Peter Sagal: Hi, my name is Peter Sagal. You may know me
from my habit of telling fart jokes on NPR, and I am honored to host this online virtual
festschrift for Michael Hawley, primarily because of my affection and debt to the man.
I'm also a little intimidated by all this because until two days ago I didn't know what
a festschrift was. If I was forced to guess, I would have maybe said it was one of those
compounded German words used to describe a particular kind of ennui. But if I may start
off this event the way I started off all my term papers in college, Webster's dictionary
defines festschrift as, "a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute,
especially to a scholar". Okay, that helps. I was also told by Nicholas Negroponte who
organized this, that this event should be about Michael's ideas and their influence.
Peter Sagal: So in no particular order, these are the ideas
that I've absorbed through careful study of the works of Michael Hawley. First, wear vests
with lots of pockets, but if you want to do something lasting, then devote yourself to
building community, because we don't really need gadgets. This is [inaudible 00:01:20]
and art and music as much as we need people to share all those things with. And that,
ultimately, is a hell of an idea. Ladies and gentlemen who have joined us in the great
virtual moment, please welcome our first speaker at this virtual festschrift and that is the
organizer of today's event, Nicholas Negroponte. He's the cofounder of the MIT Media Lab and
the founder of One Laptop Per Child. Nicholas.
Nicholas Negroponte: I'm very happy to participate because Mike
Hawley is the embodiment of the media lab. I'll be very brief because my remarks are
how Mike Hawley followed and actually perfectly matched every idea at the beginning of the
Media Lab when it was conceived primarily by Jerry Wiesner, who was the president of
MIT in the 80s, as a place where art and science and technology could cohabitate. But at the
time, nobody thought that they could cohabitate in one head. The idea was that it would be
in a place and the people would collaborate. And so, collaboration was the key word and
you'd have artists and you'd have scientists, you now have the engineers. And in fact, MIT
was the right place to do it, because our motto in Latin is "Mens et Manus", which is
the mind and the hand, so perfect place. But what we were hoping, and we found with Mike
Hawley in 1985, that's a long time ago, were Leonardo da Vincis. People who were amphibious,
people who could do well in all of those fields.
Nicholas Negroponte: And the bloodstream of MIT started to accept
this. We were slightly rejected in the beginning, but had started to accept it, because art
was somewhat extra-curricular and, as a point of view, it wasn't as highly respected. And
in a period of less than five years, sort of from 1985, let's say to 1990, we went from
sort of a [inaudible 00:04:28] to almost the establishment, thanks to people like Mike.
And I wanted to tell you one story about the founding which will tie this to some of the
other speakers. When I was asked, "Give me an example. Where has this happened before
in history? How has this happened before? Didn't people invent things like television
and then artists used it?" And I said, "Think of photography. Most of photography was invented
by photographers."
Nicholas Negroponte: Somebody wanted more speed, somebody wanted
color, somebody wanted motion. In other words, while there's certainly scientific involvement,
the inventors were the creative users. And when Mike Hawley joined the Media Lab, he
was the first graduate student that embodied it perfectly and then for the rest of his
life. And with that, I will pass it on to the next speaker. I'm sure each one will address
some aspect of what Mike did in science, in art, and in general, and technology.
Peter Sagal: Thank you Nicholas and thanks again for organizing
this event. Next, let's [inaudible 00:06:02] a member and Associate Director of the Media
Lab that Nicholas just spoke about, Mr. Andrew Lippman. Andrew, the floor is yours.
Andy Lippman: Thank you, Peter. Part of Mike is about extremes
and extremities, hands and feet as an expression of an extreme mind. Mike's extremes go from
the head to the toe or the fingers. Winning the Van Cliburn Amateur Competition in 2002
and the Most Creative Programming Award the year before in 2001. And of these two, the
programming award is significant, because when Mike plays, it's a lesson in music, musical
history, and context. Far more than a flurry of notes, Mount Everest, and the Boston Marathon,
are the other end of the body. These were likewise lessons. The marathon was a lesson
to his students as well as to the world. Swallowing a pill to reveal temperature to make the point
that we had no idea what our body temperature really is through the course of our activities.
Using GPS in its infancy to teach where we could go as a personal peripheral. Not races
or conquests, but teachings.
Andy Lippman: Why do I bring up these two examples? There
are many more. In some ways it's because Mike expresses himself through these physical extremities
in extreme ways. His contributions are demonstrative, visceral, and instructive. But more important,
as I already said, what seems like a feat is really a moment of teaching. Only once
did I see Mike play the piano without a lesson. That was the Van Cliburn performance, but
not the rehearsal. He got the Most Creative Program Award at the Cliburn because he is
the most creative programmer of music. He knows that it's not just sound, just as playing
[inaudible 00:07:53] tones and muscle memory. He understands and explicates the mind and
the context of the composer.
Andy Lippman: Just as playing is about reading, hearing,
enacting, the compositions are part of a world of music. When he speaks and plays, it changes
your view of that world, by far more than what you heard. And that's why Everest and
the feet matter. Mike's role is to change the way one thinks by actions, words, and
stories. Of course, this isn't the whole picture. You'll hear more vivid cases of his expression
of mind as the hour proceeds, but for me it's the context, the commentary, and the lessons
that marks his contribution. Thank you.
Peter Sagal: Thank you. And next up, chairman of the MIT
corporation, Mr. Robert Millard. Bob.
Bob Millard: Thank you Peter. Thank you Nicholas, for this
beautiful idea, and Mikhail for, well, all the technical wizardry. I'm really honored
to say a few words, so thank you for that as well. I think the task is to speak for
as many of us as possible, not just for myself, about the tremendous body of work that Mike
has produced so far in his lifetime. Of course, the best part of that body of work, if you
may, is Mike himself. And now, as he himself would be the first to say, the son that Mike
and Nina produced, Tyco. Like a lot of you, I came to know Mike through various unrelated
channels because he's all over the place. He just comes into your life from different
directions. It's sort of emblematic of his Renaissance nature because at the heart of
it, Mike is just a curious kid. Wicked smart, he loves life. It's really infectious and
fun to know Mike. He's what we would call a really cool guy.
Bob Millard: By the way, I've always thought that if you
had something nice to say about someone, you really should tell him directly. So Mike has
actually heard all this from me over the years. So, sorry to embarrass you again, Mike. The
first time I heard of Hawley was when I read about some crazy person at MIT that had produced
the biggest book in the world. One of you already mentioned that. And then a different
crazy person in New York, whom I knew, had actually bought one of these books. Invited
me over to meet the author and see the thing. Well, that's when I met Mike and we just sort
of fell into a whirlwind of common interest. Of course, that book wasn't just stunt. It
was a five foot by seven foot work of art, full of incredible and important photography
about Bhutan, a place in those days that very few of us had visited, so it was really an
adventure travel log as well.
Bob Millard: So, then being at MIT, I wound up seeing a
bit more of Mike and learned that not only was he an innovative and artistic photographer,
but a technologist and an academic as well. Somewhere along the line I learned that he
played piano and then lo and behold, I ran into him again on a deserted main island that
Bob Metcalf owns that he invites a bunch of guys to camp out on every summer. And that's
where I learned that Mike is not only a great camper, kind of not, actually, but a truly
great raconteur.
Bob Millard: Just to pick one random subject that I found
particularly riveting, was there was this one night on Green's Island, this place where
Metcalf [inaudible 00:11:47] where when Mike gave us this huge sort of academic type lecture
on fake watches. It turns out that watch forgeries, at least you know when Mike talks about it,
is just an incredibly interesting field. The whole industry of it. The economics, the legalities,
the manufacturing, the distribution, the whole marketing, everything about it. It's kind
of interesting and so, for some years after it, I kept asking him questions about fake
watches. It just sort of grabbed me and then I got an incredible series of emails, really
dispatches from Mike, who was at the time trolling around [inaudible 00:12:22], seeing
how all those watches were made.
