, I think we're losing the people.
But someone did say that Rebel should do a Twitch live stream doing this stuff for many hours.
Have you looked into that, Rebel?
Doing some sort of webcast?
Yeah, I don't have the Twitch live stream.
I don't even know how to get on that.
I mean, I'm not.
No, I mean, it's comfy to consider.
I don't know.
All right.
Well, that's another thing to look into.
But please give us more information on this as you learn more information.
And not the same information again in a week.
So thank you for calling.
And we will say good night.
Now our phone number for everybody else, 802-321-4225.
That's 802-321-HACK if you have letters on your phone keypad.
Also, if I could jump in with something about the previous conversation we were having.
This note from our buddy Loop came in literally right when Rebel started talking.
So I didn't get a chance to share it.
But talking about why to assign ID numbers to the AI agents to be able to trace it back to the person who prompted it.
Right.
Which I depreciated.
Isn't that what we said, though?
That's what those ID numbers were for, to have some accountability for the AI agent.
Yeah, I kind of understood it when we were describing it as a way to tag it and give it some attribution to whoever prompted that agent or is actually benefiting from that agent's activities.
And I think there's parallels in corporate structure and governance.
There is a call, though.
We are.
Okay, let's take the call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook overtime.
Go ahead.
The Commodore phone is a piece of bullshit.
Okay, go on.
That's a strong statement.
Excuse me, you're not allowed to dox me.
Sorry.
My apologies, caller.
How different is it from the Trump phone?
I mean, it's basically a third party.
And they're hiring a third party to produce these things and just put the Commodore brand onto it.
Which is exactly the same thing as the Trump phone is.
Yeah, we saw.
I mean, I'm thinking of Polaroid.
You know, a lot of, like, things that were produced after that just with the brand when the company is not as active.
So, yeah.
And I didn't know.
I wasn't aware of the cost or anything.
I just heard about the possibility of a product like this.
Wasn't the Trump phone, like, just sort of hastily put together?
Because they said that there's no guarantee that you'll ever get the Trump phone.
Everybody got pissed off.
And then two weeks later, everybody got a Trump phone.
Yep.
I'm talking about the Trump phone.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
I'm talking about the Trump phone.
I just want to shout out to the site iFixit that got hold of one, tore it apart, and confirmed that it is a rebranded HTC U24 Pro.
So, you know, just a regular garbage Android phone you could get anywhere, but it's been painted gold and sold to Rubes.
How much is an actual Commodore 64?
I don't know.
Around $500 to $600 MSRP.
Okay.
You don't know, but that's what you're thinking.
So, okay.
Wait.
An actual retro computer or this new product?
Oh, no.
Well, I can look at it right here on the website.
But the Commodore 64 originally cost $500 to $600 at launch.
The street price definitely went down on that.
But, I mean, if you're referring to getting the Commodore 64 computer, the original one, on second-hand sites like eBay, it's around $30 to $50.
I got mine for free.
Wow.
So, there you have it.
Wait.
How is it that Commodore 64s don't cost a fortune if they're, you know, so old and retro and classic?
Because they were widely produced?
Is that true?
I don't know.
Somebody's going to have to...
They're one of the most popular microcomputers on the face of the earth.
There's so many of them out there.
So, why...
I get a microbus, a VW microbus.
Why can't I get that for cheap?
They're very popular, too.
And they were everywhere.
It's the same damn thing.
Well, the market moves in strange ways.
But, listen, I've got a Commodore 64 right behind me and the 1541 disk drive, the original one.
They both were made around 1984.
I spent time, you know, cleaning them up, doing repairs on them, and even installing new modifications to them to make them work even better.
And I didn't...
I had to pay a lot less.
I had to pay practically no money to do this.
I mean, I didn't pay for any of those.
I got them for free because somebody was throwing them out.
But, let's see.
So, does your Commodore 64 work?
Yes.
Wow.
We should do something with it.
I invite you all to write your programs for it.
Run a BBS, you know?
