BONUS - Metra Listener Mailbag 1 - How Did I Get Here?

Dear Listeners:

We believe the time has come to clear the air on a matter of some…complexity. 

Are you the sort of listener who keeps an ear out for patterns? Repetition?

Perhaps you’ve noticed a unique name popping up in numerous places. 

Perhaps you’re one of the Metra listeners who heard Episode 4 and began to have questions. 

You’re not alone. Today we address such a listener question — namely, how the hell is a guy named Tom Molpe joining the climate revolution in 2045, while he edits a podcast in 2025??

Perhaps Tom can clear things up. 

Check out our website for ways to join the climate movement: metrathemusical.com/do-something

Support Metra at ko-fi.com/metrathemusical

Follow the show:
https://pod.link/1843713183
IG and Bluesky:  @metrathemusical
metrathemusical.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Makers media presents.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Hi everyone. Tom Molpey here with the Metro Listener Mailbag. That's what we're calling it, Metro Listener Mailbag. Because we've been getting a lot of emails from people because it's a really scary time in the world these days, and folks have reached out about the show many, many sweet comments, very friendly, a few not so friendly, but mostly folks who are just really worried about the world. And a lot of those folks have asked questions, very legitimate questions, that I feel are important to address. And a lot of folks have noticed that Tom Mulpey is listed as the person who produced and mixed all of the audio for the show, a podcast that dropped on October 22nd, 2025. But Tom Mulpey is from 2045. So, Donnie from Des Moines writes, Dear Mr. Mulpey, what the fuck is going on? It's a nice start there, Donnie. Donnie continues, dude, in the credits it says you did all the music and arrangements and produced all the audio and mixed the podcast and whatever, but this is 2025 and you are from 2045. Repeat, WTF man, WTF dude, is this for real or what? Sincerely, Donnie. Well, Donnie, yeah, I get your confusion. How can someone from 2045 be making a podcast in 2025? Little known fact. When human beings sing with tree nymphs, if their voices vibrate together just so, it is possible for a space-time portal to open up. At least that is my theory. Because there I was one day in the year 2045, just writing a song with Aggie, and just as we hit uh this especially sweet harmony, well, I just you know I closed my eyes to savor the moment. And when I opened them, I was someplace very, very different. Upon opening my eyes, I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway at night, late night, because there was no foot traffic on the walkway, not much car traffic on the bridge, cold out, not bitterly cold, thankfully, but st still too damn cold for the climate gear I was wearing, you know, like layers of light, breathable kind of cloth, salvaged and repurposed for the most part, not dissimilar in appearance to the clothes that might be worn by someone living on the street of NYC back in the day, which seemed to now be today. I looked over at the clock tower in Dumbo. 3 AM. I walked into Manhattan, found a twenty-four hour deli down in the financial district, and I asked the cashier what day it was. Tuesday, he replied. I said, No, I mean the date. What's the date? The twenty eighth. And the month and the year? At that point, he lifted a baseball bat, and he told me to get out. I said I would leave if he would just tell me the month and the year, and then woo, I'll skidaddle, I'll go, no problem, no bother. And I guess I won him over because I walked out of that deli onto a quiet Manhattan street at 3:30 a.m. on the chilly early morning of what I now knew was Tuesday, February 28th, 2023. I took in the enormity of my new situation, determined I wasn't dreaming or dead or crazy, that I really was where I was, and then I began to assess my situation, which I quickly grasped was quite problematic in no small part due to the fact that I had no money, no credit cards, and no identification, which, you know, makes New York City a tough place to get around in. So I did what anyone in my situation would do. I looked myself up. I knew my younger self would be taking his 6 a.m. run in Central Park, so I sat on a bench along our running route, and I waited for myself. And there I came, my younger self running towards me. Younger self was doing what we always did when we went for a run, focusing on our breath, calming ourself mentally, readying ourself for our day-long effort to emotionally detach from the moral implications of our work, though that isn't something my younger self would have admitted to himself at the time. You know, my tendency towards detachment and disassociation is something I know about myself really only in hindsight, which, as they say, is 2020, or in my case, 2023. Tuesday, February 28th, 2023. So realizing my younger self would be difficult to engage with, I stood up and I stood in his way. And my younger self, he sort of angled his approach in order to avoid me without having to break his stride. It's that New Yorker kind of way of avoiding homeless people. But I stepped right in front of him again. I extended my arm towards him like a traffic cop, and I loudly said his name, which was my name, which felt really weird to do. My youngest self stopped, keeping his distance and said, How do you know my name? I replied. I mean, let's just sit down and I will tell you who I am and how I know you. So myself and I sat on a bench in Central Park at six AM on the chilly foggy morning of Tuesday, february twenty eighth, twenty twenty three. Do I remind you of anyone? I asked my younger self. No. Said my younger self, but somewhere inside he knew he knew I was. I could see this fear growing in his eyes as he tried to hold it together behind his calm exterior. So I I held my hands out in front of me, palms up, trying to be really non-threatening. Okay, I want you to take a deep breath and just go with me on this, okay? Okay, you ready? Okay. I am uh you uh from the future. That's right. I am you from about twenty five years from now, and I need your help because things are about to get really, really bad. Now, Donny from Des Moines, let me tell you, my younger self did not react well to this idea of me being him from the future and wanting help from him. All that calm exterior just disappeared. And my younger self sense of self was beginning to well fall apart. What do you want? He stammered. I replied, Well, for starters, a fucking coat. I'm fucking freezing.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

