It's like one of those penny-pushers machines at the arcade.
Yeah.
Eventually, it just all collapses.
Ask the host's episode four.
I'm Joe.
I'm Alan.
I'm Felum.
And I'm Will.
Hello, Chaps.
People should know the deal by now, but if not,
you can send any questions for us.
Show us the host.com.
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So the first question.
Herne Sushi asks,
if cars cease to exist tomorrow,
how would your lives change?
Do vans exist?
Do buses exist?
Do they stop existing while I'm in one, traveling
at 19 miles an hour?
Yeah.
I'm assuming this means if transportation that isn't either
a bike or public transport cease to exist.
I would become a bus driver.
Does Tesco slash supermarket delivery still exist?
Because going to the shops on a bike
would be a fucking nightmare.
That is true.
Growing vegetables.
All the bikers, please send your emails to Felum.
Getting a weekly shop on a bike would be a nightmare.
Yes.
Taking sun to school would be a nightmare
because it is not within walking distance.
It's easily 45 minutes away.
If we're being serious, which we're not,
and all the cars have disappeared,
like legislation or alien invasion
or whatever it might be,
and they can't come back,
then I think it would make a change
to communities a little bit
because people would be less reliant
on services and goods which are further away.
And so you're more likely to use local shops
for local people,
and you're more likely to,
perhaps, converse with people in your street
rather than what we do now,
which is talk to people online
and drive a long distance to get to work.
I think it would make quite a difference,
especially in large, spread out places like America.
It would kind of wind the clock back
before the early 20th century, I think.
I don't know how America could cope with it
because I was even in Washington, D.C.
Just strolling about looking at the buildings,
you know, the obvious places,
like the Pentagon, the JFK Center,
the, what's that thing that had the something gate scandal
that we all call scandals with?
Watergate gate.
Yeah, I went to Watergate,
like I was still inside the pictures of,
and the police literally rolled up
to see what I was up to.
I was like, Jesus Christ.
But I walked across a bridge there
that I was trying to get to the other side of the city,
and literally a footpath stopped
at the other side of the bridge.
So I'd walked a good clumber,
and then the footpath ended,
and it was like a moat away, freeway they call it.
It's just, you can't have no car there.
It's just, it's not gonna work.
The other benefit in that story
is that the police wouldn't have rolled up.
They'd have clipped clopped up on horses, wouldn't they?
That is true.
Well, yeah, I asked my wife this question,
and she said, well, we'd just get a horse and cart, wouldn't we?
Fucking step down.
What's the real answer is, I would just leave the house
an awful lot left.
Jesus, that even possible.
Well, yeah, it's barely possible,
but I would just lock the door and throw away the key, I think.
I think I'd try and introduce some kind of remote working
that enabled me to not have to leave the house and work from home.
I think that could work.
Yeah, it might just work.
If we still had things like the internet,
then I think we could all get by.
Like, my internet's not delivered by car, so that's good news.
But, you know, we probably get by,
but like Alan said, I think there would be this kind of throwback
to the, I don't know, the 1950s or something
where a lot more stuff happened locally,
and that would be quite a nice kind of environment to live in
and your kids could play in the street.
And all of those kind of nice things.
When we get back to pre-decentralisation as well
in your little fantasy land,
Brexit Island, it would be grand.
Nobody would have a car.
I think it would be quite nice for a little while.
I'm going to sit up and be providing iron lungs
because I think I'm going to win there here.
I tell you what polio crutches would go up in value.
I think my serious answer is I would invent
or at least attempt to invent the internal combustion engine.
I think your side stepping the basis of that question.
I'd invent the hoverboard.
I mean, what the fuck?
You're telling me that I couldn't invent, no, I couldn't.
I mean, I'd sort of know the vague principles of it,
but I think I'd probably just make a very terrible bomb
if I tried to make an engine.
I have made a fire.
If they were cars that cease to exist,
could we go back to steam engines
and all go around in things with rollers on the front of them
and just roll around with big steam engines
like get a steam fare where there's a lovely smell?
I've followed you to it.