Something like that.
That is where I am going.
I do want to assemble a cartridge for it called WIC 64 that will allow it to connect to Wi-Fi and go on the Internet and hop on our C-chats.
It's a pretty cool thing that the German hackers have done.
We should get a Commodore 64, Kyle.
We really should have one for the office.
Yeah, well, there's an ever-increasing collection.
I think that a lot of collectors and people that are interested in old hardware and stuff that's fun to play with, they reach limits to the capacity of what they can have.
But just to use it in that way, as a modern communications tool, that's a great idea.
And I think a lot of people like the simplicity.
You guys want a fun fact about Commodore 64s?
I have one.
And 2600.
Okay.
Anybody recall the first issue of 2600 when it came out?
Anybody?
That was 1984, wasn't it?
1984.
Rob gets that correct.
Yes.
Month, perhaps?
You want to give a month?
Oh, I don't know the month.
September.
Why would we start something in September, Alex?
Because you're absurd.
Wait, I'm not the one doing it.
You're the one saying I did it.
Wait, was it February 1984?
That's when my brother started.
When do you start something in a new year?
September.
Well, that's September.
No, not September.
That's when school years start?
Yeah, but I'm not a school.
Good point, Kilo.
We're a damn magazine.
That's when my culture starts our new year?
Oh, we have lost our way.
We can't get through a single conversation without running into all kinds of roadblocks.
Caller, do you have any other comments?
I'm just trying to say one interesting thing here.
A wild guess as to what month in 1984, 2600 started.
Can anybody answer that question?
Was it January?
January.
Thank you, Rob.
Boy, was that so hard.
All right.
January 1984.
Did anybody remember what was the headline of the first issue of 8 1⁄2 by 11, 2600 back then?
And I recognize this might be difficult.
And if people don't know, they don't know.
And I'll tell you.
Is it about the Commodore 64?
No, it's not about the Commodore 64.
That was going to be my guess.
Ahoy.
Wait, what?
Say that again.
Ahoy.
You're right.
You're right.
Ahoy with an exclamation point.
Now, here's the fun fact.
Ahoy, with an exclamation point, was a computer magazine for the Commodore 64 that started
publishing in January 1984.
So the very month that we put out the first issue of 2600 with the big letters Ahoy, there's
this other magazine that comes out and does the same damn thing.
And that has been the environment we've been living in ever since.
There's somebody doing it bigger and getting more attention while we're struggling just
to, you know, be recognized somewhere.
But we're still here and they're not.
Yeah.
Beware.
We transcend.
Do you remember that crazy rag that ripped off 2600 called Blacklisted 411 that basically
like reprinted all the articles?
That was funny.
Well, not only did they reprint articles, they used the exact same style, the exact same
size.
They even used the same wording in ads that we ran to get people to write articles and
letters and things like that.
They used the same fonts, the same basic layout.
The thing that bugged me about that, you know, okay, fine.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, whatever.
People just bought it with 2600.
They didn't differentiate.
Like, this is real.
This is a copy.
And it just, you know, we got kind of lumped in.
And then they came out with a second magazine called the Hacker Underground Digest or Thud.
Thud.
And it started ripping off the first one.
They were ripping themselves off and people were then buying three magazines.
And I'm like, what was wrong?
Come on, read them.
Look at them.
You'll see a difference.
If I remember correctly, too, and I may be wrong about this, but I feel like they disappeared
after taking a bunch of subscription money for subscriptions they were never fulfilling.
And that got a lot of people pissed off at them.
I think that happened twice.
Actually, it happened, I think, three times because it was linked to another magazine in
the mid-1970s called Tell, which was trying to get mixed up with Tap, which was an actual
magazine that came out for a bunch of years before 2600.
So actually, no, you know what?
I'm mixing things up.
There was another magazine called CompuTel.
Yeah.
And we did an expose on it in our first issues.
CompuTel was a magazine that ripped people off that was related to a magazine called Tell
from about 10 years earlier, and that had nothing to do with what we were talking about
just now.
