Radiolab - Mixtape: The Wandering Soul

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

As the Vietnam war dragged on, the US military began desperately searching for any vulnerability in their North Vietnamese enemy. In 1964, they found it. It was an old Vietnamese folktale involving a ghost, eternal damnation and fear - a tailor made weaponizable myth. And so, armed with tape recorders and microphones, the military set out to win the war by bringing this ghost story to life. Today, the story of these efforts and their ghosts that still haunt us today.  Mixtape is reported, produced, scored and sound designed by Simon Adler with original music throughout by Simon. Indispensable reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen. This episode was produced by Annie McEwen, with original music by Annie. Original reporting was contributed by Trung Dung Vo and Nguyễn Vân Hà. Special thanks to: Allison Boccia, Jared Tracy and Herb Friedman. And to Mathew Campbell for introducing me to the Wandering Soul tape to begin with. And to Erik Villard for all his help pulling those tapes and voices for us.  Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

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pod. I'm Simon Adler, this is Mixed Tape, and before we start today, do you know that feeling have you had the experience when someone you love or someone you know has died, and then maybe a week or a month or a year later, you hear their voice, their recorded voice again? If something about that, it's strange, it's eerie, but also precious. Anyhow, this is the story of that feeling multiplied 3.3 million times. Welcome to Tote Nist Military Training Tape.

This tape is designed to be informative to the soldier about making your own... ...gurfs and spirits and screaming banshees. This embodied so lost in another world between life and being lost. Part 1 of this cassette focuses on the means by which these realistic simulations can be understood. Understand that this tape is designed to assist you because the army takes these very serious Let's begin How are you this morning sir? Good you're looking good?

Simon, as are you you're very rosy. We're starting with this man on win. I am a Vietnamese American. Today he's a retired Coca-Cola executive who still somehow loves Coke. It's so fresh for me in the morning, lunch, and dinner. Crazy. Wow. But back in the 60s, he was growing up right in the middle of the Vietnam War. Oh yes, the US Marines fought against the Vidcon in front of our house. Literally in front of your house, they were bullets. Yes, just right in front of our house. Literally in front of your house, there were bullets.

Just right in front of our house. Wow. And I called him up because of this one story he remembers hearing as a kid that scared the pants off him. My uncles and cousins, they went out to get us hunting in the mountains, maybe lucky to kill some small animals, but mostly we were looking for dry woods to bring home for burning. Their home was a remote village in the valley of these mountains, and like so many other

villages in Vietnam at this time, this one had been caught in the crossfire of the war, and so they'd been living under the constant threat of air raid and invasion. Anyway, Yeh Wakan, mile after mile into the mountains, picking up what as they went, only turning the head home after the sun had set. But in the mountains, when this dark, it's a most quiet place on Earth. With the few winds blowing over the top of the trees. And as they're walking along carrying these heavy loads of wood, all of a sudden, a sound, the men freeze, back to back, and crouch load of the ground. a real noise like a voice very sad crying and screaming like a ghost. Finally, maybe 10-15 minutes later, The voice stopped.

The men stood up gathered their wood and hurried home. But the next night,ing from the jungle. The villagers covered their children's ears. They shut their shutters and look under the bed. And from then on, every evening is also often. This voice would return. Now this sound that these people were hearing was not a ghost. It was actually a weapon.

A weapon designed and deployed by the US military and their South Vietnamese allies to target the deepest fears of the Vietnamese people. It was only used for a brief moment during the war, but rather than fade away into history, this ghost has refused to die. Err, you have to admit there's something a little sinister about all of this. Okay, just to back up, this is historian Eric B. Vellard. I am at the US Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC, and I'm a Vietnam more specialist.

And Eric says this strange weapon was created in part because of the Korean War. Yeah, during the Korean War. Yeah. During the Korean War? Just over a decade prior. A number of American soldiers and Marines were captured by the North Koreans. And soon after, you can imagine the surprise. Heard on Communist radio stations. Exerting us in their own normal voices. Sounding like communists.

Fellow Americans, don't go on with a senseless war. Stop being the tools of the rich capitalists who start wars for profit. sounding like communists. It really spooked a lot of people on the battlefield and at home. This anxiety that the communists could brainwash, could solid-decent American, sons and daughters. And there was this feeling that like we've got to get ahead of this. And so during the Vietnam War, the United States became very interested in what motivated the enemy to fight and then figuring out,

what can we do to convince those people to not fight? This was Sia. Psychological war, the warfare of the mind. It's mentioned as to influence the thoughts of the enemy soldier. Idea was, if you could persuade people using words and ideas. To put down their weapons, you could win the war while killing fewer people. That's the essence of psychological warfare.

