Don't miss this exceptional evening of dramatic readings at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.
Selections from plays by Cornelius Eadie, Jessica Hagedorn, and other award-winning writers
will be featured in this program to benefit Cave Canem, the nation's premier home for Black poetry.
Ted Sod directs, Pratt Institute hosts.
For more information and tickets, visit cavecanempoets.org.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York, where the time is just about 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Von Diddley Bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Von Diddley Bond!
I hope that's understood.
And good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Another Wednesday evening on Wall Street, yes.
We're joined tonight by Mike, Voltaire, Rob T. Firefly, Red Hax, Kyle, Jim, and Bernie Estown of Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
You know, it's a shame there's so many of us here tonight, because we're not going to have much time to talk about anything.
We have some things, some excerpts to play, because we have some very special things to give away to people tonight who call in and pledge.
We have to make up for last week, when the phones were broken and we weren't able to do very well.
We did okay, but we didn't do great, and we're expected to do great here, because, well, we have a great audience, right?
So we're going to be playing some excerpts of some amazing things that we'll be offering tonight.
But first, a few moments for any updates. Has anyone been down to Wall Street this week?
Well, obviously, we're all on Wall Street now, but I'm referring to the occupation of Zuccotti Park on the corner of Liberty and Broadway.
I was there.
You were there, Bernie?
Yes.
Oh, well, I don't think you told us you were coming to New York.
I was there Saturday and Sunday.
You were there two days. Did you camp out in the park?
I did not, but I probably spent a couple hours both days talking with people, hanging out, sitting, talking, seeing what was going on.
One time it was like 2 in the morning, and the other time it was Sunday, it was in the afternoon.
We've been by with the 2600 van, dropping off various supplies and things like that.
Also donated a whole bunch of brand-new issues, which if you've seen the cover of the brand-new issue, couldn't be more perfect.
I won't give away any more than that, but you can see it on our main page.
And that's been passed around with enthusiasm over there, too, as well as some books.
What manual is the URL for our main page?
www.2600.com, 2600.com.
Yes, 2600 Magazine is what I'm referring to.
And, yeah, we have an interesting picture on the front of that, and also some interesting material that people seem to like.
Camped out in the park, saw a few of the issues being read very closely.
We also have some books, and there's a library now.
There's a library there.
The library has this catalog online.
These people really have their act together.
If you haven't been down there yet, it's certainly worth coming to.
Kyle and I just passed by.
I'd say, what would you estimate the number of people, Kyle?
I don't know, 1500 to maybe 2000.
It seemed a little bit less than it has been in the past.
But we were there Monday night, and it seemed like easily 2000 people there.
And it's very hard to really get these numbers right.
But I'd say a little bit less tonight, but, again, we're not there at the same time.
But, of course, the people that are there look like they're there to stay.
It doesn't look like 1500 people that are just walking by.
So that may be a number that changes.
And it's also very lively still, extremely lively, a lot of music,
a lot of people just walking around exchanging information of various sorts
and a lot of sign holding and things like that.
It's great.
People are coming from all over the country to be here,
and it's something well worth being a part of if you're considering doing that.
If you want to make donations,
one thing we've been told that people really need there are old laptops
because what they want to do is they want to set up a public terminal area
so people can do research and get online and do various things.
If you have an old laptop that can load Ubuntu or something like that,
they sure would love to have that.
You can either bring it down, contact us, oth2600.com, and we'll bring it down,
or you can send it.
They have an address.
You can send it to Occupy Wall Street.
Yes, you can send it to Occupy Wall Street,
Care of the UPS Store on 118A Fulton Street,
118A Fulton, F-U-L-T-O-N Street, number 205, New York, New York, 10038.
They'll accept all kinds of donations.
They're running a bit low on food.
Don't send food in the mail.
That probably isn't a good idea,
but definitely come down and bring whatever you can.
If you run a restaurant or something like that
and you have a lot of leftover food every day,
try and figure out a way to get that down there as well.
If you're a master chef, maybe you want to come down
and offer your services for a little while.
All kinds of neat things are happening.
They feed 2,000 people a day in their kitchen,
and it's simply an incredible sight to see, all for free.
So before you go calling these people freeloaders,
think of all the things they're giving for free.
It's simply incredible.
So we're just a couple blocks away from there.
It's an amazing bit of history.
Yeah, and I'm excited about the kinds of creative solutions
people are providing them,
all this outpouring of support.
And a lot of people get the sentiment.
They're not still asking, you know,
what are the demands or what is the demand,
all that kind of stuff.
I think people get it, and they want to support it
and let it evolve.
Yeah, because the demands have not yet been formulated
in that cohesive a sense, and that's actually a good thing.
Right.
Because you don't want to be preached to.
You don't want to be told,
okay, these are our demands, come join us.
Now how about come join us and let's work out the demands.
That's where it is right now.
And you're never going to get that opportunity again
to really be a part of something that could be massive.
Yeah, so if people can donate stuff,
please send it to them or contact us at oth at 2600.com.
And one of the best ways to keep in touch
with what's going on down there
is to listen to this radio station, WBAI.
In fact, we're going to be broadcasting
from there next week.
Off the Hook won't be on next week
because we'll be doing a live broadcast
from the park, from Zuccotti Park,
Occupy Wall Street people.
So that'll be fascinating.
BAI has had good coverage from day one of this whole event,
but the mass media is starting to get it.
I've seen lead stories in many mainstream papers
that aren't necessarily condescending.
Some still are.
But it's definitely getting better,
and I think the reason for that
is because people really started to speak out
and express their disgust at the way it was being ignored
and put down by the mass media.
One of the best outlets, believe it or not,
for this information is Russia Today.
If you can get that channel, it's on Time Warner.
It's on some outlets.
It's basically a 24-hour news channel
in English from Russia.
You can watch it online, rt.com.
And interestingly enough,
I was watching it the other day,
and a very familiar face came on.
Robert Steele, the very first speaker
at the HOPE Conference back in 1994,
Hackers on Planet Earth.
He was the first speaker, our keynote speaker.
He was talking about how revolution
is definitely possible in this country
and how this is one of the signs of it.
Very well spoken,
and a big surprise to see him on Russia Today.