Yeah.
A little bit of history there.
Any questions?
That's what I thought.
Yeah.
I did have one question, actually, about these magazines and the people who disappeared.
Was Professor Harold Hill the publisher of either of these magazines?
Who the hell is that?
What do you talk?
What do you talk?
Oh, my God.
Are you going to say, do you really not know who that is?
I'm going to say, yes, I don't know who that is.
Really?
And that's going to go on for a while?
Oh, Emmanuel.
No.
Harold Hill is the main character of the Music Man.
He's a what?
He's a what?
He's a Music Man, and he sells clarinets to the kids in the town.
Who the hell is the Music Man?
I don't know what the Music Man is.
It's a classic American musical.
Well, I kind of guessed that, but I still don't know it.
It's about a man who...
A huckster salesman.
A huckster salesman who travels to small towns as like a traveling salesman and says,
hey, we're going to start a band.
Give me money so we can buy instruments and uniforms and shit for your kids.
And then he skips town before the first concert.
So he's Mr. Tambourine Man.
Play a song for me.
Or is he Mr. Bojangles?
You know, those two were totally different people.
Yes.
I didn't know that.
They were all in the same room, though.
Yeah.
Okay, so...
You should watch the Music Man, though, E.
It's classic.
I have so much spare time.
That's exactly what I'm going to do right after the show.
We are trying to maintain, Gila, I gotta say.
So back off.
You know, take a number, chill pill, whatever you need.
We'll get to it.
We'll get to it.
Yeah.
I'm just saying, put it on your list.
We just caught up with the shy last night.
So, you know, we gotta rest.
Yeah, they snuck in an extra season.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
This is a funny story.
Another fun fact here.
We...
The Shy is a good show.
It's on Showtime.
But Showtime changed its name.
So I have a DVR on my cable system.
And it was set to record The Shy whenever it had new episodes.
Except it didn't record an entire season because Showtime changed its name to Paramount Plus with Showtime or Showtime with Paramount Plus or whatever.
And because it changed its name, the DVR didn't catch the season.
And so when I found out there were new episodes of The Shy, which, by the way, is spelled C-H-I, I discovered that I didn't know what the hell was going on because I had missed an entire season.
The entire season had gone by and I wasn't even aware of it.
And I wonder how many other people missed entire seasons of their programs because the network changed its name.
Yeah, think about that.
So, yeah, that's why.
That's why we missed the Shy.
Yeah, but we're caught up now.
So that's the good news.
Excellent.
Do we still have that caller?
We do.
I think they might have dozed off.
No, I'm right here.
Oh, I'm sorry.
No, they're hanging out.
Any final thoughts from you before we move on to yet another caller?
I mean, thank you for letting me, making me aware of the bootleg magazines.
I mean, seeing three of those in the store, you know, one is for personal reading, another one is for the archive, and another one is for friends.
You know, you can get three, buy three.
That's the other thing.
They latched on to our distributors.
And the only comfort there was our distributor ripped us off for a huge amount of money, but they also ripped them off for a huge amount of money.
So there was some comfort in that.
We got to start recording.
We got to get this, like, on camera and just set up a nice little, you know what, maybe from a rooftop?
I don't know what the setting would be.
You know what, I'll think about composition, but you got to tell these stories on tape, because there's so many.
You could go on and on.
Caller, seriously, is there absolutely, have we, yeah, I know, I know.
We could continue going, but we don't want to leave you hanging.
Do you have anything else that caught your eye this week or that you want to let people know about?
Well, I just wanted to finish my thought about Commodore.
As I've said, I've got the Commodore stuff behind me.
And, well, since this is old equipment that's about 40 years old, of course I had to do repairs.
I had to rebuild the power supply.
I was going to say power supply.
Well, the only thing I rebuilt, the other thing I did is, well, I had to do a bunch of repairs to the disk drive.
And I also replaced the kernel ROMs with Jiffy DOS to improve the performance of that.
