Well I spent an hour trying out as many commands as possible before giving up. Then came across this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252612 and went through his Twitch recordings to see if he could get past this stage. That is how I learnt about iconv. :)
Re:Google CTF 2019
by redbluething on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:31PM
(#20253144)
Hehe. I kinda love this though :P
That's quite a bit more straightforward :)