But it just goes to show how the hacker community
is intricately involved in all of this
on many different levels.
All right.
Yes, I was waiting for you to say that, Bernie.
Go ahead.
The pregnant pause.
The uncomfortable silence.
I did notice that there was a truck
parked next to the camp
with a large array of photovoltaic panels
generating electricity for people.
So if they wanted to charge their mobile devices,
laptops, that sort of thing,
they could do that.
And I thought that was very clever.
So that truck's back, Bernie?
Because I thought it was there,
and I didn't see it in person.
And I was wondering when we were there yesterday
if it was parked around the block or something.
But apparently it's back,
or you saw it over the weekend?
I saw it Saturday and on Sunday,
but I don't know if it's there right now.
Okay.
Yeah, I didn't see it on Monday.
And I was also speaking with my friend Zimmer,
who was there providing medical support.
He's a trained medical person.
And he had developed
and was distributing wearable solar panels,
like a panel that you can wear on your arm.
It's not really big, but about the size of your upper arm.
And you can walk around while generating electricity.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of trees,
or maybe it's fortunate there are trees there,
over the park.
But if you can find a ray of sunshine coming down,
you can position your solar panel under that
and generate power to power your mobile device.
So I thought that was good and very creative.
So the people there are really pretty smart
and very innovative
and just really figuring out ways
to deal with living in that small space
with thousands of people in a small space
very amicably and getting their needs met.
It's impressive.
It's interesting too,
because we've seen a couple of stories in the media
about how much this is costing the city.
And the thing is,
if the city is upset about spending money on police overtime,
you don't have to have that many cops down there
because it really is self-governing and very peaceful.
And all the expense is really the choice of the city.
It's not something that's necessary.
It's not the choice of the residents of the city,
to be clear.
It's the choice of the mayor.
Yeah, city government is what I was referring to.
I found the Russia Today piece.
I'm going to play a bit of it that features Robert Steele.
I'll talk to Robert David Steele,
political analyst and former intelligence officer.
Mr. Steele, the Occupy Wall Street protesters,
they've raised everything
from lack of jobs to global warming.
Is there a common cause uniting the activists?
There actually is.
And if you look at the Day of Rage page,
it's electoral reform.
These are not stupid people.
They're very smart,
and they understand that at root,
this is about corruption in government
and corruption on Wall Street.
And until you have electoral reform,
you cannot restore the integrity of the U.S. government.
So, yes, there is a common cause,
but it's a bottom-up movement,
and so that common cause is being voiced in many different ways.
All right. You mentioned electoral reform.
Is that what they want to achieve?
And can the demonstrations achieve this,
in your opinion?
I can't speak for them,
but I am driving up to New York on Thursday,
and we are having a meeting,
and they are adopting,
or I hope they will adopt,
the nine-point electoral reform program
that Ralph Nader, Jim Turner, Christine Tobin,
myself, and several others have put together.
My objective on Thursday
is to get the group as a whole
to consider demanding electoral reform legislation
by the 4th of July 2012,
or go on general strike.
All right. Well, if not,
what do you think will happen
if none of these are answered,
no electoral reform is to happen?
If they don't adopt these ideas,
winter is coming.
Hitler found winter in Russia.
Wall Street will have its own winter.
I think they're toast by the 1st of November,
unless they get their act together.
Okay. Well, the U.S. economy,
it has been on a downward spiral for a while now,
and we've also seen Congress a stalemate,
which nearly pushed the country to default.
Why is this movement coming to prominence now?
Why not then, so to speak?
That's an interesting question,
because I was actually a Reagan Republican,
and I did not realize that the downfall
of the U.S. economy began in 1980,
when Ronald Reagan broke the back
of the air traffic control strike.
He basically ended the role of labor
as a counterbalance to management
in the United States.
I think the United States right now
is much more desperate than people realize.
We're at 22% unemployment on our way to 30%.
We are at 16% below the poverty line
on our way to 30%.
There is no question in my mind
that this is going to be a very dark winter
in the United States.
And unless the government restores
its own integrity and starts paying attention
to the public interest rather than
to the special interests,
I believe that we will have a form of revolution,
initially non-violent,
but with the potential to become violent.
Yes, I wanted to touch on that,
the nature of the protests.
They did start out peacefully,
and now in the third week we've seen
hundreds of arrests, 700, more than 700,
on the Brooklyn Bridge.
And we are seeing a temperous flare.
Do you think it would become widespread?
We've seen sporadic violence.
Will it become widespread?
Well, I'm a son of New York,
and I have to say that on the one hand
I really admire New York City
and what it tries to do.
But on the other hand,
it's the state police capital of the world.
New York arrests more people for marijuana
than anywhere else on the planet.
They can now shoot down airplanes
and do all kinds of intrusive surveillance.
I think the New York City police
have on the one hand been very well managed,
and on the other hand
have gotten out of control at lower levels.
If we have a soccer mom
burn herself to death somewhere in here,
it will move the country to the streets.
My personal hope is that
a general nonviolent strike
will be used to force the issue of electoral reform.
Okay, well, thanks very much there,
Robert David Steele, political analyst
and former intelligence officer.
Thanks again.
Yes, and thank you Russia Today
for that piece,
including our own Robert Steele,
the first speaker at the first HOPE conference.
He has spoken, I think,
at every HOPE conference that we've had,
and we've had eight of them so far,
and we're going to have a ninth next summer.
I'd like to delve into something
involving HOPE in just a moment,
but Mike, you had a couple of stories
you wanted to get into quickly?
I just wish we had more time this week
so we could talk about these stories
in greater detail,
but I just want to make our listeners
aware of two things that have happened
in the past week
that we should really be aware of,
and one is that our friend Jake Applebaum,
who we've had on this program before
and had at HOPE,
was able to disclose
in the Wall Street Journal this week
that his ISP, Sonic.net,
was forced to give all his email headers
over to the government,
and this is in relation to this
bizarro WikiLeaks investigation
that has yet to result in anyone
charged with anything
but lots of secret investigations.
So terrible that the government's doing this,
but bravo to Sonic.net
for trying as hard as they could
to fight this
and for disclosing it
when that was questionable.
