Speaker 1: Pushkin The Last Archive, A history of truth.
Speaker 2: Imagine there's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 2: things go, shelves stocked with proof, and all around the
Speaker 2: clutter of clues. I haven't been down here in the
Speaker 2: Last Archive for a while, but Jill's stopping by later,
Speaker 2: and I promised her i'd keep it clean, which, well
Speaker 2: for starters. There's a car in the middle of the room.
Speaker 2: Is that a DeLorean from Back to the Future. Cool?
Speaker 2: I'll deal with that later. May as well start small
Speaker 2: with this stack of old stencils. Welcome people from the future.
Speaker 2: March ninth, nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 1: Weird?
Speaker 2: And what's this sleigh doing over here? By these candles?
Speaker 2: There's a plaque and you factured by HG. Wells that
Speaker 2: it's turning on the date on the dial. It's changing
Speaker 2: February twenty twenty. Oh no, there's no going back now,
Speaker 2: So step across the threshold to a highway in California
Speaker 2: on February seventeenth of that cursed year.
Speaker 1: It's like we could.
Speaker 3: Be being pulled by Oxen right now, except who lives
Speaker 3: to Melbom.
Speaker 2: I actually think we'd be faster in February twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: I went to California with Jill Lapour, host emeritus of
Speaker 2: The Last Archive, and her youngest son Oliver. We rented
Speaker 2: a twenty seventeen red Camaro convertible for work like this
Speaker 2: is overpowered for our purposes because we're currently going to
Speaker 2: ten miles an hour.
Speaker 1: Yet, but we're going to pick up speed.
Speaker 3: You don't want it so cold in here, Oliver, don't
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 2: I'm so cold. You really not that cold. We were
Speaker 2: out in California because we were recording the final episode
Speaker 2: of our first season. The convertible was Oliver's idea, very California,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't really top down weather.
Speaker 4: Cold at all.
Speaker 2: You're just scared. The first episode of the season was
Speaker 2: in Vermont. Yeah, were you also contained presence. We were
Speaker 2: researching ideas about predicting the future, computers, big data, time capsules,
Speaker 2: that kind of thing. We wanted to see the place
Speaker 2: that future was being made, Silicon Valley, so we headed
Speaker 2: west in our red Camaro. We were on a quest
Speaker 2: to figure out who killed Truth, and.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go.
Speaker 3: Try to reconstruct some of that story to understand how,
Speaker 3: I don't know, all the world became California in the nineteen.
Speaker 2: Fifties, So that was a good explanation. The tape is
Speaker 2: totally unusual, blowing out my ears. The episode ended up
Speaker 2: being a lot about California archives and the fantasy of
Speaker 2: predicting the future. We spent a lot of time in
Speaker 2: the old church offices of the Internet Archive. But there
Speaker 2: was one other stop we made that trip that we
Speaker 2: didn't include in the final thing to dig for another
Speaker 2: forgotten piece of computer history, the Yahoo time capsule. Yeah,
Speaker 2: when was the last time you went to the Yahoo homepage?
Speaker 2: I'm going to guess that it was sometime before two
Speaker 2: thousand and six. Back then, Yahoo had been the biggest
Speaker 2: website on the Internet for years. Millions of people visited
Speaker 2: its homepage every month, totaling billions of views. Then one
Speaker 2: day a portal appeared on that homepage to a time capsule.
Speaker 2: Yahoo had hired an artist to make an anthropological account
Speaker 2: of the Internet. In two thousand and six, users could
Speaker 2: upload photos, videos, text whatever they wanted.
Speaker 5: This.
Speaker 2: I know it just sounds like any social media, but
Speaker 2: the Yahoo time capsule was before Twitter, TikTok, snapchat, Instagram,
Speaker 2: when Facebook was just a thing on some college campuses.
Speaker 2: This Yahoo thing felt new and exciting, and billions of
Speaker 2: people would have seen it. Hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 2: made entries. Then, a little under a month after it opened,
Speaker 2: the portal closed. The contents of the capsule were beamed
Speaker 2: vlaser into outer space, downloaded on a Mac Mini hard drive,
Speaker 2: and sent to the Smithsonian. Yahoo planned to open it
Speaker 2: fourteen years later, on the twenty fifth anniversary of the
Speaker 2: day the company was incorporated, at a moment in time when,
Speaker 2: of course Yahoo would still be on top and everything
Speaker 2: would be normal and cool. They put a date in
Speaker 2: the sand March of twenty twenty. I read about all
Speaker 2: this in January of that year, and it sounded hilarious
Speaker 2: to me. We thought maybe we could see them open
Speaker 2: it on our trip out west, except it seemed like
Speaker 2: everybody at Yahoo had just forgotten about it. I kept
Speaker 2: emailing Verizon, Yahoo's new parent company, but they didn't respond
Speaker 2: at first. When I reached the original artist, he said
Speaker 2: nobody had been in touch with them about the opening.
Speaker 2: And then weeks after we got back from that trip,
Speaker 2: lockdowns began. The world changed dramatically overnight. Nothing planned in
Speaker 2: the before fell right anymore. We dropped the idea of
Speaker 2: the Yahoo Time capsule changed our episode. We moved on,
Speaker 2: The world moved on, but for some reason in the
Speaker 2: corner of my mind and stop thinking about it. Welcome
Speaker 2: to the Last Archive, the show about how we know
Speaker 2: what we know, how we used to know things, and
Speaker 2: why it seems sometimes lately like we don't know anything
Speaker 2: at all anymore. I'm Ben that of Haffrey. For our
Speaker 2: season finale, I want to reckon with that time capsule
Speaker 2: and something that I think a lot of us experienced
Speaker 2: during the first year of the pandemic. Time started to
Speaker 2: feel different. And I know I wasn't the only one
Speaker 2: feeling this way, because all of a sudden, everyone around
Speaker 2: me was watching and reading all these time bending time
Speaker 2: travel stories, everything everywhere, all at once, Out of Range,
Speaker 2: Sea of Tranquility, Outlander, This Time Tomorrow, anything in the
Speaker 2: Marvel multiverse. It's like we're living in a time travel
Speaker 2: golden age. But why, you know how? On this podcast,
Speaker 2: we've always been chasing that question who killed Truth? Today
Speaker 2: I've got a different question, what happened to I'm One
Speaker 2: of the weirdest things about time travel stories is they
Speaker 2: haven't been around very long. The science fiction writer HG.