Bob Millard: Anyway, the point of bringing it up is, I've
been thinking for a while that a lot of you have gotten those types of emails with this
odd, crazy, really interesting information, and we should collect them into a book, The
collected emails of Mike Hawley. Not only would it be a reservoir of interesting and
amusing knowledge, but really, it's the craft of beautiful storytelling. Because this man
is truly a great communicator. And that's what great artists really are. They're great
communicators. So, let me just say a word about his music, which is another form of
communication and it happens to be my great passion, although I have only about 1% of
Mike's ability. But I do recognize a great musical talent. And here again, it's about
storytelling. Music just says things that words can't.
Bob Millard: There was this time, a bunch of years ago,
Mike and I were in California and we stopped in and he introduced me to Amy Tan. We were
at her house in California and she and her husband were upstairs doing something and
Mike and I were downstairs and he played a Bach prelude for me. And ever since that day,
every single time I play Bach, which is to say a massacre, I always think of Mike, and
I try to make them sound the way Mike makes them sound, which is to say that there were
these multiple voices and getting them all to sing with each other is where the real
beauty is. You've heard him play, a lot of you, and you know the gig. He tells you something
interesting about the composer and the piece of music, but then he just lets the music
draw you in below the surface and take you somewhere that's really profound and different,
but important. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but whenever Mike plays for you,
it's really for you. It's never about him trying to impress you with his virtuosity,
which he certainly has.
Bob Millard: By the way, whoever's more digitally capable
than I, I have a good digital collection of a lot of Mike's performances and can forward
them to whoever wants them. So anyway, just, here's this guy, and his many talents as photographer
or a camper, don't forget that. An academic, an adventurer, a raconteur, a philosopher,
an impresario, a musician, a family man, and above all else, a friend. And in the end,
all this is about Mike communicating, sharing a way of empathizing, and in doing that, he
just has connected so many of us with each other and I'm so grateful for that. Whether
through his stories about fake watches or shipwrecks off the coast of Greece. He went
with Alex Dreyfus once to do that. And getting all of us people together at EG. What a thing
that is. Thank you Jane, as well. Or his music.
Bob Millard: It's all about Mike's sharing stories and
getting us to share our stories. It's never about him, oddly enough. It's kind of about
us. It's him sharing his curiosity and his love of life and sometimes it feels like his
love for us. So anyway, he dropped so many pebbles in the river of life, not knowing
he's even doing it, probably not even conscious of it, let alone thinking about where those
pebbles will fall. Many, by the way, into our own lives. Together the whole enterprise
of Mike is really a beautiful thing that's changed the world and meant so much to all
of us and continues to. So thanks, Mike, for sharing your thoughts, your stories, your
art, and your friends. You've really made everybody's life better, so thank you.
Peter Sagal: Thank you, Bob. A quick story. I met Michael
myself when I was invited via the intercession of a friend to the EG in 2013 and for a lot
of complicated reasons, my life was complicated and I didn't know if I could make it. And
I had all these endless phone conversations with Michael Hawley, who I had not at that
point met. And he had sort of this infinite patience to listen to this guy he did not
know talk about his situation and why I may or may not be able to come. It's like, "Why
does this guy have so much time to talk to me? I thought he was important." And of course,
I found out it's not that he's not important. It's that he has the gift of making everybody
he talks to feel like they're important.
Peter Sagal: And that was the first [inaudible 00:17:26]
power, which he can take somebody you've known of and admired pretty much your whole life
and instantly with a snap of his fingers, transform that person into your friend, which
is what he did for me and our next speaker, professor Larry Tribe, University Professor
and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard. Larry the screen-
Larry Tribe: Okay. So I want to begin by thanking Mike
for making all of this possible, and Nicholas for organizing it, and Peter for introducing
it. My first email from Mike was an unanticipated message in January 2016 opening with a hardy
wave from the MIT and of the Charles and thanking me for piping up on the natural-born citizen
question and on Ted Cruz's ineligibility for the presidency. No, I'd never met Mike or
exchange words with him, but I was motivated to learn as much as I could about him because
what followed that introduction was it genuinely erudite exegesis of all things on the constitutional
meaning of the requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen. A series of hypotheticals
worthy of generating a marvelous Socratic dialogue in an advanced constitutional law
class and a digression into methodological questions of originalism and living constitutionalism
that would have done any of my colleagues in the legal academy proud.
Larry Tribe: After checking out Mike's more than impressive
CV and finding myself very much out of my depth in virtually all of the realms of knowledge
and practice from applied physics to musicology and world-class piano performance in which
this Renaissance man had more than excelled, I assumed he wouldn't have much time for the
likes of me, a mere legal practitioner and theorist, and I didn't pursue a dialogue with
him until suddenly hearing from him again a little over a month after the November 2016
election. Mike had been working with a colleague of mine, Larry Lessig, and had heard from
an elector who wanted to change his vote from Trump, who had won the election against Clinton
in his state. Mike wrote, "It now seems clear the Russians had their thumb on the scale,"
and Mike was exploring the legal, constitutional, and moral responsibilities of electors who
believed that someone like Trump who had decisively lost the popular vote, should not become president.
Larry Tribe: As always, Mike was far ahead of his time.
The U S Supreme court will be considering in an oral argument to be conducted by teleconference
next month the very question that Mike was pursuing before the electoral college met
to declare Trump the winner. Back in late 2016, Mike was hoping that I could help him
reach out to my former student and research assistant, Barack Obama, to make public the
intelligence report on Moscow's role, so that the 30 or so, or electors who were considering
voting down Trump could be fully informed. Typical of Mike was the idea that we should
round down to an odd number like 27. Just a touchdown and a field goal away.
Larry Tribe: There followed what Mike called an odd fact,
one of what Robert Millard calls Mike's remarkable stories, and let me quote it, "When George
Everest and his team surveyed an enormous mountain in Nepal in the mid 1800s, they used
a huge theodolite that floated in mercury. Not easy to schlep around. Every time they
surveyed the new mountain, the measurement was exactly 29,000 feet right on the nose.
Nobody thought a mountain could be that high. Surely it would collapse under its own mass.
So the number they sent to the Royal geographical society was 2002. More real." Now who in the
world but Mike Hawley would connect a theodolite floating in mercury to the politics of flipping
the electoral college?
Larry Tribe: In the years that followed, Mike and I conducted
a nonstop correspondence on everything under the sun from the emoluments clauses of the
US Constitution, to the impeachment power and its implementation, to ways of pushing
back against the bizarre view that a sitting president can never be indicted. To this strange
jurisprudence of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in the handling of local zoning
issues in Cambridge, to the best strategy for watching the solar eclipse visible in
the Northeast in August of 2017, to the connections among abstract mathematics, and the visual
arts, and legal theory, and how I might display those connections in an EG presentation in
Carmel. To how we might protect the integrity of the upcoming election, the possibility
of bringing this terrible presidency to an end.
Larry Tribe: Invariably, Mike's insights help me understand
more deeply. In the meantime, my partner Elizabeth and I have become Mike and Nico's good friends,
sharing many delicious meals and wonderful times together. We have marveled at Mike's
musical wizardry, his deep appreciation for so many realms of human experience. His mastery
of so many fields in the sciences of the humanities, his genuine talent as a photographer, his
unrivaled capacity for spotting unique abilities in unusual people from unexpected places.
