The Krononauts

In our season finale, we travel through time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin The Last Archive, A history of truth.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Imagine there's a place in our world where the known
things go, shelves stocked with proof, and all around the
clutter of clues. I haven't been down here in the
Last Archive for a while, but Jill's stopping by later,
and I promised her i'd keep it clean, which, well
for starters. There's a car in the middle of the room.

(00:49):
Is that a DeLorean from Back to the Future. Cool?
I'll deal with that later. May as well start small
with this stack of old stencils. Welcome people from the future.
March ninth, nineteen eighty two.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Weird?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
And what's this sleigh doing over here? By these candles?
There's a plaque and you factured by HG. Wells that
it's turning on the date on the dial. It's changing
February twenty twenty. Oh no, there's no going back now,

(01:27):
So step across the threshold to a highway in California
on February seventeenth of that cursed year.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
It's like we could.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Be being pulled by Oxen right now, except who lives
to Melbom.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
I actually think we'd be faster in February twenty twenty,
I went to California with Jill Lapour, host emeritus of
The Last Archive, and her youngest son Oliver. We rented
a twenty seventeen red Camaro convertible for work like this
is overpowered for our purposes because we're currently going to

(02:10):
ten miles an hour.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Yet, but we're going to pick up speed.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
You don't want it so cold in here, Oliver, don't
do that.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
I'm so cold. You really not that cold. We were
out in California because we were recording the final episode
of our first season. The convertible was Oliver's idea, very California,
but it wasn't really top down weather.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
Cold at all.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
You're just scared. The first episode of the season was
in Vermont. Yeah, were you also contained presence. We were
researching ideas about predicting the future, computers, big data, time capsules,
that kind of thing. We wanted to see the place
that future was being made, Silicon Valley, so we headed
west in our red Camaro. We were on a quest

(03:02):
to figure out who killed Truth, and.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
We're gonna go.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Try to reconstruct some of that story to understand how,
I don't know, all the world became California in the nineteen.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Fifties, So that was a good explanation. The tape is
totally unusual, blowing out my ears. The episode ended up
being a lot about California archives and the fantasy of
predicting the future. We spent a lot of time in
the old church offices of the Internet Archive. But there

(03:41):
was one other stop we made that trip that we
didn't include in the final thing to dig for another
forgotten piece of computer history, the Yahoo time capsule. Yeah,
when was the last time you went to the Yahoo homepage?
I'm going to guess that it was sometime before two

(04:02):
thousand and six. Back then, Yahoo had been the biggest
website on the Internet for years. Millions of people visited
its homepage every month, totaling billions of views. Then one
day a portal appeared on that homepage to a time capsule.
Yahoo had hired an artist to make an anthropological account

(04:24):
of the Internet. In two thousand and six, users could
upload photos, videos, text whatever they wanted.

Speaker 5 (04:30):
This.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
I know it just sounds like any social media, but
the Yahoo time capsule was before Twitter, TikTok, snapchat, Instagram,
when Facebook was just a thing on some college campuses.
This Yahoo thing felt new and exciting, and billions of
people would have seen it. Hundreds of thousands of people
made entries. Then, a little under a month after it opened,

(04:53):
the portal closed. The contents of the capsule were beamed
vlaser into outer space, downloaded on a Mac Mini hard drive,
and sent to the Smithsonian. Yahoo planned to open it
fourteen years later, on the twenty fifth anniversary of the
day the company was incorporated, at a moment in time when,
of course Yahoo would still be on top and everything

(05:15):
would be normal and cool. They put a date in
the sand March of twenty twenty. I read about all
this in January of that year, and it sounded hilarious
to me. We thought maybe we could see them open
it on our trip out west, except it seemed like
everybody at Yahoo had just forgotten about it. I kept

(05:37):
emailing Verizon, Yahoo's new parent company, but they didn't respond
at first. When I reached the original artist, he said
nobody had been in touch with them about the opening.
And then weeks after we got back from that trip,
lockdowns began. The world changed dramatically overnight. Nothing planned in
the before fell right anymore. We dropped the idea of

(05:59):
the Yahoo Time capsule changed our episode. We moved on,
The world moved on, but for some reason in the
corner of my mind and stop thinking about it. Welcome
to the Last Archive, the show about how we know
what we know, how we used to know things, and
why it seems sometimes lately like we don't know anything

(06:22):
at all anymore. I'm Ben that of Haffrey. For our
season finale, I want to reckon with that time capsule
and something that I think a lot of us experienced
during the first year of the pandemic. Time started to
feel different. And I know I wasn't the only one
feeling this way, because all of a sudden, everyone around

(06:43):
me was watching and reading all these time bending time
travel stories, everything everywhere, all at once, Out of Range,
Sea of Tranquility, Outlander, This Time Tomorrow, anything in the
Marvel multiverse. It's like we're living in a time travel
golden age. But why, you know how? On this podcast,
we've always been chasing that question who killed Truth? Today

(07:06):
I've got a different question, what happened to I'm One
of the weirdest things about time travel stories is they
haven't been around very long. The science fiction writer HG.
Wells basically started the genre in eighteen ninety five with
his book The Time Machine. I read it a few

(07:26):
years ago, but if I'm being honest, I've known about
it since I was eight years old, because it was
on an episode of Wishbone.