Speaker 2: Wells basically started the genre in eighteen ninety five with
Speaker 2: his book The Time Machine. I read it a few
Speaker 2: years ago, but if I'm being honest, I've known about
Speaker 2: it since I was eight years old, because it was
Speaker 2: on an episode of Wishbone.
Speaker 6: What's the story Wishbone's Dream.
Speaker 2: If you've never seen Wishbone, it's a PBS children's show
Speaker 2: where a talking dog reenacts literary classics. Most of what
Speaker 2: I know about the classics I learned first on Wishbone.
Speaker 2: So if we're talking time travel, I'm thinking season one,
Speaker 2: episode twenty three, Bark to the Future, an episode written
Speaker 2: by a young Morocca. The dog plays the time traveler.
Speaker 5: The hero of our story is a man who will
Speaker 5: defy convention. He is a man who will use to
Speaker 5: technology to redefine travel.
Speaker 2: In Bark to the Future, as in The Time Machine,
Speaker 2: an inventor claims he's got a new machine that can
Speaker 2: move through the fourth dimension time. I was probably in
Speaker 2: the second grade when I saw this. I love time
Speaker 2: travel stories now, but this, I think was the first
Speaker 2: one I ever came across. Wish Bon. It turns out
Speaker 2: was sticking pretty closely to the nineteenth century source material,
Speaker 2: just with dogs not people. This by the way is
Speaker 2: the dog's voice?
Speaker 5: Have I really traveled to the year eight hundred, two thousand,
Speaker 5: seven hundred and one.
Speaker 2: People like to say there are only something like seven
Speaker 2: plots for every story. Plots people have been reusing since forever.
Speaker 2: You know them Rags to riches, the hero's journey, overcoming
Speaker 2: the monster, the quest. Okay, maybe it's all a little
Speaker 2: schematic exactly seven, but still it's weird to have this
Speaker 2: big new story time travel come out of nowhere in
Speaker 2: the eighteen nineties. People have explained that in a few ways,
Speaker 2: but what it all amounts to is that at the
Speaker 2: turn of the century the eighteen nineties, when HG. Wells
Speaker 2: was writing, people had a sense that they were living
Speaker 2: in a historic time, not just because the twentieth century
Speaker 2: was starting, but also because industrialization seemed to have sped
Speaker 2: up the pace of history. Things were changing so fast.
Speaker 2: Suddenly there were machines for everything. Why not a time
Speaker 2: machine for time travel? It didn't seem so crazy, especially
Speaker 2: since a lot of those machines had made it possible
Speaker 2: to travel at speeds that just a few decades before
Speaker 2: had been impossible, like travel by train. Trains collapsed distance
Speaker 2: and altered people's sense of time. For instance, it used
Speaker 2: to take about ten days to get from London to
Speaker 2: Edinburgh by horse drawn stagecoach, but by the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: you could board a train in London, stop for lunch
Speaker 2: in York, gossip about the Royal Baccarat scandal of eighteen ninety,
Speaker 2: and step off in Edinburgh a mere eight and a
Speaker 2: half hours later. The speed of travel changed how people
Speaker 2: thought about time, and not just because trains moved quickly.
Speaker 2: Imagine the world before the nineteenth century, before trains and
Speaker 2: telegraph lines and telephones. Back then, time was a local thing.
Speaker 2: You'd set your clock to the town clock. Depending on
Speaker 2: where in the world you were. You might even have
Speaker 2: an entirely different calendar. But there was no sense that
Speaker 2: whatever time it was in one town should match up
Speaker 2: exactly with the time in another town. Until trains and
Speaker 2: telegraphs and all sorts of machines started to connect those
Speaker 2: towns together for trade and travel, and it became necessary
Speaker 2: to standardize time across them. Public time became an absolute,
Speaker 2: precise thing, But as soon as time became rigid began
Speaker 2: to unravel. Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity,
Speaker 2: in part through a thought experiment about clocks on trains,
Speaker 2: and then all this renegotiation of time fueled the time
Speaker 2: travel genre from HG. Well's right up to Bark to
Speaker 2: the Future, stories about the malleability of time and the
Speaker 2: feeling of being in history.
Speaker 5: This is the problem of time. I'm hungry now, but
Speaker 5: snack time is lighted.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that. As an eight year old sprawled
Speaker 2: on the floor after school, I was thinking about how
Speaker 2: the time travel genre was a way of metabolizing rapid
Speaker 2: historical change. But you can't watch one of these stories
Speaker 2: without thinking about time just a little differently. These stories
Speaker 2: chip away at that standardized public time, and they restate
Speaker 2: a feeling most of us have privately that was more
Speaker 2: publicly shared centuries ago. Time isn't a rigid straight line
Speaker 2: that works the same for you as it does for me.
Speaker 2: Wishbone is a thirty minute long show. Back in the nineties,
Speaker 2: watching it was to me a major event. Rewatching now,
Speaker 2: it felt like it passed in the blink of an eye.
Speaker 2: Part of that's just getting used to hour long prestige TV,
Speaker 2: but most of it is that when I was eight,
Speaker 2: afternoons felt the way days do to me now. So
Speaker 2: there's a history of a feeling about time baked into
Speaker 2: time travel stories, something personal. I wanted to figure out
Speaker 2: what that was, and I found my answer by doing
Speaker 2: a kind of time travel myself to a party for
Speaker 2: time travelers on March ninth, nineteen eighty two, in Baltimore.
