Oh What A Time... -  #72 Currencies (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

This week we’re talking about cold hard cash, moolah, readies: Currencies. We’ll be chatting about worker’s pay tokens, pieces of eight and the creation of banknotes! And we’re also discussing how on earth swimming got going? And just how easy is it to swim the channel? If you’d like to get in touch with the show you can do so at: [e-mail] If you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER? In exchange for your £4.99 per month to support the show, you'll get: - two bonus episodes every month! - ad-free listening - episodes a week ahead of everyone else - And first dibs on any live show tickets Subscriptions are available via AnotherSlice, Apple and Spotify. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.com You can also follow us on:  X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepod And Instagram at @ohwhatatimepod Aaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice? Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk). Chris, Elis and Tom x Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Oh What A Time In History podcast that asks the question, how on earth did people learn to swim before swimming pools and swimming lessons? That is a great question. And who was the first person to go, do you know what, I think I can do this actually. Yes. I've seen dogs doing it and I've seen some other animals doing it and I think I can take those principles and tweak them a little bit because obviously, you know, we've got different skills, we've got different limbs, you know, physically very different. But I think I can get from A to B in the water. Because we're not like dogs. A dog can just swim instinctively.

If you chuck someone into a river and they don't know how to do it, they drown. So the reason I'm asking this is I just took my daughter for a swimming lesson. And she goes down the local river, doesn't she? Elder in. There's a dog going past. You thought, he's doing that so instinctively. Go on then, follow the dog. Go on then. Well, the dog can do it and it can't even read. You can read. Come on. Look how big your palms are compared to his titchy little paws.

Exactly. Come on, you do reading Corner at school, you can do your Times Table, you can do loads of stuff that the dog can't do. So just copy it until you survive. So she'd had lessons before with a different teacher and she was almost there with a back stroke and I tried to teach her on holiday, but I wasn't getting very far. But then this new teacher's really good. And it's basically about eight different things, eight different steps in the process. And you master each step until you're confident and it's instinctive and then you move on to the next one. And you know, using floats, you never feel less than 100% confident, all

this kind of stuff. I was watching it and the difference in the last three weeks has been absolutely enormous. But I thought, if this was 1900, what would happen then? My grandfather was born in 1919 in the Gwendreth Valley in West Wales in a pit village and he could swim. My dad told me that he learned to swim in a river. That sounds like bollocks. Will Barron Well, pretty much you'd only have rivers or the sea. Will Barron Exactly. But it's high risk, isn't it? It's

high risk, high reward. Will Barron So high risk. Will Barron That's interesting though. So there must have been, to answer your question, Ellis, you're right, there would have been a period where they'd have just seen a number of people,ow- not people attempting to swim, people who've just got caught up in a watery environment by mistake and then drown. So they'd be aware of the dangers from that. Will Barron The daft thing is, a lot of my mum and dad's generation can't swim. I think of my four grandparents, I think my paternal grandfather

was the only one who could. So I'm going to guess it's relatively recent. Mason Harkness The invention of swimming? Will Barron The invention recent. The invention of swimming? The invention, certainly the invention of mass ability when it comes to swimming. Mass competence. The other thing, what sort of nutcase invented the butterfly stroke? The world's most pointless stroke. It's so inefficient.

Yeah. You know, bruncrawl I get, backstroke I get, breaststroke I get to an extent. But bloody hell. Butterfly. Well- Can I say something? I'm going to say something shocking about backstroke. You know people say it's hard to swim the channel. You get people who say that.

Yeah. I think that's fair enough. Yeah, yeah. You get people who say that. I think those people might be on to something. To be fair. I find backstroke so efficient that I was sat watching Dunkirk and they're all trying to get off the beach, the Nazis are coming, and I watched that film and I thought, my backstroke is so efficient that if my life depended on it, I would back myself to leap

into the sea and my super efficient backstroke, which burns less than a calorie a minute is what it feels like. I could basically be like a human jet ski from Dunkirk to safety. So as the Luftwaffe are peppering the beach with bullets, you are getting into your Speedos. And I would be going, watch this.

You're not gonna believe how efficient this is. It's easy. Just pop, like, that's just lifting your arm and like kicking a bit. I could do that for days. Well, it was May the 26th to June the 4th. So it would have been, I'm assuming it would have been relatively warm. Lovely. Conditions are perfect.