Speaker 6 (07:34):
What's the story Wishbone's Dream.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
If you've never seen Wishbone, it's a PBS children's show
where a talking dog reenacts literary classics. Most of what
I know about the classics I learned first on Wishbone.
So if we're talking time travel, I'm thinking season one,
episode twenty three, Bark to the Future, an episode written
by a young Morocca. The dog plays the time traveler.

Speaker 5 (08:03):
The hero of our story is a man who will
defy convention. He is a man who will use to
technology to redefine travel.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
In Bark to the Future, as in The Time Machine,
an inventor claims he's got a new machine that can
move through the fourth dimension time. I was probably in
the second grade when I saw this. I love time
travel stories now, but this, I think was the first
one I ever came across. Wish Bon. It turns out
was sticking pretty closely to the nineteenth century source material,

(08:34):
just with dogs not people. This by the way is
the dog's voice?

Speaker 5 (08:39):
Have I really traveled to the year eight hundred, two thousand,
seven hundred and one.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
People like to say there are only something like seven
plots for every story. Plots people have been reusing since forever.
You know them Rags to riches, the hero's journey, overcoming
the monster, the quest. Okay, maybe it's all a little
schematic exactly seven, but still it's weird to have this
big new story time travel come out of nowhere in

(09:09):
the eighteen nineties. People have explained that in a few ways,
but what it all amounts to is that at the
turn of the century the eighteen nineties, when HG. Wells
was writing, people had a sense that they were living
in a historic time, not just because the twentieth century
was starting, but also because industrialization seemed to have sped

(09:29):
up the pace of history. Things were changing so fast.
Suddenly there were machines for everything. Why not a time
machine for time travel? It didn't seem so crazy, especially
since a lot of those machines had made it possible
to travel at speeds that just a few decades before
had been impossible, like travel by train. Trains collapsed distance

(09:53):
and altered people's sense of time. For instance, it used
to take about ten days to get from London to
Edinburgh by horse drawn stagecoach, but by the late nineteenth century,
you could board a train in London, stop for lunch
in York, gossip about the Royal Baccarat scandal of eighteen ninety,

(10:14):
and step off in Edinburgh a mere eight and a
half hours later. The speed of travel changed how people
thought about time, and not just because trains moved quickly.
Imagine the world before the nineteenth century, before trains and
telegraph lines and telephones. Back then, time was a local thing.

(10:38):
You'd set your clock to the town clock. Depending on
where in the world you were. You might even have
an entirely different calendar. But there was no sense that
whatever time it was in one town should match up
exactly with the time in another town. Until trains and
telegraphs and all sorts of machines started to connect those
towns together for trade and travel, and it became necessary

(10:59):
to standardize time across them. Public time became an absolute,
precise thing, But as soon as time became rigid began
to unravel. Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity,
in part through a thought experiment about clocks on trains,
and then all this renegotiation of time fueled the time

(11:21):
travel genre from HG. Well's right up to Bark to
the Future, stories about the malleability of time and the
feeling of being in history.

Speaker 5 (11:33):
This is the problem of time. I'm hungry now, but
snack time is lighted.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
I'm not saying that. As an eight year old sprawled
on the floor after school, I was thinking about how
the time travel genre was a way of metabolizing rapid
historical change. But you can't watch one of these stories
without thinking about time just a little differently. These stories
chip away at that standardized public time, and they restate
a feeling most of us have privately that was more

(12:03):
publicly shared centuries ago. Time isn't a rigid straight line
that works the same for you as it does for me.
Wishbone is a thirty minute long show. Back in the nineties,
watching it was to me a major event. Rewatching now,
it felt like it passed in the blink of an eye.
Part of that's just getting used to hour long prestige TV,

(12:25):
but most of it is that when I was eight,
afternoons felt the way days do to me now. So
there's a history of a feeling about time baked into
time travel stories, something personal. I wanted to figure out
what that was, and I found my answer by doing
a kind of time travel myself to a party for

(12:46):
time travelers on March ninth, nineteen eighty two, in Baltimore.
That party after the break In nineteen sixty HG. Wells's

(13:06):
The Time Machine was adapted into a blockbuster film. It's
not a good movie, but it was a big movie
and a lot of people saw it, including a little
boy named Richard trisno Elsbury. It was his bark to
the future.

