Ira Glass Act Three, When Worlds Collide. This story begins at a convention, well, two conventions actually. John Perry Barlow was at a convention in 1993 for the NeXT computer, the machine that Steven Jobs created after he co-founded Apple Computers. The other convention, the American Psychiatric Association. Our story starts on the border of those two. John Perry Barlow is a former rancher, song lyricist, now head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He travels everywhere, talking about computers. And that is what brought him to the Moscone Center for a convention in 1993.

John Perry Barlow And I was supposed to be the MC at a Steve Jobs celebrity roast.

Ira Glass Uh-huh.

John Perry Barlow And across the way, the psychiatrists were having a seminar or something.

Ira Glass Before we even go anywhere, it really does like a when worlds collide sort of thing.

John Perry Barlow Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. It was.

Ira Glass Because the thing about a convention is that each world is so distinctly it's own--

John Perry Barlow Right.

Ira Glass --world, with its own concerns and its own priorities and its own paradigm.

John Perry Barlow Oh, yeah. And both of these groups of people were so distinct from one another. I mean psychiatrists as a group have a look. NeXT was one of the only computers I've ever been around where the whole notion of design was really important to the product.

Ira Glass Right.

John Perry Barlow Elegance of design. And it attracted the strangest kind of hybrid, which was sort of like UNIX weenies by Armani , combination.

Ira Glass OK. And describe what the psychiatrists tend to look like? What was there look?

John Perry Barlow Well, the psychiatrists were all the sort of Jules Feiffer cartoon psychiatrists, tweed jackets, slightly rumpled.

Ira Glass Right.

John Perry Barlow And no distinct difference between the men and the women really, except for this one person. I was standing outside the entrance to the ballroom, where I was going to supposedly roast Mr. Jobs. And the psychiatrists were all milling around over there, in their corner. And I saw a woman standing with her back to me. She actually looked dressed to be more one of us, than one of them, in the sense that she had this very crisp Armani look from behind, long blonde hair. And she turned and looked over her left shoulder, and looked right at me. And I've never had an experience like this before or since. I mean I've always thought that the whole idea of love at first sight was one of those things that was invented by a lady novelist, with three names from the south. Right.

Ira Glass Right.

John Perry Barlow Because how can this work? What's the process by which you would recognize something that profound?

Ira Glass Yeah.

John Perry Barlow She looked. And we started looking at each other. And we didn't avert our gaze, either of us for probably 45 seconds. I mean we just locked on the beam. And I felt like I was having an hallucination. I mean I felt like I was hearing voices. It was the strangest thing. And I kind of stepped back and rubbed my eyes and tried to figure out what I was going to do about this.

Ira Glass You literally rubbed your eyes.?

John Perry Barlow Literally. No. It was an odd-- the whole thing just felt really dreamlike.

Ira Glass I was going to say, it's like in a story.

John Perry Barlow It went into this surreal state. Finally, I thought, well, whatever is going on between this person and me, I am definitely not going to let this moment pass without investigation because I haven't experienced this before. So I circled her a couple of times. And then finally I came over to her, and I said, "You're something." And she said, "So are you." And I said, "Well, where are you from?" I assumed that she was part of our show. I thought that actually what she was-- it didn't occur to me that she was associated with the psychiatrists because she didn't look anything like them. And I thought that what she was probably was what is-- I wish there were a better term for this, but the general computer trade show term for this is booth bimbo, which is somebody who stands in the booth selling the incredibly difficult to use software, who's actually a model or an actress or something, who doesn't know anything about the software. But the marketers sort of dangle her out as bait.

Ira Glass Right.

John Perry Barlow And then once she's gotten these poor innocent hackers to wander over so they can talk to the beautiful girl, then wham, they get them.

Ira Glass Right. Geeks move in.

John Perry Barlow Right. The geeks move in and hustle them off and sell them software.

Ira Glass Time honored practice.

John Perry Barlow Right. Exactly. It works. And so I just assumed she must be a booth bimbo because she was much too beautiful to be a computer hacker.

Ira Glass Or a psychiatrist.