Go on. Conditions are perfect. Go on. Conditions are perfect. The channel would have been absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tempting. Tempting you in. Where are you swimming to? If you're swimming to England, you're mad. I've got a few concerns with this, Chris. A, you've never mentioned swimming before, which suggests that you're not particularly good at it. And I think anything you're half decent at, you will have mentioned. Secondly, you don't understand where the currents are pushing you. That's a major thing. Thirdly, the stuff that's in the ocean with mouths and teeth. That's the stuff as well, I think,

which is becoming an issue. I'm good friends with, well, of course, I broadcast with Alex Brooker. Alex Brooker from The Last Leg, he attempted to swim the channel with Duncan from Blue and other celebrities. He was on a TV show, it wasn't just- Yeah, but they're going back to the fever dream. I'm not doing anything this weekend. Yeah, for Channel 4, they did a thing for charity and he will tell you it was impossible because it's so cold, you're getting dragged here and there, it's just a horror show. But it made to do. cold, you're getting dragged here and there, it's just a horror show.

Made to June? I'm not sure, I think they probably chose quite a nice time considering it was a TV programme. They didn't go dead of winter, sorry, that's the only availability we've got. Christmas Day. Dunkirk is located north of France on the shores of the North Sea near the Belgian-French border. The Strait of Dover, with a distance between England and France, is just 21 miles across the English Channel.

That's not even a marathon. To the southwest. I mean, very good point though. Very good point. You've never mentioned something before. Chris, I'm sure you agree with this, Ellis. I think Chris would be dead by the horizon. He would be dead by the horizon. Before you reached the horizon, as seen from the beach, you would be dead. That would be how it would look. What a glorious death. The first point I'm mentioning now, how good I am at the backstroke,

in a very, specifically the efficiency of that, the point about the mouths and the things that could eat me, I'm not, I heard jellyfish, you might get something about jellyfish, I would be worried about that. I do accept the point about direction. But I feel, is there a way where I could look into the sun in the middle of the day and figure out where East and West is? Currents pushing you straight into a German U-boat. In a directional sense, in a worst case scenario, I could definitely meet the oil rigs at the North Sea if they're around in the 40s. And cling onto one of those. Well, they're in the wrong direction. Do you know where Dunkirk is? I think you're probably

better off. If you reach those, something's gone horrendously wrong, Chris. How badly wrong could my directional sense get me? You're better off. I'll be beach land. I think if you try and swim for Ramsgate, if you get to Ramsgate that's ideal. If you miss Ramsgate and then miss Margate, you're in big trouble. Because then it's like three 80 miles to Clacton.

Aberdeen. In Chris's mind, I know Chris's mind, he's having fish and chips on the beach at Ramsgate by lunch. That's how we see it. To answer your earlier question though. He's being clapped to the chippy. The boys from Sport Relief on the beach with a blanket for me. To answer your earlier question, Ellis, about when did people start swimming, which is why we started on this Barmy conversation, a quick Google tells me. Some of the earliest evidence of swimming comes from the cave of swimmers in Egypt. A 10,000 year old piece of rock art in this cave shows humans mid-stroke along with images of a giraffe and a hippopotamus.

There's also another tomb in Egypt that depicts swimming. It's from 2000 BC. Well, they were mad. 10,000 years ago, people were swimming, but even those people... The pre-water wings and armband age. How do you learn is what I'm asking. Yeah, well, I suppose there's a question. A, what are you observing? Because most things you'd be watching something else, seeing how that does it, and that would kind of affect your behaviour. So I'm guessing maybe are they watching a bear or something which has some kind of limbs? That must be the answer.

I just think that because of the age I grew up in, I am tremendously lacking in initiative. So now, if you give me a new task or a new skill to learn, if there isn't a YouTube video, I'm like, that cannot be done. You can't do that. So if you said, right, Al, you need to learn how to juggle. But we've removed all the juggling videos from YouTube and all the YouTube tutorials on juggling. And if you go to WH Smiths,

there are no learn to juggle in 45 minutes books. I'd be like, well, then it cannot be done. It is impossible. Some people are born able to juggle just like that. Nobody's learned. So it's like being tall. You can either juggle or you can't juggle. Bone length.

