Mixtape: Dakou
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Hello, I'm Akio Morita and I have been Sony's chairman and chief executive officer for the last 10 years. Before handing you over to our narrator, I would like to offer human beings use or abuse technologies. And it is in our mind and hearts that the future will be decided. And now, here is our narrator telling my story

I'm Simon Adler. And I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.

Truth be told, I don't even know if this is the way to start, but let's just jump in, I guess. Yeah, take it for a spin. All right, so I've got a short story for you about a piece of technology we don't think about much today, and how one morning it tore a small hole in the time-space continuum. According to the memoir, it's only for listening to music on headphones.

This is Noriko Ishigaki. And whose memoir are you reading from there? Yasuo Kuroki. Okay. She's a Japanese to English translator as well as a longtime friend.

And she says that on the morning of June 22nd, 1979, in Yoyogi Park... One of the biggest parks in Tokyo, magazine reporters and editors are gathered. Maybe a dozen or so alongside some press people...

from the Sony Corporation. Okay. And Sony has gathered this gaggle of journalists there to sort of unveil this new product for them. A product called Walkman. The Sony Walkman. Oh, yes. Now, these reporters had very little idea what exactly to expect or even...

or even what this Walkman was. Until the product leader carefully hands each reporter the Walkman. With a cassette inside it already. Okay. Did you have a Walkman, Chad? Yeah. Oh my God, yes. It was blue, steel, none of this plastic shit. Yes. I remember the way that you would put the cassette in and then click it shut. And there was something about that tactile sound effect

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyhow, so these reporters put on these orange headphones. And then the event organizer says, please press the play button. One, two, three, go. And... Oh...

There's this sound blasting into their ears, and this voice welcoming them. And the voice says to them, look out into the park. And they see that they are not the only ones listening to a walkman.

There are dozens of other folks with orange headphones on moving through the park. Kids on roller skates. College students jogging. Women exercising. People skateboarding. Even a Buddhist monk.

Like this scene that you and I see every day walking down the street. You know, people in their own little world listening to whatever they want to. Yeah. This is the first time anyone had ever seen that. Amazing. Amazing. And of course, if they took their headphones off, they'd rejoin our shared world, hearing the din of the park and the city around them. But then...

When they put them back on, they'd be back in their own little world. Headphones off, collective reality. Headphones on, whatever personal reality, whatever mood they'd chosen for themselves. Oh my God. Totally. And maybe you can communicate this better than me because you lived it.

But like, this was all so new. Like, most of these people had probably never worn headphones before. They've never had stuff pumped directly into their ears. They've never listened to something outside before, short of a transistor radio or maybe a boombox. And they're now doing it all together, but by themselves. People don't really understand what a big deal the Walkman was.

Like, remember when Steve Jobs did the iPhone and everyone was like, oh my God, oh my God. Yep, yep. This...

was like that times a thousand. You'd go that far? No, really. Like to go from a world where you have to sit on your ass and listen to music in a specific place to suddenly you could walk, like literally walk and have the music playing just for you, thereby soundtracking your journey. You know, I was like, this is a movie and I am the protagonist. This is amazing. Like it was, it was, it was amazing.

well, as amazing and liberating as it was, it was also controversial. Almost immediately, folks were hollering that this personalized, siloed, intimate consumption of media

was going to end community, if not society as we knew it. It's like the same conversations we're having now about Twitter and Facebook. Oh, yeah. And so, I don't know, in more ways than one, I think what Sony unintentionally gave those reporters that morning was a glimpse into the future. I don't know whether it's good for the people or bad for the people, but at least...

We gave people some joy of enjoying the music. Now, I've spent the last year listening to, thinking about, and researching the object powering those Sony Walkmans, the cassette tape. And what I've learned is that this object, this little piece of plastic, changed the world. It brought down governments, collapsed space and time,

and remade how we say those three simple words, I love you. So, for the next five weeks, I've got a mixtape of stories for you. A mixtape that'll take us to China, Vietnam, South Sudan, Czechoslovakia, 1940s America, exploring this object's impact and how, believe it or not, we're still really living in a cassette world. I'm Simon Adler, and this is Mixtape.

Okay, well, Simon, why don't you just take it from here? I'll just excuse myself and go listen to my Walkman in the kitchen. All right, then. So, here we go. Hi, I'm Steve Moog. And in this tape, I'm going to pass on as much knowledge as possible about playing rock and roll. As you sing, you will feel more and more free.