He also has email accounts
with other providers like Google
that we can assume were subpoenaed,
but they haven't said anything
because the assumption is
that they just complied.
So that's one government surveillance story
here in the United States.
The other government surveillance story
is our friends at the CCC.
In Germany, got a hold of a copy
of the Trojan,
which is used by the German government
to sneak onto people's computers
and investigate them for various things.
So they were able to analyze that,
and to no one's surprise,
they found that it is very poorly written,
so it can be abused
to do things beyond its capacity,
but that its capacity is, of course,
greater than that allowed by law,
and so we're sort of waiting
for a response from the German government
to see how they can get away with this.
Well, those are, indeed, troubling stories
and things that we focus on all the time here
on Off the Hook,
and will continue to in weeks, months, years,
and in the future.
Now, you mentioned Jacob Appelbaum,
and he, of course, was also a speaker
at our most recent conference,
the Next Hope,
and we just heard Robert Steele,
another speaker at the Hope Conference.
It ties in nicely to what we're doing here tonight,
which is our fundraiser here at WBAI.
It's vitally important that our listeners pitch in
and help keep the station going
so that we can continue to bring you stories
like the kind Mike just mentioned
and all the ones that are coming in the future.
What we're offering tonight
is something that we call the Hope Keynote Package,
and what that is
is something we've never actually offered before.
Every single one of our keynote
and featured speakers at all of the Hope Conferences,
all eight of them so far,
starting from the first one,
ending with the Next Hope,
which took place in 2010.
We have Robert Steele as our first keynote speaker.
We've got Jello Biafra in there.
We've got Kevin Mitnick.
We've got Jacob Appelbaum, as we mentioned,
but I'd like to play an excerpt
from someone you might know from a more mainstream media,
Adam Savage from the Mythbusters.
He was a speaker at the last Hope,
which took place back in 2008,
and you can get all of this.
You can get 18 different talks on 20-plus DVDs
for a pledge of $75, 212-209-2950,
and for a pledge of $125,
you can get all of that,
all 18 Hope Keynote and Feature Talks
plus a full archive of Off The Hook,
every episode of this radio program
for a pledge of $125 to 212-209-2950.
But I've said enough.
Let's hear from Adam Savage
as he addresses a crowd of hackers back in 2008.
Ah, God, it's good to be here.
This is the group of people
that actually understand what we're talking about
when we don't even know what we're talking about,
which is most of the time.
I've been paying attention to this conference for a while.
I'm really honored that you guys have me here.
It really is my honor.
I feel like I'm one of the least qualified people in this room,
but being unqualified is my job,
so I'm just going to run with it.
What I have is about a 15-minute, maybe 10 minutes,
if I could talk really fast piece on obsession,
discussing my personal obsessions,
because I suspect that there's some minor
obsessive-compulsive tendencies in the audience.
And then I'm going to take questions from you guys
and just have a conversation for another 40 minutes.
All right? Sound good?
Okay.
We'll see how fast I can run through this thing.
About four years ago,
the New Yorker did a piece on a cache of dodo skeletons
found on the island of Mauritius.
Now, Mauritius is a small island
off the west coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean
where the dodo bird was found, discovered,
and eventually extinguished by human inhabitation or rats
or whatever your prevailing theory is.
Now, this article was about how archaeologists
were very excited to find this cache of skeletons
because it meant that they might actually be able
to assemble a full dodo skeleton for the first time.
While museums all over the world have different dodo skeletons,
none of them has a complete and whole skeleton
from a single dodo,
because the dodo went extinct at such a recent time, 1700.
Nobody was actually paying attention to extinction
as the tragedy that we understand it is now,
and nobody saved the bones.
Nobody saved all the bones from a single dodo.
Everyone's had to assemble theirs
from many, many different pieces.
Now, this appeals to me.
I have a particular obsession
with things of a peculiar type of rarity,
things that there's only one of in the world,
or maybe no one even knows where the one in the world is.
Lost manuscripts,
the Necronomicon from Evil Dead.
Yeah.
Tibetan clay-sealed tablet manuscripts found in caves.
Aristotle's Commedia from The Name of the Rose.
Things like this really, really get me going
and make me, for some reason,
it feeds right into my love of making objects,
because the objects that I make are, of course, one of a kind,
because I'm the one that made them.
There's this direct parity
between objects of this kind of rarity.
The thing that really got my attention, though,
about this article about the dodo birds
was this photograph.
I couldn't... This photograph was so compelling to me.
It was so beautiful.
There was so much personality in this skeleton.
I could see that this isn't fossilized, that it's real bone.
I could see the wire that the conservator used
to assemble the skull there around the beak.
There was so much story in this piece.
And it got to me that I wanted one.
LAUGHTER
Now, I have a little more money now than I used to.
And I began looking around on the web.
This is actually the dodo skeleton on the island of Mauritius
in their tourism museum. It's my favorite.
And I began downloading pictures of dodo skeletons
from all over the web, museums all over the world.
And I wanted to see if anyone sold a replica of one.
I figured it was a long shot.
I did find this couple that makes them for museums.
They charge about $20,000 apiece,
and I don't have that much money.
But I did manage to gather several hundred pictures
into my Creative Projects folder.
I think a lot of you have folders like this.
It's called Creative Projects.
It really is just full-out obsession.
Probably 40 gigabytes, 25,000 photos
of everything I'm interested in.
Rings, decoder rings.
Right here, that's a pistol ring.
You guys have probably seen this online,
just checking the same sites.
Airplane cockpits, people's workbenches.
Ah, the ZF-1.
Stormtrooper costumes.
And I'm going to give up my geek cred.
I hand-drew this map of Middle Earth for myself.
So one day, I'm at the art store,
and maybe about a month after I saw the dodo article,
it might have been a year,
but I'm at the art store, and I'm buying some Super Sculpey
and some stuff for my kids.
We're going to have a craft day at home.
And I got all these photos,
that for some reason are ringing through my head
while I'm in the art store, and I'm thinking,
you know, I've looked at the dodo skeleton enough,
the dodo skull enough, that I really understand
its topology, I think.
I've got it in my head, and maybe I could
make a dodo skull.
The thing you should understand about me, though,
is that I'm not a sculptor.