Speaker 7 (13:22):
And the movie like totally blew my mind. I was
like seven years old.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Richard grew up in a quiet, middle class home in
Baltimore in the nineteen sixties. His dad worked for the irs.
His mom was a part time secretary who wanted to
be an artist. Richard was a dreamy kid and a
bit obsessive. He kept thinking about that movie, especially the
first time the time traveler gets his machine to work.
The traveler jumps just a couple hours into the future,

(13:50):
and everything looks the same, except the candles he lit
just before he left have all burned down to the Wick.

Speaker 7 (13:59):
I would like lyon bade awake at night and think
about the candles burning Dad, and it was it was
just spectacular, you know.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Richard wanted to know if time travel would ever be possible.
One day he had a realization, what if we were
a few lifetimes away from the invention of a time machine.
If someone invented time travel in the future, they could
go whenever and wherever they wanted, but they very likely
would not come check in with Richard and Baltimore in
the nineteen sixties. How could he get them to come

(14:30):
to him? And then he had an idea.

Speaker 7 (14:34):
Suppose we invited people from the future to come visit us.
And it seemed very logical to me, and now it
still seems logical to me.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
This idea became a lifelong obsession, and it grew in
his mind into something totally wild, a party for time travelers.
Maybe if Richard made the party big enough, fun enough,
absolutely legendary enough that it got into the historical record
and centries on people were still reading about it, well,

(15:04):
he might wind up with some surprising guests.

Speaker 7 (15:07):
It's a logical idea.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Richard thought about this for years when he grew up
and graduated art school. He was part of Baltimore's wacky
conceptual art scene in the nineteen seventies. He was living
in a Rundown twenty room mansion with three or four
other artists, throwing parties, parades, making weird art, wearing black
trench coats with oversized red buttons, and always he was

(15:31):
thinking about his time travel party. He decided to set
a date.

Speaker 7 (15:35):
So, first of all, the date was chosen because of
an astronomical event called a syzygy that was known to
becoming in nineteen eighty two, which was an alignment of
a lot of planets and was going to be in March.
And then I selected a night of the full moon,
which would be March ninth of nineteen eighty two.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Once he had the date nailed down, he had to
figure out how to get that date into the historical record.
I love this part, the pad cap rigor of it.
It's like sort of a joke, but then not really
a joke at all.

Speaker 6 (16:07):
But that was kind of a nature of what we
were doing, was trying to figure out possible placements in
history that could somehow end up in an archive somewhere.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Artist Doug Retzler he was part of an organization Richard
started to manage all this, the Chrononautic Society.

Speaker 6 (16:29):
Richard had created a stencil welcome people from the Future
of March nineteen eighty two.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
They used that stencil to spray paint the date everywhere,
including the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Speaker 6 (16:43):
And so we went down there and we were about
to spray it onto the base of the sculpture that
was outside of that and we were apprehended by the
National Archives Police and detain.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
They wanted to get in the news. They wanted the
story of the party and that date to be in
the historical record, and they had people working around the
country trying to spread the word. In nineteen eighty Richard
bought an ad in Art Forum magazine inviting people from
the future to come to a party on March ninth,
nineteen eighty two. It said welcome people from the future
in huge letters. An influential la art magazine called Wet

(17:24):
Magazine ran an article titled future Humans Read This, giving
the date and inviting future readers to come back to
nineteen eighty two in Boogie. Richard even wrote a letter
to famed astrologist Linda Goodman, who reprinted it in her
best selling book, Linda Goodman's Love Signs, which is still
in print. She called it a perfect example of aquarian thinking.

(17:46):
There were plans for parties in Los Angeles, New Mexico,
and Montreal, but Richard still needed a venue for the
main event in Baltimore, and he got his chance when
a new bookstore came to town and decided to set up
shop in a glamorous, abandoned old beauty parlor Second Story Books.

Speaker 8 (18:04):
The place was a go to destination for a let's say,
evolving counterculture.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Alan Steipeck, owner of the store, which was staffed entirely
by Richard and his conceptual artist friends.

Speaker 8 (18:20):
I was the wrong person to own a store with
this kind of culture.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
The artists became a problem for Alan. They're always throwing parties,
sleeping in the art installations, or stealing his books.

Speaker 8 (18:34):
There were two separate cultures trying to run a store
and concert and that concept. It was like having kazoos
and violins.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
I completely fell in love with recreating the crazy world
of this bookstore. I have to admit, so indulge me
for a minute. It's like if Empire Records were an
episode of the X files set at MoMA, but in Baltimore.
I spoke to a bunch of people who worked at
or hung out around the shop, including the artist Lori Stepp,
who seemed to confirm the kazoos and violins thing.