We're kicking off in Hangzhou, China with this guy. This is Hao Fang. Alongside our interpreter,

And really, a co-reporter in China who, for political reasons, has asked to remain anonymous. Anyhow, these days, Hao Fang writes about music for a living. But he says, you know, back when he was a kid, he had no idea that job even existed.

He was born in 1963 in this very small town called Qianjiang. Very small. The kind of place where you'd walk for 10 minutes and be on the outskirts already. Surrounded by mountains, lush countryside, and super isolated. I mean, the best source of reading material he had was...

was at the time people would use old newspaper as wallpaper. Right, like you want to make it look good. And so when Hao would go over to his neighbor's houses... He would just dash to the wall and start reading. Wow. Because there's so little for him to read. But while Hao was hungry for any information about the outside world, his real love was...

Right. His mom worked in this art and dance troupe, an organization under China's military, creating music and choreography. What we nowadays refer to as red songs or revolutionary operas.

This is historian and scholar Mabu. I'm a music fan. I also write about music. And he says these operas were really a tool of the government. I mean, of course, I didn't live through that time, but they were propaganda. I mean, campy, over-the-top productions filled with dolled-up Chinese soldiers.

Really pretty girls, long legs. Determined peasants. Corrupt businessmen. And in them, the peasants seem to always win and the capitalists get what they deserve. And I mean, Hao loved this stuff. I remember watching my mom sing and I would join.

It was simply something that made me happy. But there was very little for him to listen to. Because actually these revolutionary operas, they were the only officially sanctioned style of music. And nationwide, there were only eight that people could listen to.

There were only eight operas. That was the... Yeah, yeah, eight. Eight operas. Virtually everything else was illegal. Does that mean that if I turned on the radio in China in, let's say, 1974...

I would be hearing one of those operas being played? The answer is yes, but then back in those years, it's not that common for a person to turn on the radio. It's more about loudspeakers, which was, I guess, the most common way to listen to music. So you don't even tune into them. They're blasted to you through loudspeakers. Mm-hmm.

It might sound unbelievable to you, but that's how it was back then. And for Hao, it pretty much stayed that way for years and years and years. But then, a decade or so later... So the year is 1948. Wait, 1984? Sorry, what did I say? 48. Oh, God.

This is what happened when you worked a 10-hour day. Totally, absolutely fine. Let me rewind. So, yeah, the year was 1984. Hao just graduated from college. He went to Wuhan, where the virus started.

During the day, Hao would venture out into Wuhan to explore his new home. So he was just like wandering the city, looking for stuff to do with his roommates. And they just happened to stumble across this theater-like place. Little hole in the wall showing bootleg movies with a curtain for a door. He opened the curtain and walked in and...

There were 20 or so people there, small illuminated screen up at the front. And he had to really squint through all the cigarette smoke to make out the screen. But the first thing he noticed was the smell. And not just from the cigarettes. People's oily hair. Feet. Oh, wow.

Sorry. You told me to describe as vividly as I could. Yeah, you did it. Yep. Anyhow, the movie they were showing was an illegal bootleg copy of Apocalypse Now. And he'd never seen anything like it. The realism, the violence,

the explosive budget. Well done, Hawks, well done. But what hit him hardest was not those smells or those images on the screen, but what was coming out of the speakers. The doors. Classic scene in the movie, where the doors, the end, was played. Morrison started to sing. This is a beautiful spring.

He remembers being frozen. He had goosebumps all over him. It was like magic. And so, yeah, Hao was just totally touched by the music.

He'd never heard such a simple yet powerful arrangement. Basically never heard a song about death. Never imagined music could be so emotionally complicated and layered. I think it's just love at the first sight, really. And he needed more of it.

But there was nothing, nothing at all. I mean, China was opening up a bit at the time, letting some Western music in. But there was an actual committee that would handpick which songs. And what they were letting in, like John Denver, The Carpenters. Yeah, very limited songs, only really, really popular stuff. It's pretty harmless.

And as for the more complicated, subversive music coming out of the West at that time, like no one had legal access to it. But there was a group of people in China who, like Hao, had gotten at least a little taste of that larger musical world. University students. Right, right, right. Students at the university, they were some of the few people who had connections to

the foreign community. This is Kaiser Ghoul. I am a podcaster. I run the Sinica podcast on SubChina. He's also a musician, was born to Chinese immigrant parents, and came of age in Tucson, Arizona. Which is why I talk the way I do. Everyone thinks I sound like I'm from Southern California or something, but it's the Tucson in me.

