Alex Goldman (3:09)

This is Allie. She lives in Los Angeles and she teaches at usc. And the reason we're talking to her is because on a Tuesday night this past January, she was one of the thousands of Angelenos who heard that a fire had broken out in their neighborhood and it was moving in the direction of her house. Allie had been living in this house for only a little over a year, but from the moment she and her husband first saw it, they knew it was their home. Located at the western edge of Altadena, a suburb about 30 miles from the coast, the 1960s ranch style house had a layout that was wide and flowing. There was a massive deck and a 10 foot picture window that looked out onto the San Gabriel Mountains. The house was a fixer upper, but that was fine for them. They were just gonna take their time, fix it up slowly over the course of several years, plant trees and flowers and raise a family there. They were gonna make a little life for themselves. But then during that first week of January, all across Los Angeles, the wind started blowing hard and erratically. Little fires had started springing up all over the city. And those little fires were quickly becoming big fires. So around 7pm when the news hit that a fire had broken out in Altadena's Eaton Canyon, Allie began planning her evacuation.

Allie (4:27)

I mean, knowing that there was a fire fewer than five miles from our house, knowing that I was alone at the house, that my husband was across town without a vehicle, and that we had three animals. And just being from Colorado, where fires are fairly common, my parents have had to evacuate a couple times from their house. So I just, it just wasn't worth it to me to stay and find out.

Alex Goldman (4:48)

Allie grabbed her pets, her laptop, some clothes, important documents, photos, and whatever sentimental objects were within arm's reach. And then she packed up the car and drove to a friend's house to wait it all out.

Allie (5:01)

I stayed up all night checking the news and texting with neighbors who had stuck around behind, saw the flames getting increasingly closer and at some point just kind of knew that it was too close and there was just nothing. There were no firefighters, there weren't enough fire hydrants. They couldn't get an air tanker out there because the wind was so bad.

Alex Goldman (5:19)

The next day, while the fires were still burning, the brother of one of her neighbors drove into their neighborhood to assess the damage.

Allie (5:25)

And he took pictures for each of us in the cul de sac so that we would have confirmation for our own sake. So I remember getting that picture through on my phone and just, like, seeing that it was real, that it was gone. And so I don't love that picture.

Alex Goldman (5:50)

When you say a picture of your burned down house, like, what, after the fire, like, what physically remained?

Allie (5:56)

Just the entryway. So, like the stairway up to our front door, which was maybe three stairs, and then the kind of the frame around our front door and our mailbox, which stood next to that.

Alex Goldman (6:08)

Oh, my God. It's like the barest suggestion of a home.

Allie (6:12)

Yeah, just enough to know for sure it was ours, including the little. Our little address above the door was. Was there. That was a. That was probably one of the worst moments of my life to date.

Alex Goldman (6:27)

But the heartbreak that Allie felt over the loss of her house paled in comparison to the heartbreak that she felt over the loss of the things that had been inside of the house, which is ultimately why she ended up writing to us, which we will get to in just a minute. See, over the years, Allie had meticulously collected and archived countless treasures and artifacts from each stage of her life and from all her most beloved people. There were boxes of photographs and handwritten letters, all kinds of family heirlooms, and a library of more than 2,000 books. For Ally, these were way more than just possessions. They were, like physical memories that lived outside of her body. And now the vast majority of them are gone, and Allie feels like she lost herself with them.

Allie (7:14)

It feels like I don't exist anymore. I think that's been the biggest. It's like the identity crisis of identity crises. Like, to have lost all of the things that I feel like defined me or were kind of physical manifestations of my past. It really feels like I was severed from my past self and I just exist in the present now.

Allie (7:37)

And I think part of it is just, like, not having those objects that proved that I had a childhood, that proved that I, like, became an adult, that I, like, was loved by people that, you know, I had a box of letters that, you know, notes from friends in high school. And, like, kind of all those things were just a record that I existed and had experiences. And they were a place to keep memories. Like, you can't keep everything in your head all at once or in your body. Like, it's, it's too much. So they were like little places where I could outsource my memory to these objects and let them be and then like connect with those memories later by holding those objects or looking at them. They were like prosthetic memories.

