Mixtape: Cassetternet
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Just get more Radiolab at youtube.com slash RadiolabPod. Wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yep. The Gospels, Cassette 2, The Book of Matthew.

Chapter 14. Enjoy the six top quality Bible tape. Jesus said unto them, give ye them to eat. And they said, we have here but five loaves and two fishes. This recording is copyrighted. He said, watch what you can do with this Apple II personal computer. We can write information to a guest. He said, you've occasioned. He said, you've occasioned.

I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape, a series about how the cassette tape allowed us to record, reshuffle, and reimagine our lives.

And in this case, usher in a new world order. And we're starting off today with a second Simon, Simon Goodwin. So I am indeed Simon Goodwin. I've been inventing gadgets and writing computer software since the late 1970s. These days, he sports a white goatee with a waterfall of white hair falling down the back of his head. Kind of has the vibe of a mad computer scientist. I'm afraid, yeah, that's, that's, you got it.

Absolutely. Yeah. I have to imagine that when you were growing up in the 1970s, like there weren't a lot of computers around. Actually, the situation was that having a computer at home really set you out as a bit of a nutter, I would say, at that point. I mean, it's sort of impossible to imagine today.

But back then, most people had no experience with computers. Yeah, people understood computers as being, quote, giant electronic brains that couldn't be argued with. They were just big government-owned math machines. And so Simon, he could really only share his passion for these things with a small group of oddballs like him, which he did. Radio Waffer!

On this local independent radio show he worked at. Good evening and welcome to Radio Wyvern Computer Club. It was a weekly magazine-style show broadcast in West Central England. I'm Robbie Arnold and with me tonight, Simon Goodwin. This week, I'll be explaining what sorts of steps make up machine code. Heard by, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred people. We did things like, which computer should I buy? Potentially, the Commodore 64 is the best machine on the market, although...

It's very economically prized. The answer to which should be one that hasn't been made yet. And what does the jargon mean? For no sensible reason, the contents of every memory location is called a byte. And then also... Well, this week we've had three new titles in. Lots and lots of computer game reviews. One of those for the Commodore 64 called Everest. Right-o. And while for Simon this was fun and all, it seemed small. I mean, I'd already been...

deeply, deeply moved and had my life changed by these obscure computers. And I knew that home computing, it's not about shooting games or driving racing games. It's about sharing. And how did you know that? Well, I used to ride my Vespa motor scooter to a pub where there was a computer club.

We'd bring along the software that we'd written ourselves, we'd show people, and they'd usually be, "Can I have a copy of that? Can I have a copy of that?" And you'd swap. And when you did that, you weren't just handing them a program. You'd be swapping inspiration and ideas too. And so really before most, he saw the future filled with these computers. Oh yeah. I believed they were going to change the world.

I mean, way back in 1983, he was already imagining open source software, file sharing, a world where ideas and information would be shared across borders and between people frictionlessly. And so it was pretty obvious that we needed to do something innovative. Right. Now if you press enter. Obvious to me anyway. And that's it, Mike. Not very exciting really, is it? And one day I had an abnormal idea that

That using nothing more than a simple cassette tape, he could create the internet. Or at least an internet. Of freely downloadable software. To explain. All of the early computers, certainly this side of the Atlantic,

Even the Apples used cassettes. Strange as this may sound, before there were flash drives or floppy disks, there were these data cassettes. I've actually got a couple of them with me right here. This is Finance One for 1979 Apple computers. This one's Arcade Classics for the Commodore 64. And I mean, these were the exact same cassettes you'd use to play music on your stereo.

But instead of music, the cassette plays two different tones, a bit like Morse code. So what I'll show you now is, this is the original 1982 model of the Spectrum. Sitting in his office over Zoom, he actually isolated these tones and played them for me. Here we go.