He was living and studying in China in the late 80s. And he says exchange students like him, English teachers, were giving Western music to these students. And they were beginning to express themselves through it. The question of the day, are events in China out of control? For the second day in a row, a million demonstrators have filled the streets of Beijing and there have been demonstrations for democracy. You know, the 89 protests started happening. The Tiananmen Square protests. Justice!

Kaiser actually attended these protests. And said, you know, students had taken over the entire center of the city. It is very important to let the people in the world to know the situation in China. These students in Beijing were demanding democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of access to the outside world.

But also, Kaiser told me, they were doing this thing that doesn't really get talked about much. He said that right there in the heart of the demonstrations... People would just sort of set up stacks of PA, and then they'd have, you know, all the bands at the time just playing, you know, what long end of the night. And, you know, people were in the mood to party.

In the history of communist China, there has never been anything like this. This is a version of the protests that I haven't heard. We only ever hear about or talk about sort of the end of them, I suppose. Right, right. We don't talk about the seven weeks of just love and anarchy. It was wonderful. Some of the happiest days I can remember.

Peace, love, rock and roll, and yes, John Denver's Country Roads. But then, on the morning of June 7th,

I turned the television on. Kaiser had left Beijing and was several days behind the news. The very first image I see is of the charred body of a copper soldier hanging from a bridge. The protests turned violent. Of course, they only showed, you know, the...

Killings in and around Tiananmen Square.

The number of killed is not well known.

But estimates put it in at least the hundreds. The Chinese Red Cross says at least 2,600 people were killed. Some going up to as many as 3,000. The students claim thousands of others were wounded. Yeah, yeah, it's really remarkable. Crazy. Now, the chilling effect Tiananmen had on China really can't be overstated. And music...

Got caught up in all this too. Of course, after the crackdown, just immediately you really cannot listen to popular music from United States or England. This is Wenhua Sher. I'm from, originally from China. He was willing to talk to us about this because today he lives in Boston, where

where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts. During the crackdown, I was quite young, how to say, in ninth grade. But I remember so vividly listening to Sure Wave Radio. Mostly Voice of America. VOA, learning English, and then listening to some popular songs. But after Tiananmen, suddenly those are being removed.

They produce noise to jam the signals. So you cannot hear anymore. It's impossible. So you feel the air is really exhausted because there's no outside possibilities. But just a few short years later, the outside came flooding in.

in pretty much the most unexpected way I can think of. Somewhere in the early 90s, it was spring. Somewhere in Wuhan, Oxiang. Again, music critic Hao Fang. He was on a business trip.

He was meeting a friend, but the friend wasn't there and he was early and he heard some rock music being played. He's like, where is that coming from? So he just followed the music. Down the street and around the corner. And he saw this

and pretty much a hole in the wall. He stepped in and he was just caught off guard completely. It was a store filled with tapes.

More than he'd ever seen in his life. Yeah, Walter Walker sets hundreds, hundreds of hundreds of tapes. And he's like, what the hell is this place? It would be like, turning around and there is Jefferson's airplane. Michael Jackson, Vice President. Turns around and there's like Bob Dylan. And then he turns around, there's Yes Band and really niche ones. Like, is this for real?

It was everything you ever dream of. In that tiny store. And it was cheap. So he thought this is his only chance to own these tapes. And so, yeah, he grabbed all these albums. You have to take them out of your hands first.

as many as he could carry. This big plastic bag with like 20-something tapes. He checked out and began inspecting his treasures. One by one, he started like examining them, analyzing and comparing. And he saw that each of them had been cut

Through the jewel case and into the bottom of the cassette. The cut was about the width of a quarter and an inch or so deep. And he was wondering, you know, like, why is there some marks on these tapes? Or, you know, what happened to them? I mean, he didn't know, but he was encountering dark hole.

He didn't know where they came from. He didn't know there's going to be more access to daco. And he didn't know it was going to be a national scene. He didn't know these daco tapes were about to change how he and millions of others in China thought about music. All Hao knew at the time was that he wanted more.

We'll get to that right after a quick break. This concludes Side 1. Turn your cassette over to begin Side 2.

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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 who moonlight 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.