Alex Goldman (8:17)

Losing all of that must be incredibly disorienting.

Allie (8:21)

It's. It's very disorienting. I think one of the strangest things was in the early days after the fire, maybe in the first month, I was always surprised that my tattoos were still on my body.

Alex Goldman (8:34)

Oh, God.

Allie (8:35)

Because I like, I think of my tattoos as also these kind of markers of. I think I got my first tattoo when I was like 22 and a lot of my tattoos were done by friends in their homes. I feel like my tattoos are kind of markers of like where I've been and who I am. And I think because I lost every other record of myself, my brain couldn't fathom that I still had these other records of myself, like the tattoos. So it was very disorienting to even see my own body after the fire and was like, who is this? And oh my God, I still have this tattoo from this Roberto Belano novel that I got in like 2015. Crazy. I have that, but nothing else. Like, I don't even have that novel anymore.

Alex Goldman (9:15)

Virtually all of Ali's neighbors have lost their homes, which has forced many of them to move to other areas. Some have left Southern California altogether. But Allie and her husband have decided to rebuild their home. Something which requires navigating insurance, city permits, contractors, and so much more. And she's also a block captain for the other people who've decided to stay, answering questions they might have about rebuilding. But Allie told us that every time she has a new question, answering it gives birth to 15 more questions. The questions Allie faces on a day to day basis are so large and sprawling, it's become like a part time job for her. In the process of trying to rebuild her home, she's had to learn about debris removal and soil remediation, wastewater treatment and boundary surveys, septic tanks and sewer lines. These are issues that are so complicated and layered that even listening to her talk about them felt overwhelming. It's hard to imagine that I would have anything to offer her. But there was one problem that Allie had been afraid to tackle alone. And for whatever reason, the person she wanted to help her with, it was me. And what is your particular. How can I help you? I guess is my question.

Allie (10:28)

So we're in this weird situation where, like, we have very few things that remain from our old life. And some of them were the things that I chose to evacuate the house with, which wasn't a lot, but some of the things that we were left with were an accident. Like, things that just happened to be in the one car that we saved. And one of those things is my ipod Classic. The ipod Classic is. It is now the only object I have that contains any of the music that I used to own. I was a very late adopter of, like, Spotify or, like, streaming music. I was very much into owning, you know, CDs. Really a child of the 80s and 90s. And so all of my music that I ever owned was, like, I purchased the CD or a friend burned me the CD or I downloaded it from itunes, but I felt more safe and comfortable having the music with me somehow. And now all of those hard drives, all of those CDs, all the old computers I had that had music on them burned down. And so the only thing I have left that has my music on it from pre Spotify era is this ipod Classic.

Alex Goldman (11:52)

And what is the pre Spotify era music that, like, you would be devastated to lose.

Allie (11:56)

So I grew up in, like, outside of Denver, Colorado, and I went to college in Denver, and I was a really huge fan of the Denver music scene circa, like 2007-2012, which is a very specific era in a very specific place.

Alex Goldman (12:12)

Right.

Allie (12:14)

Most of those bands, really, none of them exist anymore. And I have have a lot of their music, and some of it was music like that was never even released in the form of a CD or streaming. It was stuff that was, like, on their MySpace page that I downloaded.

Alex Goldman (12:28)

Wow.

Allie (12:29)

Or that, like, their band manager sent me over email because I emailed being.

Allie (12:33)

Like, hey, what was that song this.

Allie (12:35)

Band played last night? And, like, do you guys have, like, an MP3 of it that I can have? And that music scene was my life for a very long time. Like, that was, you know, most of my nights were spent in dive bars in Denver going to these shows.

Alex Goldman (12:49)

If I can be honest with you, I'm like, I'm like, really impressed that you managed to hang on to so much of it. Like, I don't think many people have that foresight.

Allie (12:58)

So here's the. Aside from the regular devastating things about losing your home in a wildfire, I am like an archivist at heart. I preserve everything in an orderly way. I wrote a dissertation about archives. Preserving things is just, like, such a deep impulse in me. So not only had I preserved most of the things from my childhood, my adolescence, my 20s. But I had preserved them sort of methodically. So I had like, the CDs, but I also had hard drive backups, and then I also had this ipod, but then I lost the CDs and the hard drive backups. So all I have left is the ipod. And I do not know how to get music off of an ipod.