And who's the best in the world at convincing people to do stuff? The ad folks of Madison Avenue. At that particular moment, there was, you know, this madman advertising, explosion. With TVs and radios now in living rooms across the country, all of a sudden there were all of these opportunities to understand what makes us tick, what's going to do about my hair? Exploit it, and get us to buy things. Why can't you special for your birthday? Just a decent cup of coffee.

And the military took note of this. And do we know were there actually ad folks that joined the armed services? Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the areas where they were, you know, look for talent. They would go to people and say, boy, Lucky Strike filters will show you

plenty of smooth flavor. Your Lucky Strike campaign was really effective. Maybe you can tell us something about how to convince someone to turn in their weapon. And so all these admin began to search for a weakness in their target audience, the Vietnam and Vietnam soldier. Tôi tên là người ứng văn sự,

sinh năm 1973. Mày nói là vấn sâu, tôi nhật mũ, tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn sự tôi đã nói với người ứng văn I joined the military when I was 18, in the year 1971. We hired Votong Dong and Nguyen Van Ha, reporters in Vietnam to interview a few North Vietnamese and Vietnam soldiers for us.

When you think about these soldiers, they were far, far from where they were born and raised. Most of these kids would be farmers or fishermen or maybe live in a place like Hanoi. I was a Hanoian. In my sophomore year at the University of Industrial Art, I was the first of the university to join. My college principal even drove me to the Army Station, and the students lined up on both sides of the gate, clapping hands. At that time, I didn't think much. I thought that the war wouldn't be too terrible.

But when I had been in the Army for a while, I was mentally broken. I mean, your average North-East soldier, they're not, they can never lived in the jungle. They never lived in the mountains. That was crazy. And so, here they are, squatting in the jungle, hundreds of miles from home. Haven't seen their family in six months, a year, two years. I was hoping that I could get out of the war and go home. I felt like a ship that ran Yeah. Yeah. They're incredibly homesick. So the ad people were like, that's it. That's the emotional appeal. They want to go home.

Let's give them an opportunity to quit. And so they start spitballing. They're all the stuff that gets lost. Like what about theater, culture plays, drama skits, live music? They're like ads, try it out. And the Vietnam War very quickly becomes this're like ads, try it out. And the Vietnam War very quickly becomes this Petri dish, this test pad for all these ideas.

Oh boy. And by far, the favorite, the number one tactic was leaflets. We had cases and cases of these damn leaflets. That's American Sci-op officer Chad Spar. We call ourselves the bullshit bombers and the professional litter bugs. He and his team would go up in an airplane with all these leaflets. Fly along 2500, 3000 feet over a target area and we literally threw them out by the handful.

You know, you could sit and look out the back. See them streaming out behind you. And there were times when you could hear a strong metallic pop when the rounds hit your aircraft. Start taking fire. And that increases the pucker factor substantially. And just the term pucker factor, what does that mean? Who's going to hear this? If it's inappropriate, we'll edit it out.

It's where your sphincter tightens up so bad that it might pull a piece of fabric out, okay? Wow, okay. Yeah, that's when you start really throwing stuff out of there. And so these leaflets eventually flutter down to earth, landing in tree tops in gardens, animal pens, creeks.

We'd blanket the country and those things. And if someone picked one up, they'd basically be holding a coupon. There'd be these graphics. Yeah, the American and the South Vietnamese flag smiling faces. And it'd say something like, Good for one free pass. You're miserable. You probably have malaria. You're homesick. Why don't you just put your own weapon? Come over. We'll give you a nice cup of hot coffee. And some warm food. Come in and bring this little piece of paper with you.

We'll take care of you. All your problems will be over. So millions and millions of these leaflets were printed and dropped from the sky. But as for whether they were effective. Here is North Vietnamese veteran Tron. As for whether they were effective. Mình đúng nhanh anh, đồng phải hiểu như thế này. Mình ở nguyễn nước bây giờ là sau khi mà thành nấp để nhất. Here is North Vietnamese veteran Trang Nhiap Thô.

Để nhắc của anh ở nguyên giường, mình đau hơn đi. You need to understand this. Our hatred was very high. No matter what. Mình ở trung tôi là những người... Mình và người mình ở thời gian, mình sẽ đưa ra khóa và chúng ta sẽ giúp đỡ chúng. We young men and women at the time went to liberate the South and re-unify our country. And Nguyen Van Su says the well-de-united states was appealing to their desire to go home,

North Vietnam, and their propaganda was appealing to why they left home in the first place. This feeling of being called to something larger than oneself, to their sense of identity and bravery and strength. The goal was to destroy as many enemies as possible. So these scattered American leaflets, falling like leaves, we didn't read them. We were not influenced. But then, a special day comes up. That was in 64. This is Major Ram, Rojak, and back in 64.

