Bless you all. Thanks for joining us again on our Hyperculture tutorial series. Hyperculture is the greatest, the most dynamic and the richest culture humanity has ever experienced. There are literally millions of artifacts, cultural practices, skills, traditions, games, stories and skills out there. No person can possibly learn it by themselves, so that's why we're here to help you. And today we have a very special tutorial prepared for you. What are we doing? I'm sure you've all heard of Tesla. I'm sure you've all been to Silicon Valley. Maybe you're even living there. But Tesla, in fact, I mean, now they're even sending cars to space, but it's actually something which was copied from communism. And what I have here is the Tesla Sonnet Duo. You can see it here, Tesla Sonnet Duo. Tesla was actually a Czech brand which made these amazing tape machines. You can see it here. Tesla. This is a super heavy thing. I would say it's about 5 kilos plus. I'm not really yet so much into fitness. We have some extra fitness tutorials, swimming, all of that coming up. But right now it's a challenge just to lift this machine. There's a plaque here on the back. You can see it here. It says Tesla Pardubice. That's Czech Republic. And yeah, you can already see this machine is in a pretty bad state. The tapes are falling off. There's a lot of buttons here. And if I turned it around, there's like the cable right here. So I'd like you to imagine now that you're not living like in the year 2021, 2022. I'd like you to imagine that you're living like basically in the Stone Age, in communism. People in communism, you might not know this, they were really, really poor. Like in Romania, for example, there weren't any nails or hammers. There was nothing. They were using it all to make tanks and military equipment. And the one thing people always had, however, cigarette paper. Cigarette paper. And scissors. Because when you're living in poverty, the one thing you really need is cigarettes or any other kind of drugs. Maybe even religion. That's what, I think, who said it? Lenin or Marx said it. Religion is the opium of the people, except it wasn't allowed in communism. So that's why we had cigarettes. And I would now like to explain how we're going to get a sound out of this old machine just using cigarette paper and scissors. So to get us started, what you need to do is to plug in. You need to plug in this machine. It still has actually this old soviet style plug. And when I plug this in, I'm going to do it right now. Let's hope there's no electric shock. So you might hear a sort of throbbing, pulsating sound. There's actually nothing turning here as yet. And I have these two reels with the tape hanging off. And these reels aren't really turning. So let's just go through the buttons to see if there's anything we can do with these buttons. If I press here, nothing, nothing. It does speed up, though, so this is a speeding speed button. That's good to know. We have here three buttons, nothing working. There's a little green light. So what I suspect is actually happening here is that there's a tape drive, a traction drive stored in here. So actually it isn't the reels which are moving. It's probably, there's probably a drive system in here. If we feed tape inside here, we might see it move. Let's see if we get any movement here. And you can see if I'm starting to do this, I'm getting these sort of DJing sounds. There's this kind of throbbing sound. You can slow it down, speed it up. And now in here, I can engage or disengage the tape using this lever switch here. There's a traction mechanism here, so I'm going to disengage that, feed the tape in, and then re-engage. Fast. And it's out. Okay. So basically, this is really an unusual, highly sophisticated sort of tape drive mechanism where all the motion is happening here beneath the Tesla logo. So what I suggest now that we do is instead of trying to activate these rolls, which in any case over the years the magnetic signal kind of weakens, it's also not clear if this roll is not turning how we're going to actually feed tape in it. So, since we're going to use this for like an avant-garde experimental performance, I suggest we make a loop. What is a loop? It's simply putting a tape through here, a bit like this, so it goes in a circle. Okay? And it just goes in a circle so we have like a sample. So, to make our sample, the first thing we need to do is we need to cut a section of the tape. All right, so just take any section we have. We have enough tape here. I take the scissors and just you want to make that cut nice and perpendicular. I hope you're all seeing this. Okay, it doesn't always come off as clean as you'd like it, but this is a pretty good cut I'd say. Okay, we're kind of done with the scissors here and now you need to find the correct length for your loop. You can go and make a double loop if you're like feeling confident. We're just gonna make a small sort of single loop, which is of going to go around one roll here and it's really it's really interesting it's like a bit like an easter egg hunt or something you just we don't really know what's on here we're only going to hear it once we have our loop ready up and running so it's going to be look something like this you want it to be tense but not too tense so I'm just gonna see okay all right and this is where the Soviet thinking comes in okay because now we want to make this into loop just using cigarette paper okay that's really the hypercultural special which we're bringing you today. So I'm going to make another cut right here. So this is my loop. There might be treasures on here. We might have Gorbachev's voice. Who knows what's on here? There might be secret surveillance information. We're only going to hear it once we manage to glue the ends together. So I'm not a smoker. Smoking is super unhealthy. You shouldn't be smoking at all. And especially if you don't smoke, it's great because then you still can use the cigarette paper for other stuff. And as you might know, especially the non-smokers, it's good to remind you, especially the non-smokers, it's good to remind you, every cigarette paper has this sort of glue strip on it. And we're going to use that glue to glue together our Soviet tape loop. And this is really the brilliant part, because they didn't have glue in Hungary, in the Czech Republic. Glue was basically for the elite in Moscow Moscow but there was always glue on the cigarette paper so we've been having some trouble here you know a lot of old papers kind of it's not really gluing on properly and there's a lot of tutorials out there about how to repair soviet machines and the one thing they don't tell you is that you have to first glue the magnetic band onto the cigarette paper and then you cut it. The mistake most people make is to cut first and then try to glue. So I'm going to show you how to do it correctly, professionally. It's wet, lying very neatly. I can handle it easily because it's a big paper here. Neatly I put the strip