Speaker 9 (19:04):
I mean, what did you expect, you know?

Speaker 2 (19:06):
Despite the chaos for a beautiful moment, the store was
at the center of the Baltimore arts scene. Alan Ginsberg
read there, so did a lot of famous poets and artists.
John Waters, the director, was always hanging around. It was
on national lists as one of the best bookstores in
the country. The Mayor of Baltimore would start the city's
parades from there, and it was totally beautiful. It had

(19:27):
thirty foot high ceilings, twin staircases up from the ground
floor to a balcony, an art gallery on the second floor,
and twelve foot high gilt mirrors all over the place.
It was perfect. And when Alan Stipeck decided to open
a bar in the basement, Richard saw his golden opportunity.
He suggested that the bar's opening night should be on

(19:48):
March ninth, nineteen eighty two, the night of his Time
Traveler landing party.

Speaker 9 (19:54):
I do remember thinking serving alcohol to poets wasn't a
great idea.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Alan agreed to host the Time Traveler party, and Richard
got to work planning the most legendary party of Baltimore's history.
Years of thinking Richard's big day was finally arriving the syzygy.
The alignment of the planets was actually a big deal,
not just for Richard. It was like y two k light.
There'd been a best selling book called the Jupiter Effect

(20:23):
that predicted that the alignment of the planets would lead
to a whole bunch of natural disasters earthquakes, floods, nuclear meltdowns.
The local news in Baltimore covered the astrological angle by
going to the director of the planetarium, doctors or Poli,
and asking for his expert opinion.

Speaker 7 (20:40):
As you can see, the planets are not in a
straight line.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
They're in kind of a crazy zigzag line across the sky.

Speaker 7 (20:47):
There's nothing unusual about it.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
But who cares. Even the newscasters wanted to believe.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
But if Zirpulli and the majority of astronomers in the
world are wrong, well we'll see tomorrow, Bill Sider, you've
seen too.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
A few of the crononauts drove out to a Mesa
in New Mexico for the big night. Crews around the
world started setting up their spin off parties, but most
of the team was in Baltimore. Richard and the staff
of Second Story Books got the flagship party started, and
when evening came around, the scene was unprecedented.

Speaker 7 (21:21):
So it was like, we're here, and I believe that
the Mayor came by that day.

Speaker 8 (21:29):
The Mayor brought in searchlights helped them up to try
to catch the the interplanetary travelers as they came down
to Earth.

Speaker 10 (21:39):
It was crazy. It was full of people.

Speaker 6 (21:42):
So I was on the top of this mesia lighting
flares and documenting the star and the different venuses rising.

Speaker 7 (21:50):
There was a nude couple who claimed that they were
Adam and Eve.

Speaker 10 (21:55):
I was getting really nervous because we couldn't really tell
who was doing what.

Speaker 7 (22:02):
Jello all over the floor and people were like writhing around,
and Kirby had a television set on.

Speaker 9 (22:08):
The where the people from the future, where we see
our future selves.

Speaker 11 (22:13):
Not only did the may of thick around, but he
stayed there the whole night and led a conga line
of people up the stairs of the Washington Monument at
Quall for flop.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
The New York Times sent a reporter to cover this madness,
and I swear to you I am not making this up.
The Times reporter at the Time Traveler party was named
Benjamin Franklin. They ran out of alcohol, the party just
kept going. It was amazing. Except so did any time
travelers come to the party.

Speaker 7 (22:50):
We don't know. I mean, you know, there wasn't any
indication that there definitely was time travelers there.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
That was Richard. Again. When I talk to the Second
Story bookstore management about this, they had a slightly different take.

Speaker 10 (23:04):
I will say, just for the mostly for Ben's sake,
that I'm totally open to the idea that the time
travelers erased all of that from our memories.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Okay, so probably no time travelers. But the party was incredible. Still,
good things never last, and a little more than a
year later the store closed. It was just untenable kazoos
and violins. But when I talked to Richard about the
whole thing, I wasn't so much after whether or not
the experiment worked, as I was trying to understand why
so many people were drawn to it and what he

(23:40):
meant by it. It seems to me like you're not
a person who's necessarily like, time travel is real and
this will prove it. You're more a person who's like,
why have we closed our minds to so many things?

Speaker 7 (23:51):
Is that that's a that's a pretty correct statement. Yeah,
I see it. It's fun and funny, but it's also
kind of dead serious. I think that the limitations that
people have on their thinking, on their imaginations keeps us
sort of you know, and trapped in a lot of

(24:12):
pretty lousy stuff in this world, you know. And if
they felt if they felt more self empowered to use
their imagination and to like follow their their dreams, not
only would they be better off, but other people would
be better off.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
Somewhere in between dead serious and fun and funny. That
is the exact feeling that time travel stories express. And
this party wasn't just a rave. It was, as Laurie
reminded me, a work of art.