His endless patience in explaining the most esoteric things to rank amateurs, his fabulous
cooking, his palpable love for his friends, and for his growing little family. The joy
he took in the miracle of Tyco's arrival and development, his endless and totally infectious
wonder at the mysteries of the universe.
Larry Tribe: When Mike was diagnosed with cancer, the blend
of optimism and realism with which he confronted the news and coped with a seemingly endless
array of experimental treatments was an inspiration to those of us who could only look on and
hope against hope that all would be well. And when all was far from well, Mike's courage
in soldiering on was all that those of us who have grown to love, and I mean love, this
most remarkable man that we have ever met, could hold onto. Of course, we continue to
hope, but even the audacity of hope must sometimes bend to unhappy truths. Of Mike Hawley, when
the end nears, and hopefully, that will be a long, long, time from now.
Larry Tribe: That would be a long, long time from now.
It might well be said as Juliet said of Romeo in act three of Shakespeare's great play,"When
he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the heaven,
face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship
to the garish sun." Thank you Mike, for who you are and [crosstalk 00:00:39].
Nicholas Negroponte: Larry, thank you.
Larry Tribe: Thank you.
Nicholas Negroponte: It is now my pleasure to introduce our next
speaker. He's an architect, urban planner, educator [inaudible 00:25:54] and...
Moshe Safdie: Thank you Larry for your beautiful words.
I'm deeply moved and I am honored to move to, be part of this group. Thank you also
Nicholas for setting this up. I've been thinking a lot about Mike in the last few weeks and
it seem to me that in a world that we live in, we are mostly focused on one discipline.
We tend to be highly specialized. We're focused just looking forward and in that world that
we live in, I think Mike stands out, he defies the norm. He spans so many different disciplines.
To me it's always been a pleasure as an architect to try to fit into so many disciplines. He
bridges music and the visual arts and architecture and computer science and AI and anthropology
and he's a student of culture and I think also reflecting on our lives, many of us gets
consumed in the pursuit of our career.
Moshe Safdie: I think sometimes we compromise friendships
in that relentless focus. Sometimes family, certainly I don't think we pursue our interests
as widely as a curiosity might lead us to, and to me Mike is a proof of the value of
a balanced life. The kind of a free spirit that I always have admired, always connecting,
always bridging, which is I think why EG has been the perfect expression of his persona
and it's only possible because of Mikes's deep knowledge of everything he talks about.
It couldn't just be a superficial gathering of things. There's a deep knowledge there
and that gave to connect to bridge culture and politics and ethics and science and arts
and magic, I think is something that enriches all our lives. I have to say, Mike is probably
the one person I could say unequivocally, every time I meet him, every time I meet you
Mike, I learn something new and meaningful.
Moshe Safdie: It's always a matter of wonder. It comes out
of nowhere, some subject we never talked about and I leave enlightened, but I want to say
something about friendship because as we know, Mike has been struggled with this healthy
issues. That's an understatement, and he's been consumed by his treatments and studying
them and knowing them. And then [inaudible 00:28:53] I got sick of myself and I was hospitalized
and I couldn't get over the fact that every day, every day one, Mike was going through
what he was going through. He was on the phone within a few days. He probably knew as much
about my condition as my doctors. He helped me replace my doctor. It just became a lifeline
at a moment of need. And these are things you just cherish and never forget. So Mihaela
and I Michael, cherish our friendship with you and with Nika and with Tyco and we look
forward to many years of being together and enjoying each other and we love you dearly.
Nicholas Negroponte: If you're watching this later on and you want
to spend an interesting hour or so, just Google the names of the people you've seen today.
It's amazing. For example, if you saw the movie crazy rich Asians, you know the big
amazing hotel, they had the final scene at, well, Moshe did that. One of his buildings.
This is an experience I have a lot. Being a friend of Michael, you meet these people,
when you find out later you've just spoken to a O Titan in their industry who just happens
to be another friend of Michael's. All right, Moshe, thank you. It's true. He is a father
of personal computing and a winner of the touring award. Alan Kay, the virtual floor
is yours.
Alan Kay: Thank you very much. Can everybody hear me?
Nicholas Negroponte: Yes indeed.
Alan Kay: Yes, thank you. Well, it's hard to follow
these perfectly true and heartfelt. Deeply from the heart remarks so far. I've known
Mike a long time, I thought I would just make a short observation that we live in an age
that I think worships scale above all things and Mike has scale in so many different areas.
I knew him for a few years before I realized how much depth he had.
Alan Kay: I happen to like depth more than scale. And
one of the deepest experiences I had from knowing Mike was at a conference in Paris,
where we had a pretty talented cellist and composer as a guest there, but it came up,
it'd be fun to get him to play. And then we thought, well we should get Mike to play,
and Mike said, well if you get a Steinway D over here to the hotel, I'll play. And so
the conference... The Steinway D is the big nine foot concert grand. And so the conference
organizer was organized and ran down a Steinway D in Paris and got it over the hotel. And
what happened there was something much more than chops and of course winning the Cliburn
and then much of the 19th century piano repertoire, if not the 18th century keyboard repertoire,
partly makes its way in the world from chops technique, but there's a whole nother dimension
of music, which is sometimes called musicality.
Alan Kay: And musicality is something that grows organically
out of the heart of the musician. It is very, it's not fakeable. It's readily a parent to
other musicians. And Mike that day sat down and reduced all of us to a puddle of tears
from the sheer musicality of the presentation. Wasn't that he didn't play some pieces that
were technically demanding, but that was not even remotely the point. And I sat there thinking,
Oh my God, Mike is so deep, he's so deep in, he's so bright that we often miss his depth.
But to me the key to Mike is art and depth. And I think that all of us who've known him
over the years have found that one way or another. Thank you Mike.
Nicholas Negroponte: Thank you very much, Alan. A lot of people
are talking about Mike's talent and music. I should tell you that couple of years ago
I turned to Michael, I said, you've so inspired me with your musicianship and your love of
the piano. I can [inaudible 00:34:17] musical talent or ability, but I was thinking maybe
it wouldn't be too late for me to take up the piano and learn it myself, and he said,
yes it is. Which I guess I can only be grateful for. Next. We're honored to hear from Brian
Ferren, he is a technologist and artist and an architectural designer, a photographer,
and in [inaudible 00:34:38].
Bran Ferren: Thank you and it's a great pleasure to be
included here in this extended family around Mike. First principles wise, I'd like to thank
my parents, not Mike, for making Mike possible. We've known each other for a long, long time
and I generally use the phrase long, long time when I can't remember how long we've
known each other, but it's over 30 years. If I recall correctly, I think it was at the
Minsky's house with Gloria and Marvin over dinner and many associations through Nicholas
and the media lab over the years. When I was at Disney, we worked together on a collection
of exciting projects, but we hit it off very early on and in some ways it was because we
had many shared interests in photography and science and engineering and sound and acoustics
and travel. But I think it was mainly because Mike doesn't separate art and science design
engineering and believes as I do that when they all work together, it's substantially
more powerful and makes each better.
Bran Ferren: I think most of us in school had a moment
when a guidance counselor or a teacher said,"it's time for you to get serious and decide what
you want to be." Do you want to be a scientist? Do you want to be an engineer? Do you want
to be an artist? Do we want to be a filmmaker? And it turns out that you really don't. And
I think Mike is a great example of not having made that decision and it was for the better
for him and his life as well as for the rest of us and the contributions that he's made.