I have never been a traditional, soft sculptor.
In special effects, I was what you call
a hard-edged model maker.
I did this all day long.
Things from The Mummy, Destroyed New York
from AEI, parts from Terminator 3,
Bicentennial Man.
This kind of stuff, absolutely my belly wick.
I love hard-edged model making.
When it comes to the soft stuff, dragons, faces,
I leave that to the other guys.
Some of my friends are the most brilliant sculptors
I've ever met. It's their task.
However, I understood the topology
of this thing enough where I thought
I could tackle it, and I found this photo,
which is a hand with a skull,
which gives me a size reference.
I promptly printed it out.
I kept on expanding the size until the hand
matched my wife's hand, actually.
It looks like a lady's hand.
Then I had a size reference for the skull,
and I began to gather
all the rest of the photos I had, print them up
to an accurate scale.
After about an hour or two, I had a reasonable
facsimile of a dodo skull.
I wish I could show it to you.
The problem is, even though it occurred to me
at the moment to take pictures of the process
of my first, quote, sculpture,
for some reason I was lazy, and I did not take pictures.
However,
after about an hour, I had this dodo skull,
and the armature wire I had
going around to the back of it
to hold the skull up actually turned out to be
perfectly placed for a vertebrae,
because skeletons is another thing that I've been
obsessed with over the years.
I have several dozen in my collection,
and if I'm in the woods and I find some vertebrae,
I'm taking them home.
I understood vertebrae enough to actually
to know their mechanical, how they work
mechanically, the different parts ride upon
each other, and I began to fake
myself a dodo spine.
I wasn't thinking about making a full dodo at this point.
It was kind of like, the only way
you can clean a really messy room,
I don't know if you guys have ever seen one,
is to just
pick up one thing at a time. You don't have to
think about the whole thing, just one thing at a time,
and eventually the room is clean.
I was just going vertebrae by vertebrae by vertebrae,
just thinking about the next one and keeping on going,
adding some more wire, etc., etc., until
by the end of that day, I had a dodo skull
and a spine and the better part
of a pelvis.
So I kept going. I downloaded
more pictures of dodo skeletons,
more pictures of dodo pieces, parts.
Check this guy out.
I found drawings, original drawings
from naturalists who visited Mauritius
when the dodos were alive. A whole dodo
foot skeleton. This guy even
put it on a scanner with a ruler on it.
Thank God for him.
And so finally,
after about six weeks,
I made myself a dodo skeleton.
Oh, but that's only the beginning of the story, folks.
This is Adam Savage speaking
at The Last Hope back in 2008 here
in New York City, and
it's really the story about how he
got a, or was trying to
get a full replica of the Maltese falcon
made in lead.
I don't know if he ever actually succeeded
in doing this, but I think what this
demonstrates is
the hacker mindset.
How obsession does play a part
in it, how research,
downloading things, figuring things out,
just being creative and
ingenious in how you do things.
That's a major part of what hacking
is all about. And that's why
he's one of our featured speakers in this
package. That's why this and 17
other speakers will come your way for a pledge of $75.
212-209-2950.
Was anyone here
in the room when Adam gave that talk?
Rob, I believe you were. Yes, indeed I was.
It was a heck of a talk.
He kept going on like that for
basically the entire hour. He told that story,
he told other stories, and he took questions
from us. And he was really, we knew we were
talking to one of our own.
There was no doubt about that.
And you have to see what he was doing, too, because
there was a whole display that he
was showing. You definitely have to see
the visual part of his presentation to get the full effect.
It's wonderful. And this is on the
video, right? Of course, yeah.
You can see it on the video.
This is just one of our talks.
We're offering the HOPE keynote series.
Every single keynote address given
at every single HOPE conference.
Some featured speakers thrown in as
well. We have
Adam Savage.
Just for the last HOPE alone,
we have Adam Savage.
We have Steve Levy, who wrote the book
Hackers. Not the movie, the book.
We have
Jello Biafra. We have Kevin Mitnick.
We have private investigator
Steve Rombaum. We
also have, as we mentioned before, Robert
Steele. For Beyond HOPE
in 1997, we had
correspondent Brock
Meeks, who I believe
went on to work with MSNBC.
We have actually
no fewer than four different talks from Jello Biafra
because he spoke several times.
And we also have Richard Stallman.
We have
Dan Kaminsky. We have Jacob Applebaum.
We have all kinds of amazing
speakers. We have Steve Wozniak.
In fact, we're going to be playing something from Steve Wozniak in just
a few minutes. All of this comes
your way for a pledge of only $75.
212-209-2950.
But the most important thing is
you're pledging for the radio station.
You're keeping us on the air.
And you're keeping material like this
coming to you in a variety of ways.
We have people like this
on the radio. We have
conferences where we
feature this kind of material.
And there is no other outlet
on the FM dial or the AM dial in New York
City where we can openly discuss this
for hours on end. So
occasionally, yeah, we have to take a break and
ask for support in order to continue doing this
without commercial interruption.
$75, you get this amazing package of
more than 20 DVDs.
For 125, you'll get
even more DVDs because we'll throw in
an entire 20-plus
year archive of Off The Hook. Every single
show we've ever done coming to you
in full broadcast quality sound.
But you've got to give a call now.
We stopped the recording because the phones
weren't ringing while we were playing it because everyone's
riveted listening to it. And I understand
that. That makes perfect sense. But
for now, we have to
get a whole bunch of calls because
well, we're behind where we need to be.
212-209-2950.
Rob? It really strikes me the amazing
range of people we've had the privilege
of having as our keynote speakers.
We have people like Steve
Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick and
hacker figures like that. We've got Adam from Mythbusters.
We've also got other people. We've got
people like Aaron McGruder who
did the newspaper strip and later the cartoon
The Boondocks. Yeah, Aaron McGruder was one of our
keynotes. He's included in this package, too.
Yeah, and Jelebi Offer from Dead Kennedys and all these different
people from all these different walks of life who still
their work in some way represents
an element of the hacker mindset and what we're all
about and applying that to all these different
walks of life. We have the late Michael
Hart who was basically the founder of
e-books and unfortunately
passed away very recently.