Alex Goldman (13:36)

This is why Allie reached out to Hyper Fixed. Because amidst this insurmountable difficulty she's facing and all this loss, she was hoping I could help her with this one small problem. That problem being that she has all this irreplaceable music on a 20 year old iPod and she doesn't know how to get it off. And if you think that sounds like a frivolous task, that's probably because you've never had this happen.

Allie (14:00)

I remember back in the days when ipods were still like a thing that people used as their primary mode of listening to music. I had plugged my ipod into my computer at one point and it started syncing it, and it was like a different computer and it wiped everything off.

Alex Goldman (14:16)

If you're either too young or too old to remember this period when everybody had to sync their ipods by connecting them to their computers in order to get music onto them, if you did it incorrectly, it could wipe everything off of your ipod. And I know this because I personally did it more than once. It was frustratingly common.

Allie (14:35)

And at least at that time, I had backups of stuff. So, you know, I panicked. But then I was like, okay, let me get this external hard drive and put all that music back on.

Alex Goldman (14:43)

But now that hard drive's gone, her CDs are gone. And this music that feels like the soundtrack to the process of Allie becoming the person that she is, it lives on one device she originally purchased in 2008. And she is terrified that she's going to lose yet another piece of herself, one of the few that she feels like she has left. After the break, we're gonna plug in Ali's ipod and cross our fingers. This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Blueland. So when I had one kid, he made a terrible mess in my house. And somehow having two kids increases the mess exponentially, like, beyond the amount that two kids should logically make. So, like, every day is a horrible whirlwind of chocolate stains and dirty dishes and unwashed hands. And it takes a lot of cleaning up. Fortunately, there's Blue Land. From cleaning sprays to hand soap, toilet bowl cleaner and laundry tablets. All Blue Land products are made with clean ingredients you can feel good about. Blueland is on a mission to eliminate single use plastic by reinventing cleaning essentials to be better for you and the planet. The idea is simple. They offer refillable cleaning products with a beautiful cohesive design that looks great on your counter. And instead of paying for all that bulky packaging, you only pay for refilling the product itself. You can get even more savings by buying refills in bulk or setting up a subscription so you don't even have to think about the purchase anymore. Just arise at your doorstep when you need it. It Bland has a special offer for listeners right now. Get 15% off your first order by going to blueland.com hyperfixed you won't want to miss this bland.com hyperfixed for 15% off that's blueland.com hyperfixed to get 15% off this episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Greenlight. So when I was a kid and I had some money in my pocket, I knew exactly what I was going to do with it, which is I was going to go to Pinball Pete's and play Total Carnage and Attack from Mars and then eat enough Laffy Taffy that I got sick to my stomach. And in retrospect, there might have been some better uses for what little money I had when I was a kid. And that is what Greenlight is for. Greenlight is a debit card and money app made for families that helps kids learn how to save, invest and spend wisely. Parents can send money to their kids and keep an eye on their kids spending and saving. Meanwhile, kids and teens can build money, confidence and skills in a fun, accessible way like with games. And the Greenlight app also includes a chores feature where you can set up one time or recurring chores customized to your household and reward kids with allowance for a job well done. Greenlight is an easy, convenient way for parents to raise financially smart kids and families to navigate life together. Start your risk free Greenlight trial today@greenlight.com HYPERFIXED that's greenlight.com HYPERFIXED to get started. Greenlight.com HYPERFIXEN welcome back to the show. So before the break we met Allie, who lost almost everything she owned in LA's Eaton Fire. But there was one notable exception. A decades old ipod with irreplaceable songs by band she grew up listening to as an active member of the Denver local music scene. She's desperate to get them off her ipod, but she's also afraid that her computer might wipe the ipod Entirely. And although I haven't told her, I'm a bit afraid that even if she gets the music off her ipod, the files might be corrupted. Either way, we're going to need to plug this thing into Allie's computer to find out what we're dealing with.