You know, my femur is this length, Tom Crane's femur is that length. He can juggle, you can't juggle. Bone length. My femur is this length, Tom Crane's femur is that length. He can juggle, I can't. There's nothing I can do about it. It's completely innate. It's like trying to change my DNA. Can't happen. Will Barron Well, I think he's obviously not listening

because he died 10,000 years ago, but whatever guy in the past sort of mid-paddle decided to step it up a level and it worked out because of that little swim. And invent the breaststroke. Exactly. Fair play to him. Do you know what? Fair play to him. Or her. Or her. Exactly. You have your place in history. Right. Now that we've dealt with that and tied a nice bow on that, shall we move on to some correspondence? Do we fancy that?

Absolutely. Yes, please. This email, I'm afraid, comes with the heading, Oh what a shame. Open brackets. Love it. Physics. Hello chaps, says Declan Crogwell. Firstly, let me tell you this, I'm a huge fan of the pod and it pains me to do this, but standards must be kept.

Declan, re Chris's self-proclaimed lifelong love of physics. What a relief. Do you want to quickly tap into that? Because once again, you say it's a lifelong love. Prior to that, much like swimming, I'd never heard you mention it. I never mentioned it. Not even for at least 10 years. Oh no. Oh no. Go on. Any trendy red dwarf obsessed science teacher or communicator worth his salt or her salt would know hydrogen is the most abundant element

and not, as Chris asserted, a mineral in the universe. Chris Bounds Mineral, didn't I? Stupid old idea. Chris Bounds I said mineral. Will Barron Quickly too, just to go back a couple of sentences. There we are. Life long love of physics is what you said. So, right to defence, Chris? Thoughts on that? Do you know what Chris reminds me of? Do you remember that fantastic fascial sketch of the 90s of the modern football fun played by John Thompson? The Arsenal, eh? God. Love

the Arsenal. I'd like that, but the periodic table. He's like, but physics. Love physics, eh? Hydrogen. Hydrogen, eh? God, love it. Everywhere, isn't it? Got enough of this stuff. So it's aluminium, eh? That's right. So listen, how do you defend the fact that you have a lifelong love of physics but didn't know that hydrogen was in fact an element?

Yeah, hold my hands up. As soon as you said that, I was like, I know I said mineral. Yeah, I don't know why I said mineral. So I'm sorry. Well, that's good of you. To rub it in, Declan ends this with all the best Declan undergraduate studying astronomy. So there you are. He's really... Just to underline the fact, I'm a science guy and you are not a science guy, Skull. Chris Skull, lifelong lover of West Ham. Bobby Moore? Never heard of him. I remember that you, once I went to your house Chris and you told me, I know this is maybe a maximum of a month since your wife had told me that you didn't know how to cook anything.

I went to your house about a month after that and you told me you were really into food and loved cooking. So that was like within three weeks of your wife telling you had no idea how to cook anything, you were claiming that you were one of the great undiscovered chefs of Essex. But that's like you going to the first guy who ever swum, like a month after him having swum. You've met him a month before, you're into swimming, no, no, he doesn't swim. A month later, he's like, yeah, I love swimming. Things change. What I'm saying is, Crane, people change. The world changes fast and I need to catch up.

It changes fast. Listen, one day I'm cooking, the next day I'm swimming from Dunkirk back to England. Backstroke. I'm a man of many talents. Mason- So that is some wonderful correspondence as always. Thank you very much from our astrophysicist friend. I think that's right, astronomy, studying astronomy. I think that's basically the same thing. Mason- We've got listeners in high places. Mason- If you have anything you want to send into the show, be it one-day time machine-based you want to send into the show, be it one day time machine based yearnings, be it incredible historical relatives, anything really you want to get off your chest. Mason Vies Ideas for topics. Will Barron Ideas for topics. Exactly.

Mason Vies Or just general praise. I thrive in that kind of environment. Will Barron Museum of failure. Don't forget that. Mason Vies Yes, exactly. Will Barron I'll tell you what as well, we're so close to a thousand reviews on Apple. Just do us a favour. Crane, let's go and try and read the 1000th. We will. You can do that for us. Absolutely. Feel free to do it in an ancient language. Feel free to suggest a subject by way of a review. It all helps, doesn't it? It's all grist for the

meal. Is that the phrase? I've heard that once, an old person once said that and I'll just repeat it as if it means something to me. Here's how you get in contact with the show. All right, you horrible lot. Here's how you can stay in touch with the show. You can email us at hello at earlwatertime.com and you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at owhatatimepod. Now clear off. So on today's show we are talking about currencies, money, wonga, the stuff that makes the world go round. So, at the end of the show in part two, because today we are discussing currency, Wonga, Moolah, Bucks, Dollar, Wedge, Heath, Greenbacks, Cheddar.