A deep note for a one and a note an octave higher for a zero. And so to load a program, you'd literally play those tones into your computer off a cassette. The computer would listen to those tones flying by super duper fast, convert each of them into a zero or a one,

and then display whatever you're running on your screen. Roughly speaking, that's exactly right. And so Simon thought... I mean, the vicinity with radio was obvious because... Since this software is sound, we could use our little radio show to broadcast it.

And not only that, I mean, we were already using our cassette recorder to record hit records off the radio. So people could tape the radio broadcast onto a cassette, have their own copy, and then play it into their home computers. Did anybody you were working with say, like, Simon, what the hell are you talking about? This is a terrible idea? Well, in those days, if you'd got a home computer, you were regarded as mad anyway. Pfft.

Okay. So you didn't get much challenging. And so one evening in December 1983, Simon wrote up a small bit of software to share with anyone who was listening. You're my bird.

Simon, will this load on the 16 and the 48? Should load on both machines. Well, let's hope he does. Well, get your tape recorders out. Load your tape, first of all. Inside the radio station, Simon and his co-host walked people through what was about to happen, prepared them to hit record, and across the broadcast region... There's a lot of people around here, poised with their fingers already over the recording buttons as it is now. Okay, Stuart. People were ready and waiting. Stand by for blasting because here it comes.

And it loads in three, two, one. And there it was. Well, presumably quite a few people switch off. But beyond that, it worked. Yeah, it did. Across the county, dozens of people had captured these mysterious tones onto a cassette tape.

played that cassette into their computer and then on their screen. First, they would see the pixels arrive on the screen and then as the tones changed timbre, they would see something that I thought looked a bit like a reindeer. It was a little Rudolph animation. He's wagging his leg or something along those lines. Of course, you couldn't tell his nose was red. The graphics were black and white. Okay, and why Rudolph? It was Christmas. It was...

Okay. Well, that's your present from the Radio Wyvern Computer Club for this evening. Lots and lots of programs. And many thanks to everyone that sent in today, even Ian and Adrian. Okay. So Simon's reindeer was sort of hilariously rudimentary. But this was 1983. Before TikTok, before Twitter or texting or really even emails, Simon had managed to send an animation across space to hundreds of people instantaneously.

I mean, at that time, the only way to send someone a bit of text was telegram or letter. And the only way to share a picture or a song was by actually going over to someone's house and handing them the physical photograph or cassette. And well, back then, yes, you could record something onto a cassette tape. Making a copy of that tape was a technological feat beyond the grasp of all but a few people. Until that is...

Along came a guy by the name of Lord Sugar. Yeah, Lord Sugar. I'm sick of looking at you at the moment. Get out that door, you're fired. Who currently is actually the host of the UK's version of The Apprentice. He plays sort of the boss character. Was he knighted? And is that why he gets to call himself Lord Sugar? Yeah, because he built up an electronics industry just at exactly the time when that was the place to be. In 1984, he released this dual-deck cassette recorder. These machines that would

allow you to record from one cassette tape to another cassette tape. This is legal academic Daniela Simone. She's an expert on UK copyright law who remembers this twin-deck cassette player. It was a truly revolutionary technology of distribution and a very fond memory of my youth. So did you have one of these growing up? No. The people that had that at school were really...

Like, just the coolest, really. I wasn't... You could tell, having become an academic, I was not one of the coolest kids. Oh, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Oh, probably I've just given myself away then. But Daniela says she does remember going over to her friend's house that did have one. Some twins, Catherine and Timothy? Of course they have the dual-deck cassette player. Of course the twins have the twin cassette recorder. Exactly. And copying these tapes with her friends, she says...

was crazily empowering. Like magic, you know? Because before this, record companies were able to control the way in which you would access what they were selling. Like you couldn't make a playlist. You couldn't even just buy the songs you wanted. You had to buy the entire album. And so the idea that you could have your own compilation that you made and you could have songs in any order you wanted...

It's like sort of a superpower this technology was giving you. And this superpower, wielded by millions of kids in their bedrooms, was beginning to threaten the music industry.