Another way you can improve playing rock and roll is absorb as much outside knowledge and information as you can, even if it's a simple kind of thing like... or very undesirable noises... or something more easy to listen to. Or whatever, you know, because we're going to cut up and combine them and just make up a little thing.

I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape. Before we went to break, after decades of Communist Party operas sprinkled only with the occasional John Denver song, Hao Feng had stumbled upon a trove of cassettes filled with music that neither he nor pretty much anyone else in China had ever had a chance to hear before.

And the thing is, he wasn't alone. I mean, rows and rows and rows of tapes. This, again, is Wenhua Sher, who also encountered one of these stories. You see Bob Dylan. And then you see, no, this is not just one Bob Dylan. That's ten Bob Dylan. Whoa, this is crazy. And where were they coming from? At that time, nobody knows. ♪

Again, historian Mabu. But...

Professor Ye? Ye. So Ye Laoshi. Ye Laoshi. Yes. Okay. Yes. Ye Laoshi. Oh my God. Even you, you heard this guy. Ye Laoshi. And while we couldn't 100% confirm that he was the first guy, he was certainly one of the first. So this is, I guess, the most common version of the story. So Ye Laoshi. Ye Laoshi.

Professor Ye took a trip to this nearby town of Heping. Maybe to do some research, maybe on vacation. And he got a tip that he should go check out this giant warehouse. Uh,

It was actually a recycling center. What we call liao chang. At that time, China was buying up and importing much of the world's recycling. And this town and warehouse was processing all of the plastics. And looking around at all this plastic, waiting to be ground up into tiny little pellets, he realized... He was standing in a mountain of cassette tapes. I mean, to the left of him...

a pile five feet high, to the right, a mound of them ten feet high. There were thousands and thousands of cassettes, each with a cut into it. I mean, of course he would be astonished, imagining what kind of sounds is in there and thinking, who is this band, who is this singer? And he would be dying to hear the music in it. Yeah.

The point is that those cassettes came in as plastic scraps and they came in tons. That warehouse made my jaw drop.

For the sheer number of cassettes in there? This again is Hao Fang, who years later took his own trip to Heping to see it. You couldn't possibly count how many cassettes there were. Millions and millions of tapes, yeah. Ballpark estimates Mabu gave me put it somewhere between 45 and 150 million of them each year.

I'm ready. Okay, so I'll hear him coming through my phone, but I'm talking in the microphone, right? Now to figure out the origin of these millions and millions of garbage cassettes.

Hello. I gave this guy a call. Hello, is this Bill? Yes, it is. Hey, Bill, Simon here from Radiolab. How are you? I'm good, Simon. How are you? This is Bill Nadel-Seder. I covered the recording industry from 1982 to 1989. And he says back here in the U.S.,

The late 80s and early 90s were just a period of decadence in the music industry. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. The record companies were the cash cow. You were Warner Brothers. Your record company was making more money and was more profitable than your movie division. They were flush with bands selling millions and millions of records.

like R.E.M., U2, Nirvana, Bon Jovi. So the money was enormous. And so record execs were making big bets.

producing millions and millions of copies of just about everything they were releasing. Everything from Madonna to, I don't know, probably even the animated rapping character MC Scat Cat. I mean, they were producing so many that even a hit record often left hundreds of thousands of unsold copies, let alone a flop like MC Scat Cat's.

And so what did they do with this surplus? They wanted to get rid of it. Okay. And so what they would do is they would sell them in bulk for pennies apiece to a network of buyers and resellers. First, they ended up in record stores labeled as cutouts. You know, a discontinued record is called a cutout because they cut it out of their active sales category. If they didn't sell there, someone would buy them in bulk for pennies on the dollar again, try to sell them somewhere else. Truck stops.

car washes, drugstores, and whatever else. And finally, if no one wanted these cassettes... They'd send it out to be destroyed. The standard way they did this was to run a saw blade through them, cutting about an inch deep into the cassette itself, leaving a gash in the plastic and a break in the magnetic tape. And from there, unbeknownst even to Bill... It's getting there in garbage and like big...

Fucking barges? Drash? Is that what you're saying? Yes, scrap barges. Wow. These cut-up cutouts were thrown into shipping containers and shipped to China, where Professor Yeh found them as these mountains of scrap. I take heart from this. The music will get to the people no matter what. However...