Speaker 9 (24:42):
I mean, it's all about raising questions, you know, and
making making you think so. But I do remember that
sort of you know, like maybe maybe they'll show up.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
How will we know, you know?

Speaker 9 (24:57):
I mean certainly now I'm like, are you the same person?
Like if you met yourself, would it be like meeting
the same person. I think it's a great conceptual piece.
I really, I really do.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Time travel stories and time travel parties raise all these
big questions about what happens to us as we move
through time, but they also ask a big question about
what we would change if we could go back. There
are often stories about regret and loneliness and time. The
time traveler is almost always lonely. If you visit the past,

(25:31):
you know how everything's going to turn out, how people die,
when wars break out, who winds up with whom. If
you go to the future, your world is gone, replaced.
That's why I love this party. It's about bringing people together,
calling out across the void to the future, and welcoming
it back to the past.

Speaker 7 (25:53):
One of the definitions for me of conceptual art is
is that it carries some content, whether or not you're
there to experience it or not. It's participating people participating
in the idea. Say you're part of the You're part
of it. You being here is part of it. Yeah,
this is what we were going for forty years ago.

(26:14):
It's one day Ben, it was not even born yet.
He's going to come back and ask good questions.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Thank you, I'm glad to have been part of whatever
weird time lift this is. To me, the party is
not really about time travelers in the future. It's about
living in the present, which is a hard thing to
do because as soon as you're thinking about a present moment,
it's already in the past. The party seems to me
like a moment when everyone was really aware of that,

(26:42):
aware of where you are in time, that one day
your crazy bookstore full of conceptual artists will be gone,
and so will a lot of your friends, and so
will the old you. It's a message in a bottle
to the future, just like a time capsule. We'll be
right back. We're in Mountain View, seven miles away from

(27:10):
the Googleplex.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Isn't it gonna Doesn't it seem like you're entering a wormhole.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Just because it's called the Googleplex? Oh yeah, you know,
they used to have this thing that they never.

Speaker 8 (27:23):
Back.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
On February seventeenth, twenty twenty, Jill, her youngest son Oliver,
and I drove all around San Francisco in that bright
red convertible for a long time. We were looking, among
other things, for that Yahoo time capsule, that archive of
the early Internet. We were curious about it because it
was strangely like an early social media thing, before social
media was really mainstream, Uploading yourself was still new for people.

(27:47):
What did that look like right before it became the
thing we all did all the time. We wanted to know.
We saw Facebook in the Google Plex, but we never
found the Yahoo time capsule. Still, we're pretty sure that
we're the reason Verizon, Yahoo's new parent company, remembered it
even existed, because right after we started emailing about it
that January, the artist who created the time capsule, Price

(28:10):
said Verizon reached out to him. And then a week
or so after we left San Francisco, Yahoo staff got
the Macmini they'd saved it on out of storage and
hauled it out on stage during their twenty fifth birthday party.
Nobody could find the password the Luckily someone had it
written down somewhere. The password was the word paper.

Speaker 11 (28:30):
And making its return in cinematic fashion, a digital time capsule.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
After sitting in the Smithsonian for years, Yahoo's twenty fifth birthday.

Speaker 11 (28:39):
Marked the perfect time to take a glimpse at history.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
I gotta say, watching the chip or video of Horizon
made about the event, I'm happy we weren't there. During
the heady days of the early two thousands. This thing
was beamed into outer space and projected on canyon walls
in New Mexico. Now he was just carried out in
a box during an all staff ah the passage of time.
It kind of feels like you're going through someone's home

(29:03):
videos that you don't know, But it was really just
kind of looking at a slice of personal lives of
these people that we never met that were Yahoo users
Once upon a Time. Thirty six thousand, five hundred and
forty eight messages, ninety seven one hundred and seventy seven pictures,
hundreds of thousands of slices of life. Two friends at
a soccer game with flower necklaces, someone skiing in a cowsuit,

(29:26):
a teen wielding two lightsabers, a note that read I
love Anita. I'll tell her after I finished my MBA
in France. All these messages to the future met with
a shrug. But I couldn't stop thinking about it because
of how utterly unimaginable the world that Time Capsule landed
in was from the one that left just fourteen years before.

(29:52):
The week we were in California, the number of worldwide
deaths from Sarskov two passed one thousand A day later,
the who gave it the new name COVID nineteen. On
March second, Yahoo opened up the time capsule at a
big in person event. A couple of week later. Ninety percent
of Verizon staff started working from home when the lockdown started.