But a lot of that, it was a lot of fun.
And I learned a lot about this particular system and how it works and vintage computing in general.
But now we've seen that the Commodore, all the trademarks have been bought by this one guy, this one guy from YouTube, Retro Recipes, if I remember correctly.
And he's got this nice, I mean, they've got a nice website, you know, on the homepage.
I think they've even got endorsement from, who is the son of Jack Trammell.
What's his name? Is his name Jason?
Not sure, but go on.
I can't find it.
Leonard, his name is Leonard.
Leonard, thank you very much, Gila.
I appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Absolutely.
Yeah, anyone else want to look up?
Gila's the person to ask.
He really is.
It's doxing central here.
It's on the website.
You doxed the caller.
Now you doxed this poor Leonard guy.
Well, I mean, it's critical, you know, critical analysis of whatever this product is and the way the branding is being used.
I think it's a fair review.
I don't agree with how the branding is used.
This is not Commodore, okay?
I really think they should have just let this brand die 30 years ago.
It doesn't need to be resurrected and turned into something that it totally is not run by people who were never, ever even associated with the original company.
You know, the Trammels.
What about even running the games?
No.
Yeah, okay.
It's a LARP.
I see your point.
They are LARP.
That's good.
All right.
Well, thank you for your thoughts and for the memories, and we'll continue this conversation.
Yeah, keep building stuff and messing around with those systems, though.
Yeah, I wouldn't buy anything from them.
This is not good.
Okay.
Don't buy the Commodore 64 Ultimate.
Just get an old one.
Come on.
You'll learn a lot more that way.
All right.
We're going to try to do that.
We're going to try and get an old Commodore 64.
That'd be kind of cool.
I will.
Yes, we'll do that tonight.
Hey, you guys, check out the Hope website recently, hope.net.
We have a bunch of speakers that we have announced.
We also have organizations like Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
We've got speakers from ProPublica.
We've got Tiffany Radd.
We've got Cindy Cohn from the EFF.
All kinds of people.
And that's just a small smattering of people that we have had distributed denial of secrets.
If you go to hope.net, you'll see a few, a few of, you know, a handful of confirmed talks.
You're going to see more starting tomorrow.
We're going to start listing details on talks.
Cindy Cohn's picture just popped up when I went to the website.
There you go.
See?
I'm not kidding.
It's there.
It's all there.
No, it's very true.
And we need people to help spread the word because we suck at publicity, if you can't tell.
So hope.net.
Hope is taking place August 14th through 16th.
And it'll be at the New Yorker Hotel, which is on 8th Avenue and 34th Street, which is a pretty busy place.
It's right in the middle of Midtown.
But, you know, it costs small fortune to have events at a place like that.
So we need people to support the conference.
Please support us.
Hope.net.
It's not an inconsequential task that we have in front of us as a group.
And, yeah, it really is, you know, every bit of it is what will make it happen.
So, yeah, look forward to more of the content and activities surrounding the event in the weeks ahead,
as a lot of it is going to be getting underway.
And you can support us by buying a ticket to the conference, buying a virtual ticket if you can't make it to the conference,
becoming a sponsor of the conference.
There's all kinds of information on how to do that, making a tax-deductible donation to Hope on Planet Earth, the nonprofit wing.
And we would basically appreciate every bit of support that we can get.
So we can continue doing this every year.
We'd love to do this every year, but we can't just do it on good intentions and lots of hard work like we're putting in.
And we need to have support out there.
It's two months away.
It's less than two months away, actually.
But if we're going to be able to have a decent setup, we need to be able to invest now in purchasing what we have to have.
So Hope.net, all the information is there.
Any questions, you can always write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
And again, every little bit of mentioning or sharing some of the links or announcements that we make, it really goes a long way in the sort of environment.
We're not, you know, creating a bunch of ad campaigns or, you know, taking over link NYC terminals.
We wouldn't dare.
I believe commandeering is the word.
We certainly wouldn't pay to do it.