He was a tall guy with a blonde crew cut. I was stationed at the time in a radio station, the official voice of South Vietnam. What are we talking here? Big real to real recording machines? Yeah, all that, a complete studio. How many real to real machines are we talking here? Big real to real recording machines like yeah, all that a complete studio. How many real to real machines? Are we talking about? Now, you're talking to a very old man here who was there in 1964 and he wants to know how many real things.

Forgive me. Well, we were shooting. You might be able to get a sense of it. We were shooting for four hours of original broadcasting. That's four hours of pro-South Vietnam content today. No, that was music, news, commentary. There were comedy routines. Two guys coming on there like Abbott and Costello doing Vietnamese jokes.

As well as pretty in-depth little radio plays. This idea of the soap opera. Always sort of ending the same way. Somebody dies. And then the music would come in. That was pretty much it. And then one day at a staff meeting, everyone was sitting around a table.

Maybe three or four Vietnamese. That's South Vietnamese. Three or four of us. The production coordinator is going over the broadcast schedule and said okay on this certain date I think it was about two weeks since. Said we're going to be on a reduced staff and we're only going to have you know x number of people in here instead of what we usually have and I said wouldn't you know what's that all about. I said, well, there's sobreding, there's holiday, and they name the holiday. This big national holiday called Trong Nguyen,

wandering soul's day. And Ray had never heard of it. So he turns to his Vietnamese colleagues, and he says, I'd like to know what that is. And so this is the holiday where we honor our dead. This was the first time I'd heard about it. And so we took a good part of that meeting talking about this. They told him that in Vietnamese culture, when you died, you had to be buried in your homeland in order for you to have a chance at a good life

in the afterlife. And if they don't have that proper general, then their spirit is condemned to wander in the ethereal mist forever. And their soul will never be at peace. And, you know, I'm thinking, really? Because, you know, well, the first thing I thought was, you know, stupid, you should know about that already. I should have known about that already. No, really.

You know, because all those hundreds, thousands of soldiers coming out of North Vietnam to South Vietnam, that's where they fight their battles, that's where a lot of them were going to die. And there was no way that they were going to get their bodies back to the North to have a proper funeral. And everybody got excited about that. The ad people are like spiritual fear of death. This was a handmade vulnerability that could be exploited. I've made a good night to today.

And not too long after. I got a radio message to come to the Titan headquarters at Benoit. Chad Spar enters this Spartan military office. This is Sit down. I mean, we got some coffee. This is Sit down. And the officer in charge said we've got something new. We got a tool.

We want you guys to start using it out in the field. And it reaches over to this small little mini real, real recorder on the table. And press play. आपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपाविपा� Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa! had ever heard anything like it. And most of them didn't know what it was saying. I was the only one who had any language training, so I got it real quick. And what was it saying?

It's essentially the disembodied voice of a soldier, a communist soldier, who's been killed. My friends, I come back to let you know that I am dead. Dead. I'm in hell, just hell. It was a senseless death. How senseless. How senseless. He's in horrible distress because he's lost his body's lost.

He can't be properly cured for. He can't be properly prepared for burial and properly vitiated by his family to carry him forward into the afterlife. It's a spirit in anguish. To give some context, we're just 22 years after Bing Crosby and Jack Mullin started editing audio on tape for the first time. started editing audio on tape for the first time. It seems to me. Just 14 years after being released his first track, where he layered his voice on top of itself.

I mean, this stuff was still pretty damn new. And so to create this tape for weeks or months, we're not really sure, a team of sound designers and producers had hunkered down in a recording studio and taken Jack and Bing's techniques to their logical extreme, using some of the latest sound equipment,

including hot off the market, just released. What a teapot equal dot, Lee Thung. This is my super scope tape order with built in mic. And a sonic cassette tapric order. Cheap portable tapric orders. Almost any sound can be recorded magnetically and both simple, so convenient, so easy to use. Armed with this new tool, the producers could go out

into the world and collect sound. Let's get some audio of, let's say, a Buddhist funeral dress. Again, historian Eric Vellard. Well, you just go down the street, there's one going on. And they run out there with a tape recorder, and you get audio that. And then, let's say, you see a woman crying on the street. Literally anguishing, and you get that audio. There's scavengers like that.