Bran Ferren: I would like to talk about the idea over my
collegue rather than Mike. I'm very fond of Mike. We share, as I said, many things in
common, but I think beyond Mike, the idea that a Mike exists is what really matters
to the world. I got thinking about this when I was asked to write a piece years ago for
discover magazine on Einstein. And Eistein to me was one of the great thinkers of our
time, of course, but the fact that an Einstein could exist and that a person who is able
to grasp multi-dimensionally our world, our universe time concepts, that most of us simply
put in the too hard bin and we move on and think about something more practical is important.
It's important because it inspires people. It lets them believe that they as an individual
can make a contribution to our world and to the future as well as to our kids and to our
communities that is important and moves the needle.
Bran Ferren: And I think of Mike that way, because his
ability to work and as Alan said, be deep, but at the same time do it in many different
directions at the same time, I find truly inspirational. And it means that the old phrase,
"a Jack of all trades and a master of none." You can actually be a Jack of many trades
or a chain and in fact master them. And that to me is an important message. It's inspirational
for our kids, for folks like my daughter, Keilar and Tyco and both Mike and I were late
dads. And so we're getting to rediscover ourselves through our kids, which is quite a fascinating
process. But to me the fact that Mike has embraced storytelling as being a fundamental
method of communicating the fact that Mike appreciates and understands and cultivates
in my observation, the best programmers are artists, not engineers.
Bran Ferren: And in fact the best artists take advantage
of the latest technologies or techniques and storytelling to convey their art and compel
an audience. And I think that when you look at what Mike has done with the EG Conference,
which has transformed into an astonishing extended community of talent, of hope, of
optimism, and creates a forum that not just allows but encourages people to rethink their
perspectives and to allow their thinking to help others reshape theirs, is really important.
Bran Ferren: I think when you add this to his incredible
generosity, and we've heard about that so far today, generosity of connecting people
together, generosity of pulling ideas together in a way that allow people to create things
that they wouldn't have imagined before this happened. That body of work, the ability to
be deep in different areas, the ability to pull people together and get people who might
have an interest or a connection with Mike in one of those areas and cause them to expand
their thinking through the contact and in exchange with others, whether it's what he
arranged his personally and his daily life or through vehicles such as the EG Conference
or his public speaking.
Bran Ferren: He is a fabulous speaker and uses humor and
uses entertainment and more to the point, uses storytelling as an incredibly valuable
tool to help open people's minds and touch their hearts. And this is an extraordinary
gift and I think his contributions to our world are both significant important and will
be enduring. And in conclusion, I'd like to point out that he is an incredibly snappy
dresser. Thank you.
Nicholas Negroponte: Right. It'd be something I found out relatively
late that Michael, not only are we about the same age, but we actually came from more or
less the same place he went to New Providence, New Jersey high school. That's the town next
to where I grew up in Berkeley Heights. So we almost had almost exactly the same beginning,
which makes me feel even more impressed with everything he's done, that much more disappointed
in myself. Next, we're going to hear from again, we have to assume this is true and
not hyperbole. One of the inventors of the internet and a professor at UCLA, Leonard
Kleinrock.
Len Kleinrock: Hi, can I be heard?
Nicholas Negroponte: You okay?
Len Kleinrock: Great. Okay, so I've only known Mike about
a quarter of a century, so I'm a youngster in this group in that respect. But I want
to tell you, if you want to choose a Renaissance man, you choose Mike. You want to out of the
box thinker, you choose Mike. You want somebody with big ideas, ideas with impact, visible
ideas, you choose Mike. You want somebody driven by fun and curiosity? You choose Mike,
and Mike knows how to enter those arenas of excellence, participate and grow the excellence
within those groups. He somehow gravitates and enhanses the domains in which he interacts.
For example, as a teenager, he managed to get a summer job at the famous Bell Labs in
Murray Hill as a teenager. He lives in the oldest church in East Cambridge, built 1827
how many people live in the church? Big idea at the media lab. He worked on fun things
like toys of tomorrow, like things I think
Len Kleinrock: He has a contact database including the people
on this video, which is an enormously capable and connected people and he's helped to connect
them. And as you've heard a few times, he helped impact produce this enormous book.
If I can show it here, I'm not sure it's showing up. You're going to hear more about it, but
I'd like to go and share my screen right now if you guys can participate with that as well.
Tell me if I'm sharing yet.
Nicholas Negroponte: You are.
Len Kleinrock: Great. So here's a picture of what that book
looks like. Now you're looking at my small two and a half foot version. The originals
you heard is five foot by seven foot and weighs 133 pounds and the thing you find in the opening
the book is this magnificent map and that little thing in the middle, which looks like
this, that's where Bhutan is. This book is all about Bhutan and amazing photographs in
there. And here's a picture of Mike moving those huge heavy pages as an example, but
instead of Mike Donut, it's much nicer to see this beautiful young lady moving those
pages around. This is the kind of project that Mike engaged in. Beautiful art, an exotic
world. Bhutan in the Himalaya, unbelievable people and totally orthogonal to everyday
signs that we all engage in. Mike just continues in that direction.
Len Kleinrock: Here's a picture of him playing with a young
man, taking a picture of a Bhutan elder. You have to see the gleam in Mike's eyes. He's
always gets engaged. Here's Mike in the elegant format playing the piano, conducting this
was I believe at the Cliburn or reproduction of the Cliburn and he always does it with
aplomb. I mean there's always an artistic, beautiful aspect of it. Look at that shot.
Look at this shot, now how many people take the shot a piano player like that? Mike knows
how to engage in the beauty of an event as well as the excellence of the event and Mike
can be a lot of fun too, makes fun of himself. He's a very handsome man and you can see the
gleam in his eye here as another example besides the entertainment guide in the EG that he's
worked on.
Len Kleinrock: He's been a participant in this TTI Vanguard
for many decades and it's an interesting event, but here is an interesting picture of Mike
and myself [suffering 00:45:33] Bob lucky antics. And of course if you look carefully,
Mike says huh and looks down upon these antics. But the Mike that I love the most is this
Mike here, this handsome, exciting, curious young man. And in fact my wife as well admires
Mike so much, so that I think she has a crush on him. So Mike, I'm not sure that's going
to lead to fruition, but it's been a pleasure working with you all these years and the environment
in which you've created you unique person and we love you.
Nicholas Negroponte: Thank you very much Leonard. That was the
book, like I said that when someone told me about it, I thought it was so amazing that
we included it as a bit of trivia on our show. And it turns out, like I said, Michael made
it. Next up, Robert Metcalf, are you available to go? Robert? Anybody there?
Bob Metcalfe: Yes.
Nicholas Negroponte: All right, Robert. Bob. Why don't you take
it? This is Bob Metcalf. He is... I am told the inventor of the ethernet again, who finds
these people. Michael does. Robert it's yours.
Bob Metcalfe: I'll never live it down.
Nicholas Negroponte: Thanks a lot by the way.
Bob Metcalfe: I have a Safari jacket, but I can never bring
myself to wear it. And I'm a big fan of music, but The Shirelles are my favorite group. Anyway
I'm delighted to be... Despite those features to be included in this Fest shrift that we
have going here, now we only have, I only have a few minutes, so I don't want to be
guilty of giving Mike short shrift, but I would boil my admiration for him down to one
word, enthusiasm.
Bob Metcalfe: Mike is enthusiastic and it just so attractive.
Now his enthusiasm is extreme. For example, he's an inveterate irrepressible name dropper.
He's constantly dropping all of your names and how great you all are and how we should
meet. And the temptation is to think his tendency is toward dilettantism. He's so broadly enthusiastic,
but no. I guess was Alan there who just said he's deep and I concur with that assessment.
One night. I had known Mike for maybe 10 years, when my phone rang one night and it was Mike
announcing that he had won, he'd gotten to the finals of the Van Cliburn Competition.