Speaker 2: That party after the break In nineteen sixty HG. Wells's
Speaker 2: The Time Machine was adapted into a blockbuster film. It's
Speaker 2: not a good movie, but it was a big movie
Speaker 2: and a lot of people saw it, including a little
Speaker 2: boy named Richard trisno Elsbury. It was his bark to
Speaker 2: the future.
Speaker 7: And the movie like totally blew my mind. I was
Speaker 7: like seven years old.
Speaker 2: Richard grew up in a quiet, middle class home in
Speaker 2: Baltimore in the nineteen sixties. His dad worked for the irs.
Speaker 2: His mom was a part time secretary who wanted to
Speaker 2: be an artist. Richard was a dreamy kid and a
Speaker 2: bit obsessive. He kept thinking about that movie, especially the
Speaker 2: first time the time traveler gets his machine to work.
Speaker 2: The traveler jumps just a couple hours into the future,
Speaker 2: and everything looks the same, except the candles he lit
Speaker 2: just before he left have all burned down to the Wick.
Speaker 7: I would like lyon bade awake at night and think
Speaker 7: about the candles burning Dad, and it was it was
Speaker 7: just spectacular, you know.
Speaker 2: Richard wanted to know if time travel would ever be possible.
Speaker 2: One day he had a realization, what if we were
Speaker 2: a few lifetimes away from the invention of a time machine.
Speaker 2: If someone invented time travel in the future, they could
Speaker 2: go whenever and wherever they wanted, but they very likely
Speaker 2: would not come check in with Richard and Baltimore in
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties. How could he get them to come
Speaker 2: to him? And then he had an idea.
Speaker 7: Suppose we invited people from the future to come visit us.
Speaker 7: And it seemed very logical to me, and now it
Speaker 7: still seems logical to me.
Speaker 2: This idea became a lifelong obsession, and it grew in
Speaker 2: his mind into something totally wild, a party for time travelers.
Speaker 2: Maybe if Richard made the party big enough, fun enough,
Speaker 2: absolutely legendary enough that it got into the historical record
Speaker 2: and centries on people were still reading about it, well,
Speaker 2: he might wind up with some surprising guests.
Speaker 7: It's a logical idea.
Speaker 2: Richard thought about this for years when he grew up
Speaker 2: and graduated art school. He was part of Baltimore's wacky
Speaker 2: conceptual art scene in the nineteen seventies. He was living
Speaker 2: in a Rundown twenty room mansion with three or four
Speaker 2: other artists, throwing parties, parades, making weird art, wearing black
Speaker 2: trench coats with oversized red buttons, and always he was
Speaker 2: thinking about his time travel party. He decided to set
Speaker 2: a date.
Speaker 7: So, first of all, the date was chosen because of
Speaker 7: an astronomical event called a syzygy that was known to
Speaker 7: becoming in nineteen eighty two, which was an alignment of
Speaker 7: a lot of planets and was going to be in March.
Speaker 7: And then I selected a night of the full moon,
Speaker 7: which would be March ninth of nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2: Once he had the date nailed down, he had to
Speaker 2: figure out how to get that date into the historical record.
Speaker 2: I love this part, the pad cap rigor of it.
Speaker 2: It's like sort of a joke, but then not really
Speaker 2: a joke at all.
Speaker 6: But that was kind of a nature of what we
Speaker 6: were doing, was trying to figure out possible placements in
Speaker 6: history that could somehow end up in an archive somewhere.
Speaker 2: Artist Doug Retzler he was part of an organization Richard
Speaker 2: started to manage all this, the Chrononautic Society.
Speaker 6: Richard had created a stencil welcome people from the Future
Speaker 6: of March nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2: They used that stencil to spray paint the date everywhere,
Speaker 2: including the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Speaker 6: And so we went down there and we were about
Speaker 6: to spray it onto the base of the sculpture that
Speaker 6: was outside of that and we were apprehended by the
Speaker 6: National Archives Police and detain.
Speaker 2: They wanted to get in the news. They wanted the
Speaker 2: story of the party and that date to be in
Speaker 2: the historical record, and they had people working around the
Speaker 2: country trying to spread the word. In nineteen eighty Richard
Speaker 2: bought an ad in Art Forum magazine inviting people from
Speaker 2: the future to come to a party on March ninth,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two. It said welcome people from the future
Speaker 2: in huge letters. An influential la art magazine called Wet
Speaker 2: Magazine ran an article titled future Humans Read This, giving
Speaker 2: the date and inviting future readers to come back to
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two in Boogie. Richard even wrote a letter
Speaker 2: to famed astrologist Linda Goodman, who reprinted it in her
Speaker 2: best selling book, Linda Goodman's Love Signs, which is still
Speaker 2: in print. She called it a perfect example of aquarian thinking.
Speaker 2: There were plans for parties in Los Angeles, New Mexico,
Speaker 2: and Montreal, but Richard still needed a venue for the
Speaker 2: main event in Baltimore, and he got his chance when
Speaker 2: a new bookstore came to town and decided to set up
Speaker 2: shop in a glamorous, abandoned old beauty parlor Second Story Books.
Speaker 8: The place was a go to destination for a let's say,
Speaker 8: evolving counterculture.
Speaker 2: Alan Steipeck, owner of the store, which was staffed entirely
Speaker 2: by Richard and his conceptual artist friends.
Speaker 8: I was the wrong person to own a store with
Speaker 8: this kind of culture.
Speaker 2: The artists became a problem for Alan. They're always throwing parties,
Speaker 2: sleeping in the art installations, or stealing his books.
Speaker 8: There were two separate cultures trying to run a store
Speaker 8: and concert and that concept. It was like having kazoos
Speaker 8: and violins.
Speaker 2: I completely fell in love with recreating the crazy world
Speaker 2: of this bookstore. I have to admit, so indulge me
Speaker 2: for a minute. It's like if Empire Records were an
Speaker 2: episode of the X files set at MoMA, but in Baltimore.
