I have a drawer of cassettes nobody will ever play again. This episode is my argument for why I still can't throw them out (also, I hear Gen Z is getting into cassettes). Simon Adler starts with a wonderfully odd story: in 1983, a British radio enthusiast broadcast a computer program over FM so listeners could record it onto cassette and load it into their home computers. It feels like the sort of technological cul-de-sac history forgets. A Czech teenager cracks software for fun; copied games spread across the country in under a week through what people called sneakernet. Ayatollah Khomeini's sermons, recorded outside Paris, arrive in Iran on cassettes copied and recopied until they outrun the state's ability to stop them. The same cheap plastic rectangle carries both liberation and theocracy. The machine has no politics. The moment that stays with me isn't historical. Adler tells one guest he sounds like the man who sold OxyContin door to door. The guest doesn't flinch. "Not so guilty," he says. Podistan verdict: A cute premise, and it has teeth.