I've seen your holidays on your steam engines
and your canal boats.
I like the idea of more canals.
That sounds like a solution to this problem.
Get dig up all the tarmac roads and filming the water
and we'll just have canals everywhere.
All right, Dan asks, what intellectual property
would you make into a TV show or movie
from any other medium?
I was going to say Minecraft,
but it turns out there's already a film planned,
which as is typical with Hollywood is off again on again.
It's been in production since like 2014
and it's currently due for release on my birthday in 2025,
but the SAG After Strike has probably delayed that.
They're supposed to start filming this week,
but apparently not because of the strike.
So that's what I would have said,
but I'm not saying that because that's actually a thing.
So I would say a Sinclair Spectrum game
called Lords of Midnight
that was an epic fantasy strategy role playing game
and it had loads of characters in it,
an epic story and a big powerful villain.
And I think that could be turned into something like
Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones
or that kind of thing.
Like a TV show with an epic storyline.
Mine is computer game based as well, unsurprisingly.
I think Nethack the movie would be worth making.
But more seriously, I'd love to see something based on Elite
and then there isn't really a story there,
but that whole like epic space journey thing,
I would like to see that in movie form
and a story based around that book,
that story you got with it.
I quite enjoyed that.
Oh yeah, Commander Jameson, oh, so good.
It's funny, I was chatting to Winpy at lunchtime
about the questions that you had come up
and he came up with Elite as well.
Mmm.
You'd very use new each other.
It's funny, the two I was gonna pick,
one is one that I wish they'd reignite and keep going with
and the other one has already been done.
The one that I'd like them to pick back up again
was the Man in the High Castle.
It was like, it was the Philip K. Dick book.
I was such a good series that I haven't watched
the whole of it yet, but I know it's canceled
at after season three, which just gulls me.
Spoilers.
Have any seen the first episode?
I think if you have bloody producer show
you should be made to follow it through right the end.
It's like, oh yeah, sorry teacher, I didn't do my essay.
I stopped halfway through because funding ran out
or something like that.
I was like, no, but the other one was The Wheel of Time
which is a series of books by a guy called Robert Jordan
which started reading back in school
and we always used to joke, oh, I hope nothing happened to him
and he doesn't die halfway through right now
and then he fucking died with three books left to go at the end
but they got another fellow to finish it.
But Amazon picked that up as well.
So I just hope they don't make a buzz about it.
The first season was all right, it's changed,
but it's all right.
Actually, you've reminded me of another one.
There's a book that I've read called Split Second
and I absolutely love it.
It's about these people who come up with a technology
to travel in time but they can only travel
like a fraction of a second in time
but because the earth is moving so fast
it means that when you travel in time
you actually travel like 50 feet in a particular direction
and so you're not actually traveling in time,
you're traveling like in distance
like portal like traveling
and it's these two factions
that are trying to secure control
over the ability to travel in time
and duplicate things and stuff.
It's really, really good. I love it.
I've listened to it two or three times on Audible
and I love it.
What my serious answer is nothing.
I'd like something original for a change
and that might be a bit of a cop-up
but it seems like everything is just an adaptation
of something else these days
and what about something just genuinely new
and different for a change?
I think there is stuff that is new.
I think perhaps you're not going to watch it
because it's only in picture house cinemas
or straight to DVD
and because if it's not got a tie in that they can market it
then it's not gonna get the viewers
and they're gonna get their money back on it
with their special Hollywood accounting.
So I think there is plenty of new stuff out there
but I think you're not seeking it out maybe.
Well, there was that Apple thing Severance
which I believe was a totally original idea
and that was fucking brilliant
and I think the strikes are delaying the second series
of that which is annoying
but more stuff like that I think.
All right, Prozac asks,
what is your most expensive buyer and more experience
and what happened to it?
Well, it went off a cliff.
I've got two, one that was a hundred quid
and one that was two and a half grand.
Mine was more expensive than that.
Oh, well, you must tell us.
Right, it was a car and we were in a hard spot.
We just moved back to Ireland, got rid of the old car,
wife, bold and it got taken away.