Benjamin's. And then you can go into the cockney denominations. Monkey. Yeah. Nice. Shiny whinies. Pony. That's the only two I know. A squid. I don't know, just made that one up. We are discussing money and in the second part of this week's episode I will be discussing the original first banknotes. I'm going to be talking about pieces of eight, which is a fascinating subject actually,

and the impact they had on money around the world. Yes, indeed. And I'm going to be talking to you about pay tokens. Zellish, you've talked about this a lot, but I never really knew about it until historian Daryl gave me this little bit to research. Pay tokens. Never heard of that. Well, buckle up.

I'm going to take you back now to the Industrial Revolution. I've got quite positive thoughts of the Industrial Revolution, mainly because of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, which made it look like a right laugh at the home of football London Stadium. Do you remember that at 2012, the opening ceremony? I walked in. Is it by Kingdom Brunel? Yeah. The tower's going up. Well, the opening ceremony? I walked in. It was in Kingdom Brunel, the towers going up. Well, I'd never seen a good one.

Apart from arguing, I don't actually remember this, I'd just seen footage of it on programmes about the history of the 1980s. The guy in the jet pack flying into the stadium prior to LA 84. I'd never enjoyed opening ceremonies. It tended to be military pageantry, which is incredibly dull. So 2012, I absolutely loved it. I thought it was an amazing achievement. Will Barron Incredible, absolutely. And the only reason I know the name Tim Berners-Lee is because of that as well, because he pops up in it. And to be fair, I should know his name because he invented the internet. It's quite an impressive thing.

Will Barron Also quite a few bit of Oh What A Time alumni appearing. Michael Fish appears, doesn't he? He's projected onto the house making his infamous incorrect weather forecast just before Tim Berners-Lee appears. That's how he refers to himself, an Oh What A Time alumnus. But they did a lovely job in 2012 of showing how Britain changes and indeed the world changes from a largely rural population. The start of that 2012 Olympic ceremony is just fields and the old lovely people dressed like rural population playing cricket. It's lovely.

And then things turn into ironworks and an urban population develops working in factories, et cetera. I don't think that life pre the Industrial Revolution was just people having pleasant games of cricket in the countryside. I think it was actually quite a hard time to be alive. If your name is Danny Boyle that's what happened. Okay fine. I think it was a lot of people struggling to make ends meet.

Shivering in very cold houses. Pray for the sweet release of death. Not just cricket. But the Industrial Revolution happened at such an incredible pace that interestingly like public infrastructure struggled in the UK to keep up with what's going on and when it comes to like coinage as we'll talk about, it was very interesting. But also the other things that were associated with the industrial revolution, the pace of change, involved things like, again, it wasn't all brilliant as depicted in that opening ceremony.

You had shocking housing conditions, open sewers running through streets, underneath houses, adulterated food and drink supply, children going to work at incredibly young age, sometimes picking thread out of machines, sitting in dark underground tunnels waiting to open tramway doors, children at work and constantly at the risk of injury or death. Fun fact, what was the first industrialised nation on earth? Don't say Wales. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I could see where that was going because you had a little smug grin on your face. Census of 1851 showed that we were the first country ever to have more people working in industry than in agriculture. Wow. Wow.

We loved it. That's impressive. So what was that early industry then in Wales? Coal, steel, iron. Yeah. The big three. The big three. Love in it.

Love in life. Fascinating. Well done, Wales. We take for granted that people were paid actually in the industrial revolution, relatively little, but they nevertheless were actually paid. And for a while this was true, until you get to the end of the 18th century and you have the French Revolution and then the Boholianic Wars and then the material that was being used to make Britain's coins started to be required for other things. Bullets, cannon balls, cannons, guns, nails, even the buttons used to fasten military uniforms and quickly Britain developed a currency supply problem, a problem that was exacerbated by population growth and years of a government who didn't

really care about the quality of its coins. So people in the UK had coins in their pocket, but a lot of those were really old, badly worn and in most cases kind of counterfeit as well. That's so interesting. Yeah. So annoying. Like can you imagine being paid in worthless coins? I mean, how irritating that would be. It gets even more complicated than that.