Speaker 2: I spoke to a bunch of people who worked at
Speaker 2: or hung out around the shop, including the artist Lori Stepp,
Speaker 2: who seemed to confirm the kazoos and violins thing.
Speaker 9: I mean, what did you expect, you know?
Speaker 2: Despite the chaos for a beautiful moment, the store was
Speaker 2: at the center of the Baltimore arts scene. Alan Ginsberg
Speaker 2: read there, so did a lot of famous poets and artists.
Speaker 2: John Waters, the director, was always hanging around. It was
Speaker 2: on national lists as one of the best bookstores in
Speaker 2: the country. The Mayor of Baltimore would start the city's
Speaker 2: parades from there, and it was totally beautiful. It had
Speaker 2: thirty foot high ceilings, twin staircases up from the ground
Speaker 2: floor to a balcony, an art gallery on the second floor,
Speaker 2: and twelve foot high gilt mirrors all over the place.
Speaker 2: It was perfect. And when Alan Stipeck decided to open
Speaker 2: a bar in the basement, Richard saw his golden opportunity.
Speaker 2: He suggested that the bar's opening night should be on
Speaker 2: March ninth, nineteen eighty two, the night of his Time
Speaker 2: Traveler landing party.
Speaker 9: I do remember thinking serving alcohol to poets wasn't a
Speaker 9: great idea.
Speaker 2: Alan agreed to host the Time Traveler party, and Richard
Speaker 2: got to work planning the most legendary party of Baltimore's history.
Speaker 2: Years of thinking Richard's big day was finally arriving the syzygy.
Speaker 2: The alignment of the planets was actually a big deal,
Speaker 2: not just for Richard. It was like y two k light.
Speaker 2: There'd been a best selling book called the Jupiter Effect
Speaker 2: that predicted that the alignment of the planets would lead
Speaker 2: to a whole bunch of natural disasters earthquakes, floods, nuclear meltdowns.
Speaker 2: The local news in Baltimore covered the astrological angle by
Speaker 2: going to the director of the planetarium, doctors or Poli,
Speaker 2: and asking for his expert opinion.
Speaker 7: As you can see, the planets are not in a
Speaker 7: straight line.
Speaker 2: They're in kind of a crazy zigzag line across the sky.
Speaker 7: There's nothing unusual about it.
Speaker 2: But who cares. Even the newscasters wanted to believe.
Speaker 1: But if Zirpulli and the majority of astronomers in the
Speaker 1: world are wrong, well we'll see tomorrow, Bill Sider, you've
Speaker 1: seen too.
Speaker 2: A few of the crononauts drove out to a Mesa
Speaker 2: in New Mexico for the big night. Crews around the
Speaker 2: world started setting up their spin off parties, but most
Speaker 2: of the team was in Baltimore. Richard and the staff
Speaker 2: of Second Story Books got the flagship party started, and
Speaker 2: when evening came around, the scene was unprecedented.
Speaker 7: So it was like, we're here, and I believe that
Speaker 7: the Mayor came by that day.
Speaker 8: The Mayor brought in searchlights helped them up to try
Speaker 8: to catch the the interplanetary travelers as they came down
Speaker 8: to Earth.
Speaker 10: It was crazy. It was full of people.
Speaker 6: So I was on the top of this mesia lighting
Speaker 6: flares and documenting the star and the different venuses rising.
Speaker 7: There was a nude couple who claimed that they were
Speaker 7: Adam and Eve.
Speaker 10: I was getting really nervous because we couldn't really tell
Speaker 10: who was doing what.
Speaker 7: Jello all over the floor and people were like writhing around,
Speaker 7: and Kirby had a television set on.
Speaker 9: The where the people from the future, where we see
Speaker 9: our future selves.
Speaker 11: Not only did the may of thick around, but he
Speaker 11: stayed there the whole night and led a conga line
Speaker 11: of people up the stairs of the Washington Monument at
Speaker 11: Quall for flop.
Speaker 2: The New York Times sent a reporter to cover this madness,
Speaker 2: and I swear to you I am not making this up.
Speaker 2: The Times reporter at the Time Traveler party was named
Speaker 2: Benjamin Franklin. They ran out of alcohol, the party just
Speaker 2: kept going. It was amazing. Except so did any time
Speaker 2: travelers come to the party.
Speaker 7: We don't know. I mean, you know, there wasn't any
Speaker 7: indication that there definitely was time travelers there.
Speaker 2: That was Richard. Again. When I talk to the Second
Speaker 2: Story bookstore management about this, they had a slightly different take.
Speaker 10: I will say, just for the mostly for Ben's sake,
Speaker 10: that I'm totally open to the idea that the time
Speaker 10: travelers erased all of that from our memories.
Speaker 2: Okay, so probably no time travelers. But the party was incredible. Still,
Speaker 2: good things never last, and a little more than a
Speaker 2: year later the store closed. It was just untenable kazoos
Speaker 2: and violins. But when I talked to Richard about the
Speaker 2: whole thing, I wasn't so much after whether or not
Speaker 2: the experiment worked, as I was trying to understand why
Speaker 2: so many people were drawn to it and what he
Speaker 2: meant by it. It seems to me like you're not
Speaker 2: a person who's necessarily like, time travel is real and
Speaker 2: this will prove it. You're more a person who's like,
Speaker 2: why have we closed our minds to so many things?
Speaker 7: Is that that's a that's a pretty correct statement. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I see it. It's fun and funny, but it's also
Speaker 7: kind of dead serious. I think that the limitations that
Speaker 7: people have on their thinking, on their imaginations keeps us
Speaker 7: sort of you know, and trapped in a lot of
Speaker 7: pretty lousy stuff in this world, you know. And if
Speaker 7: they felt if they felt more self empowered to use
Speaker 7: their imagination and to like follow their their dreams, not
Speaker 7: only would they be better off, but other people would
Speaker 7: be better off.
Speaker 2: Somewhere in between dead serious and fun and funny. That
Speaker 2: is the exact feeling that time travel stories express. And
Speaker 2: this party wasn't just a rave. It was, as Laurie
Speaker 2: reminded me, a work of art.