But in seriousness, please tell a friend, tell a few.
Your networks really help our network.
And I think that's always been how we get the word out is word of mouth and sharing in our groups.
And it's actually a fallback for an environment that unless you really have a huge amount of different outlets that you're paying or channeling your message through, that fallback is really the best plan, actually.
But for us, it's always been the way we get to our little slice of an audience and a community that's out there.
So if you can help share, that helps us take a look at what we can actually plan to do and what kind of show we produce.
Yeah, it's going to be fascinating.
You're going to be blown away by the speakers we have, by the workshops we have, by the activities, and just by the location.
You know, this is the hotel that Nikola Tesla lived and died in.
And it's quite a fascinating part of Manhattan.
And it's just great to be in Manhattan again.
Again, August 14th through 16th, hope.net, hackers on planet Earth.
It's what it's all about.
Gila, go ahead.
Yes.
We just had a couple of quick questions from people.
There is a phone call.
There is a phone call, too.
Oh, okay.
Someone asked, if you submitted a talk, when will you find out if it's accepted?
Well, people are finding out now.
Not everybody has found out yet because we're basically assembling the schedule and it takes a period of weeks.
Everybody will hear something at some point.
But even if your talk is not accepted, it doesn't mean you can't give the talk because we have the unscheduled track.
And all that is is basically the ability to sign up when you're there and give your talk in a different room.
So if you're there before other people, as far as signing up for a particular time slot, you can still give your talk.
Absolutely.
So we make that opportunity available to lots of people.
But, again, you know, we've gotten more talks, I think, this time than 2018 was the last time we had that many talks.
And that was when we were in Manhattan last.
So it seems to have something to do with being in Manhattan, which is great.
We have a lot more enthusiasm.
We need that enthusiasm to translate into ticket sales, though, because that has not happened yet.
We've gotten more speakers than ever before.
We've gotten all kinds of workshop submissions.
We've gotten contacts from people we haven't heard from in decades sometimes.
People who are excited that we're back in Manhattan.
And that is great.
And, you know, it shows that there is so much positivity towards doing this.
Yeah, early interest in sponsorships as well.
And we want to gather more of those vendors.
But we need the ticket sales in order to be able to do the event.
That is just a fact.
That is what has to happen.
And if you can't make it in person, we understand people can't make it in person.
Please support us with a virtual ticket.
You know, they're a lot cheaper.
And you can interact with the conference from wherever you happen to be.
If you want to see hope continue, that is what we need.
That is just the reality of the situation.
So hopefully we get it in flux.
Yes.
That would be nice.
Yes.
All right.
So, Kyle, you said we had a phone call?
What are you pointing at?
Yeah.
Was that all the questions?
Yeah, that's what we got for now.
Okay.
Okay.
And good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Oh, hello.
My government said I'm not allowed to talk here.
Hi, Zap.
How are you doing?
I can tell you're imitating a voice from a mile away.
Yeah, well, you know me and my funny voices.
But you mentioned the UK, so I had the phone in.
Oh, yes.
The UK with their 16 and under band.
Yeah, that was Zap's under-16 voice.
You're not allowed to talk to us.
All right.
You're trying to sound like a child.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, I don't have children, and they always say the argument is, oh, you'll understand
if you have children.
But the kids are just going to get around it.
Or like Rob said, they're just going to be driven underground to sort of some nefarious,
dodgy, more dodgy sites than what they already know.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's obvious it's, you know, the Labour Party trying to save themselves,
I think, in this particular case.
Yeah, well, I don't think Keir Starmer's got long to go, because there's going to be a
challenge for leadership soon.
He's the only one that doesn't seem to know that.
Yeah, well, you know.
So how have you been?
Still not good.
I'll update you when I'm getting better, but I'm slowly improving.
Okay.
But on a side note, I'm waiting for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum phone to come out.
I'm a Specky fan, die-hard Sinclair fan.
Now we're talking.
And my favorite machine is, yeah, ZX81.