And I mean, this panic even had Simon Goodwin nodding along. Probably for good commercial reasons. By this point, he was making and selling cassette-based computer games. It was a side revenue stream, but the particular one that was a hit was a...

exploring underground game called Goldmine. You'd play as this little stick figure burrowing down into the ground with a pickaxe and they would start exploring the space trying to avoid getting crushed.

Anyhow, Simon had spent dozens, if not hundreds of hours working on this thing. And so with all this pirating going on... I spent as much time on the copy protection as I did on the game. Using a bit of computer magic, he slipped some code into the program that would detect if the cassette was a duplicate. And if so, it wouldn't play. Oh!

I'm hearing a slight tension, though, because on the one hand, Simon, you love the sharing with your compatriots. But on the other hand, you're trying to lock that thing down so that it can't be used to its full extent, potentially. So how did you square those two in your mind? I was being paid.

I was being paid for the commercial software. Whereas for the radio program, I won't ask whether you're getting paid, but radio is not a way of making a living. Touché, Simon. Touché. Let's get this quite clear. A pirate is a thief. The only investment he has is a piece of tape. And he is making money... And this was detention. Once money got involved, for people like Simon, the people making stuff, sharing effectively became stealing.

However, across the Iron Curtain, questions like "Who's the pirate?" and "Who's being harmed?" were even harder to answer. In fact, the whole situation was playing out in this

fascinating, almost upside-down kind of way. First of all, the term software piracy was unknown back then. The pirate was only the guy with the parrot and one eye and nothing else. This is Frank. František, and that's Frank in English. But online, he goes by a different name. Do you prefer Sir Fucksoft or...

Or Mr. Fucksoft? Now, you've done the classic mistake. It's pronounced Fooksoft. Fooksoft. Oh, excuse me. I've had this problem with English-speaking people for a long time. Anyhow, he says in Czechoslovakia at that time. The copyrights were something completely alien concept in our country. The idea that a person could own a song or an idea and therefore insist that it not be copied

Like, that just didn't exist. There is maybe an interesting story which illustrates this. Many of Western songs were just adapted to Czech and officially released over here with completely different lyrics. What would be an example of a song? Can you think of a specific song or two? Of course. So, for example... Berlin's Take My Breath Away here. Stolen. And rewritten as...

Please don't laugh at me. Really? Yeah. And there were literally like dozens of these songs. Don't cry for me, Argentina. Don't cry for me, Argentina. It was released over here as a song about... Drive carefully in your car when you are going through the mountains. I'll close your forerunner.

And Fuchsoft was so cut off that growing up, he was convinced those were the original versions. Yes, I thought those were Czech songs. I'm not sure how much do you know about how socialism worked, in fact.

Treat me like I'm a child and I know nothing. Okay, so let's say you wanted something from the West. Anything like clothing, computers, calculators. Illegal. There was simply no legal way to get it. So as late as 1980, he'd never seen a computer. But then I visited Exhibition of Achievement of Soviet Republics.

Sort of like a communist science fair. They were showing the best socialism has to offer. And there was a computer...

By today's standards, super simple. And so...

Fuchsoft became like an Eastern Bloc version of Simon Goodwin, only a little more celebrated. I was like a wunderkind. They were making interviews for TV and for newspapers with me. Like this boy, he understands computers. Because he taught himself to program,

he became this sort of Communist Party show pony. We were being paraded. Like, you see, this is our future. They are playing with computers. But while the Communist Party was showing him off as the best of the best, he was about to realize just how far behind the curve he and everyone he knew really was.

He said he doesn't recall the specifics perfectly, but signed off on me taking a few creative liberties here for you. He says it happened... I would say 84, probably. I knew a guy who could get commercial games. He smuggled the cassettes in from Yugoslavia, and somehow Fuchsoft got one of these games, either from him or someone else.

Fuchshoff played it into his computer. And when this scree of data was finished playing, he began to play this game from the West. One of the first was Mooncresta, it was called. It's one of those games where you're a spaceship moving side to side at the bottom of the screen, shooting upwards at alien spaceships. Very, very simple game. But it was...