Speaker 9: I mean, it's all about raising questions, you know, and
Speaker 9: making making you think so. But I do remember that
Speaker 9: sort of you know, like maybe maybe they'll show up.
Speaker 2: How will we know, you know?
Speaker 9: I mean certainly now I'm like, are you the same person?
Speaker 9: Like if you met yourself, would it be like meeting
Speaker 9: the same person. I think it's a great conceptual piece.
Speaker 9: I really, I really do.
Speaker 2: Time travel stories and time travel parties raise all these
Speaker 2: big questions about what happens to us as we move
Speaker 2: through time, but they also ask a big question about
Speaker 2: what we would change if we could go back. There
Speaker 2: are often stories about regret and loneliness and time. The
Speaker 2: time traveler is almost always lonely. If you visit the past,
Speaker 2: you know how everything's going to turn out, how people die,
Speaker 2: when wars break out, who winds up with whom. If
Speaker 2: you go to the future, your world is gone, replaced.
Speaker 2: That's why I love this party. It's about bringing people together,
Speaker 2: calling out across the void to the future, and welcoming
Speaker 2: it back to the past.
Speaker 7: One of the definitions for me of conceptual art is
Speaker 7: is that it carries some content, whether or not you're
Speaker 7: there to experience it or not. It's participating people participating
Speaker 7: in the idea. Say you're part of the You're part
Speaker 7: of it. You being here is part of it. Yeah,
Speaker 7: this is what we were going for forty years ago.
Speaker 7: It's one day Ben, it was not even born yet.
Speaker 7: He's going to come back and ask good questions.
Speaker 2: Thank you, I'm glad to have been part of whatever
Speaker 2: weird time lift this is. To me, the party is
Speaker 2: not really about time travelers in the future. It's about
Speaker 2: living in the present, which is a hard thing to
Speaker 2: do because as soon as you're thinking about a present moment,
Speaker 2: it's already in the past. The party seems to me
Speaker 2: like a moment when everyone was really aware of that,
Speaker 2: aware of where you are in time, that one day
Speaker 2: your crazy bookstore full of conceptual artists will be gone,
Speaker 2: and so will a lot of your friends, and so
Speaker 2: will the old you. It's a message in a bottle
Speaker 2: to the future, just like a time capsule. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. We're in Mountain View, seven miles away from
Speaker 2: the Googleplex.
Speaker 3: Isn't it gonna Doesn't it seem like you're entering a wormhole.
Speaker 1: Just because it's called the Googleplex? Oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: they used to have this thing that they never.
Speaker 8: Back.
Speaker 2: On February seventeenth, twenty twenty, Jill, her youngest son Oliver,
Speaker 2: and I drove all around San Francisco in that bright
Speaker 2: red convertible for a long time. We were looking, among
Speaker 2: other things, for that Yahoo time capsule, that archive of
Speaker 2: the early Internet. We were curious about it because it
Speaker 2: was strangely like an early social media thing, before social
Speaker 2: media was really mainstream, Uploading yourself was still new for people.
Speaker 2: What did that look like right before it became the
Speaker 2: thing we all did all the time. We wanted to know.
Speaker 2: We saw Facebook in the Google Plex, but we never
Speaker 2: found the Yahoo time capsule. Still, we're pretty sure that
Speaker 2: we're the reason Verizon, Yahoo's new parent company, remembered it
Speaker 2: even existed, because right after we started emailing about it
Speaker 2: that January, the artist who created the time capsule, Price
Speaker 2: said Verizon reached out to him. And then a week
Speaker 2: or so after we left San Francisco, Yahoo staff got
Speaker 2: the Macmini they'd saved it on out of storage and
Speaker 2: hauled it out on stage during their twenty fifth birthday party.
Speaker 2: Nobody could find the password the Luckily someone had it
Speaker 2: written down somewhere. The password was the word paper.
Speaker 11: And making its return in cinematic fashion, a digital time capsule.
Speaker 2: After sitting in the Smithsonian for years, Yahoo's twenty fifth birthday.
Speaker 11: Marked the perfect time to take a glimpse at history.
Speaker 2: I gotta say, watching the chip or video of Horizon
Speaker 2: made about the event, I'm happy we weren't there. During
Speaker 2: the heady days of the early two thousands. This thing
Speaker 2: was beamed into outer space and projected on canyon walls
Speaker 2: in New Mexico. Now he was just carried out in
Speaker 2: a box during an all staff ah the passage of time.
Speaker 2: It kind of feels like you're going through someone's home
Speaker 2: videos that you don't know, But it was really just
Speaker 2: kind of looking at a slice of personal lives of
Speaker 2: these people that we never met that were Yahoo users
Speaker 2: Once upon a Time. Thirty six thousand, five hundred and
Speaker 2: forty eight messages, ninety seven one hundred and seventy seven pictures,
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of slices of life. Two friends at
Speaker 2: a soccer game with flower necklaces, someone skiing in a cowsuit,
Speaker 2: a teen wielding two lightsabers, a note that read I
Speaker 2: love Anita. I'll tell her after I finished my MBA
Speaker 2: in France. All these messages to the future met with
Speaker 2: a shrug. But I couldn't stop thinking about it because
Speaker 2: of how utterly unimaginable the world that Time Capsule landed
Speaker 2: in was from the one that left just fourteen years before.
Speaker 2: The week we were in California, the number of worldwide
Speaker 2: deaths from Sarskov two passed one thousand A day later,
Speaker 2: the who gave it the new name COVID nineteen. On
Speaker 2: March second, Yahoo opened up the time capsule at a
Speaker 2: big in person event. A couple of week later. Ninety percent
Speaker 2: of Verizon staff started working from home when the lockdown started.
Speaker 2: I kept working on the last archive from my apartment.
Speaker 2: My fiance Julia, and I were in New York. I
Speaker 2: remember running in the streets and holding my breath when
Speaker 2: I passed someone. I'm embarrassed to say. We scrubbed down groceries.