For this music to get to the people of China, these cassettes needed to be repaired, which is what Professor Ye tried to do. Here's what we're going to do. Bring the tools out here. His theory was essentially... Even if the mechanism is damaged, you can take the tape out. Again, Kaiser Guo. Splice it and rewind it onto a new cassette body. It wasn't going to be easy. In fact, it was going to be a royal pain in the ass. Okay, here we go. But...

After sawing a John Denver cassette nearly in half.

Oh yeah, and you went right through. You can see we got the tape itself is split. Oh yeah. My AP and really co-pilot on this series, Eli Cohen, and I also set out to see if we could do this. So, first things first. We're going to have to destroy it further in order to bring it back to life. We had to get the John Denver tape outside of its broken cassette shell. Smashing it with a hammer.

Now we've got some breakage, and now it's quite like the experience of cracking open a crab leg or something. There we go. With the John Denver tape out of its cassette. We've got screws. Eli opened up the cassette we'd be transplanting John Denver into, and we taped the John Denver tape onto the new reel of tape. Snipped off the excess. Beautiful. Oh, fuck.

Struggled a bit. Damn it. Okay. Eventually succeeded. Okay. It's time to sew the patient back up. And screwed the new cassette back together. It looks functional. Yeah. I don't see why it shouldn't play at this point. And so we popped it into my tape player. Big money, no whammies. Didn't work. Doesn't...

Wait, hold on, hold on. We took the tape out and tried to wind it forward manually a bit. Put it back in. Still nothing. Doctor, can you diagnose the patient here? The host seems to be rejecting its new organ. And so, giving it one more shot, we manually wound a bunch of tape from the left reel onto the right reel. So we're losing the first song, basically. It might be okay. All right, let's try again. And...

Now this tedious, painstaking repairing process, Professor Ye and others began doing on a massive scale.

hiring folks to do the labor and distribute these tapes across the entire country. And he or someone like him eventually gave these things a name. Daco. Daco, which just so happens to translate to... Cut out. We somehow also invented this term...

And they spread like wildfire. I left China after '89. There weren't Daco at that point. And I came back in '91 and '92, and they were everywhere. Even in cities that are not that big. Far-flung places like Urumqi in Xinjiang, Dali in Yunnan. Outside of my home, there was a flower shop. And the flower shop was selling Daco. That's how crazy it is. And they were affordable for Chinese consumers to buy.

And there were so many of these things that the Chinese government really just had to throw up their hands. And so folks all across China got to have their own little apocalypse now, this is the end moment.

And for Hao Fang... Da Kou was there when he needed it the most. The diversity Da Kou was able to provide him totally altered his life course.

He says without them, he definitely would not have become a music critic. And so what he feels about Darko, if you have to summarize in one word, is gratitude. Without Darko, he would not be him today. And half on things, all these...

artists, many of them would not be them either. Because these unregulatable garbage cassettes sparked a musical explosion and totally reimagined what rock and roll was. This is Li Yang. Today he's a musician with tattoos, sleeves crawling up each arm.

And these doco tapes are what inspired him and countless others to form bands in the first place. Do we know the name of his first band? I'm not sure he told me that. You know, everybody's embarrassed by the name of their first band, so he probably didn't want to tell you the name.

Or he kept on saying, I can't remember because of the life I've lived. That's all I can remember. So, you know, I can only imagine. And that's Rebecca Cantor, journalist in Shanghai, who helped facilitate and conduct our interview with him. Anyhow. Come as you are.

As you friend, as you... One of the first bands Li Yang heard was Nirvana, and he loved it. He wanted to hear more stuff like it, but he didn't know what genre to be looking for.

No, no idea. In fact, he wasn't even aware there were genres. There was Western music. And there was the music that everyone was listening to in China. Those were the two genres because...

Nobody was there to teach us, this is metal, this is punk, this is grunge, this is garage, this is emo. We were just not clear on this in the beginning. All Li Yang had was the recordings, nothing else.

And so he was listening to all of this stuff. With no context. Again, Kaiser Ghoul. No understanding of, you know, what this particular album is in the history of rock. No sense that the Beatles came before ACDC or that ACDC came before Nirvana, right?

There's certainly no sense of what was quote-unquote good. So, for example, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, a lot of people complain about their sound are just, you know, very common sounds. Wait, wait, wait. People thought Bob Dylan and the Beatles were underwhelming? Yeah. And in their place, what folks were drawn to was... God, there were so many, so many obscure bands. For example... This really obscure Finnish symphonic metal band. Called Sonata Arktika.