Of course, one way they try to battle against all these counterfeit coins, but really strict laws on people getting caught counterfeiting the coins. The penalty was death. If you counterfeited a coin of the realm. And if you were just seen handling forged banknotes, you could get sent to a penal colony in the Americas or Australia. Yeah. Whoa. I don't know poor cold water of this. I am fairly certain I could counterfeit notes. Right now?

No, no, not now, but like in 1800. Yes. There's no watermark or anything. I'd be like, yeah, it's just copying out, isn't it? Yeah, but I think it'd take you a bit. Per note. I don't know, maybe. Maybe it'd be a worthwhile endeavour. But you'd get killed if you get killed. Have you ever done any illustrating before? I reckon I could blag it, yeah. This is Chris Skull and swimming and physics all at... Both of you are as bad of each other.

I can do anything, they said. I never ever said that. I reckon I could give a good copy in a bank note. It's like when I watch anything on telly with my six-year-old, like the Olympics, it'll be one of those skateboarders doing flips and he's always like, I could do that. Yeah, I could do that. Yeah, I will. I could do that now. Despite the fact he hasn't got a skateboard and he hasn't learned to ride his bike yet. Crane, when are you going to accept that Ellis could be one of the finest 19th century counterfeiters the world has ever seen and that I could swim the channel now doing backstroke? When will you accept that? Stop pissing on my parade, Tom.

When will you accept that? Stop pissing on my parade, Tom. Here's another absolutely mad thing about the coinage in Britain around the time of the Industrial Revolution. A lot of the production of silver used in shillings and copper for pennies, so the silver in shillings and the copper in pennies, that material had a higher value than the coins themselves. Oh wow. This is something that I've kind of always at the back of my mind wondered about.

And here it is. It's true. A brand new silver shilling. Any silver shilling was worth more on the market as silver than it was as a shilling. Wow. So what happened, Crane? What happened? You love to pose a shilling. Wow. So what happened, Crane? What happened? You love to pose a question like a teacher.

Well, I would imagine anyone with access to a hot furnace was getting their shillings, melting them down and then selling them on for even higher profit than they're worth as coins. Ten points to that man. People started hoarding the coins. Wow. Horde them under beds and then eventually they were melted down and turned into the valuable metal as opposed to the coin.

So yeah, you've got that bang on. So like the coins disappearing wasn't much of a problem if you had a rural economy where you could kind of trade two carrots for half a loaf. But when Britain was becoming an increasingly industrial economy, these wages, these coins really mattered. And so when the Royal Mint shut down in a huff because of complaints about its coin production, new industrialists took matters into their own hands and started creating their own tokens, their own coins, pay tokens or conda tokens, a nickname that was taken from an

early catalog or collector called James Conda. So these were tokens distributed to the workforce in exchange for things that could be bought within the kind of the factories, the industry. Amazing. The first of these tokens was made in Birmingham in 1787, a wage coin manufactured by Paris Mining Company. The PMC used copper extracted from the great load running through the Paris mountain on the island of Anglesey, creating a range of penny and half penny tokens between 1787 and

1791. And it basically, this decision kickstarted a revolution in Britain's currency supply. The mine itself was soon to be the largest copper mine in Europe, and such was the success of the PMC that its chief proponent Thomas Williams was known as the Copper King. To reflect their association with Anglesey, you can see these little PMC tokens that have like a hooded druid figure. Subsequent designs featured cameos of industrialists. Now it was not long until almost every major factory,

coal mine, copper mine, copper works and iron works in the country started producing pay tokens of their own. A system that prevailed until the 1830s. So, you basically have- So, these pay tokens were specific to the industries that were making them. So, each company had their own basically. Yeah. The factories. Yeah. Basically, it was specific to the kind of industrialists who making them. Each company had their own basically. Mason the wages it's giving out. If the money is going back into them, then surely it's kind of its double profit. Bang on. Well, often in some of the Welsh ones, you could only buy goods from shops that took