Speaker 2: Suddenly everything changed, and then nothing was changing. All the
Speaker 2: old clockwork fell away no more. At the next trains
Speaker 2: in three minutes, pick ups at four, meet you at
Speaker 2: five for anyone lucky enough to be working from home
Speaker 2: who was just big, long days, each the same as
Speaker 2: the one before. After a little while, we moved to
Speaker 2: Julia's mom's house in Connecticut. I watched a nest of
Speaker 2: Bluebird's Fledge and another move in and start the process
Speaker 2: all over again. I fell in love with birds. I
Speaker 2: was also listening to a lot of ambient music. I
Speaker 2: came to realize birds and ambient music were just two
Speaker 2: different ways of thinking. About time. Cycles of natural time,
Speaker 2: like treeswa is showing up on the same day years apart,
Speaker 2: and then music without any meter long spare vast like
Speaker 2: an ocean. For some people, it was like time had
Speaker 2: just stopped. The days seemed unbelievably long. For others, they
Speaker 2: sped by. People started calling everything before March twenty twenty
Speaker 2: the beforetime. They didn't usually mention in after the psychologist
Speaker 2: talked about that on NPR.
Speaker 12: We are aware of time, We're aware of the fragility
Speaker 12: of time, and we're aware of what happens when your
Speaker 12: time to do the things you want is taken away
Speaker 12: from you. And I think that that is the real
Speaker 12: thing that will have changed, is how people value time.
Speaker 2: Valuing time. That was part of what freaked me out
Speaker 2: about the Yahoo time capsule, how near it came to
Speaker 2: being lost, and how pointless it all seemed in the end,
Speaker 2: and just how totally inconceivable everything in between closing and
Speaker 2: opening that box had been. Like a lot of people
Speaker 2: don't the pandemic. I had so much time, and all
Speaker 2: I could do was think about how it was slipping away.
Speaker 13: It's like, so it's the brick apartment building smack in
Speaker 13: the middle of Cambridge. Right, that looks like maybe we
Speaker 13: can go to that main door and then we have
Speaker 13: to press a button on the intercom.
Speaker 2: Three years after that first pandemic bunch, on March twenty eighth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, Jill and I met up in Cambridge
Speaker 2: to go see a time machine.
Speaker 1: Hey Stewart, it's Jill and Ben.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll buy you and go to third flour left.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 2: I told Jill I wanted to talk about time travel stories.
Speaker 2: Jill told me she had a crafty neighbor named Stuart
Speaker 2: who had built a perfect replica of a tartist Doctor
Speaker 2: Whose time machine.
Speaker 1: Look it's perfect.
Speaker 4: It's pretty good. I got. They were rebuilding the house
Speaker 4: next door, and I got all the wood for free.
Speaker 4: And that's why.
Speaker 2: It's to tear. Doctor Who is a sixty year old
Speaker 2: BBC show which is still running. The Doctor is the
Speaker 2: last of an alien race called time Lords. Each week
Speaker 2: he travels in his time machine, which looks like a
Speaker 2: blue police box. Usually, when Doctor Who shows up, it's
Speaker 2: because something's gone terribly wrong in time and he has
Speaker 2: to save the world. It's a mad zany, beautiful, sad show.
Speaker 2: It's also a show though, about how disorienting time travel is.
Speaker 2: The Doctor is a little adult and very lonely. We
Speaker 2: wanted to see this perfect artist, just the right shade
Speaker 2: of blue on a wood framed phone booth. Stuart had
Speaker 2: built it on the roof of his apartment building in Cambridge,
Speaker 2: which had entailed some compromises the dimension of the base.
Speaker 4: It should have been like a four foot square, but
Speaker 4: I was constrained by the dumpster next do our. It's
Speaker 4: on wheels though, it can be moved.
Speaker 1: Around, and well, I mean also it can tell Oh
Speaker 1: that's true.
Speaker 2: Stuart gave us the keys. Oh my god, it's.
Speaker 3: Really the key and you have a little chartist on
Speaker 3: it and it's the real yellow.
Speaker 1: So where would you go if you could?
Speaker 3: If it was working, it wasn't temporarily disabled.
Speaker 4: Oh I would probably go the future, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When would you go? Is what I'm supposed to Wan scared?
Speaker 10: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Fifty years to start?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I never really thought about that.
Speaker 2: Then do you have any predictions for what you would
Speaker 2: see in fifty years?
Speaker 12: No?
Speaker 4: I also stopped watching the news about a.
Speaker 2: Year though, Yeah, are you still watching Doctor Who?
Speaker 8: Though?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: It turned out that this particular tartist was full of
Speaker 2: stacked lawn chairs and buckets.
Speaker 14: It is true, the inside is not as exciting as
Speaker 14: the outside.
Speaker 2: We left Stuart and his amazing tartists and headed back
Speaker 2: to Jill's house down the street. We set up in
Speaker 2: the kitchen to talk about time.
Speaker 1: This isn't really about doctor, but I like I do.
Speaker 3: I'm very fascinated by the idea that messages can travel
Speaker 3: across time.
Speaker 1: Like I just really like that, and.
Speaker 3: Like that's why I like going to an archive, Like
Speaker 3: it's a message that somebody left and now I can
Speaker 3: see it. So when I was a freshman in college,
Speaker 3: I got a letter in the mail that was from
Speaker 3: my mother. But inside the envelope I thought it was
Speaker 3: a letter from my mother, But inside the envelope was
Speaker 3: a letter in my It was another envelope, and it
Speaker 3: had my handwriting in it. It was addressed to me by me,
Speaker 3: And it was this letter that my high school English
Speaker 3: teacher had everybody writes yourself four years in the future,
Speaker 3: which was like new then. Although I talked to students
Speaker 3: all the time, I was like, oh, yeah, we all
Speaker 3: have to do that now. But it was really it
Speaker 3: really affected me to get this because I was like
Speaker 3: this is a completely different person. I don't remember writing it,
Speaker 3: and then I had access to this whole other view
Speaker 3: of the world, and like that's.