I know you, my younger self whispered.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

That's when I leaned in and I spoke very softly. We should never have quit music. We should never have broken Gretchen's heart. We should never have walked away from the only two things that brought us joy in this life. So, Donnie from Des Moines, I gotta fill you in on that backstory you might be missing here. So my dad had this weapons company, defense systems government contracts, basically an arm of the Pentagon. I had a knack for the sciences, and I had just finished up an undergraduate degree in engineering from Harvard, and my dad wanted me to get a master's in electrical engineering and software design from MIT and then go to work for the family business. But you know, I was in a band, a rock band, uh kind of, you know, liberal political, you know, Americana music, which, you know, all really pissed my dad off, which I think probably made me pretty happy. And and the band had this beautiful red-haired, blue-eyed singer by the name of Gretchen. Amazing voice. And the two of us wrote amazing songs together. And we fell in love. And the band was kind of popular around Boston and Cambridge. So I begged my dad to give me a year off from school to play music. Just get it out of my system, I told him, because I sure as hell wasn't gonna be able to be in a band with a double master's at MIT. He begrudgingly, at my mother's insistence, allowed me one year off. But then, during that gap year, the band really caught on. We started selling out shows, and lo and behold, we got offered a major label record deal. I told my dad I was postponing grad school indefinitely, and he uh well, let's just say he didn't take that very well to say the least. At one point, he threatened me with a six iron, which, let me tell you, is not a good recruiting tool if you're trying to win someone over. I was just like, fuck it. How many chances do you get to have a record deal, right? So while the lawyer for the band was negotiating the deal, the label wanted us to fly out to LA to play for the label execs. And the gig went, great, but by the time we get back to the East Coast, the label, for no apparent reason, had pulled the deal. Then the lawyer for the band calls me and confidentially tells me that my dad had paid off the label to drop the band. Then the lawyer tells me that the band would be re signed as long as I quit the band. My bandmates didn't know any of this. Gretchen didn't know any of this, just me, my dad, the lawyer, and the douchebags at the label. So the band were all very surprised when I told them that I was quitting. They were even more surprised when I told them music was a waste of time and that they were all fools. And nobody was more surprised than Gretchen when I lied and told her I didn't love her anymore. At the time, I told myself that I was doing the right thing, told myself I was being noble, but you know, looking back, maybe I was just being a coward. Anyway. So then, sitting on that bench in Central Park, I told my younger self about the societal upheaval that was going to happen in the next decade, something that didn't surprise him. But I really got his attention when I told him that as the world fell apart, I future him, tried to find Gretchen. I called some people I knew at Palantir, and despite their ability to run surveillance on every United States citizen, they weren't able to find Gretchen. Which means she might have already died in one of those floods or wildfires or storms when the numbers of dead became too high too high to identify everyone. But more likely, knowing Gretchen, she probably was one of the millions who protested against the authoritarian takeover. And many of those people were killed by either right-wing paramilitaries or by US troops themselves. Maybe she was killed like so many peaceful protesters were by technology that my younger self and I had developed. At least she wasn't one of the disappeared, because if she had been one of the ones who were abducted by the government, Palantir would have had that information. When the prisoners were abducted, how they were abducted, where they were abducted to, how they were tortured, how they died, all got logged by Palantir. So at least she didn't go through what those people did. This is all the stuff I told myself sitting on that park bench in Central Park in 2023. And you know, I can come off sometimes as a little flippant, a little seen it all, done it all. But uh Donnie from Des Moines, let me tell you, sitting on that bench on a cold winter's morning in February of twenty twenty three, telling my younger self about the bad life decisions we had made, decisions that killed off everything we loved in our life, decisions that made us complicit in the destruction of everything good and beautiful in the world. Well, hey, that little talk on that park bench, me speaking to my younger self, ah God, that was the most painful, sad, pathetic conversation I think I have ever had. My younger self was very pale at this point. I could barely hear him when he asked me. You weren't able to find her? I shook my head now. My younger self sat back, he took a deep breath, and said, You know that I didn't sleep well last night, right? I nodded my head, yes. I knew. You know, my younger self said, You know, I I woke up around three AM from a dream, don't you? Yeah, I replied. And in that dream, you're sitting on a park bench in Central Park early in the morning, talking to some old man who's telling you that he is you from the year twenty forty five. Then I told my younger self that in fact I had been having that same dream since Tuesday, february twenty eighth, twenty twenty three. So we both just sat there soaking it all in, but then all of a sudden, my younger self just leaps to his feet.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Oh my god, he cries out, if you're right here right now, then from this moment on, nothing is as it was for you. Nothing is as it will be for me. From this moment on anything, everything is possible.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