We have
Mike, you know how to pronounce his name. Siva?
I've always referred to him
as Siva V.
There's a real cop out there. Really long
last name but very bright guy.
Formerly of NYU, now at the University
of Virginia. One of the
really the experts in the world on copyright
and free culture. I would say
Vaya Hayanathan. That's how I would say it.
Siva Vaya Hayanathan
but I know that's not right. I'm sorry.
He's the only Siva V. who's an expert in these
topics and he's worth hearing.
He really is and that was from H2K2
back in 2002.
So to run it down,
we had in
1994, way back in
1994, we had a very young looking
Robert Steele giving the very first
talk. And this has never been made available
before on DVD. It's brand new.
And you'll be one of the first people to get this.
If you give a call at 212-209-2950
you'll get his keynote
address. Imagine that back in 1994.
He's as relevant today as ever.
Russia Today just interviewed him about the
Wall Street occupation. But in 1994
he was our first speaker. Former
CIA operative,
Robert Steele. Very interesting talk.
Media correspondent in Brock Meeks in 1997
at Beyond Hope. General Biafra
in the year 2000 at H2K.
Aaron Magruder, as mentioned, H2K2
and Siva V.
At the 5th Hope we had Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak
and General Biafra once again.
At Hope No. 6 in 2006
Richard Stallman, Michael Hart
and again General Biafra.
At the last Hope in 2008
we had Steve Levy, General Biafra,
Kevin Mitnick, Steve Rombaugh
and Adam Savage.
And at the most recent one, the next Hope
in 2010, we had Dan Kaminsky
and Jacob Applebaum. All those talks,
all those amazing, riveting talks, you get
for a pledge of only $75.
This is video, full video presentation
of these events.
For $125 you get the entire
catalog of Off The Hook as well.
I'm just trying to do the math. You get 18 DVDs
when you pledge $75.
That's a number that's too small
for me to really compute how many
dollars per DVD. And you get
the radio station. The DVDs are
donated by 2,600 so none of your
pledge money goes to pay for their
printing.
It's really, I mean even
if we were selling them for that price, that would be
an amazing deal. But instead 2,600
is donating them. All your money goes to keep
us on the air, keep us doing the kind of
reporting that we do here on this program, here on this
radio station. There's really no
excuse for you not to call. 212-209-2950.
Make your pledge. If you think $75
or $125 is just too little
money for this sort of package,
please pledge more if you can afford it
because you'll
help fund it for the people
who can't afford it.
So many people don't call because they think we're asking for too little.
So if that's one of your
concerns, by all means, you can fix that yourself
by pledging more.
When you said there's no excuse, I
saw a few people in the audience raise their hands and say,
oh but there is an excuse. I still haven't gotten my premium
from the last fundraiser. And yes, we
hear you. We hear every single one of you that has
not yet gotten premiums. Sometimes
there are delays. We're still waiting for the TV Begons
from Mitch. We're still waiting for the autographed
books from Kevin Mitnick.
But everybody gets what
they pledge for at some point. In fact,
in one of the more
ongoing stories, those
people who pledged for the
Tesla material back in, I think, January,
we had a very unfortunate situation
where we didn't get what we were promised
from them. We ran into them
at the recent Maker Faire in Queens, and
they promised to send us everything, and I think
that's what they mean at this time. So, we don't forget.
We don't forget, and you will get
everything that you pledge for.
You won't get it overnight, I know.
We're a bunch of volunteers here,
and everyone's doing what they can.
But we are very adamant about
making sure everybody gets what they pledge for
at some point. So if that's holding you up
by any stretch of the imagination,
please don't let it hold you up. 212-209-2950.
I see we only have
one call on the line. We should have something like
five or six. There are enough people down there to take
calls, and Adam Savage
is still going here,
still as enthusiastic
as ever, telling the same story.
And that's only one story that he told.
He gave a good long talk
there, and every single one of these talks
is around
an hour, maybe an hour and a half in length,
and they all have fascinating material in them.
All yours for a pledge of $75.
212-209-2950.
...did all this work for me, taking my wax
master, actually spraying it with the plaster
and prepping it, setting it up in his
forge and actually pouring it
in bronze. Here's the bronze master
just coming out of the mold.
Here it is sitting on a scale. You can see it weighs
27 and a half pounds.
Okay, Bernie, I'm sure you can get another phone call coming in.
This is really an amazing
talk from Adam
Savage. I happened to be there
for The Last Hope, and
it was a great talk, and he was
so accessible. He was, as Rob
pointed out, he was one of us, and
it was just a good energy in that room.
And not unlike
most of the other
keynote speakers we've
had since 1994, this
is really an incredible selection
of hacker
history that you can sit back
and enjoy either on your DVD
player at home or your computer
or just listen to it.
This is a great package. It's just like
$3 or $4 a
disc, it works out. But the main thing is you're
supporting WBAI, which is really
the only radio station I know of
that's going to bring you this kind of information
about hacker culture and what's going on.
So please, call 212-
209-2950.
We will give you this donation
from $2,600 of a
big pile of DVDs of amazing
hacker culture
history since 1994's
keynote speech
at the First Hope conference.
Ernie, you did succeed in getting one more phone call in.
Now, RedHack is going to try and get a couple
more in. Is that right?
Well, I was just going to say that you're talking about
talks that span
about 16 years. That's a lot of history.
And I'm sure that in a lot of them
the speakers make
reference to what's going on
at that time.
And some of them are very relevant, like
Jacob Applebaum's talk about Wikileaks
and what was going on at the time with
that.
You're going to hear that. You're going to hear that
evolution over that time period
of how things have changed. I mean, the world is a really
different place now than it was in 1994.
You already got your call, so you can stop and move on to the next part.
Kyle, do you want to get a call in now to thank you, RedHack?
I just wanted to
reiterate, this stuff hasn't ever been
seen before. The audio has been available,
but we've got-
Thank you, Kyle. You got your call.
Continue with your sentence.
This is fresh video. We've never been able to offer this to
people that want to call in.
I do, if you're interested in this package.
It was amazing. I did see this talk
and it felt
very warm and very
different than what you might get at a typical
security conference.