Speaker 1: Why I like doing history.
Speaker 2: But so what was striking about the letter when you
Speaker 2: got it?
Speaker 3: So I was fourteen when I read it and nineteen
Speaker 3: when I got it, And if you can think about
Speaker 3: yourself at those two ages, there's a lot of changes.
Speaker 1: And I didn't remember what I was like at fourteen.
Speaker 3: I probably now can't remember what I was like at nineteen,
Speaker 3: but I was a lot closer to who I am now.
Speaker 3: But when I was fourteen, I could actually imagine who
Speaker 3: I was when I was nineteen, because the letter that
Speaker 3: I wrote at fourteen was sort of perfectly pitched to
Speaker 3: that nineteen year old self and was a very effective harangue.
Speaker 3: Like the letter was like I know you will not
Speaker 3: actually have done the following things that you really should
Speaker 3: have done by now, and I'm really mad at you
Speaker 3: for not doing them. So if you haven't done them yet,
Speaker 3: like get them the fuck done. And it was furious
Speaker 3: and scathing and seething and passionate and urgent and terrifying.
Speaker 3: And then I did all the things like I got
Speaker 3: the letter.
Speaker 1: And I was like, Oh my god, I guess she's right.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I thought I was going to do those things,
Speaker 1: but I also thought I might.
Speaker 2: Not sending messages to the future. This seemed to me
Speaker 2: a perfect segue to my old hobby horse. The reason
Speaker 2: I wanted to do this story is because of the
Speaker 2: Ahu time Capsule, which, as you may recall, as a
Speaker 2: story I've been unable to let go of. But I
Speaker 2: because I think for me, one of the things that
Speaker 2: expresses the weirdness of the pandemic and time and all
Speaker 2: of that is the fact that, you know, two weeks
Speaker 2: before Lockdown, two or three weeks, we were on the
Speaker 2: last trip that I took, like traveling around sort of
Speaker 2: like nothing was wrong, with the growing sense that something
Speaker 2: was maybe wrong.
Speaker 3: I do think about that trip as a kind of
Speaker 3: crazy Hurrah last Hurrah turned out because it was a
Speaker 3: mad cap trip and there was all this weirdness around
Speaker 3: the Matrix being shot in San Francisco, and we rented
Speaker 3: this crazy car and then we locked that interview in
Speaker 3: a vault, like it became its own time capsule.
Speaker 2: Every time we had a brainstorm meeting. For years after
Speaker 2: that trip, I kept bringing up the Yahoo time capsule.
Speaker 2: I felt like it was finally time for me to
Speaker 2: explain myself. I wonder if there's something about like a
Speaker 2: feeling of historical disjunction or like epical change, where you
Speaker 2: suddenly feel like things that are somewhat recent in chronological
Speaker 2: time are actually just like totally different eras, and if
Speaker 2: part of the way people express that feeling is through
Speaker 2: stories about time travel and being out of time.
Speaker 3: Well, one thing that I noticed a lot during the
Speaker 3: pandemic is that I think it meant that everyone had
Speaker 3: a sense of living in historical time.
Speaker 1: That is to say that there was.
Speaker 3: Not just this is February, but this is a specific
Speaker 3: time in the history of humanity or the history of
Speaker 3: the planet, and that I don't think most people walk
Speaker 3: around with that every day, although I do think most
Speaker 3: historians do, like that's part of the job, like where
Speaker 3: are we in time? That sense of orientation is it's
Speaker 3: kind of a pain, right, but like you're kind of
Speaker 3: in that a lot. Like so, I remember thinking how
Speaker 3: weird it was that everybody was thinking that way when
Speaker 3: it used to just be like I could talk.
Speaker 1: To my colleagues that way.
Speaker 2: It's good to live in the present, but it's a
Speaker 2: little crazy making to be constantly aware of the historical
Speaker 2: contingency of everything. It's like putting a window between yourself
Speaker 2: and the world.
Speaker 1: And it reminded me a little bit of.
Speaker 3: A friend of mine who was living with us when
Speaker 3: she was in medical school, and she talked about the
Speaker 3: day that you first do start dissecting a human cadaver
Speaker 3: in anatomy class.
Speaker 1: And it's like.
Speaker 3: You cross a bridge and then the people that are
Speaker 3: on the other side of the bridge are other human
Speaker 3: beings who have also dissected a cadaver, and you're completely
Speaker 3: separate from all other humans because you have seen the
Speaker 3: inside of humans and it's transformative. You then belong to
Speaker 3: that guild. But you even if you don't never become
Speaker 3: a doctor, like, you'll always belong to that guilt because
Speaker 3: you were one of the people who has seen.
Speaker 1: The inside of people.
Speaker 3: And I think of historians as people who've seen the
Speaker 3: kind of inside of time. And so that it was
Speaker 3: just weird, weird during the pending that it was like
Speaker 3: everybody had seen the inside of a human body. Like
Speaker 3: it wasn't like, oh, great, everybody now knows what this
Speaker 3: feels like. It was more like, oh, everybody carries the
Speaker 3: same burden.
Speaker 2: I remember how during the pandemic people said they started
Speaker 2: keeping journals because things just months in the past felt
Speaker 2: like they came from a different time. But the main
Speaker 2: reason I think there were so many stories about time
Speaker 2: and time travel these last few years is that time
Speaker 2: travel thinking is the same as pandemic thinking. You step
Speaker 2: on a crack in the sidewalk and suddenly you've changed
Speaker 2: the whole course of history. You cough on a subway
Speaker 2: and suddenly you've risked the life of someone's aminocompromised mom.
Speaker 2: Everything's tangled up and everything else. Richard, the time travel
Speaker 2: party guy said something about this towards the end of
Speaker 2: our call.
Speaker 7: I just wanted to mention because it's important to me.