Don't move and then he ran off. So I sat there. It wasn't like I had anywhere I could go, and twenty minutes later he returned. Thank God, now wearing regular clothes and carrying a duffel bag and whew a coat. Wow, I needed that. Then we went to a diner. I went into the bathroom and changed into the clothes that were in the duffel bag. We sat, drank coffee, ordered breakfast we didn't eat, as I told him everything that was going to happen. How the right wing tech, finance, and oil billionaires ended democracy and using the military and surveillance state they now controlled crushed dissent and murdered countless good hearted souls. But eventually, they saw all their own plans for domination scuttled as the climate apocalypse swept in like a tsunami so much faster than they thought, predicted, or planned for, arrogant fucking idiots that they were. I told my younger self about how the bubbles were built as the world collapsed, how the bubbles starved the outside of resources until the outsiders were too weak with hunger and thirst and heat to do anything but grovel outside the walls of the bubbles, desperately hoping for crumbs cast aside by billionaires. And I told my younger self that while the world fell apart, while the world burned, I just shut myself off, shut down, did my work, kept my head down. Then I told my younger self about this beautiful Azure blue Gretsch Broadcaster Junior and this amazing, fully outfitted, programmable, MIDI controlled pedal board that this nice family on the outside wanted to trade me simply to get access to food and water. Access that I could provide. Seemed like a good deal to me at the time. But then, thankfully, on the best day of my life, I got abducted by and joined up with a group of rebels, one of whom was a mythological tree nymph with the most beautiful voice I'd ever heard, at least since listening to Gretchen sing. And I told my younger self how singing with that tree nymph and being part of the revolution to bring down the bubbles had been the first time I'd felt joy in decades, oh, especially when the Northeast bubbles came tumbling down. Now surprisingly, my younger self didn't seem to have any problem with all those rather incredible details like mythological tree nymphs and magic. No. When I finished speaking, my younger self simply asked me, so what are we going to do now? I replied, I don't know. No, my younger self said. I know what I'm going to do. I mean, I I have an idea. I've got some ideas about what I have to do, but what are you going to do? I don't know, I replied. I don't have any money or a place to live, or don't worry about that, he said, cutting me off, because I just realized what you were going to do. He pushed aside his plate of cold eggs, leaned across the table towards me, pointed his finger in my face, and said, We need new stories, better stories, and you've got a hell of a story to tell. A story that people need to hear and share with everyone they know.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

So, Tom Mulpey from 2045, you are going to make a podcast. I said, Cool.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

And that, dear Donnie, my dude from Des Moines, that is how Tom Mulpey from 2045 made a limited series scripted musical audio drama podcast in 2025. Change the myth.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Change the world, baby, and the biggest.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

This episode of Metro Listener Mailback features Tom Mulbey as Tom Mulby. Tom Mulbey takes sole responsibility for the views expressed in this episode.

SPEAKER_03 19:33

The views expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the production cast or creatives. My name is Tom Mulpee, and I endorse this episode.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Dialogue directed by Emily Hartford. Singing sessions directed by Tom Mulbey. Songs written by Aglofanos Corey. Sam and yours truly, Tom Mopey.

SPEAKER_03 20:01

Music and vocal arrangements, as well as sound editing and sound design by Tom Mopey. All audio produced and recorded and mixed by Tom Mopey at MythMakers Media Studios. Principal casting by McCorkoCasting. Additional casting by Mythmakers Media. Public relations and media outreach by Tink Media. Visit our website, Metrothemusical.com for a detailed list of credits and thanks.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky at MetroThemusical OneWord.

SPEAKER_03 20:45

Metra, a climate revolution with songs, is a production of Mythmakers Media. Copyright Ned and Emily Hartford. All rights reserved. Remember.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Change the myth. Change the world.