There were a lot of them that were like that. Stratovarius, get it? I think also from Finland. Finland was overrepresented here, but Cannibal Corpse. They're a Floridian death metal band. They're big. Sort of. But I started seeing their cassettes all over in China.

And for Kaiser, this was all sort of horrifying. You know, I would say, for example, you got to start with the Beatles and the Stones and the Who. And you can't skip because Nirvana doesn't make sense unless you understand what it was in reaction to.

And I totally get that. Like, I studied jazz saxophone for 10 years. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is all about knowing exactly what came before what. Right, right. And knowing who played what lick when and quoting those licks in your solos to demonstrate a knowledge or an understanding of the form. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know. Like, there is value in understanding something in its context. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

However, Kaiser says... I mean, I kick myself now for having done this sort of school of rock teaching. Because he says of what happened next. Mid-2000s, Kaiser's at a music festival in China. And who does he run into but Li Yang and the band he's fronting... Called Demerit. I see these guys. They show up to soundcheck.

And they've got, you know, gigantic mohawks, denim jackets and the spikes on them, Chuck Taylors. They're dressed like a punk band, which is what Li Yang was going for. He says in hindsight, the stuff he was listening to was... But Kaiser notices that under this punk exterior... They're wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts.

I think that's ironic, right? They're kind of making fun of Iron Maiden. Ha ha. That's very funny. Because Iron Maiden is one of the classic heavy metal bands that plays these crazily technical songs with intricate guitar solos. Like, punk and metal is just a total musical mismatch. But then later that day when it was demerit's slot to perform...

They get up and they start playing their songs and they're like a, you know, punk, major chords. Exactly what Kaiser expected from a punk band. Kind of brash, bratty vocals. But then partway through the song... They bust into these dual guitar solos where they're, you know, they're shredding in tight harmony. It's this chimera of 70s American punk

and 80s British metal. And it's like, whoa!

I thought in America, there's no punk band that would bother to, you know, apply that much technique. And there's no metal band that would have been okay with that aesthetic. But it was great. It was like, this is a music I could really get into. And so I talked to them. I'm asking, so aren't you guys punk? Like, how do you think about these genres that you're blending together? And so they said, we don't really care about that.

There was something freeing that he didn't know what it all was, and so he... He didn't have any rules. He could just make stuff. Make music. Mixing everything together. The way that he wanted to. He was able to make music liberated from its own history or expectations.

And all across China, other musicians were doing the same thing, obliviously mixing rock with bebop, with outlaw country, with classical. It was such an odd, completely disembodied borrowing. It was like free of context, free of obligation. It was like taking a plant.

away from its soil, dusting off any residue of the old soil and putting it in this totally different soil with a different pH level, different level of sunlight. It's going to grow differently, and it did. It's sort of the mixtape on the grandest of scales. Exactly. Exactly. And the impact that it had on that generation was just utterly profound. Young people need a different sound. Everyone is very...

for him. The biggest impact of "Dakou Kises" was not music. It was about him finding a new way to think about the world. Maybe he didn't know he was searching for it, but when he heard it, he was like, "Oh." Yeah.

That's me. So, Daco, it was just like a little window. And then everything came rushing in. Now, what strikes me about all this, more than anything, is that we're all sort of living in this world now. From Spotify playlists that span eras and genres...

to the scattershot of news we consume and then weave into our own understanding of what's happened. I mean, our tastes, our beliefs, our realities are a collage, a mixtape of decontextualized and then recontextualized snippets. Next week, we're leaving China and going back to the moment this remixed existence began.

We've got the story of the first splice in our reality and the two men, one you definitely know, one who you most definitely don't, who made it happen.

Mixtape is reported, produced, scored, and sound designed by me, Simon Adler, with original music throughout by me. Invaluable reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen. This episode also included original reporting from Noriko Ishigaki, Rebecca Canther, and our amazing anonymous Chinese reporter.

I'd like to take a moment to give special thanks to Paul DeGay, Juliet Christensen, Rebecca Tours-DeBrow, Nick Lyons, Michael Bull, Jiro Ishikawa, Haley Zhao, Megan Smalley, and Deanne Toto. This episode would not have come together without each and every one of them. We've got another tape for you next week.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latef 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 Niyanasambandham, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari,

Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Tanya Chawla, Shima Oliai, and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shabill.