John Perry Barlow And it didn't even dawn on me that she was a psychiatrist, which in fact she was. But I said, "Well, where are you from?" And she said, "Well, I'm from a little town in British Columbia." And I said, "Well, that's interesting. I'm from a little town in Wyoming, which is kind of like British Columbia."

Ira Glass Un-huh.

John Perry Barlow "Where do you live now?" And she said, "New York." And I said, "Well, that's even more interesting because that's where I live." And I said, "Where do you live in New York?" And she said, "19th and 3rd." And I said, "Well, that's not too far from where I live. I'm down at the lower end of Fifth Avenue." And she said, "Where?" And I said "Well, Fifth and Ninth." And she said, "Really? Which building?" And I said, "It's the old Fifth Avenue Hotel. It's 24 5th Avenue." And she said, "Really? Well, it turns out that I just got an apartment in that building." And in fact she had just gotten an apartment precisely two stories above mine in the same building. So there I was with this woman that I had an instantaneous and inexplicable attachment to, who was about to move into my apartment building. And we just went off together-- and actually moved in together, really, literally, a week after we met.

Ira Glass So when you're at the convention with her, you just spent all your time together basically?

John Perry Barlow Yeah, from that point forward. And it was a great opportunity for me to introduce her to my world in a lot of its other dimensions, because the Grateful Dead was having a concert in Sacramento one of the nights of these joint conventions. And so we went over and she saw her first Dead concert. And this is a person who would never have been caught dead at a Dead concert.

Ira Glass Explain your connection with the Grateful Dead?

John Perry Barlow Oh, I spent many, many years as their sort of junior varsity song writer. There were two song writers. And I was the lesser of the two.

Ira Glass And so what did she think of the concert? What did she make of it?

John Perry Barlow She liked it a lot. She thought the Deadheads were fascinating. She thought the music was great. But the other thing was that we were just completely, hopelessly besotted with each other.

Ira Glass Yeah.

John Perry Barlow I could have taken her to a dogfight I think and she would have thought it was OK. It was just one of those completely unexpected, acts of providence where two worlds collided and something wonderful came from the point that they touched.

Ira Glass Do you think that if you would have met this woman in some other setting, just on the street or seen her in the lobby of the apartment building that you lived in, after she had moved in there, do you think that you would have had this moment quite so powerfully? Or do think that there was something about being at a convention where one is just open to experience in a way that one wouldn't be elsewhere?

John Perry Barlow Actually I think at that moment, she was more inclined to judge things more on the basis of their appearance. And what she mainly saw was a guy in a real sharp suit. The next day when I returned to my normal style of dress, she said, "Wait a second. Is this how you usually dress?" And I said, "Yeah." And she said, "Oh, well. All right."

Ira Glass But do you think that if you had seen her just walking into your building three weeks after that, for the first time, do you think this moment would have happened?

John Perry Barlow I think that it probably would have happened anyway. There was something about this particular connection that would have overridden any of the surrounding noise in the data. I mean I felt like I had finally met another member of my tribe, and felt that before I said anything to her or she said anything to me.

Ira Glass What happened with her, finally.

John Perry Barlow Well, what happened was-- we had both had the flu. And she was a young woman. I mean quite a bit younger than me. And very healthy. Took extremely good care of herself-- athletic. But we both had the flu. And it had been a real nasty flu. And it had had us both kind of hitting on maybe five out of eight for close to a month.

Ira Glass Yeah.

John Perry Barlow And I had gone out to Los Angeles to give a speech. And Tim Leary had gotten some tickets to a Pink Floyd concert at the Rose Bowl. And she was going to come out and join me, to go to this Pink Floyd concert with Tim. That all got bollixed up. We ended up going by ourselves and having a very long, complicated evening, with a lot of waiting in traffic, and looking for our car, and what not.

Ira Glass Going off by yourselves, you and Timothy Leary or you and her?