I was talking to someone on the chat, and they're reminiscing about the old Sinclair machines.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe it'll be a smart pager or something.
It's going to be a brick, because it's going to be nostalgic.
Yeah, yeah.
Just hanging off your belt.
Do pagers still work?
Does anyone have a pager?
If you set up a station and run that frequency, yeah, you could probably make one light up.
But I don't know.
They might run for specific jobs.
I have a beeper somewhere.
I'm going to put a AA battery in it and see what happens.
I bet it's still used for...
Don't, like, surgeons use them or something?
In fact, I have an old Omnipoint phone, too, from the 1990s that I haven't turned on in decades.
Yeah.
Never throw any electronics out.
Never.
Yeah, old hardware.
Yeah.
I was going to say, I think pagers are still working in the UK.
It's mainly for rescue crews and hospitals and doctors.
Mm-hmm.
But it's been a while since I checked.
If you do some pager decoding, the old PogSec and Flex.
Yeah, I think it's just that the average person wouldn't be seeking a plan like that.
It's an unusual way to communicate.
So it's less prevalent.
We're less aware because there's so many other options for communication.
But it was so much fun when pagers existed.
Like I said, the PogSec monitoring, being able to just see what people were saying, what numbers they were sending across.
It was a lot of mischief.
It was all sent in the clear if you tune into the right frequencies.
Another thing.
Are you guys watching the Suckerer?
Yes, I think we might have alluded to that at some point.
Yes, we've seen a few football matches.
They're playing a bunch of them.
That's better football, yeah.
It reminds me of Cheshire Catalyst.
Yeah, he was big into that.
In fact, he was involved at some point.
Yeah, he said it's a way to communicate.
At least you've got a common topic to talk about.
There are more countries in FIFA than in the UN.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they're both...
Been watching a few of the games?
I've been watching.
I'm having all in the background as I'm doing work.
Yeah, have you...
It's exciting.
Have you seen some or have you gone to any, like, public watch parties or anything?
I've been sort of keeping an eye on the games.
There's, like, three countries I'm sort of rooting for.
Well, you know, I already know what happened with England and Croatia
because my phone ratted it out to me.
So you can go ahead and ruin that game because it's already ruined.
But who do you like?
What do you think?
Well, I have three choices.
I watched the Spanish game, I watched the Austrian game,
and I watched, of course, the English game.
Okay, okay.
So those are the three teams I'm going for.
I'm trying to think.
Kate Verde played a very good game.
Their goalkeeper did a massive great job.
He was amazing.
That goaltender, unbelievable.
Incredible, yeah.
Even though I was supporting Spain, but, you know, respect to the man.
Yeah.
40-year-old.
He got a million, I think, followers on Instagram or something after the match.
Yeah, it was like 50,000, and then it turned into over a million after the game.
But, you know, Spain's going to be okay.
They're going to make it out of the group.
Not a problem.
But seeing a country like that shine, you just imagine what's going on back home.
It's just the most incredible thing.
Similar to DR Congo today.
You know, just getting a goal against Portugal, holding them to a draw.
That's amazing.
That is history.
That is good.
Yeah.
That is good.
I love that.
But, yeah, we did well in the English game.
That was quite impressive.
I like how, you know, there was a penalty shot for the English, and he missed.
So they got to take it again.
And he got it the second time.
Yeah, Croatia was robbed.
But for the record, I think the goalie moved off his line, and so he was allowed to retake it.
But in the end, even if they didn't have that goal, I don't want to spoil it for you.
No, I know the score.
My phone told me everything.
But, okay, how about this?
People listening might not know the score.
Lionel Messi with a hat-trick and a 3-0 victory, that was amazing right there.
I really like Messi so much more than Ronaldo.
I don't like Ronaldo at all.
Messi, I really respect.
Yes, much more affable.
Right.
And the other thing I've come to realize is that I'm really getting old, because I don't really recognize any of the English players.
Because I don't like football.
