Message In A Laptop
Endless Thread
WBUR
4.1 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is your relationship with the trash heap of digital history? Can you still connect your old hard drives? Still sifting through your old photos in the cloud? Do you ever low key snoop in the old electronics of other people, searching for treasure?
That's what Noah Simmons was doing a while back when he discovered something compelling in its simplicity: a homework assignment document, on an old laptop picked up at an estate sale. The title of the essay? "My Secret Place."
From there, the mystery of the author, and the meaning it had for so many people who got hit right in the feels by a nostalgic description of childhood, played out on TikTok. Like hundreds of thousands of people online, Team Endless Thread had to know more.
Credits: Co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, produced by Frannie Monahan, Edited by Meg Cramer, and sound designed by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Managing Producer Paul Vaitkus, Dean Russell, and Grace Tatter.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. |
| 0:09.1 | MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. |
| 0:16.8 | Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. A recent episode explores the high stakes of the AI economy. Stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. |
| 0:55.9 | On a cold day back in January, Noah Simmons, a curious 20-something, was browsing at an estate sale in a small town of Bristol, Virginia. |
| 1:01.5 | Noah was looking for things to resell because he kind of needed the money. |
| 1:06.4 | He had just quit his customer service job at Verizon after getting burnt out. I was kind of getting tired of just dealing with the general public and I felt like I was kind of getting tired of, you know, just dealing with the general public. |
| 1:11.5 | And I felt like I was kind of growing to hate people. |
| 1:15.7 | And that's not who I want to be. |
| 1:17.2 | I've been trying to make ends meet on my own by going to estate sales and buying things to flip online. |
| 1:30.5 | What about estate sales speaks to you? |
| 1:36.1 | Well, I'm a total treasure hunter at art, and it's like the most easily accessible treasure hunt you can have. |
| 1:37.8 | Noah's idea of treasure might be a little different than yours. |
| 1:41.6 | He's not looking for vintage furniture, antique wares, or mildly |
| 1:45.6 | creepy trinkets. Yeah, Noah's treasure of choice is much nerdier, our kind of nerdier. |
| 1:52.0 | I love old electronics, honestly. Some of it makes me feel nostalgic. Some of it's just built a lot |
| 1:58.7 | better than things are now, and I'd just kind of like to appreciate them. |
| 2:02.8 | Earlier in the day, Noah had found a crypto miner, some graphics processing units attached to two-by-fours, with a USB stick plugged into the back. |
| 2:12.8 | The Ethereum crypto on the USB stick could net him $800. |
| 2:19.0 | Not too shabby. |
| 2:20.1 | Cash money. |
| 2:26.0 | But Noah's day of under-employed estate sale hunting was about to net him something else. |
| 2:29.8 | Something you can't really put a price tag on. |
... |
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