The action was flashier, the sound effects were richer. This wasn't a game you just played and beat in an afternoon.

You could play it for days. It opened his eyes to what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, this world that his own government had completely cut him off from.

And eventually, he thought, I have to share this with my friends so they can experience this too. Yes, yes, something like that. But it had a copy protection scheme. That bit of code that Simon put into his games...

This game had one of those too. And so to be able to copy and share it, I had to correct it. Essentially pick its digital lock. Okay, this shouldn't be too hard to do myself. Fuchsoft went for it. So basically switch on computer and type in just load decode loader inside another loading routine exit back to operating system. But didn't work.

They were really using all the tricks in the book. So he tried again. Write my own safe routine. No place to put memory was full. Still didn't work.

Much to the glee of folks like Simon Goodwin. When I create something, I do my best to protect it. And so you don't put up something on the screen saying, you are a nasty pirate. What you do is mislead the person by reporting a tape loading error. Because then they think, oh no, this is a world of pain I'm entering into. Who cares? Let's copy somebody else's game. But for Fooksoft...

Cracking this thing became its own sort of game. I was something like a quintessential geek. So it was a challenge to me that I actually, I could like look into it and find tricks which they have used.

So what I had to do at the beginning save the game when the loading started. The state of running it, operating system was right. My every kilobyte was needed. Original screen happy. I was hating this. Small modifications. Press T for change original. Cannot be copied. Overwritten. Then exit.

I don't think I'm ever going to fully understand what you just said, which I think is okay. I think I can say a cartoonish version of it that communicates the idea, but I won't understand it. However, what I do need to understand is, did it work or not? Well, in that case, yes. I correct it and the game runs.

And from that point on, it could be copied throughout the whole country. Very, very fast. That's Jaroslav Švelik. Professor at Charles University in Prague. He wrote a whole book on these pirated games, and he says... Just by people kind of giving it to each other... This thing multiplied and spread internet-style almost as fast as that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer broadcast. It took about six days to spread across the whole country.

And there was, there's a term for it, it's called Sneakernet. Like just people in sneakers running around and distributing cassette tape. We had so-called copy parties, like dozens of people were meeting. All of them brought their small computers, put it on the tables and connected their tape decks to the one device. And through this rat's nest of cables. They were doing copy to all of them at the same time. Copy to all of them.

Somebody would then leave that copy party. Running around the neighborhood with a plastic bag full of cassette tapes. He gave it probably to some of his friends. They took their copies to copy parties. And each of the copies from the originals created five or ten more copies. And those would then be copied. And so on and so on. And so on and so on.

It was the loaves and the fishes. Suddenly you could feed all of the people you wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So basically for people around me, I was something like a goat. This, of course, set off its own Cold War-style arms race with folks like Simon creating new copy protections and folks like Fooksoft figuring out how to break them. Well, and so over the course of your career...

How many games do you think you cracked? I would say between 100 and 200. Wow.

Actually, how do you call it in English? I was looking forward when there was a new copy protection method. Why? Because I learned so much just from debugging their copy protection schemes. Strangely, this arms race became its own form of sharing. So I got a great respect for the people who came up with those copy protection schemes.

And Simon says he began to feel the same way. It became a collaborative and a creative process of forward and backward communication. Each time he updated his copy protections, it became less an angry attempt to deny robbers and more like, huh, okay, okay.

let's see what you can do with this. Yeah. So what we were doing there was partly we were sharing knowledge and partly we were trying to show one another what was possible. And not just what was possible with zeros and ones or bits and bytes.

i mean by the late 1980s more and more pirated material of all types was being smuggled in and shared on these cassettes and so folks who had always thought don't cry for me argentina was about driving in the mountains we're suddenly and simultaneously experiencing this onslaught of slapstick

explosive, stupid, dynamic, compelling media that capitalism is so good at pumping out. And when I talked to Fuchsoft, he told me that he thinks this media and the sharing that facilitated it was at least one reason why... Hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks are in the street. The young want an end to communist rule altogether. So many people, all at the same time, were primed to want more...

and ready to take to the streets to get it. They packed into Wenceslas Square. Definitely through pirated movies and music and computer games. More and more people, including me, could see how better it is for you to live in a capitalist society. Several hundred thousand people. It just came down because of this, because it was no longer tenable. Resign, resign, they demanded.