I don't actually watch football normally, but I do watch the competitions like the World Cup and the Euros.
Yeah, me too.
I'm the same way.
I don't follow it during the season.
I'm more fascinated by the whole system.
I mean, over there in England, you've got an amazing system.
You've got the Premier League, then the Championship, then League 1 and 2 below that.
But it keeps going.
You have, like, 16 leagues that do promotion and relegation every year.
Three teams go up a league.
Three teams go down a league.
So it's possible for Manchester United to be 16 leagues down if they really suck.
And it's also possible for a team that's made up of people who work at a gas station to go up to the top and become champions.
It doesn't happen, but it's possible.
Yeah, I'm still confused.
I'm not too sure when we're meant to go rioting and looting.
Is it when we win or when we lose?
You know, any time.
It's open.
You know, just like here in the States, you know, that you can riot whenever, whenever you feel the need.
Yeah, well, we're famous for our football hooligans.
But I don't know if they realize that the Americans have guns.
They get shot.
So hopefully they'll behave.
But well done for the Scots.
Back into the game after about 28 years.
It's so cool seeing them just having the time of their lives in Boston.
And it's perfect for them.
I'm not surprised they drunk the place dry.
I mean, we tend to do that in the British, the UK.
You know, we like to drink.
How is Boston not prepared for that?
No, no, no.
The supply is on the way.
They're going to handle this.
There's plenty of beer in America.
What's incredible, though, is that the Algerian team was training in Kansas.
And there were all these Algerian Americans who live in Kansas.
And that's just that's that's beautiful right there to see that happen, to see all these people of Algerian descent in the middle of the country, having the time of their lives following the team that they are behind.
Yeah.
Anyway, I suppose I better go.
But I'll speak to you soon if I have a topic to talk about.
So if you mention the UK, I normally ring in.
And then we'll keep mentioning the UK.
Always welcome.
Yes.
Good hearing from you.
I don't want to become like Rebel phoning up every week.
It just gets too much.
You could never be like Rebel.
Don't worry about that.
And Rebel, you could never be like Zap.
So don't you worry about that.
I do love Rebel.
I did actually meet him in 97 was the first time.
Uh huh.
He is a character.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
And he's well known in the UK, London 2600.
People have heard of Rebel.
Uh huh.
So he's famous internationally.
He is.
And he travels internationally, too.
So you may definitely cross paths at some point.
I was just going to say he'll show up.
Yeah.
Before you know it.
All right.
Okay.
I'll go.
So bye, everyone.
And I'll speak to you soon.
Take care.
Bye.
And I'm sure the people in Signal Land say bye, too.
They're there.
They're nodding.
It's always it's always nice to hear from you.
Guys can talk whenever you want.
You know, it's just right there.
I've been chiming in.
But yeah, that was fun.
I think that's going to do it for calls tonight.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Because we're we're tired and we've taken a bunch so far.
Well, we got a lot of good info out there, a lot of discussion.
So please feel free to write us, as we said on the radio, OTH at 2600 dot com.
If you're going to the Knicks parade, you should be in line now, I'm told, because otherwise
you might somehow miss it.
Yeah.
So let's all get out there.
Right.
I mean, yeah, I feel like the best way to catch it is probably going to be on TV.
And keep leaking things and hacking things and blowing the whistle and sounding the alarm
because people are listening and no one else is going to do it.
Wow.
You people are tired.
OK, we're going to go.
Well, you know, we were just trying to prove you're right.
You said no one else is going to do it and no one else did.
No one else is going to do it.
OK, I guess we'll see you next week, everybody, on the radio and hopefully on overtime as well.
Again, write to us, OTH at 2600 dot com.
And I guess that dog barking means that it's over.
Our time is up.
Good night.
It's about 22.
Yes, it's about 22.
Yeah.
We have 22.
Yes, it's about 22.
Thank you.
Yes, it's about 22.
Yes, it is.
Bye-bye.
University.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Good night.
It with that.
Bye-bye.