Allie (19:03)

So I do have the cord, and that cord was in my car. So I have the ipod and I have the cord, but I do not have an appropriate cord to connect this ipod to the computer that I have. I don't think I have enough storage space on the current computer that I have if even if I could get this music onto there. And I'm also terrified that if I plug in this ipod, which is the only repository of all of this music that exists now, that it'll wipe it, that it'll. Something will happen.

Alex Goldman (19:30)

I'm going to flex a bit here. It is rare that I can solve a problem on this show without even looking it up. But there are two things here that are working to Ali's advantage. One is that this is the kind of problem that was right in the wheelhouse of things 20, something Alex Goldman had to deal with on my own ipod. I loved screwing around with that thing. And two, the iPod existed at a very specific moment in my life, a very tech savvy moment. This is like a holdover from a period of time where I was much more technically savvy than I am now, because, you know, 2005, I was working it. This is the kind of stuff I had to know. I have gleefully forgotten 90% of it, but same I do remember this. So you are going to need an adapter, a USB to USB C adapter, but you can get those off of Amazon for like four bucks.

Allie (20:22)

Okay, yeah, great.

Alex Goldman (20:23)

And then ipods have a function that is called opening it in disk mode. Old ipods would automatically try to synchronize with itunes. And depending on your settings, it might overwrite whatever's on the device with whatever's on your computer. But in disk mode, your computer just treats your ipod like an external hard drive. They don't make it easy to actually get the music off the ipod this way, but it's possible. So Ali got an external hard drive and a USB to USB C adapter, and we reconnected. A couple weeks later, I gave Ali the series of button presses to get the ipod into disc mode, and we were off to the races.

Allie (21:02)

It says disc mode. Okay to disconnect.

Alex Goldman (21:05)

Okay, so go ahead and try connecting it to your computer. Now, in theory, you should be able to see it in your finder.

Allie (21:17)

It says, on my desktop, there's. There's a little icon that looks exactly like it, and it says my pod. Because I think I probably named it mypod in 2000.

Alex Goldman (21:26)

That's very cute.

Allie (21:28)

And thought it was funny to call an iPod MyPod. I'm thinking that's me that did that.

Alex Goldman (21:33)

Ipods back then did a couple of annoying things. When you loaded music onto them, they renamed the files and arranged them arbitrarily into folders, and they also hid the folders that the music was in. I've read that Apple said that this was for quote unquote optimization. But my pet theory is they did this just to make songs harder to pirate. So Even if the MP3 file is renamed with gibberish, if you drop them into itunes, they'll have the correct info. So if you're in the finder, if you press command, shift and period, that should show you your hidden folders.

Allie (22:06)

Got it. Okay. Hidden folders.

Allie (22:09)

Oh, okay.

Allie (22:10)

No, I think I found it. Okay, so I did. There's a hidden folder called ipodcontrol, and then that opens a bunch of other folders, one of which is hidden, just called music. And I click music. And now There are folders F00 through F49. So there's 49 folders.

Alex Goldman (22:28)

If you open those, you should see MP3s in there.

Allie (22:32)

I do see a bunch of just like, scrambled letter MP3s.

Alex Goldman (22:35)

That's your music.

Allie (22:36)

Yes, that's my music. And it's all just totally random. But you said the metadata remains.

Alex Goldman (22:43)

The metadata remains. So in theory, if you put those songs in your itunes, they should still show up with the proper information in them.

Allie (22:51)

So now I just drag all of these.

Alex Goldman (22:55)

Drag all of them. I mean, I would copy them, so you're not taking them off of your ipod. But I would do, like, a copy and paste.

Allie (23:00)

Okay.

Alex Goldman (23:00)

Copy onto your external hard drive. It is going to take a while because it's a big thing, and the USB speed for ipods of that generation are pretty slow, so you're just gonna have to. Have to wait. But I'm wondering, just so we can see for sure, if you could just pull, like, a single song off of the thing and toss it in itunes to see if it shows up properly while it's copying. Yeah, any one of them. It's not going to be. It's. It shouldn't be a big deal if you just do one song.

Allie (23:31)

Okay, let me see if it'll. Let me. I think it's starting F1, F00. So let's see what music is in F00, because this doesn't necessarily seem to be alphabetical.