And I said, what's that? And he said, well, it's a piano thing in Texas. And I got to
the finals. Well, I wasn't terribly impressed. I've ever heard, never having heard of the
Van Cliburn competition.
Bob Metcalfe: The next day I learned a lot more about what
it was and I learned that Mike had won it. That's a... Oh, the key fact about that is
until that phone call, I didn't know Mike played the piano. So, he managed for 10 years
to hide the fact that he played the piano from me, I guess a detecting accurately that
I was in another world. And the thing about Mike's playing of the piano, which I have
particular interest in, he is the backstory.
Bob Metcalfe: So he'll sit at that piano and will play just
wonderful music, but then he'll tell stories about the origins of the music. And that to
me is the... That's what I live to here, his backstory. So imagine we're on that Island
in the background there, in my background. And we have found a house, probably Bob Billard's
and it's probably Millard's piano, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure it was a piano that
had a number like nine. But there was Mike sitting at this piano playing his music and
telling us backstories. And the entire group of 60 year old men who had just spent the
day on the water and finished a big dinner and drank a lot of red wine, all of them were
asleep while Mike play the piano. And I sat listening to his backstory. So Mike goes deep.
So for example, he decided once he needed to have a dog. And at the time.
Len Kleinrock: He needed to have a dog. And at the time we
had two dogs. We had golden retrievers, which are a perfectly nice dog, but Mike's not the
kind of guy who has golden retrievers. So, he went off and he found a Tibetan mastiff
puppy. Tashi is her name. He brought her to the island, this Green's Island, forgetting,
of course, that Tibet is far from the ocean. And this dog had no genetic or other background
in oceans. And the puppy ran all over the island and ran and sat on a rock.
Len Kleinrock: The tide rushed in until the dog is sitting
on this rock surrounded by the ocean all alone, never having been in the water. And we finally
coax Tashi into jumping off the rock and she immediately started swimming out to sea, not
realizing that that was a fruitless direction for her to go.
Len Kleinrock: I want to mention two people that Mike and
I had in common, Marvin Minsky and Steve Jobs. 50 years ago, Marvin was my thesis advisor
at MIT in artificial intelligence. And so, over the years, Mike and I have talked about
Marvin intermittently because he was close to Marvin. I would like to point out that
Marvin, 50 years ago decided that I wasn't smart enough to be in artificial intelligence.
So he sent me off to work on computer networking instead.
Len Kleinrock: Steve Jobs was also a friend we had in common,
although I knew Steve before Mike did and then not so much afterwards. Robin and I got
married in Woodside, California in 1980 at the little white church and Steve came to
our wedding and I can imagine Steve, and this did not happen, but I could imagine Steve
walking up to me in the midst of the wedding and saying, where's Mike? I'd like to end
with that note. Thank you very much for this time.
Peter Sagal: Thank you very much. And I've been watching
you with some concern that you're going to fall backwards onto that island. So, hang
on.
Peter Sagal: We have found Peter Cochrane. Apparently,
whoever invented the internet, we'll put it on you. Peter Cochrane, if you're ready, the
floor is yours.
Peter Cochrane: Sure. Apologies, everyone. I had one of those
mysterious crashes that come along now and again at the most inopportune moment. A pleasure
to be with you. I thought I'd do something a little different, and try and dimension
Mike Hawley in the strictly linear sense, if you will.
Peter Cochrane: Quite recently, I've been working for a rather
large organization in Silicon Valley. The founder is very effusive about the abilities
of young people compared to old people and insists that young people are just smarter
than the old people, and that's just the way it is. What was fascinating working with the
team, was all of these young people were 10 centimeters wide and two kilometers deep,
with a human interface, that wasn't all that good. And basically my job was to try and
sort a few projects for them.
Peter Cochrane: And on the site there are an awful lot of
people my age doing the same thing. Really quite interesting. So, when I think about
Mike, I tend to think of someone rather exceptional. He's not typical at what you find in the engineering
and science world. In my view is about two kilometers wide and at least one kilometer
deep. He knows such a lot about a lot of things.
Peter Cochrane: I met him quite a long time ago but spent
many years with him on the TTI board, and there was a little competition between us
about online working, mobile working and all the facilities and things that we carried.
And my mission was to get down to a really lightweight travel pack and it was my practice
at the conference to go to the back of the room and get a conference and walk on down
and see what the audience were doing. What were they typing? What were they looking at?
And Mike was on the back row.
Peter Cochrane: And one day, I came across him with a full
size printer/scanner on his knee, and he was scanning in papers furiously. And behind him
was his roll-on which he [inaudible 00:00:54:47]. I said to him, "Mike, I thought we were supposed
to be getting a bit lighter." And he was carrying so much equipment which included lots of power
leads and other things.
Peter Cochrane: So, I pulled his leg about that mercifully,
and we had a lot of fun. But Len mentioned the book, and I have a copy of the book here
too. And I thought you might be interested in how I got that, because I got to see the
process of this thing being put together. Kodak were providing the ink, HP were providing
the printer, FedEx were making a very special pack to transport it around the world.
Peter Cochrane: And I said to Mike, "I would really love one
of your books, but they are paying us 35,000 bucks and I can't afford one. But what I would
like to do, is get a small book. And a coffee table version of this would be great. So,
what I am going to do is, I'm going to make a bet, and I'm going to give you a hundred
dollar donation to your charity." We were trying to get all this money for Bhutan, and
thought nothing more of it.
Peter Cochrane: And few months later this book arrived, and
he had actually decided to make this smaller copy, which I then went around the UK selling
to every company that I could persuade that they needed a book about Bhutan. And even
at this scale, it's a remarkable experience to thumb through the pages and look at the
human stories that are cataloged.
Peter Cochrane: But, when you see the real thing, seven foot
tall, five foot wide. I've never actually worked out how long the pages would stretch
if you stuck them end to end, but I figure it's about a hundred meters or something like
that. And it was a fabulous project and fairly typical of Mike. I have many happy memories
working in the same organization.
Peter Cochrane: And he was always at the back of the room,
and I was always running at the front. Partially because I couldn't see too well, and I'm also
quite deaf. And so, I would always listen and I would hear Mike's Exocet missile of
a question come over. And very often add an awful lot, and occasionally totally demolished
some argument that he didn't agree with. It's been great fun. I wish that we could do it
all again. And would be worth repeating. Thank you so much Mike.
Peter Sagal: Thank you, Peter. I do think it's funny that
we had internet problems on a panel, which is basically Heaven's own IT team. When I
was growing up in the '70s, I was a precocious little kid and loved language, and there were
all these phrases that meant a lot to me like from Million Dollar Man, "We have the technology",
but ...
Peter Sagal: (silence)
Peter Sagal: ... seeing and thinking this bespeaks a much
larger world than I know about in suburban New Jersey. It was access to tools, which
was the subtitle of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was created by our next speaker, Stewart
Brand. Stewart. It's an honor to hand the podium to you.
Stewart Brand: Gosh, well thank you Peter. I want to call
attention to one of Michael Hawley's maybe least credited, and most impactful works.
And, this happened in 2005 when a college dropout at Stanford University gave what turned
out to be one of the most loved and famous of all commencement addresses. This was Steve
Jobs and it was short. It was moving.
Stewart Brand: Steve talked about having that far survived
a lethal pancreatic cancer, a set of episodes. And I was telling personal lessons, and then
I wound up being the punchline of the most famous college address ever, when he started
talking about the Whole Earth Catalog, what it meant to him, how important he thought
it was, ended up with one of our punch lines, which is "Stay hungry. Stay foolish", and
he advised the entire Stanford class to go out and be hungry and foolish. That's pretty
interesting.