John Perry Barlow Cynthia. And over the course of this evening, we decided that even though we had been sort of the opinion that we didn't want to think about the future that much, she said, "Well, I know that we're not supposed to think about the future. But I think that you and I should have children. And if we're going to do that, I would love to start soon. And if we're going to do that, then we should be married. And how do you feel about those things?" And I said, "Fine. sure. No problem." Anyway the next day, I had a meeting and-- the next day was a Sunday. And I had a red-eye back to New York that evening. And Cynthia was going to go on that. And I said, "Look, you've been sick. And you've got patients tomorrow. And why don't you just take an afternoon flight. And I'll be home to see you before you go off to work." And so she took an afternoon flight. And I took her down to the airport. And gave each other a great big kiss. And she said, "Nothing can keep us apart baby. We were made for each other." And then she just walked onto the plane and went to sleep, took a nap. And it turned out that the virus that we both had, the flu virus, had attacked her heart and had been chewing away on it for the previous 10 days or so. And it pretty well consumed the pericardium. And so eventually it was so compromised that, as she was sleeping, she started to fibrillate and just died. She was two days short of her 30th birthday. And they went to tell her to put her seat belt on coming into JFK, she was dead and had been for awhile.

Ira Glass Oh, my god.

John Perry Barlow So this whole episode, from the moment I saw her there in the hallway of the ANA, to the moment where I watched her walk onto the aircraft was one of the really central passages of my life. And after that, everything was different.

Ira Glass And smaller.

John Perry Barlow Well, no, not-- actually, I wouldn't say that. In many ways, not at all. Because one of the things that came out of it was that prior to this, I didn't believe in the soul. I mean I think that within us we're two spirits that had always-- I mean, there's really just no way to say this without sounding incredibly sappy. But we were the same soul. And having seen that, that changes everything.

Ira Glass Now that you've had this experience with her, do you find that you have this experience all the time, in a smaller form, where you'll meet a group of strangers and there will be one whose eyes strikes you. And you think, OK, I can see a part of this thing.?

John Perry Barlow Absolutely. I mean I feel an ability to attach on a moment to moment basis that is completely unlike anything that I felt prior to that. And I think it's sometimes a little disconcerting to other people, because it's genuine on my side. And people are not used to having somebody just dock emotionally that instantaneously. For one thing, I feel like I can see their souls. Their souls are visible to me. One of the things that happened as a consequence of this is that for a while there, if I stopped moving, the pain got so bad that I couldn't stand it. So I fell into a lifestyle of continuous motion. And that gradually became an economic adaptation. And now I just simply live on the road pretty much. I mean I flew 270 some odd thousand miles last year, just on one airline.

Ira Glass God damn. I mean I'm just hearing you say it. It's like you want to die on a plane too.

John Perry Barlow Well, it's a funny thing-- no, I'm not particularly interested in dying on a plane. But I mean that's kind of like-- I really feel like the stratosphere is my church.

Ira Glass That's where you feel like you can contact her.

John Perry Barlow Well, kind of. I feel there's something about being up there that makes me feel like I'm closer to her. Yeah.

Ira Glass No. I totally understand that. Because it's the last place where she was.

John Perry Barlow Yeah. But it's more than that. I mean last night I was flying here, to Salt Lake from New York. And I looked down, and it was just-- I don't know that I believe in heaven or anything quite like that. But I mean it looked exactly like heaven in the paintings of that period of the late Renaissance, when they really started to get light, and understand how to do light and clouds.

Ira Glass Remember that really clear, kind of blue light--

John Perry Barlow Yeah, exactly.

Ira Glass --with pale, clear blue.

John Perry Barlow There were layers and layers and layers of different colors of clouds. And they were all catching the sunlight in golds and blues.

Ira Glass Yeah.

John Perry Barlow And I thought what a great life it is that puts you in this unbelievably holy environment on such a regular basis.

Ira Glass For me, there would be the additional thing-- and I wonder if this is for you too, I mean maybe this has worn off now, because you fly so much-- but I mean every time I would get on a plane, I would just think, OK, this is her setting. You know what I mean. It's like--

John Perry Barlow Oh, yeah.

Ira Glass This is where I left her. And she could be in any one of these seats.

John Perry Barlow Oh, yeah.

Ira Glass It would be very hard for me to not be picturing her in one of those seats, and just sleeping.

John Perry Barlow Yeah. No, I mean-- she's there.

Ira Glass Even now? Even just--