It was a pride and joy and we bought a Rena McGahn
and I don't know if they went on strike
during the construction of this car
or whether something terrible happened
to the car mid lifetime of it
but it had a dodgy wiring luminance somewhere
and it had a push button start
which you'd put this, you know, like a smart card key thing.
I mean, it was really not smart.
It used to sit in a slot and you'd press the start button
and you know, about 66% of the time it would start.
The other times it would just sit there go,
nah, I'm not doing anything.
And then you'd be pissed off, you'd pull the card out,
you'd get to open the car
and the car would start when you weren't expecting it.
You're just like, what the absolute fuck?
What a piece of shit.
And at the time, I'd always lived in a city
where I didn't have to drive.
So I was very late to get my driver's license
and this car, which I took to the test,
it was a petrol car, so it was a nightmare
because it was the most underpowered piece of junk
you've ever seen.
So you had to really give a good load of welley.
So it was a nightmare to drive through the test
but then one day, I don't know what they called
tester driver, invalidator, or whatever,
came to sit in the car.
He went to adjust the seat
and the fucking plastic handle fell off the seat.
So the seat was tilted back.
Like, you know, you see gangster movies
when they tilt their seat back so they could sit behind.
What is it called?
The A-frame or something like that?
So if somebody tries to pop a cap in their ass,
well, they're in the car.
The metal will protect them.
Well, that's when he was sitting like,
and I was just like, fuck this fucking car.
And he went, I'm sorry, I can't carry out the test,
and I was like, I gotta fucking tip this car
to the river myself.
Fucking raging hours.
So yeah, anyway, fuck Renault's,
so what happened to it?
Did you actually put it in a river?
I didn't actually put it in a river,
but some stupid bastards at the Ford garage
who sells our previous, our newest car,
accepted it in the trade-in.
And I salataped as much as that car back together
to make sure it would pass the fucking test
when he started it went.
Oh yeah, it runs, it's good.
I was like, fuck and sucker.
Anyway, they've extracted enough
out of us with our fucking maintenance of the car.
So yeah.
I think mine would be an Oculus Quest,
which I bought at the start of lockdown,
thinking that I was gonna be able to do
some really immersive YouTube stuff
with the kids, you know, explore out of space,
go under the ocean, walk around a virtual city,
you know, an actual place, but in virtual reality.
And it turned out to just be a very expensive,
not very well thought out toy.
It was so expensive.
I think it was, I cut them out, three or four hundred quid,
I think, that I didn't want the kids to play with it
because I was worried they would break it,
which kind of undermined it.
And then, you know, the whole time
with Facebook accounts and all of that stuff
just ruled it out for me.
So I wish I'd never bought the bloody thing.
So it sat on a shelf for probably two years,
not getting used.
And then probably three or four months ago,
one of my kids asked if they could ever go on it
because they wanted to play this game called Gorilla Tag.
And I said, you know what, fine, go ahead, I don't care.
And one of our kids has been playing Gorilla Tag
for hours each day.
It seems to be doing a lot of good,
it's getting some exercise.
So it has turned into quite a useful thing,
but only because I don't give a shit if it breaks anymore.
I wish I'd never bought the bloody thing.
So mine would be my first brand new PC that I bought,
which was made by a company called Dan.
I previously had like all the eight bit computers
and I got a second hand 886 Epson PC
and then moved on to a second hand IBM PS2 model 50Z,
which was a 286.
And then at some point, I decided that wasn't powerful enough
and I needed a new Pentium PC.
So I bought this one from Dan.
It was a P200, I think.
And it wasn't actually that much faster
than the 286 that I already had.
And I bought it on credit, which was a big mistake.
So yeah, that cost me an awful lot of money.
And I pretty much regretted it the second I turned it on
because I was like, well, this is not any faster.
This is rubbish as soon as I got it and I kept it
and I still used it for years and years until about.
I've still got photos of it
when I still had it in 1998.
As if in a frame on a wall.
So when you're out.
No, it's a photo of my desk with my cat on the desk
and it just so happens to having the photo
and IBM Model M keyboard, a Palm 3, a Modem,
a Scuzzy CD-ROM writer.