Stewart Brand: One of the results of all that is I wound
up getting famous late in life, which I think would not have occurred, except for that amazing
out-of-the-blue-sky event, and I have to thank Mike for that. Thank you very much indeed.
Peter Sagal: All right. Thank you, Stewart. And it's an
extraordinary pleasure to you talk to you, even in these circumstances. So thank you.
Peter Sagal: Next up, another colleague from the media
lab, in fact, the first professor appointed to the lab back in 1985, he is the head among
many other things of the future of ...
Peter Sagal: (silence)
Tod Machover: Hello?
Peter Sagal: Do we have you? There you are. The floor is
yours.
Tod Machover: Great to be here everybody. It won't surprise
you when I also say that Mike Hawley is probably the most amazingly accomplished person that
I know at more things than anybody could imagine. And, as many people have emphasized, I think
that one of the most important aspects of what Mike does is that he chooses all of his
projects, as well as the people he spends time with and generously supports out of pure
passion. And I think that's maybe one of the reasons why music is so central to what everything
Mike does. And since music is also my field, I want to emphasize that even a bit more than
what some other people have talked about.
Tod Machover: I first met Mike 40 years ago, as it happens,
when I was director of musical research at Pierre Boulez' IRCAM Institute in Paris. And
Mike, if I remember correctly, was still an undergrad at Yale. Max Mathews, who is considered
the father of computer music, told me that there was this incredible young Yalie who
was putting interactive music scores on graphic displays. This was several years before the
Mac came out. So, we invited Mike to Paris, and indeed, he developed one of the very first
graphic based composing systems, which was very influential and Mike and I have been
close friends and colleagues since then.
Tod Machover: Mike went from Paris to the brand new Lucasfilm
Studio at Skywalker Ranch, where he helped to transform the recording, editing and production
of film soundtracks, laying the groundwork for what has become the enormous and enormously
profitable field of digital audio production.
Tod Machover: The next stop was next, in fact, with Steve
jobs where Mike's innovations and digital libraries, and Mike loves books almost as
much as he loves music, uncovered many techniques and principles that underlie the increasingly
important field of music information retrieval. Think Pandora and Spotify.
Tod Machover: And then Mike came to the media lab for his
PhD and somehow he convinced the Rolls-Royce of piano companies, Bösendorfer of Vienna,
to give the lab one of the very first and still one of the very best digitally activated
naturally acoustic pianos. And he based his PhD work on transcribing historic piano rolls
from the early 20th century, think Scott Joplin or Gershwin or Rachmaninoff, to MIDI format
that could be played on this gorgeous futuristic instrument.
Tod Machover: This work contributed to the explosion of
MIDI format, and to the development of robotic musical instruments that combine the precision
and complexity of machines with the warmth and spontaneity of human musicians. And I
could go on and on and I wish I had time to do so, but what's important is that central
in all of these innovations and the many more that followed, is the pure delight that Mike
has always taken in imagining new forms of expression that stretch our hearing and our
minds. Plus he has the engineering chops to actually build these things. In fact, he can
build just about anything.
Tod Machover: Many of Mike's music tech ideas seem to many
to be purely playful and maybe kind of eccentric when he first worked on them, but all of them
have turned out to be deeply significant in the long run. Mike was consistently way, way
out ahead showing all of us what could be. In fact, what would be.
Tod Machover: I think that Mike can imagine these profound
innovations because he's not just a good musician, he's actually a great musician. He has music
in his heart, in his mind and in his fingers. He's really a totally incredible pianist.
He knows more about piano literature, including some pretty obscure stuff, and I would know,
than just about anyone. And he delights in discovering new repertoire and sharing it
with anyone who will listen. And he also knows more about pianists, and musicians in general,
than just about anyone and his extreme generosity, and his very fine nose for talent, allows
him to discover young artists and to spread the word as widely as he can.
Tod Machover: And now, so you don't have to just take my
word and others about how well Mike plays piano, I wanted to share my screen and share
a little bit of video that I shot at Mike and [inaudible 01:04:00] place just a little
while ago.
Tod Machover: Let's see. Here we go. And this is Mike playing
a little bit of Bach. Organ music, not meant for the piano, which he has tamed so that
you can hear it. So let me just play that for you.
Tod Machover: (music)
Tod Machover: And I think he was sight reading that, and
he happened to have a young student with them at that time. So here's Taika who's the next
generation ... absorbing everything he can from his dad, and thought I'd just play a
tiny smidgen of this little session of one of Taika's first explorations.
Michael Hawley: I didn't teach him that.
Michael Hawley: Okay. Thanks.
Tod Machover: It's a multimedia piece he's doing.
Michael Hawley: Yeah.
Michael Hawley: Hey Taika. Do it.
Michael Hawley: [inaudible 01:05:19] That's right.
Tod Machover: Now, if I can come back to my Zoom here. Let's
see, where is it? Oh, there we go.
Tod Machover: Oh, there we go. Stop share.
Tod Machover: (silence)
Tod Machover: Oh well. I've lost it. I'm never ...
Tod Machover: So, I just wanted to say one last thing, which
is that you can see that for Mike, music is not a sideshow. It's not a hobby. It's the
main event. When he won the Van Cliburn Competition for amateur pianists in 2002, which is an
incredible achievement for an engineer and a scientist at Mike's distinction, he was
quoted by the MIT news office as saying "My dearest mentors were musicians. Music has
made me a better person. It helped me learn patience, perseverance, and how to reach people
in ways beyond words. Music is a window to a better place. A sanctuary where there's
harmony, beauty and where we do things simply because we love them." End of quote.
Tod Machover: To do things simply because we love them.
To choose our projects, and the people we spend our time with, just out of love. What
could be more important than that? Whose life can better show us the way than Mike Hawley's?
Thank you, Mike. We love you.
Peter Sagal: Thank you Tod. And yeah, we do.
Peter Sagal: One of the people who of course can't be with
us, is one of Michael's dearest friends, his mentor. Somebody who, out of all the people
that Michael talked to me about, I always heard the most about. And that, of course,
was Marvin Minsky, the giant of AI and of the media lab and so much else.
Peter Sagal: However, we are fortunate to have with us
today, another dear friend of Michael's. Lifelong. The wife of the late Marvin Minsky, Gloria
Minsky. Gloria, the floor is yours.
Gloria Minsky: Thank you. All I can do is second, or ditto,
or whatever one does, to say I so agree with all of the wonderful things that have been
said about Michael, and, I guess I'm going to revert to some little stories, or anecdote.
One little Michael story of meeting him.
Gloria Minsky: So back in, I think it was the fall of 1985,
Marvin answered the phone and he said, "Oh, this student from California. He doesn't have
a place to stay. Can he stay here?" And I said, "Sure." And I said, "Oh, when do you
think he'd be coming over?" "About 20 minutes."
Gloria Minsky: So ... can you hear me?
Gloria Minsky: Can folks hear me? Yes. Okay.
Gloria Minsky: So, oh yeah, he had something with him. "He
has a piece of furniture with him and is it all right if he brings it?" "Well what kind
of piece of furniture? Will it fit up in our guest room?" "Well, it's a Darth Vader table,
he just came from working with the George Lucas group." So, "Sure."
Gloria Minsky: And half an hour, 20 minutes later, Mike came
over and it was just wonderful from the beginning. He became a wonderful friend of Marvin and
myself. He had, Marvin was so happy that year. He had Mike to talk to, to discuss with and
it was sort of like another son. Our kids, we were empty-nesters. Our biologic kids had
left. So Mike was really like another son. And I think that the things that they shared
were ideas and music. And both, I think I discovered, were consummate musicians. And
this lasted all Marvin's life.