And I think that's why basically the communism ended basically at the same time at the whole Europe. Watch what you can do with this Apple II personal computer. Czechoslovakia became the latest to throw off its communist yoke. And they did all meat and were food.

And after the Iron Curtain did fall, someone paid me to come up with a copy protection scheme for his game. Fuchsoff took full advantage of his newfound freedoms.

What a good little capitalist you became. Did I tell you about bitcoins? About me and bitcoins? No, no, no. Tell me, tell me. Well, like later I started blogging about movies and I allowed people to send me like a voluntary amount of money. Just if you want, send me money. Like an early Patreon thing or something? Yeah, yeah, basically. And 11 years ago,

I said, okay, here is this thing, this Bitcoin. Here is how it works. It's very interesting. You can also send me Bitcoins if you want. Well, okay. And then they sent me something over 200 Bitcoins. 200 Bitcoin. Let me look this up. Yeah. Okay. Into US dollars.

$10 million. No, no, I don't have 200 of them. But I can tell you in the last year I bought a new car and a new house with bitcoins. Turns out Simon Goodwin was right. Radio is just not a way to make a living. ♪

Now, whether or not Fooksoft is right that these sneaker nets and cassettes helped bring down the Iron Curtain, sort of impossible to tell. However, up next, we've got the story of a cassette internet that, without a doubt, sparked a revolution. That's after a quick break. ♪

This is Ronia from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Mixtape, a special series from Radiolab, is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, the Shanahan Family Charitable Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

This ends side one of cassette four. Please turn the cassette over and start side two at the same point.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

In politics, you can say something and thousands of people or maybe millions of people pay attention because it relates to their destiny. And so all politicians have a strong motivation to be a god, to have the destiny of the people in their hands. All right, we're back. I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape. And for part two, sort of a B-side here,

I've got the story of how one man's voice upended a country's politics and continues to echo around the globe today. The skills you're about to learn truly are the unspoken strategies for gaining power and getting ahead. In these cassettes, you'll learn how to build a political power base and get the important information that nobody reports in formal memos or meetings.

Starts off with the guy you just heard, Mohsen Sazhigara. I was born in Tehran in 1955. He was a precocious kid, bookworm, loved reading about political theory and political philosophy. I don't know, maybe you call it geek or something. I tried very hard during all my education years. He left Iran, moved to Chicago in the mid-70s to study physics, but...

By 1978, his focus was very much back home. Making a revolution. At that time, Iran had already been engulfed in a years-long struggle against the country's tyrannical leader. The Shah.

Shah came to power with a British and American plot. And he was a military dictator. He and his secret police, SAVAK, ran the country with an iron fist and impunity. The, you know, shadow of SAVAK was everywhere. And Mohsen and all sorts of other folks wanted this guy out. I mean, there were nationalists fighting against the Shah. Marxists and leftists like Mohsen. And while they'd made some strides...

getting people out onto the street to protest, things were stagnating. Yes, we thought that we have a long battle. And so, Mosen and his smarty-pants leftist allies decided to hit reset. Which is where our story really begins here.

We went to a small village about half an hour, 45 minutes out of Paris. This town, Neuf-le-Château, would be their new base of operations. They knew someone there who owned this rudimentary house they could stay in. I remember there was one shower which had no hot water in the cold weather of France. And they were bunking up with this relatively unknown and very unlikely ally.