Some of them even hopped on a plane to Bangkok. Because they got a zoo there. To record the sound of a tiger growling. And then maybe if we like little little echo and flange on that, you know. Play around with it, see if we can get something spooky out of that. This is sort of an early iteration of sound design. For the voices they hired actors, or maybe you grabbed the secretary from down the hall. Got them to read a script, slapped a little echo on there.

There's no handbook per se. And after much trial and error, they'd created a ghost, captured on magnetic tape. If we got done playing it, I was talking to one of the Vietnamese who worked there in the office. He was a Vietnamese infantry sergeant who had been through a lot and I said, what do you think about it? He said, I don't like it. He said, why not?

He says, it hits my soul. And when he said that, I knew that it had some potential power. So, you know, they gave me a little tape player with some batteries and the tape. And so I packed myself up and went back to Clonloy to play the water and soul tape. The gates of hell are opened. Right after a quick break. This is Ronia from Ipsilanti Michigan. McTape, a special series from Radio Lab, is supported in part by Science Sandbox, Assignment Foundation Initiative, the Shanahan Family Charitable Foundation,

at the Alfred Peace Loan Foundation. This is the end of Side 1. The program continues on the other side of the cassette. Part 2 of the Viscouset guide you through a tape tour of our nation's capital, Washington, DC. That's East Stop, you're here to be. Here in this city, you can see the scars. I think this is for our Japanese special instructions for me.

The yesterday's wars. There are the VCs who run out of their own at streamline, where it makes the cut back to the east, and that's the Cree's. the stop one. Our tour will begin. I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixed Tape back with Chad Spar, who'd just been given the wandering soul tape and orders to get it in the ears and the souls of the enemy. Do you remember the first time you used this thing? Yeah.

He and his team had gathered at the Kwan Loi air base. It's a dirt pack runway in the middle of a rubber plantation. The soil up there is full of iron. So everything gets stained red. You know, you get into your skin, under your nails, in your ears. You can't ever get rid of it. Anyway, they decided the creepiest time to play this tape would be late at night. We went out at about 2 o'clock in the morning.

I had three or four South Vietnamese soldiers with me for security and I showed them on the map where we wanted to go. They headed through the jungle on foot toward a village believed to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong. I had a backpack speaker with the tape and my weapon and some extra ammunition and a couple of grenades, the canteen. We went at least a kilometer, maybe two, being very careful because it was nighttime and we clearly didn't want to get ambushed. When the village was in sight, maybe a hundred meters just through the trees, they stopped. We set the speaker up and we angle it up into the air about 40-45 degrees and then pointed it toward the village.

And then started the broadcast. And as the sound came in, I turned the volume. So it sounded like it was coming closer to people who are hearing it. It was very eerie. Very eerie. What Chad was broadcasting off that magnetic tape in the middle of the night, seeping into the dreams of those sleeping. It was far heavier than he ever could have known. It was tapping into a long, cruel, very present history. The ghost stories,

we don't take this easily. Again, on Nguyen, who says Vietnam history is filled with violence. They suffered under Chinese rule for a thousand years. And after that, under the brutal colonialism of France. Backed in the late 1930s, the French navy entered where city threw the port. And their navy's it up to the rivers and they killed every Vietnamese insight.

Thousands and thousands of people died for no reason. Not in the World War II, the French take away their rights, their troops take all the rights, two millions Vietnamese knives due to starvation and knowing that they took no action. In a diss point, we're in the middle of the Vietnam War, which would go on for another decade. Families get lost so much and the noise of the one-ringed soul, it reminds them in a personal manner. And aunt's family is no exception. I had a young cousin who died during Tet Offensive in 1968, his body never recovered. It disappeared some way in the mountains. So the ghost wandering around with nowhere to go and just like a screaming. And so, when Chad was playing this... It gets you sooner, so I can get the hell out of here.

He didn't know it, but he was tearing at an open wound. And I mean, this tape was played to many quiet villages, to many soldiers hiding in the jungle. Once it... do we know if this thing worked? to many quiet villages, to many soldiers hiding in the jungle. Once it, do we know if this thing worked? I mean, they did studies, they would get these defectors and an interview them. Again, historian Eric Valard.

And say, you know, what type of message was most effective on you? And so we have some basic data, but like in terms of the wandering soul in particular, that messaging, we're still not entirely sure how successful that was. Okay, got it. I mean, I've always thought that part of the reason that the United States not only did

the sort of wandering souls message in the first place, but why we're still fascinated? Is almost more about us as a society than it is about the Vietnamese? I've been thinking a lot about what Eric means by this. And here's where I've landed. The Vietnam War still hangs over all of us. Talking to these veterans, the horrors they endured, the things they were asked in order to do is just unimaginable. It is, you know, Christ, what I'm 21 years old, and it was my job.