(30:16):
I kept working on the last archive from my apartment.
My fiance Julia, and I were in New York. I
remember running in the streets and holding my breath when
I passed someone. I'm embarrassed to say. We scrubbed down groceries.
Suddenly everything changed, and then nothing was changing. All the
old clockwork fell away no more. At the next trains

(30:37):
in three minutes, pick ups at four, meet you at
five for anyone lucky enough to be working from home
who was just big, long days, each the same as
the one before. After a little while, we moved to
Julia's mom's house in Connecticut. I watched a nest of
Bluebird's Fledge and another move in and start the process
all over again. I fell in love with birds. I

(30:59):
was also listening to a lot of ambient music. I
came to realize birds and ambient music were just two
different ways of thinking. About time. Cycles of natural time,
like treeswa is showing up on the same day years apart,
and then music without any meter long spare vast like
an ocean. For some people, it was like time had

(31:21):
just stopped. The days seemed unbelievably long. For others, they
sped by. People started calling everything before March twenty twenty
the beforetime. They didn't usually mention in after the psychologist
talked about that on NPR.

Speaker 12 (31:38):
We are aware of time, We're aware of the fragility
of time, and we're aware of what happens when your
time to do the things you want is taken away
from you. And I think that that is the real
thing that will have changed, is how people value time.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Valuing time. That was part of what freaked me out
about the Yahoo time capsule, how near it came to
being lost, and how pointless it all seemed in the end,
and just how totally inconceivable everything in between closing and
opening that box had been. Like a lot of people
don't the pandemic. I had so much time, and all

(32:13):
I could do was think about how it was slipping away.

Speaker 13 (32:25):
It's like, so it's the brick apartment building smack in
the middle of Cambridge. Right, that looks like maybe we
can go to that main door and then we have
to press a button on the intercom.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Three years after that first pandemic bunch, on March twenty eighth,
twenty twenty three, Jill and I met up in Cambridge
to go see a time machine.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
Hey Stewart, it's Jill and Ben.

Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, I'll buy you and go to third flour left.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Great.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
I told Jill I wanted to talk about time travel stories.
Jill told me she had a crafty neighbor named Stuart
who had built a perfect replica of a tartist Doctor
Whose time machine.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
Look it's perfect.

Speaker 4 (33:06):
It's pretty good. I got. They were rebuilding the house
next door, and I got all the wood for free.
And that's why.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
It's to tear. Doctor Who is a sixty year old
BBC show which is still running. The Doctor is the
last of an alien race called time Lords. Each week
he travels in his time machine, which looks like a
blue police box. Usually, when Doctor Who shows up, it's
because something's gone terribly wrong in time and he has

(33:34):
to save the world. It's a mad zany, beautiful, sad show.
It's also a show though, about how disorienting time travel is.
The Doctor is a little adult and very lonely. We
wanted to see this perfect artist, just the right shade
of blue on a wood framed phone booth. Stuart had
built it on the roof of his apartment building in Cambridge,

(33:56):
which had entailed some compromises the dimension of the base.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
It should have been like a four foot square, but
I was constrained by the dumpster next do our. It's
on wheels though, it can be moved.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Around, and well, I mean also it can tell Oh
that's true.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Stuart gave us the keys. Oh my god, it's.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Really the key and you have a little chartist on
it and it's the real yellow.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
So where would you go if you could?

Speaker 3 (34:21):
If it was working, it wasn't temporarily disabled.

Speaker 4 (34:24):
Oh I would probably go the future, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
When would you go? Is what I'm supposed to Wan scared?

Speaker 10 (34:31):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Fifty years to start?

Speaker 4 (34:33):
Yeah, I never really thought about that.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Then do you have any predictions for what you would
see in fifty years?

Speaker 12 (34:41):
No?

Speaker 4 (34:42):
I also stopped watching the news about a.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
Year though, Yeah, are you still watching Doctor Who?

Speaker 8 (34:47):
Though?

Speaker 4 (34:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
It turned out that this particular tartist was full of
stacked lawn chairs and buckets.

Speaker 14 (34:55):
It is true, the inside is not as exciting as
the outside.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
We left Stuart and his amazing tartists and headed back
to Jill's house down the street. We set up in
the kitchen to talk about time.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
This isn't really about doctor, but I like I do.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
I'm very fascinated by the idea that messages can travel
across time.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Like I just really like that, and.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Like that's why I like going to an archive, Like
it's a message that somebody left and now I can
see it. So when I was a freshman in college,
I got a letter in the mail that was from
my mother. But inside the envelope I thought it was
a letter from my mother, But inside the envelope was
a letter in my It was another envelope, and it
had my handwriting in it. It was addressed to me by me,
And it was this letter that my high school English

(35:41):
teacher had everybody writes yourself four years in the future,
which was like new then. Although I talked to students
all the time, I was like, oh, yeah, we all
have to do that now. But it was really it
really affected me to get this because I was like
this is a completely different person. I don't remember writing it,
and then I had access to this whole other view
of the world, and like that's.