Something that may not
seem relevant, but it totally is
if you look at it. These talks are not in any
way dry.
Like you say, the typical security talk where
it's, okay, move on to the next diagram. No, these
are animated speakers. That's why the keynotes, that's
why they're featured speakers. And the thing that amazes
me, I don't know if you heard this at the beginning of this talk,
he feels inadequate in this
room of hackers. He feels
humbled to be here amongst us.
And I just was blown away by that
because obviously this guy
is a giant in the world of
hackers. People watch
the program Mythbusters all the time.
Such a sense of humor, such a sense
of adventure. That's exactly what
hacking is all about. And it's just amazing
to see people like that
believing in the hacker world as much
as we believe
in them and what they do. And
we've seen the same thing at Occupy Wall Street.
We've seen people embracing the hacker world
as well. It all is so relevant.
And I'm never
too amazed to realize that.
Anyway, we had three calls on the line
just now. Anyone want to try to get a fourth call?
And then we can move on to our next feature.
Rob, you're leaning towards the microphone. Go ahead.
Yeah, going back to Aaron McGruder's
talk, it was really funny because going back
to when he was speaking, he was intimidated
by being at a hacker con. He wasn't quite sure what he was
doing there. But then he started talking about his work,
which at that time was his newspaper strip, The Boondocks,
and the things he had to do
and the ways he had to work his way into an industry
that really wasn't willing or ready
for his type of work and
his goals in that. And of course
it would be years later that he finally
got what he wanted, which was a hit cartoon
version of his strip. And it's
funny, especially for fans of
The Boondocks and for his work, to see
where he was at, I think it was 1997
or 2000, I think maybe,
that he was there and
talking about it. 212-209-2950.
If you want to pledge $75,
you get all 18 of these keynote
addresses and featured speakers
from the various Hope conferences.
$125, you'll get that plus a full
archive of every Off the Hook episode
aired since 1988, even
before the Hope series began.
Off the Hook was on the air. And you'll get
every episode up through 2010,
which is really an
incredible deal, much less than it's usually
offered for. That's for a pledge of $125
to 212-209-2950.
I'd like to move into our next
feature here, which is
well,
basically, it's Steve Wozniak,
but he's talking about some
interesting adventures
at the beginning of Apple with
Steve Jobs, who very tragically passed away
a week ago tonight, in fact.
We learned this last week.
And it's
amazing to me to hear
how something that turned into such
a monumental success
worldwide started
out with something that is so
recognizable to all of us in the hacker
world, that sense of adventure and
just sort of fighting the system
and doing things your own way.
And I just hope we all take
a moment to listen to some of Steve's
stories here. Steve spoke
at the fifth Hope,
which was 2004,
I believe.
And he
tells some very interesting
stories from a hacker perspective.
212-209-2950
to get that talk, plus 17
others.
And I don't think
there's anything more we can say. Mike, you?
I just want to point out, this is just one of three talks by
someone named Steve. There are a lot of Steves,
yeah. Steve Rombaugh, we have Steve Levy,
we have Steve Wozniak, and of course
he's talking about Steve Jobs. So, a lot
of Steves in the world. We do
realize that, but it's not going to be that
confusing to people who pledge.
It'll all be nice and labeled. All with very different
perspectives on the world and different things to
tell you about it. Absolutely. Please keep
calling us while we play this, because if you call
us and pledge for this, you'll be able to see it, as well
as hear it. But let's
take a listen to Steve Wozniak
at the Hope Conference back in
2004.
I went down there and felt that the commuter club
is information, is something
you've learned should be made available
to the world. People can learn from what
you and extend it and do other things. It's different
than making products. So, of course,
I would pass out schematics to almost everyone
in the computer club, schematics
of the Apple One.
The listings of the code that was in it, I would pass
them out. They were given away freely
to try to share, because it was a sharing environment.
How many big companies
like Apple ever started out by
giving away their stuff for free?
So, it's kind of unusual.
Nowadays, you go to a company, everything has to be
secret, not talked about, not exposed,
even if it doesn't matter if somebody knew what you were doing.
So, the Apple One,
Steve Jobs, that was another one, he said,
well, let's sell it.
Let's sell a PC board, make a PC board for 20
bucks, sell it for 40.
We'll have to put a few hundred bucks each
in. I didn't think we'd get our money back. And he said,
we'll have a company for once in our lives.
It was almost like you're
not doing it for seriousness.
You can justify doing it
just to say you're doing it.
Just like a lot of the hacking
pranks you do. It doesn't have to
pay back with success and money
and all that. So, we'll make these
PC boards, and I said, well, if I design it,
I'm ethical. It belongs to Hewlett-Packard.
So, I went to Hewlett-Packard, and we had
big meetings, and I tried to convince them I wanted
Hewlett-Packard to do it. I loved that company.
I was never going to leave that company in my life.
And they turned me down, actually, believe it or not,
three times.
So, Steve and I
started, and we built the Apple One,
and we started getting a little bit of fame in this hobby
computer world that was to come.
Not exactly
hacking stories, but we had this neat
little fun device, and as I
wrote the basic on my own, I mean, I just did everything
myself, because whatever it took to
get a complete computer finished, I had to do it.
It didn't matter that I'd never read a book on it or taken
a class on it. Had to do it.
Had to force yourself to find the better ways.
And you know what? When you don't know how to do
something, and you go at it yourself
and you're smart enough, you'll come up with better
solutions than the ways companies are doing it today.
Almost always. The two things
that helped me the most was not ever having
done most of the things I did that turned out great,
not having done them before, and knowing
the ways they're done normally,
and also not having enough funds
to just buy my way out of it.
So, this
Apple One, I was at work one day,
I got a phone call from Steve Jobs, and he said,
are you sitting down?
And I said, no, and he said, well,
I got an order for $50,000.
And that was
the biggest financial shock in Apple's history.
And I was floored. He, the one
computer store in our area, and they wanted
to buy 100 computers for 500 bucks
each. And we
so, man, this was big time.
So I had Hewlett-Packard's legal department go to
all the divisions to make sure I was in the clear,
because I wasn't leaving Hewlett-Packard.
And we built the Apple One.
And, as a real computer.
And we had to price it.