This long-bearded cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini was quite old. He'd been in exile for quite some time. That's Kim Khattas. Longtime journalist who's covered the Middle East and the United States. She says Mohsen's allies had handpicked Khomeini to join them. We needed to...

a religious leader that was activist against the Shah. Someone who could really inspire people to take to the streets. And Khomeini fit that bill. Yes, he was very adamant. He was kind of crazy. He was the kind of guy who would not compromise. He said the Shah should get the hell out of Iran. Iran!

This is Iranian writer and activist Arash Azizi. You know, he said, And so, you know, Mohsen and the other leftists thought they could use Khomeini, overthrow the Shah, and then cast Khomeini aside. And so, from this tiny town, these strange bedfellows hatched a plan to make Khomeini a superstar.

This small village, 20 miles to the south of Paris, has become the center of resistance to the Shah of Iran. Mohsen and the leftists, with their connections, They set up literally a media office. made a bunch of calls, sent out tons of press releases, You are able to call for peace. And before long, His title is Ayatollah. Nuf le Chateau became the center of the media universe.

Good evening from Pontchartrain, France. And with the cameras trained on him... Tonight, the 78-year-old Muslim religious leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini became the voice of the revolution. Sort of. I ordered the Muharram to respond to these issues.

Because, and this is where things get a little complicated, sitting on the floor or out under an apple tree, Khomeini would let the reporter ask their questions. If the peaceful demonstrations do not succeed...

Will you then order your followers to fight? And he then answered those questions in Farsi, which the reporters didn't speak. So, the leftists like Mohsen would step in to translate.

And what they said, what they translated, something soft, smart, and diplomatic, The cause that we are striking is the independence of the country and the liberty of our own people. was often quite different from what Khomeini had actually just said. Khomeini believed in what he called wilayat al-faqih. How do I translate? Sorry, let me just check how I translate that. Mm-hmm.

A state, a wilaya of the faqih, of the wise man. So, you know, an Islamic state on earth. Yeah. He thought that if you implement a religious order from Middle Ages, everything will be right and we will have a utopia on the earth.

And so it was like, was that a red flag for you in any ways? No. You know why? Because we were in danger by secret service of Shah, Sabak. We were imprisoned by Shah and we were ready to sacrifice our life. So our first priority was to bring down regime of Shah.

And we thought that Khomeini was in our side. And again, they also thought Khomeini was a useful puppet they'd eventually discard. They were the ones in control. And so anytime he brought up this idea of the Islamic State… They would omit that, as they called it, crazy talk. So that part of the message did not reach the Western media. But the problem was,

that basically no part of the message was reaching the people of Iran. "How are your orders communicated to the millions of your followers in Iran?" "The Shah of Iran, he had an iron grip on media and the media would have been the radio and TV and the newspapers." Again, Arash Azizi, who says the Shah had this media blockade.

that was effectively preventing all of this news coverage, all of this messaging, from making it back into Iran to its target audience. And there was not, of course, any WhatsApp or any internet services. So they needed to find some underground analog way in. Enter the cassette tape.

Every week at weekends, after evening praying... Oftentimes sitting in this blue and white striped tent that they directed in the backyard. I told Khomeini he had a speech about sometimes an hour or less than an hour. And this is where they'd let Khomeini be Khomeini.

And we recorded them to cassette tapes. Shah, you are not a king. You are a nasty, rebellious person.

You are ruling the country against the rule of law. People want a politician, a ruler whose beliefs are based on Islam. Islam is the religion that half a century ago conquered all countries in the region to make them decent human beings. Islam is not dictatorship. It is God's rule. Islam is not dictatorship.

And when Khomeini had finished his speech and the recording was done... After his speech, I took that cassette to the basement. Recorded a little intro onto it. The speech of the great leader. Then the date. And one day Mohsen, or one of his allies, thought...

Maybe there's a way to send these cassettes, these speeches, back to Iran. Maybe by telephone. In that house, we had an international line, a colleague in Iran who was an engineer in Telecom of Iran. And he and his friends, they could open international line, one international line from Iran for us, like a collect call.