Speaker 1 (35:59):
Why I like doing history.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
But so what was striking about the letter when you
got it?

Speaker 3 (36:05):
So I was fourteen when I read it and nineteen
when I got it, And if you can think about
yourself at those two ages, there's a lot of changes.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
And I didn't remember what I was like at fourteen.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
I probably now can't remember what I was like at nineteen,
but I was a lot closer to who I am now.
But when I was fourteen, I could actually imagine who
I was when I was nineteen, because the letter that
I wrote at fourteen was sort of perfectly pitched to
that nineteen year old self and was a very effective harangue.

(36:41):
Like the letter was like I know you will not
actually have done the following things that you really should
have done by now, and I'm really mad at you
for not doing them. So if you haven't done them yet,
like get them the fuck done. And it was furious
and scathing and seething and passionate and urgent and terrifying.

(37:04):
And then I did all the things like I got
the letter.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
And I was like, Oh my god, I guess she's right.
I didn't. I thought I was going to do those things,
but I also thought I might.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Not sending messages to the future. This seemed to me
a perfect segue to my old hobby horse. The reason
I wanted to do this story is because of the
Ahu time Capsule, which, as you may recall, as a
story I've been unable to let go of. But I

(37:35):
because I think for me, one of the things that
expresses the weirdness of the pandemic and time and all
of that is the fact that, you know, two weeks
before Lockdown, two or three weeks, we were on the
last trip that I took, like traveling around sort of
like nothing was wrong, with the growing sense that something
was maybe wrong.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
I do think about that trip as a kind of
crazy Hurrah last Hurrah turned out because it was a
mad cap trip and there was all this weirdness around
the Matrix being shot in San Francisco, and we rented
this crazy car and then we locked that interview in
a vault, like it became its own time capsule.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Every time we had a brainstorm meeting. For years after
that trip, I kept bringing up the Yahoo time capsule.
I felt like it was finally time for me to
explain myself. I wonder if there's something about like a
feeling of historical disjunction or like epical change, where you
suddenly feel like things that are somewhat recent in chronological

(38:38):
time are actually just like totally different eras, and if
part of the way people express that feeling is through
stories about time travel and being out of time.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
Well, one thing that I noticed a lot during the
pandemic is that I think it meant that everyone had
a sense of living in historical time.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
That is to say that there was.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
Not just this is February, but this is a specific
time in the history of humanity or the history of
the planet, and that I don't think most people walk
around with that every day, although I do think most
historians do, like that's part of the job, like where
are we in time? That sense of orientation is it's

(39:27):
kind of a pain, right, but like you're kind of
in that a lot. Like so, I remember thinking how
weird it was that everybody was thinking that way when
it used to just be like I could talk.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
To my colleagues that way.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
It's good to live in the present, but it's a
little crazy making to be constantly aware of the historical
contingency of everything. It's like putting a window between yourself
and the world.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
And it reminded me a little bit of.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
A friend of mine who was living with us when
she was in medical school, and she talked about the
day that you first do start dissecting a human cadaver
in anatomy class.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
And it's like.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
You cross a bridge and then the people that are
on the other side of the bridge are other human
beings who have also dissected a cadaver, and you're completely
separate from all other humans because you have seen the
inside of humans and it's transformative. You then belong to
that guild. But you even if you don't never become
a doctor, like, you'll always belong to that guilt because

(40:31):
you were one of the people who has seen.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
The inside of people.

Speaker 3 (40:35):
And I think of historians as people who've seen the
kind of inside of time. And so that it was
just weird, weird during the pending that it was like
everybody had seen the inside of a human body. Like
it wasn't like, oh, great, everybody now knows what this
feels like. It was more like, oh, everybody carries the
same burden.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
I remember how during the pandemic people said they started
keeping journals because things just months in the past felt
like they came from a different time. But the main
reason I think there were so many stories about time
and time travel these last few years is that time
travel thinking is the same as pandemic thinking. You step
on a crack in the sidewalk and suddenly you've changed

(41:18):
the whole course of history. You cough on a subway
and suddenly you've risked the life of someone's aminocompromised mom.
Everything's tangled up and everything else. Richard, the time travel
party guy said something about this towards the end of
our call.