Alex Goldman (23:42)

It's not alphabetical. It's not. It's in no order that a human being can understand, as far as I know.

Allie (23:48)

Okay, well, here's gonna be a random song from the Eels album Souljacker, circa early 2000s. Let's see.

Alex Goldman (23:57)

Ally pressed play and I held my breath. And then this is the sound that came out of her computer. Over the din of this cacophony, I could hear Ali say, wait a second. And I panicked. Here it is again. In the moment, I was sure I was gonna have to tell Allie that in addition to losing her home and most of her possessions, I had somehow corrupted her irreplaceable music files. And then when Ally stopped the tape, all she said was, yeah, I think it's working now. I was still in shock, so I didn't respond to her at all. But Hyperfix producer Emma Cortlandt took herself off of mute to say, wait, so.

E (24:54)

So that's how it's supposed to sound?

Allie (24:55)

Yes. I picked something a little more mainstream.

Alex Goldman (25:02)

And. And does. Does it show up in itunes with normal names and things?

Allie (25:06)

It does, yep.

Allie (25:07)

It says, David Bowie, Diamond Dogs. Rock and roll with me. There you go.

E (25:12)

Alex, I just need you, for the sake of this, to reflect on the fact that having that be the first song that we actually heard play was, like, in no way an indication that this was a successful kind of transfer.

Alex Goldman (25:23)

It did sound like a corrupted. It did sound like a corrupted file.

Allie (25:27)

Oh, no.

Alex Goldman (25:28)

We're fucked. We're so fucked.

E (25:32)

Alec, I was, like, watching your face, and I was like, she's not showing any signs of, like, if this is good, if this is bad. I don't know what this music's supposed to sound like, but this can't be it.

Alex Goldman (25:45)

So it turns out that's actually what the EEL sound like. And as a lover of nearly unlistenable music, I tucked that in my back pocket. But it seemed like we were pretty much done. Her music was copying both to her computer and her external hard drive. And beyond that, I don't know that there was anything else we could do for her. So. You know, Ally, I feel like in the grand scheme of things, things, this is like a drop in the bucket for all of the stuff you have to do. But I am really glad that we were able to get this stuff at least backed up, so you're not going.

Allie (26:16)

To lose it, you know, it Might seem like a small thing, but I think that's the thing about losing everything is that like, when you lose everything, any little thing you can get back is huge. Like, huge. If. Yeah, I mean, any small thing. I had a swimsuit that was the pony brand, the sneaker brand, Pony, which was my favorite sneaker brand. When I was in high school, I used to drive like 45 minutes to the Aurora mall to go get pony sneakers. And I had bought that swimsuit for $5 and it was my favorite swimsuit and I wore it everywhere. And after the fire, my husband somehow found it on Poshmark or something and ordered it. And like, it's just a crappy Forever 21 branded swimsuit. Like, it's not like. But it was like, oh my God. Like, I wore this swimsuit to my best friend's bachelorette weekend in Colorado where we swam in a lake all day. And like, you know, and I wore that swimsuit on like our third date when we went to the beach. And so just having like these little small things back sometimes is. Is everything. Because that's all we have now. There's very little I have that is like connected me to my old life. So any little thing like that, and especially my music, because, like, music was absolutely how I defined myself for most of my life. Like really my whole sense of self was like, through music. So having that music and knowing that it's not gonna like, if my ipod gets stolen from my car, which I'm always afraid it will, that I won't lose that part of myself is huge. Truly, truly huge. So I really appreciate it.

Alex Goldman (28:15)

This episode of Hyper Fixed was produced by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates and Serious Offers Akanek. It was engineered by Tony Williams. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. The episode was fact checked by Amor Yates and Sari Sofersuketic. You can get bonus episodes. Join our discord and more@hyperfixedpod.com join and if you're curious about how much we make, what our money goes to and more generally, what it's like to run a completely independent reported podcast. I wrote an article about it last week which you can find on my substack which is called the Cool Dude Zone and I'll also drop a link to the article in the show notes. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from prx, a network of independent creator owned listener supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at Radiotopia fm. Thanks so much for listening Radiotopia.

Allie (29:24)

From prx.