You're going to sell it to the store for 500 bucks wholesale,
what do you price it? We figured, add a
third, that makes it $667.
Well, I was into repeating
digits on phone numbers and things, so I
66666 came to
mind. And neither Steve or I
knew that 666 had biblical references.
Until later.
It's really funny to go to these
websites that tell how satanic Apple is.
So,
anyway,
I was still working at Hewlett-Packard.
We're getting real famous in our little
community of computer hobbyists around the
world and the country, mainly, with this
Apple name. We were first in alphabetic order
in all the comparison charts.
And had some
super, super, super things.
Very few chips for what you got.
And it was the first small computer
to say, small computers will come with a human
keyboard. That was a huge
huge step, even though the Apple 2
was going to take 10 first ever
steps that we'd never back off from.
That one step of using the keyboard was
probably more important.
The Apple 2 I designed extremely
quickly, lucked into the best designs of
my life, condensing many chips into
one, clever different approaches, using
chips for things they weren't even designed for,
because it got the chip count down.
And this Apple 2 just turned out so good.
The first time ever was going to have color.
Where does color come from?
You know what?
It's one of those things where you have to try the impossible.
I was not an analog engineer
that I could look at all the formulas
and the calculus for the chroma
signals, and how they got added, and the
phase changes, and the circuits that do that.
I didn't know that stuff.
But somehow an idea floated in my head
from what I could do, where my experience base
was. Spin a little
code around, a 4-bit code,
1011 maybe, 1010,
whatever. Spin it around in a register
at the right speed,
and what comes out the end
is a bunch of bits of 1s and 0s that
look like colored TV from what I learned
in high school. They look like
colored TV signals.
And some of them are spaced
differently in time, and there are four different colors
of them. Some of them are all highs,
and that's a white. And some of them are all
zeros, and that's a black.
And I wonder if
this would show up as color.
And sometimes you've got to take a risk
not even knowing if it'll work.
And I finally built this thing in the first day,
turned on a TV set, and there was
color. Oh my
God. This is just, it was unbelievable
to Steve and I. It was only a few months after we
were introduced to the Apple One.
So, just amazing
lot of designs in a very short amount of
time. You can do that when you're one person
crossing a lot of disciplines.
I could come up with the ideas of what
I wanted to do. I could sketch it out on
paper. I could build the chips. I could solder them.
I could write the code for it. I could test it.
I could debug it. I could add features.
I could get ideas, change the code, and change
the hardware to match each other.
When you cover all these disciplines yourself,
you really aren't hung up by anyone else
and having to wait and schedule things.
And you can go about ten times as fast on
a lot of projects. You know, at least twice
as fast on any project.
I was very lucky. Now, we didn't
have the, all of a sudden, this was
the third computer to have a keyboard.
In between us and them
was one from Processor Technology.
And we knew that we
could sell a thousand a month because the
Processor Technology Sol was selling a thousand a month.
But how do you build a thousand computers
that cost $250 each?
You need $250,000.
We didn't have any money. I didn't own
a car, a house. We didn't have, you know, $10,000.
We didn't have anything.
So how do you do that? So we started looking for
money. And
we went to one company, Commodore, and they said
well, they liked our computer
but they're going to build their own. They don't need all these fancy
features. They thought theirs was going to be cheaper
to build than my clever design with
all the color and sound and paddles and
dynamic RAM and slots
and high res and all that stuff.
But
their head of engineering, Andre Sousan,
left Commodore and came to
Apple saying he thought we had the right product.
Not them. Not they.
So sometimes you have to sit
down and do something with a quality
level in your head that makes sense
or it doesn't.
We tried to sell our product to Commodore.
We tried to sell it to Atari. We tried to sell it
to VCs. VCs didn't like
speaking non-business language
like I would. They would say,
what's the market size? And I would say a million
computers. And they'd say, how do you
know? I'd say, well, it's bigger than Ham Radio
and there's a million Ham Radio operators.
You know,
sometimes people can't listen to the
simple truths.
Eventually, though, we met Mike Markkula.
He was about 32.
He'd made a million and a half bucks at Intel.
He'd been an engineer, gone into marketing.
Very well respected. He had a home
in the Cupertino Hills and a nice daughter
and he got interested
in what we were doing and believed in it.
He talked with Steve Jobs a lot and came up with
formulations of how it was going to change
people's lives, how they were going to use computers in their
own homes and what it was going to bring them.
And
so he joined us as a third
and equal partner and really gave us
a lot of input that we needed. But you never hear
about him because he didn't come from
nothing to starting Apple.
Somehow he's always left out of the picture. A lot
of important people are.
All right, we're listening to Steve Wozniak
giving an address at the
Fifth Hope, the Hackers on Planet Earth
conference here in New York City back in
2004.
And we're offering that plus another
17 talks by all kinds of people
in the hacker community of one
sort or another for a pledge of $75
here at WBAI.
212-209-2950.
Steve gave a great talk. I think
it went about 90 minutes. Any of
you guys in the room for that one?
That was a great talk. You were there, Bernie?
I was. That was a great talk. Steve
talked about being one of our
own. He was, I mean,
you hear a lot about Apple and how
it changed over the years, but this
was really at its hacker roots
how Steve Wozniak
came up with these amazing designs and
came up with them with everybody openly.
He was really patient, but after his
talk he sat, I think, for about two
hours at a table
autographing with a magic
marker anything anybody wanted to bring with
him, whether it was their old Apple II
computer or their
Mac laptops or
whatever. He was just very
friendly. He was great. He was amazing.
He was just a good guy to have around.
He also brought the first Segway to Hope. This is
why we have Segways now. He brought his own Segway and
riding it around. We said, hey, that looks like a lot of fun.
Let's do that for Hope No. 6, and we did.
It's been a tradition ever since.
Steve was a great guy.
He gave an amazing
talk at the conference
telling all about the founding of Apple
and antics with Steve Jobs
and various other
people in the computer
world in the early days.
Wow, what history.
It's part of what you get for
people who are really into the history.
What's the perfect package for you?
Either the $125 or the $75 version.
For $75, you get
18 talks of
various keynotes and featured speakers
at the Hope conferences.