Speaker 7 (41:33):
I just wanted to mention because it's important to me.
The song by the Beatles. I've just seen a face
and there's one line in that which I think is
so brilliant. Had it been another day, I might have
looked the other way. And there's this couplet, you know,
this like simple line, and it really encapsulates the whole idea.

(41:54):
Am I going to answer the door or not answer
the door? Am I going to make the phone call
or not make the phone call? And we're constantly inventing
new lives for ourselves. You know, you know, where did
COVID come from? Somebody I did something wrong.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
That kind of thinking it can be totally paralyzing, but
I think in a spirit of acceptance and letting go.
It's also beautiful. All the future depends on even the
smallest moments. Now, even if you can't speak to the future,
it still depends on you. Okay. It's twelve twenty eight

(42:33):
on Wednesday, March twenty ninth, and I am on the
Eagle Scout bench just to the left when you come
into the main area outside the Dudham Public Library, Massachusetts,
just off Norfolk Street, waiting for time travelers. After Jill
and I wrapped up our conversation, I went back to
my parents' house to get my things. They live in Denham, Massachusetts.

(42:56):
I was on my way back to New York, but
before I left, I wanted to throw my own party
for time travelers, just to see what it felt like.
I took down the latitude and longitude of that bench
at the library, just in case they don't have a
record of the street names in the future, and I
also wrote down the time that I was there. I'm
not a proud man, so I'll admit it. I was
slightly embarrassed to be sitting alone on a bench holding

(43:18):
a microphone in front of a public library at noon
on a Wednesday. So if it sounds like I'm speaking
out of the corner of my mouth, I am four
to two point two four seven seven nine three four
comma negative seventy one point one seven five nine four
seven zero. History is not time travel because the past

(43:42):
is actually past, and all you have left of it
are these bits and pieces of messages from the people
who were, to the people who are. Yahoo time capsules,
parties for time travelers, letters to yourself. I've spent a
lot of time with those bits and pieces this season
of the Last Archive, and I didn't plan it this way,
but I came to realize that a lot of these

(44:02):
stories are about moments when people became connected in new ways,
the dawn of social network theory, the rise of the
telephone at work, human population science, time travel, moments when
people came up with new ways of thinking about how
everything was bound up together, networked, like any moment in
time and everything that follows. Everyone you see who have

(44:25):
this question, was that person from the future, which of
course is ridiculous, but there is something sort of destabilizing
about it. I'd assume this would be a party of one,
not because I'm sure there'll never be time travel, but
more because a few people have tried this now and
it never quite seems to work. After Richard, there was

(44:45):
a party for time travelers at MIT in two thousand
and five. Destination Day in Perth, Australia the same year.
Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist, even through a birthday party
in two thousand and nine, but didn't invite anyone until
after the event. Nobody came, and same for me. Okay,
it's twelve thirty six and I'm gonna head home now.

(45:07):
That was the window for time travelers.

Speaker 14 (45:09):
I saw a man in a black zip up with
a bald patch walk by. See a man with a
shock of white hair and a black shirt approaching movers left,
but no sign of time travelers.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
I walked home to catch my train. It was a sunny, warm,
late March day. The pandemic felt something like it was over.
Someone had put new mulch in the churchyard and the
church clock was running four minutes fast. The birds were
out the daffodils and crocuses were coming up. Richard is
restarting the Chrononautic Society, so later I sent him my

(45:45):
party's coordinates. But I don't think it matters whether anyone
knows where or when I was. Besides, even if you
wrote it down, saved it on a hard drive, walked
it in a box, eventually, somebody is probably gonna forget
that password. That's okay. The Last Archive is written and

(46:16):
hosted by Me Ben Nattapaffrey. It's produced by Me and
Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is
our engineer. Fact checking on this episode by Arthur Gomberts.
Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Me. Additional music by Korntooth.
Our executive producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Special

(46:37):
thanks on this episode to Amaldra, Jacob Goldstein, and Sarah Nix.
If you're a lover of time travel stories and time
travel history, check out the Time Travelers Almanac from Tour
Books and Time Travel a History by James Glick at Pushkin.
Thanks to our executive team including Jacob Weisberg, Malcolm Gladwell,
Heather Fain, John Schnarz Leet Malade and Greta Cone. And

(47:01):
to our business team including Kerrie Brody, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan,
Royston Beserve, Jasmine Perez and Blair Jilkes. Marketing team includes
Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Navarez, Sean Karney and Brian Strebrenek,
with operations and licensing support from Nicole Optenbosch, Maya Kanig,

(47:22):
Daniella Lakhan, Jake Flanagan, Fara de Grange and Owen Miller.
Thanks to everyone at Pushkin for a bibliography, further reading
and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode. Head
to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad

(47:45):
free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month.
Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our
newsletter at pushkin dot fm slash Newsletter. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Mattafhaffrey,