I still remember clearly the Marines, 19th year-sold as well as so many North Vietnamese army Kill in front of our house in Vietnam There are screaming voice in Arganis and shouting in pain and shaltan in pain. Each year on wandering souls day, when the veil between the land of the living and the dead is the thinnest, the Vietnamese leave out offerings of food for their dead family members. They sing, they dance, they feast, they release birds from cages, fishes from bowls, and burn ceremonial offerings.

For us here in the U.S., there's so much shame, anger and trauma mixed together, and no real national cultural way to deal with these things. We don't speak of the ghosts that haunt us, but they're definitely there. So that's our security door opening. And the souls of those ghosts are lingering right here in our nation's capital. It has a little bit of a feel of like a library. Okay. Take my jacket off. I went to DC to visit Eric.

We are at the center military history here in Fort McNair. And the largest collection of raw interviews with Vietnam soldiers in the world. Whole wall is filled with our Vietnam-interview collection. Shelf after shelf, row after row of carefully labeled boxes full of cassette tapes. And so when were these captured? So these are the result of these military history detachment teams. Eric says the military was always trying to improve, and so when a battle was over or an

ambush survived they'd send out these historians who would sit down with the soldiers Intense or offices or wherever they could find a relatively quiet spot They'd take out a tape recorder popping a tape and ask so what happened? Can I just look at one of these cassettes? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely So what happened? Can I just look at one of these cassettes? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let me give you 169, see. He just bold one off the shelf at random.

It's a beautiful cassette. He's Saturday, 22 March, 1968. Saturday, 22 March, 1968. This first interview is conducted with Captain Robert G. Hoop. Captain Hoop 9, a consideration of command and communications for this mission was you can discuss that subject. The format of these interviews was just dry, basic, unedited data capture. The idea Eric says was to preserve as much as they could about a moment in the war so that they could then recreate what had happened. I figure out what had gone right, what had gone wrong. In previous wars this hadn't really been possible.

But by the 60s, you could go out with a cassette recorder, right, and you bought it Hong Kong, popping a tape or a real deal, and do these interviews. Thanks to those efforts and technology, we still have all this information. Spatterheads, bugging the sad, are you trying to have different points on the campus? all this information. But Eric says that a happy byproduct of this is that preserved in the information is a piece of someone. Still here on earth. It's just one moment in a young man's life. Some of the time he's spent on this earth is recorded right here. It tells you something about who they were and what they went through. He sounds very solid. He sounds very tired. And less than two months after this interview, during combat and a pineapple plantation,

he was hit, probably by an RPG, and died of multiple fragmentation wounds. He was 29 and there are hundreds and hundreds of these. death. Who's a combat after action interview report with Lieutenant Rowe? I was first paternity leader of D-True, 17th cab. Body count is about 29 bodies. We've got all these ghost voices. And in a way, I feel like these audio tapes are kind of like these wandering souls. You know, sitting in our archives, on our shelves, just asking us to listen to them.

This is when I discovered he was one of them. There was a very big stream of blood pumping with every heartbeat. That's a body. It's a man of God. They had to cut off a body that they were raising on a voice. That's a body. You don't make a hole in your mouth.

I'm going to use it. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a good guy. We're up on the net. We're up on the net.

We're up on the net. We're up on the net. We're up on the net. We're up on the net. You're going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going. I have to break. I have to do it. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break.

I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break.

I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. I have to break. Next week, the story of how the cassette tape created the internet. Mixed tape is reported produced, scored, and sound designed by me, Simon Adler, with

original music throughout by me. Indispensable reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen. This episode was produced by Annie McEwan with original music by Annie and had original reporting contributed by Trong Dong-voh and Nguyen Van Ha. Our voice actors were David Li-Win, Tofer Gno, Merck Nguyen, and Maggie Hai Trong. I'd like to give a special thanks to Alison Bachia, Jared Tracey and Herb Friedman, and to Matthew Campbell for introducing me to the wandering soul tape to begin with, and to Eric Valard for his help pulling those tapes and voices for us.

I'm Simon Adler, and we will have another tape for you next week. Radio Lab was created by Jada Bumeraud and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulou Miller and Lottip Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lektonberg is our executive producer and Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sunion Asambandum, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwen, Alex Niesen, Sarah Curry, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Tanya Chabla, Shima Oliai,

and Sarah Sondbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibil. you