It's got all the classic 1990s computer paraphernalia
and there's two desks on the shelf of this very common
PC desk unit thing.
One of them is a P400, which is what replaced the P200.
But the P200 was just, I was so annoyed when I first got it
because it just was so slow.
And yeah, I regret that.
That reminds me of my first computer.
I went to the local computer shop and said,
just build me a PC and he just built me the worst
Athlon piece of shit in a quite nice Nokia case
that looked like a lot of the classic Nokia phones
on the front.
So this day I've not seen another Nokia case.
But that was such a piece of shit
that the stock cooler was so bad
that it would just overheat and just reboot
or turn itself off.
So I had to take the side off and get a desk fan
and point it at the machine.
But I don't regret it.
Obviously because he gave me a CD full of wires
as well with it, including Photoshop 7,
which works brilliantly in wine.
And I know that.
It's too much to actually use to this.
I'm not chucked by that at all.
But I don't have buyers from all sides of that
because that taught me a lot.
And it was cheap and whatever.
And that was my first introduction.
That was my first actual PC that was mine
and not like a family PC or whatever.
But I've got two.
So as I said, one is I spent 100 quid
buying the bits to add electronic functionality
to my drum kit because one spot of time
was to be in a band, right?
We had a record deal and everything.
It was a shit small independent record deal
and it was so we were never gonna go anywhere.
We were terrible.
But I thought I'd add some electronic elements
to my drumming.
And so I spoke to this dude.
I found it on eBay and then I got a phone number
and spoke to him, told him what I wanted.
And he said, oh yeah, I've got the thing for you.
It's this brain and a couple of pads
and whatever.
I can do it for 100 quid.
And I said, so this is gonna work with reason
that I've always used.
Oh yeah, plug it into the computer and blah, blah, blah.
And then I got it.
And like you would hit the drum, bang, bang.
There was that much latency.
And I was like, what the fuck?
I can't use this at all.
And so he's, oh yeah, there's a driver from this person
and this website, like he just didn't have the driver
on it and he emailed the dude and just in the end,
I gave up and just threw the whole fucking lot
in the bin, 100 quid literally in the bin.
That was terrible.
And another musical one.
This one actually ends a lot better.
In a fit of what I can only describe as madness,
I spent two and a half grand on a guitar.
I did wonder when we were gonna get
onto the top of the guitar.
Yeah, I mean, every, every now and again,
he sends me a picture and I just go,
oh, fucking hell, here we go.
And it's like this desperate attempt
to like have me convince him that he's making
the right decision that it's like, yeah, yeah, whatever.
The crack is good, just take it.
This was Gibson ES339 in blueberry burst.
That I got from Tomin for, as I said, two and a half grand.
I know you hate a semi, but I love,
I love semi's whatever.
They're awful.
Whatever.
If you played one, you'd love it.
But anyway, so I got this thing.
I don't know why I thought was good ideas
and two and a half grand on a guitar.
That's by far the most I've ever spent.
I thought, right, you're worth it.
And I think it was like birthday or something, I remember.
Anyway, so I get this thing and I'm like,
I don't really like it like the next bit
or whatever and the tops and I was sort of regretting it
over a few days.
And then one day I was sort of playing it
and I felt the neck and I was like, what the fuck is that?
And there was a crack on the neck.
I was like, what the fuck?
And so I got in touch with Tomin and they said,
send us some photos of the box.
It is fine.
There's nothing wrong with the box.
Then I actually found the box
and there was big fucking dense in the box.
So it obviously been thrown around in transit
from Germany to the UK.
And so I had to send them a shitload of photos
and then they were like, yeah, all right.
Here's the details of when we're going to come pick it up
whatever.
And it went back to Germany,
sat in customs for about a month
and then eventually I got my two and a half grand back
and all's well there ends well.
And I was like, yeah, I'm never buying a brand new guitar
again, quite frankly.
That was just, I dodged a bullet there
and then the apocalypse happened.
And I'm very grateful that I've got my two and a half grand.