For $125, you get all that plus
the off-the-hook
archives, which I think is about
23 years of us
in one form or another.
Full broadcast quality.
212.209.2950. We can only offer
this for another 10 minutes, though. Rob?
If you've got a computer on your desk
or in your bag or even in your pocket, you
owe Steve Wozniak and what he's talking about
in this sequence of events something.
That's just one of the amazing chunks
of our shared history that you're going to get
on this set if you dial
212.209.2950
and pledge your
pledge and help us out.
Most importantly, you get this radio station.
We're well over $1,000 now, which is great, but we
need to bring it up closer to $2,000
to really make things
right here, because we didn't do great last week.
We did okay. We didn't do great, but it's mostly because
the phones were broken.
We have one call on the line now. Let's make that
five or six calls. 212.209.2950.
One thing
we don't tend to mention, but
it is a factor.
If you pledge to the station and you get
one of these premiums, you also get a membership
in the station, which if you care about the station
and where it's going and you would maybe
like to have a voice in that, if you become a
pledger, you become part of the station and
you will get the newsletter and all that sort of stuff.
You will be part of what's going on here.
I want to play a little bit more from Steve Weissnap.
First, I want to thank Matthew from
Baskin Ridge, New Jersey.
I want to thank Zephyr from Montclair,
New Jersey, and someone who only
wants to be identified as a teacher from
New Jersey. Everybody's from New Jersey tonight.
That's not right. People from New York
call, fix this. Maybe it's because we're
giving the area code.
You do have to dial the area code.
It used to be you didn't have to dial the area code, but you do.
No excuse. 212-209-2950.
Maybe you have to dial one first.
Maybe that's what's confusing people. We have two calls
on the line. I really think we should make that four.
Let's bring Steve up for a little bit longer
just to give another part of his talk.
I love teaching those young kids
the fun they had
learning new things every day and exploring
it. The biggest day of all in their
life was the day they got to be a
server, and they learned how to
toggle all the things in the Macintosh
and it made their Macs a server.
Then they could access everybody else around the classroom
and send files and stuff like that.
I always told them, if somebody doesn't protect
the right areas of their disk
and you get onto it, you can do
anything to it you want
to mess them up as long as you can restore
it to what it was.
Every year for eight years, that was the rule in my class.
If you do something to somebody else's computer,
you can get it back to what it was.
They'd come up with the funny pranks that makes
the fonts black and the menus
black and the screen black and everything black.
Somebody turned on a computer and they couldn't see
one darn thing, but they could laugh
and get it back to what it was
or hide folders and things. I looked up once
in the class this girl, Sandy Runyon,
says, Steve, Steve,
my control panels just disappeared.
What?
What's going on?
You sure? Hey, another
folder just disappeared. I looked
over and there's little Daniel Lee
hunched at his keyboard,
kind of smiling.
Just hit them. They were fixable.
I got to do...
I actually did one like that that I'm just
about to discuss.
It was so much fun. It was more important to
me in the class that everything you did with computers
had a fun element,
an attraction, or something especially
imagination and how it worked.
The kids sometimes even found things
in programs. They'd say, I got a little arrow
to move in Clarusworks, Steve. I said,
Clarusworks can't do that. I did it.
Sure enough, this kid had a bunch of little white
boxes, one over the other, that made this arrow seem
to move. So I learned things
from those kids all the time. It's incredible.
Just to hear Steve talk about
teaching kids and the things
they're capable of and just that
whole hacker mentality of,
yeah, you know, you can experiment. You can be mischievous
but just don't cause any damage. He
gets that. A lot of people get that. You'd be surprised
how many people understand that very
basic part of the hacker world.
Now, you can get this plus
the 17 other talks, 212-209-2950
for the last few minutes of the program.
We're listening to Steve Wozniak.
We have so many other people that
will be part of this package. We have Kevin Mitnick.
We have Richard Stallman.
We have Dan Kaminsky,
Jacob Applebaum, Jello Biafra.
The list just goes on and on
of all these talks that you'll get for
a $75 pledge. You'll get
DVD video of that 212-209-2950
for $125. You get all those
talks plus
23 years of Off the Hook
DVD with full
stereophonic sound, broadcast quality.
212-209-2950.
Talk about education. Think of what an education
you'll get if you watch these talks.
The history
over the almost two decades
that these talks span, the huge
variety of topics.
You get them all in the mail, all in one
package and you can watch them at your leisure.
212-209-2950
is the number to call.
There's just four minutes left to get this.
Personal computer people are here. I didn't mean it that way.
They're here,
meaning that we can't be here. We have to
leave and we only have a couple of minutes
and after that this package
is not available. Now, I know a lot of people
curse our names, curse our lineage
because we don't offer this
beyond 8 o'clock. The reason we don't do that
is because if we were to offer this 24
hours a day, 7 days a week, do you know how many
people would take advantage of it? Do you know how many DVDs
we'd have to make? It would be insane.
You wouldn't have to necessarily listen to Off the Hook
in order to pledge for this and that's why we ask people
please call during our
7-8 broadcast period on Wednesday
nights and that way we know.
If you're listening online, you can still
donate. Rob, do you want to tell people how to do that?
Yeah, if you go to WBAI.org
and click the donation link, there's an
option there to donate to your favorite show.
Our show would get credit for your donation.
We can't give you our premiums for that
because it's after our live broadcast
but your donation would still count toward our show
and help keep us on the air and
you would get the radio station as your premium.
And you can get, I believe, radio station premiums
like a BAI shirt or something
like that but if you want to get this
amazing package of 18 keynote addresses
including Steve Wozniak
who tells many
funny stories. I can't tell you how well
it worked. Yeah, you'll find out what that's
all about if you get the
package of 18 DVDs
actually no, 20 plus DVDs
18 talks. 212-209-2950
pledge is $75
pledge is $125. You get all that
plus off the hook from the beginning to the end
or the end of 2010
anyway. 212-209-2950
join the callers on the line now
we are out of time
but you're not. You still have a couple
of minutes left. Give us a call.
212-209-2950
We won't be here next week. We'll
update you on the website as to when we'll be back
but this might be our
last fundraising show for a while so please
take advantage of it.
212-209-2950
See you next time. Good night.