And while these speeches were less diplomatic, less polished than the messages Mohsen had been passing to the Western press... They didn't mind whether the Iranians who were religious heard this message about an Islamic state because they thought, OK, it would bring them out onto the street and it's never going to happen anyway. So let him say whatever he wants because it's all crazy talk.

I remember the first time... After one of Khomeini's weekend speeches... I took the cassette upstairs to our colleagues, and I remember that they smoked cigarettes very much, and their room was always covered by smoke. Gave it to them, and then our friend in telecom connected the line...

With the revolutionaries in France now speaking to the revolutionaries in Iran, they attached this tape player to the phone and pressed play. And our colleagues in Iran... Using a little tape player on their end. Recorded it. And when the call was finished, the folks in Iran, they took the tape out, rewound it, played it back. And

— You can just imagine the crackly quality that you would get. — And it worked. Suddenly Khomeini was there with them in that room with their proof of concept.

they started going wild with this. Once a week from France, they'd set up a conference call. All the folks on the call would record it. From the various points in Iran, then, they'd start making calls, spreading it further.

And along each step of the way, this network of people, you know, have almost a little cottage industry duplicating the tapes. They duplicated it thousands and thousands and thousands of times. It becomes a flood.

So, yes, it's estimated that it took about nine hours from a speech being given by Khomeini to it being spread in large numbers of tapes in Iran. I mean, these things were spreading hand to hand, from family member to friend, in the bazaar, in living rooms. I mean, at its peak, some 90,000 mosques were duplicating and distributing these tapes. Well, it feels to me like this is...

Khomeini seeing how to create virality before virality was a word outside of epidemiology. Absolutely. Absolutely. Khomeini knew exactly what it meant. The art of Khomeini was he exactly knew what to say to go viral. What to say and just as importantly, how to say it. Great politicians in the world, most of them can speak very well and have very good lectures. But Ayatollah Khomeini was not like that.

His grammar is one of the worst.

Maybe I gave him a D or F. He used the verbs in the wrong way. He had quite a provincial accent. This is Nizila Fatih. Former New York Times correspondent based in Tehran for 17 years. She also grew up in Iran as all this was happening. And she says his language was so strange that educated folks made fun of him. One of the jokes was that yogurt is white.

Yogurt is white. Three words. Because all his sentences were like that. Very simple and obvious things. But while the upper crust was mocking him... His speech was more attractive for ordinary people.

He was from rural Iran, and so were many, many Iranians, millions of Iranians. Even the ones who had grown up in the cities, their parents came from villages. And so this was a very familiar language to them.

similar to the language of their fathers or grandfathers. And on top of all this was the way they were hearing it. People had cassette players at home, so you could listen to it at home and you could sort of gather around and all together listen to those cassettes. And when they did that, when they sat down and pressed play...

It's not a politician speaking to a reporter. It's not a politician behind a lectern giving a stump speech. It's not even some image being beamed into your television and your neighbor's television and their neighbor's television. It's a man in your living room speaking to you and saying that there's important work to be done and that you're invited to be a part of it.

That you've been treated unfairly. That you've been wronged. But that with your help, we can fix it. We can make the world a better place. We can make the world as great as it used to be. And that the only thing standing in our way is one man. So his voice gave them an identity, purpose. This voice that they could keep hearing and it would drill in over and over and over again.

One Iranian man we spoke to who heard these tapes said, in hindsight, that it was almost like Khomeini had hypnotized him and he was not unique. Everybody in Iran, in every faction, listened to Ayatollah. Millions of people. I mean, when Khomeini called for strikes on these tapes, they happened. When he told people to take to the streets on these tapes, it happened.

And when he told the Shah to get the hell out of Iran, that eventually happened as well. The man who from long distance had led the revolution to topple the Shah. The people were in a frenzy. It was through these cassette tapes that Khomeini mobilized the masses and managed to hijack the revolution from all the other political parties. Khomeini, come on.