Gloria Minsky: And it's obvious that this has been a sustaining
thing for Mike. And he is a consummate musician, just as Marvin, aside from AI, underneath
his AI, was a consummate musician. It was a very happy year, and I had many interesting
discussions with Mike. He always seemed interested in something I was doing, which other guests
of equal statures and interest in science had not been quite as much interested in my
work as a director of child health in a local system.
Gloria Minsky: All I can say is Mike has been a friend and
was a college of Marvin, a dear friend, a sort of second son to me. And we love him.
Treasure what he's done and would love to see more of him. Very positive health trajectory.
We want Mike. Thank you so much, for everybody.
Peter Sagal: Thank you, Gloria. Yeah, we want Mike. We
can all shout that at the end. I don't know if it's an official tradition at EG. It certainly
has happened all the years I've been there, that somewhere toward the end of the conference,
which as you have been there, sometimes as some heavy or serious topics discussed. Sometimes
not, but often.
Peter Sagal: Somewhere toward the end we hear from Jill
Sobule, the songwriter and musician who always adds such an element of joy to the proceeding,
is that it helps us walk out into the sunshine with that feeling. I think one year we even
insisted on having her Skype in, because we couldn't do it without her. And we're very
glad she's here. Jill Sobule, everybody.
Jill Sobule: Oh, hello everybody. Oh, Gloria, it's so good
to see you.
Jill Sobule: I'm just going to talk selfishly, really quick,
Mike, that my world really changed knowing you at EG. I got to know all these smarty
pants weirdos, and that they accepted me into their world, and my life has been completely
changed by that. And you freak me out. You are this scientist and amazing musician. And
when I was there a couple months ago and you were playing, I was just in tears. It was
so beautiful. And, you're also a nice guy at the same time. I don't know who has that
combination.
Jill Sobule: So, I'm going to sing a song because right
now I wish I could take a jet pack and be right there. We could play Smile together,
which you did once. It was one of my favorite moments in life when we played that together.
So here.
Jill Sobule: You guys hear that?
Jill Sobule: (singing)
Jill Sobule: (singing) You know, I think with all those
smart people and inventors and scientist and architects that someone would have come up
with
a jet pack that was affordable for me, but no, a jet pack,
I love you all.
Speaker 3: My point about Jill's effect is proved. Thank
you so much. We're coming to the end of today's session, but we have just a few more important
people to hear from. first among them is a former student of Mike's and a pioneer in
the internet of things. That's why your refrigerator knows that you're talking about it. Rob, Poor.
Rob please.
Rob Poor: Thanks very much. Thanks very much. I'm Robert
Poor. I was Mike's first doctoral student at the media lab, but our history goes way
back before the media lab. I first met Mike about 40 years ago when we worked at Lucasfilm,
and later crossed paths again at Next and one of his neat tricks at Next was to convince
Miriam Webster to produce their dictionary in digital form on the Next box. And some
years after that he plucked me out of Silicon Valley and invited me to apply to the media
lab and openly became my advisor. And to put it really simply, changed my life forever.
There've been a lot of adjectives thrown around today about Mike. Renaissance man, and playful,
and all that. But you know that part of our game where you think of three words to describe
somebody? I was thinking about this and the first one that I came across was audacious.
Rob Poor: Mike is just plain audacious. He had the audacity
to suggest putting a black box for biometrics on marathon runners in the Boston marathon.
And later we put them on soldiers. And then he was so audacious, he went to put black
boxes on climbers, on Mount Everest. So as a side effect, a bunch of us students got
to spend a month at base camp at Mount Everest, which was pretty amazing.
Rob Poor: And of course, as anyone who has an Apple
watch or a Fitbit knows, Mike's thoughts of audaciousness often turn into reality if only
a couple of decades later. But this brings me to the second word about Mike. He's generous.
He didn't have to send his students to Mount Everest. He didn't have to dream up a project
with Harry Winston Jewelers for one of his students who happened to later become my wife.
He didn't have to introduce us to the top toy makers and send us to the Tokyo Toy Fair.
He didn't have to introduce me to Bob Metcalf who funded my first company, and he certainly
didn't have to invite all of us to Bhutan for a really magnificent wedding to the amazing
Nica. But he did all these things, and all of these have been really, really lasting
gifts.
Rob Poor: And a third word popped into my mind to describe
Mike, and I didn't want to say it, I didn't like it. It didn't feel right, at least until
I read the definition for it. Definition first, according to Lewis Hyde, this thing is someone
who crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules, violating principles of
social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life, and then reestablishing it on
a new basis. Now, if that's not a description of my colleague, I don't know what it is,
but the word is trickster, and that's Mike magic. So Mike is a generous audacious trickster
who's cajoled many of us to push our own boundaries and to think bigger and to become audacious
tricksters of our own. And our lives are all richer for that. So I heartfelt thank you,
Mike.
Speaker 4: Thank you Bob. Yeah, I like that too. Trickster,
like a trickster spirit. Emerson Collective and a son of the late Steve Jobs, Mr. Reed
jobs. Reed, you're up.
Reed Jobs: Hi everybody. Am I coming through? All right.
Thumbs up? Beautiful.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Reed Jobs: Thank you so much for organizing this. This
is really beautiful and I've had the unique pleasure of getting to know Mike a little
bit over the last couple of months. He as someone who my family has loved for a really
long time. He told me how he was with my dad when he was courting my mom, and described
a photo I've seen my whole life cause it's hanging in our house and he talked about how
he was with Dad when he bought it for her. One of the successful parts of the courtship.
They weren't also successful. And I actually have a couple emails that I'd like to read.
Dad's the one who really should be here now. So I thought I could give a little bit of
his voice. You know, Stewart was right. Mike helped a lot with the commencement speech
that Dad gave at Stanford and here's a little bit of their interaction.
Reed Jobs: So this is about five days before the speech,
by the way. So, from Steve. It's embarrassing. I'm just not good at this sort of speech.
I never do it. I'll send you something, but please don't puke. Mike cleverly said, "undergrads
aren't the only ones who pull all nighters." Now then after reading the speech, he gave
some feedback. He said, "I think like a good comedian telling a joke, or a good composer
writing a piece to music. You want to be able to be sure to nail the punchline. So maybe
think more about the ending. I like your whole earth recollection a lot. I grew up with it
too. Even the phrase whole earth taps a powerful idealistic undercurrent. The hungry foolish
mantra comes from a Hindu story, if that matters. I've tried to rewrite including the memory
of the first front cover with this earth image to balance the road image, and a reference
to brand with a couple of dots to connect. Just an idea."
Reed Jobs: And five days before the commencement, Mike
said, "I understand it's on Sunday, break a leg." And then the last thing dad sent was,
"gosh, I have far to go and not much time." I have far to go and not much time. I, I think
we can all feel like that a little bit sometimes, and I just want to say Mike, we love you.
The time we've had together has been beautiful, and thank you so much for being such a light,
miraculous human being. Thank you.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Reed. A lot of the people we've
heard from today have invented and created some amazing things, but I don't think any
of those [inaudible 01:23:11] the media lab could compare to what our next speaker created
or co-created, because he collaborated on the invention of Michael Hawley. Mike's dad,
George Hawley. George, go ahead.
George Hawley: I'm going to give you a couple of anecdotes
from Mike's teenage years, to give you an idea of how we thought even then. And that's
sort of the foundation of his later life? Well, I'm just an electrical engineer and
served in the Marines, so I'm big and tough. Well Mike luckily inherited my physique, but
his late mother's talent and brains. And that's where he got his piano skills from.