Speaker 7: The song by the Beatles. I've just seen a face
Speaker 7: and there's one line in that which I think is
Speaker 7: so brilliant. Had it been another day, I might have
Speaker 7: looked the other way. And there's this couplet, you know,
Speaker 7: this like simple line, and it really encapsulates the whole idea.
Speaker 7: Am I going to answer the door or not answer
Speaker 7: the door? Am I going to make the phone call
Speaker 7: or not make the phone call? And we're constantly inventing
Speaker 7: new lives for ourselves. You know, you know, where did
Speaker 7: COVID come from? Somebody I did something wrong.
Speaker 2: That kind of thinking it can be totally paralyzing, but
Speaker 2: I think in a spirit of acceptance and letting go.
Speaker 2: It's also beautiful. All the future depends on even the
Speaker 2: smallest moments. Now, even if you can't speak to the future,
Speaker 2: it still depends on you. Okay. It's twelve twenty eight
Speaker 2: on Wednesday, March twenty ninth, and I am on the
Speaker 2: Eagle Scout bench just to the left when you come
Speaker 2: into the main area outside the Dudham Public Library, Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: just off Norfolk Street, waiting for time travelers. After Jill
Speaker 2: and I wrapped up our conversation, I went back to
Speaker 2: my parents' house to get my things. They live in Denham, Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: I was on my way back to New York, but
Speaker 2: before I left, I wanted to throw my own party
Speaker 2: for time travelers, just to see what it felt like.
Speaker 2: I took down the latitude and longitude of that bench
Speaker 2: at the library, just in case they don't have a
Speaker 2: record of the street names in the future, and I
Speaker 2: also wrote down the time that I was there. I'm
Speaker 2: not a proud man, so I'll admit it. I was
Speaker 2: slightly embarrassed to be sitting alone on a bench holding
Speaker 2: a microphone in front of a public library at noon
Speaker 2: on a Wednesday. So if it sounds like I'm speaking
Speaker 2: out of the corner of my mouth, I am four
Speaker 2: to two point two four seven seven nine three four
Speaker 2: comma negative seventy one point one seven five nine four
Speaker 2: seven zero. History is not time travel because the past
Speaker 2: is actually past, and all you have left of it
Speaker 2: are these bits and pieces of messages from the people
Speaker 2: who were, to the people who are. Yahoo time capsules,
Speaker 2: parties for time travelers, letters to yourself. I've spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time with those bits and pieces this season
Speaker 2: of the Last Archive, and I didn't plan it this way,
Speaker 2: but I came to realize that a lot of these
Speaker 2: stories are about moments when people became connected in new ways,
Speaker 2: the dawn of social network theory, the rise of the
Speaker 2: telephone at work, human population science, time travel, moments when
Speaker 2: people came up with new ways of thinking about how
Speaker 2: everything was bound up together, networked, like any moment in
Speaker 2: time and everything that follows. Everyone you see who have
Speaker 2: this question, was that person from the future, which of
Speaker 2: course is ridiculous, but there is something sort of destabilizing
Speaker 2: about it. I'd assume this would be a party of one,
Speaker 2: not because I'm sure there'll never be time travel, but
Speaker 2: more because a few people have tried this now and
Speaker 2: it never quite seems to work. After Richard, there was
Speaker 2: a party for time travelers at MIT in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five. Destination Day in Perth, Australia the same year.
Speaker 2: Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist, even through a birthday party
Speaker 2: in two thousand and nine, but didn't invite anyone until
Speaker 2: after the event. Nobody came, and same for me. Okay,
Speaker 2: it's twelve thirty six and I'm gonna head home now.
Speaker 2: That was the window for time travelers.
Speaker 14: I saw a man in a black zip up with
Speaker 14: a bald patch walk by. See a man with a
Speaker 14: shock of white hair and a black shirt approaching movers left,
Speaker 14: but no sign of time travelers.
Speaker 2: I walked home to catch my train. It was a sunny, warm,
Speaker 2: late March day. The pandemic felt something like it was over.
Speaker 2: Someone had put new mulch in the churchyard and the
Speaker 2: church clock was running four minutes fast. The birds were
Speaker 2: out the daffodils and crocuses were coming up. Richard is
Speaker 2: restarting the Chrononautic Society, so later I sent him my
Speaker 2: party's coordinates. But I don't think it matters whether anyone
Speaker 2: knows where or when I was. Besides, even if you
Speaker 2: wrote it down, saved it on a hard drive, walked
Speaker 2: it in a box, eventually, somebody is probably gonna forget
Speaker 2: that password. That's okay. The Last Archive is written and
Speaker 2: hosted by Me Ben Nattapaffrey. It's produced by Me and
Speaker 2: Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is
Speaker 2: our engineer. Fact checking on this episode by Arthur Gomberts.
Speaker 2: Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Me. Additional music by Korntooth.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Special
Speaker 2: thanks on this episode to Amaldra, Jacob Goldstein, and Sarah Nix.
Speaker 2: If you're a lover of time travel stories and time
Speaker 2: travel history, check out the Time Travelers Almanac from Tour
Speaker 2: Books and Time Travel a History by James Glick at Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Thanks to our executive team including Jacob Weisberg, Malcolm Gladwell,
Speaker 2: Heather Fain, John Schnarz Leet Malade and Greta Cone. And
Speaker 2: to our business team including Kerrie Brody, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan,
Speaker 2: Royston Beserve, Jasmine Perez and Blair Jilkes. Marketing team includes
Speaker 2: Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Navarez, Sean Karney and Brian Strebrenek,
Speaker 2: with operations and licensing support from Nicole Optenbosch, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 2: Daniella Lakhan, Jake Flanagan, Fara de Grange and Owen Miller.
Speaker 2: Thanks to everyone at Pushkin for a bibliography, further reading
Speaker 2: and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode. Head
Speaker 2: to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
Speaker 2: a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
Speaker 2: consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad
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Speaker 2: Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
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Speaker 2: newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more
Speaker 2: Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Mattafhaffrey,