January 16th, 1979, the Shah fled Iran. And what he would be replaced by, what Khomeini's victory actually meant for Iran, began to come into focus just two weeks later, as Khomeini was flying from France back to Iran. When they were on their way back to Tehran,

the Air France plane that had been charted for them. Again, journalist Kim Khattas. As the plane entered the Iranian airspace, Peter Jennings of ABC, of course, managed to get up to Khomeini and ask a question. And he asked him, Would you be so kind as to tell us how you feel about being back

And the Ayatollah listens to the translation of the question into Persian, and the answer is Hitchi. Nothing. And the translator, as always, one of these leftist intellectual types, he just can't believe what he just heard. So he asks the Ayatollah, Hitchi? And Khomeini repeats, and I'm reading sort of phonetically, Hitchi.

Now, what he meant by nothing, none of us will ever know for sure. But listening to that interaction, and this is something that Kim Khattas felt too, you do get the clear sense of a man who sees himself as simply taking his next predestined step into power.

A man who sees himself as apart from and above the trifling emotions of politics and men. Here is a man who's been in exile for 15 years, and he's about to touch down in his home country, and he feels nothing? And his translator...

almost didn't seem to know what to do with those words. He tells Peter Jennings... He doesn't make any comment. He doesn't make any comment. Is he happy or is he excited? He doesn't make any comment. That moment on the plane is when you start seeing the danger

of what Khomeini actually represents. But it was too late. I think it was too late.

I guess I wonder,

Mohsen, your voice on these tapes, how do you feel knowing that your voice is in some ways forever intimately tied to Khomeini's voice? Not so guilty, I have to say. Okay. Because now that I look back, we know that combining revolutionary ideology with religion is

is the wrong way. But in those days, nobody knew that. Not only me as a 23-year-old student, but none of the thinkers, even the Western thinkers. So I was a part of a big movement in Iran by the people of Iran. As I've been preparing to talk to you, the person that you remind me of

is like the sales rep for Purdue Pharma who is going out and pushing Oxycontin. Like, you didn't know how dangerous this thing was that you were pushing on people. Yeah. But you're doing it. Have you had to grapple with that fact?

Yeah. I can say that, unfortunately, I didn't think about the future, the system that he suggests. We thought that we can make a utopia on the earth. We were wrong. I can say now that all those thoughts were wrong. ♪♪

We've got one more thing for you. It's actually a secret message that you can decode. And we'll have that for you right after one more quick break. These messages will be read.

All right, I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape. Before I let you go today, Simon Goodwin, the mad computer scientist from our first story today, he went to the trouble of coding a little secret message for you. It's a secret message that he turned into zeros and ones and then high tones and low tones that we're going to play for you right here and right now. And so if you have an old ZX Spectrum computer or you want to go dig up an emulator online,

You can take this sound that we're about to play, put it onto a cassette, and load the message. And in fact, if you're listening to this on the radio, you can go further. You could actually record this straight off the radio onto a tape and run it into a ZX Spectrum just like Simon Goodwin did back in 1983. Okay, anyhow, I'm going to give you a moment to prepare yourselves. If you're going to tape this, you know, put the tape in, get ready to hit record, and

because here it goes. Three, two, one. All right, there it is. If you get this to work, please let me know. I would love to hear about it. Shoot us an email or tweet at us. Yeah, I'm just super curious to know if this functioned at all. Okay, so Mixtape is reported, produced, scored, and sound designed by me, Simon Adler, with original music throughout by me. Top-tier reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen.

We've got a bunch of folks to thank today. Alex Saif Cummings, Martin Malley, Piotr Garciak, Joe Tozer, James Glick, Jason Rezaian, Golem Kiyobani, and Mo Jazzy. And to Arash Azizi for helping us every step of the way with our story about Khomeini. And to the one and only Simon Goodwin for making us that secret code. And Micah Loewinger for tipping me off to those software broadcasts in the first place. Okay, I'm Simon Adler. We'll have one final tape for you next week.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer and Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyata Sambandham, Matt

Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Tanya Chawla, Shima Oliayi, and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibu. This ends. Please rewind and then continue with cassette five.