George Hawley: It was the spring of 1977 and mike was 15
years old, and in high school, New Providence, Pioneer. And after I returned to work from
work one night, he came up to me and he said "Dad, I just finished a book." I said, "Oh,
what was that?" He said, "it's called The Maine Woods by a guy named Thoreau." I said,
"yeah, I heard of him. What about it?" He said, "well, I'd like to do what he did in
Maine. Take the same trip, and I'd like you to help me out." because he was only 15, he
couldn't drive.
George Hawley: So I had to be a logistics guy. And I said,
"well, it sounds like a good idea and sometime the summer, maybe we'll do that." I started
reading the book, what a miserable time we had with no [CMs 01:25:06] and black flies
and all kinds of stuff in Maine. But we did it. And I'll tell you what, it was a nine
day canoe trip adventure that was a memory of a lifetime was fantastic and it was all
his idea and his doing and it epitomized what he does. He thinks big, and he makes it happen.
George Hawley: As you all know, Mike is a pretty good piano
player and his mom was really beautifully, but not well enough for her to satisfy herself.
And Mike, when he was in high school, senior year is 17 years old. He was entered into
the New Jersey Symphony competition, where they invited various young musicians to compete
and a play in the concert hall in Newark. And so Mike was a finalist and he played Piano
Concerto number two. And I sat in the audience and I had never, I'm so thrilled and my life
just to hear this gorgeous music coming from my son with that orchestra and well just blew
me away.
George Hawley: Unfortunately, it didn't blow the judges away
because knowing Mike , he decided that playing [inaudible 01:26:46] in some traditional way,
it wasn't really the way to do it. And he supplied his own interpretation.
George Hawley: Unfortunately the judges were a little less,
let's say tolerant of his creativity. But he played beautifully, so that spring he had,
he had to make a decision. He put himself in a position of having this description.
I had tried to do what the typical parent does the summer before, let's go to colleges
and take a look at them. And we go there, like to Swarthmore, a suburb of Philadelphia,
drove down there in the summertime and it was a total waste of time. There was nobody
there. It was like this abandoned farm. And so I sort of gave up on that. I bought them
a New York Times book about, a lot of colleges and gave it to him, say, "Here, you figure
it out." And what he decided was the following.
George Hawley: He knew he was good pianist, but he didn't
know how good. Was it good enough to make a living at it? And the only way to find out
was to apply for a position at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which
was the number one piano school in the world. They took four students each year, tuition
free, gave them a piano, found an apartment and let them rip. And the entrance exam, it
was a 30 minute demonstration of his skill for four professors in a closed room with
a piano. And he'd supplied there his repertoire in advance and they just picked at random,
play a little bit of the second movement of the Beethoven. Now play the third movement
of Bach.
George Hawley: And so we were sitting in the ante room listening
to this but he had a plan. His plan was if he could make it there, then he'd go on and
be a professional musician. If you didn't get accepted by the Curtis Institute, then
he wasn't going to be good enough. He'd be an amateur appearance and he would become
an engineer or scientist. And, and because it was March of his senior year, he had to
already have an acceptance from some school in case Curtis fell through. So Yale was his
backup. I'm certain they wouldn't want to have heard that they were a backup, but we
sat there and listened to the music coming out. And at the end, typical of Michael, he
had included a rag, by a guy named William Bolcom, and they were furious. So they had
him play that. So her sitting there and listening and we knew it was about the end of the recital
when William Bolcom's rag came through.
George Hawley: And it was called The Graceful Ghost and it
was attributed to his father. And so Mike came out, and the next lad who was going into
the room had just arrived with his family from Taiwan. And I thought, "Oh, this is a
big deal." The Van Cliburn winner of the year before was Steven De Groote from South Africa,
who was a graduate of the Curtis Institute. So Mike went on to Yale, and you know the
rest of the story.
George Hawley: I've enjoyed watching Mike's antics, and listening
to him play. I can't get enough of it. One year in the spring, he came back from California
where he was working for Lucas and he decided to put on a little recital in honor of Bach's
300th birthday, and he put it on in the local church.
George Hawley: And we went there, played for his Bach pieces
and he played the final one. I don't know what it was, but some fugue, and all of a
sudden happy birthday to you emerged from the middle of the Bach piece. So that's typical
Michael. He innovates, he goes big, and he goes all in. And he didn't learn for me. I
was totally ignorant. I just went along for the ride, and I loved it.
Speaker 4: Thank you, George. Thank you so much for being
here, and for all of that. So my understanding of how real world festschrifts work is that
the person being honored by it has a chance to contribute an essay. Michael has been here
the whole time and we'll end by giving him a chance to make his own contribution. So
Mike, if there's anything you'd like to say, now's the time.
Michael Hawley: Thank you, Peter. Well, first of all, thank
you isn't really sufficient. I'm flattered, honored, just beyond belief. I was always
kind of a shy person and would've dreamed of meeting even one of the individuals who've
taken time out of their days to speak to ... the fact that I know you all and love you all
blows me away. I especially want to thank Nicholas for the idea of whipping this together,
and I'm sorry I don't have time now to thank everybody individually for your kind remarks.
Just want to sort of close today with one thing.
Michael Hawley: I learned a long time ago that there are lots
of different forums in which you can play the piano, in a noisy bar, in a concert hall
with a giant orchestra, but I think my favorite is a little house concert where you've got
a dozen, maybe 15, 16 friends. And what I've wondered is where is the music really?
Michael Hawley: It's not in the piano. If someone has to bang
the piano, bring it out. It's not really in the score. It's not even in the pianist. The
music is in the people in the room, and that's what makes those memories so potent and so
beautiful. And I think it's also why I've always been drawn to great universities, because
like a generalization of that, the music's not in the professor. It's in the hubbub,
and the nutty, noisy conversations that occur among all the students and researchers and
explorers and adventurers. And to me that's really the music of civilization. It's why
I've always sided with universities in a pinch. And other institutions like them, a little
conference that I have run every year called EG was mentioned many times today. And it's
sort of a distillation of that in a different kind of bottle, without the onus of taking
classes. It's sort of all icing and no cake, but it turns out it's just every bit as interesting,
every bit is wonderful and every bit is musical in every sense of the word musical.
Michael Hawley: And with that I just want to thank you all
again for your time and thanks as well, the people that have tuned in to watch. It's an
incredible honor to hear what people really think about you, and I'm just personally glad
this didn't turn into a roast. It was sure wonderful while it lasted. Thank you.
Speaker 4: Thank you Michael. I'm kind of sorry it wasn't
a roast cause that I know how to do. Let me say to you and let me say to everybody who's
been watching that for everyone who spoke today, there are 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 people
who could have spoken in the same way with the same detail, with the same gratitude,
but time was limited this afternoon and so Nicholas rounded up this extraordinary group
of people.
Speaker 4: I hope we speak for everybody. And I don't
know how best to say this other than this, you have made all of our lives better, which
is really all you can do on this Earth. As I said, there are awards, there are riches,
there's all kinds of fame and the people on this group have those things, but the greatest
thing you can do beyond all of that is to enrich the lives of the people you meet. Markable
quote from Irving Lewis [inaudible 01:36:27] of festschrifts, "They're not just retrospective,
but prospective. That is to say the festschrift is a [foreign language 01:36:35], a call to
further work, effort and energy, a call to the improvement of learning of a discipline,
a science, and artistic vision, or an intellectual position. Michael, all of those things apply
to you, but mostly this is perspective, because none of us are done with you and we look forward
to further work and further friendship and further invention and seeing you very soon.
Speaker 4: We all love you profoundly.