Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

As the year winds down, for many folks, December can be a time of reflections. How did you do on those resolutions from back in January?

Perhaps you had some big wins this year. But what do you think the you of last year would have said to the

you of this year? And how would that message land now? Let's go even further back. What about the

you of 20 years ago? What message do you think you would have sent and what would it be like to get that message today? Two decades ago, a team at Forbes made that possible. They created an email time capsule where anyone could write an email to their future self, and this year, the last

of those emails were sent out.

So here to make us smart about how they pulled it off and what this nostalgic project

can teach us about communication and people today is David Ewalte.

He's editor-in-chief at Scientific American and creator of this email time machine.

David, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to join you.

So back in 2005, you were tasked when you're working at Forbes with a special series on communicating.

What did communication mean back then? Well, back then, I was thinking about it,

and I think our advertising department was thinking about it in terms of networking. I mean,

that was still fairly early days of the Internet. The Internet was still novel to a lot of people.

And so communication in that sense,

I think people were talking about, oh, how do we transmit data across wires? How does your office

communicate? But also, like, how do we communicate as an organization? We're emailing each

other now. Like, how do I communicate with my boss? Do I need to be in the same room with him?

Or can I communicate virtually? So it was a different world where a lot of these concepts

and practices that are now completely normal to us were still kind of new and interesting.

So why an email time machine as a way to do this project?

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