on. Genius. This is gluing beautifully. And even if I'm having trouble handling I can always get back to default position because I have a little strip of non-glue paper where I can handle this really nicely. Okay, not ideal. There's a little crack here, so I'm just going to push it forward. This works super well. So basically, my friend Adam and myself, we're now just going to do a little shopping tour in Bratislava while this dries and then we'll be right back and show you how to cut it off with scissors and we're going to be off for a little break and then let's show you how it works. ¡Gracias! So I have here Art Attack Hat Christmas shopping in Bratislava and this seems like a real bargain at 13.90 so I want to check is it made in China is it made like in an unethical way and it says here beachfield United Kingdom actually oh yeah it is actually made in China which explains that it's quite cheap but nonetheless looks really good. That's pretty nice stuff. Here, these are the books. This is like a really interesting one. It is 1968, so the year of change in Slovakia. We know how it was in Paris, how it was in Woodstock, you know, all these legendary 68 venues, but we know little about what actually happened in Bratislava in 1968. and this is what you can find out in this book in honor of the photographer Ladislav Bilek and all the others who have documented the display of force so you can see the confrontations here with the tanks this was way beyond before the Berlin Wall actually fell this was 1968 this was in 1989 so get your history straight and buy this for christmas this is um also interesting ecological book about uh against glyphos glyphosate which is known to be a carcinogenic chemical weed killer which we really don't want in our gardens and here you see a Bratislava and a tree hugger a tree hugger from Bratislava these are more like children's books if you have children we fortunately don't that's why we have time to go Christmas shopping on Saturday afternoon but in case you do have children I'm with you and here you could get a book on Björn the bear this looks like not really a Bratislava thing. This is from Delphine Perret. That's like a French illustrator. Let's find something more local here because we are doing local shopping in Bratislava. It's about being local. Okay guys, if you like local hit that thumbs up button and put your comments down down below. Great. So this sounds pretty... I mean, I'm not from here myself. I'm not really a local, but I'm trying to go local. And these sound pretty... What do you reckon, Adam? Are these Slovakians or is it more like Poles? Romana, Romanissim and Andrei Lesiv. Maybe Ukrainians. Anyway, let's not be too discriminatory here. Let's just check what they're doing. Napočíku Boločíku. So I think it means... In the beginning there was a silence. Silence. This is also kind of Steve Hawking's territory. Black holes, silence, ears. Again, so this would be a great combo with the bass drum pedal over there. You see all the instruments and action great illustration with these fluorescent colors and what i really like about this book is that you have fluorescent but it's between colors normally a fluorescent guys if you're hanging fluorescent stuff in your room it fades out real quickly like in six months you kind of lose that fluorescent edge but this here is going to stay with you basically for life so really good pick fluorescent body also like how the sound connects to the digestive system bones all of that yeah i mean this is basically without words it kind of stands for itself amazing kind of internet graphics except it's offline. This also, guys, this works also offline. This works even when you're not plugged in, when you're like in a quiet hideaway perhaps. But this is now strictly offline, so you're not gonna do like online offline together. Talking of which, the offline pioneer of all offline pioneers was of course Robinson Crusoe. Maybe the first person in history who really went offline. so So, in the meantime, our paper, our loop has dried. You can see it's kind of already twisting a bit, so this glue is really as stiff and dry as it needs to be. We've had a number of comments already from you guys that a lot of you are having trouble like really making the glue stick having these two ends glued together and i'd like to let you know all of you who have had this problem you've learned something very important about the soviet union why did the soviet union fall apart they just didn't have the right glue we have tried different cigarette papers we don't want to recommend any brands. The thing to do is just if you're having trouble gluing the two ends together, just get a different type of cigarette paper. Another good tip is to ask an experienced smoker to roll the cigarette or someone who's rolled joints together. I didn't say that, but get someone to help you. This is what it should look like. You take your scissors and then you carefully, I'm trembling here a bit, but you kind of just gently cut this off. And we're using pretty, like, low-budget, high-street standard scissors. Some of you guys and girls, you have high quality Swiss cosmetic scissors but again just imagine you're in the Soviet Union you wouldn't have had any high quality equipment this is really about improvising making do with what you have to function in hyperculture and here I'm almost at the end I want to make sure I'm not tearing anything off. Just get that little bit off. There you go. So this is our loop ready to go. You can see it's looping. It's like the Hyperloop, the Tesla Hyperloop. And you can see if you look on your tape, there's a glossy side can see if you look on your tape there's a glossy side and a sort of rough matte kind of coarse side the glossy side the shiny side is where the signal is that needs to go up to the magnet and the magnet is beneath the tesla logo so i'm just going to take the reel off make sure i have the shiny side facing upwards. That's great. Okay, ready, off we go. Amazing. I can hear some strange counting. It's maybe a language which doesn't exist anymore. Old form of Czech. All right. Now your machine is ready to go. I'm sure you're going to have amazing, exciting experiences. We're actually going to tour with this machine through Austria, France, Germany, Berlin. We're going to play a lot of clubs together with my friend Adam Bolt, who's working behind the camera. We look forward to hearing about your adventures with your Sonnet Duo machine. I'll just try and close this. There we go. Travel around the globe with your Sonnet Duo machine. Share your experiences down here below. Did you manage to glue together your tape loop with cigarette paper? Were there any difficulties? Is there any other kind of tutorial specifically about Tesla technology which you'd like to see from us? We'd be really happy if you hit that thumbs up button if you like this tutorial and of course subscribe to our Hyperculture Skills channel. Yeah, so enjoy and see you again next week. Goodbye!