those tokens. That's exciting. Wow. And those shops were... the food or whatever it was, the goods in those shops was sold at an inflated price. Yeah, that's heartbreaking. the food or whatever it was, the goods in those shops was sold at an inflated price. So you're taking a poor populace, a poor working class and paying them. It's a bit like a much more pernicious version of, you know, there's like the Bristol pound and there's the Brixton pound. And it's a way of keeping money in those areas. And it's like a bit of fun and like kids use it

to buy sweets and stuff. And also it means that you buy local, which is a good thing for your local economy. Imagine that, but you haven't got anything else. So it was a really, really sort of- It's just so ruthless, isn't it? From the point of view of those running the company. To have that mindset, which is like happily ripping off your already deprived sort of workforce. Wow.

It's a bit like the local village fate I went went to three weeks ago where I had, if my daughter wanted to go on the bouncy castle, she had to buy, I had to buy two blue tokens. Yes, the school fete system. Exactly that. It's these rampant industrialists who hang outside churches. And even though it's my school, the school my kids attend, when I handle for my money for the tokens, I say, this is unfair. I hate it. Greer Yeah, you're exactly right, Ellis. They could only spend these coins in company shops, but not only that, they could only spend them

as well at company housing as well. And you hit on another good point like the industrialists, they could charge whatever they liked and the workers had basically no choice. You put up with it, shut up or you leave. One industrialist, Matthew Bolton of steam engine fame, realized that he could make a fortune from minting currency not only for British businesses, but those abroad too. And in 1788, he set up the Soho Mint in London and used steam power to strike coins at a rapid pace, 85 coins a minute per machine. And Bolton's firm was soon making coins for the East India Company, the United States

Mint, the Sierra Leone Company, the Australian Colonies, and the Tsars of Russia. Wow. So Britain kind of stumbled into, became one of the greatest coin minting countries in the world. By the mid 19th century, manufacture had shifted back to Birmingham, where the Birmingham Mint established by Ralph Heaton, and once the largest private coin maker in the world, forged coin making contracts with companies and governments all over the world. And in 1889, I'll end on this, the Birmingham Mint was able to establish the first modern mint in China, the Canton Mint, using technology methods and get this staff

imported from the West Midlands. On its opening, it was the largest coin factory in the world, able to produce 2.7 million coins every day with as many as 90 coin presses in operation. Wow. The fascinating thing is none of this, all this stuff that happened wouldn't have happened if Britain had actually managed to kind of look after its currency supply and its coinage way back when this all started at the turn of the industrial revolution. Fascinating. Will Barron It is fascinating. I'm also imagining the

contrast between this highly mechanised factory in Burmia, wherever it was, knocking out 80 coins a second, while elsewhere in the country, Ellis has spent the last six months trying to do one £5 note by hand, which he then takes to a shop and they say, of course we're not accepting that. I'm imagining Ellis has done it with the crayon. Yeah, exactly. The Queen's cross-eyed. She's not even looking in the right direction. I've been Googling early banknotes. It's just joined up writing. It's fine. I would have been a multi-millionaire in 1800. All I needed was a pen and a bit of paper and it would have been so easy.

Will Barron How long are you spending per note, looking at those notes? Richard Wagner Well, you know, I mean, people were earning pennies a week, weren't they? So if I do one fiver, it takes me all week, I'm still rich. Let's do a really good one. I'd have finished it by Thursday, have a Friday off, spend it on the Saturday. I think by the second fiver you're starting to get a bit cocky and you're adding your own little details that aren't a normal fiver.

Yeah, and I'm thinking to myself, I wouldn't have him on the back of the bank note. Dickens, what's he done? Sticked Kenneth Bale on there. All right, that's it for end of part one. And if you want part two right now, you can become an O what's time full timer. And if you do that, you get a couple of bonus episodes every month. And, El, I hope you agree. We did an episode recently for subscribers on Imagine Futures and it blew into a two-parter. Oh loved it. And I think it might be one of our best ever episodes. Yes do what it really made me look forward to really made me look forward to the future

the age of the hovercar. Yeah absolutely. know, just swallowing a tiny little micro tablet and having all the nutrients I need. And turning into a hovercar. The coming together of two of health benefits and ease of travel. I tell you what, should we do a subscriber special this month where we imagine our own futures? Could we make five predictions each? Okay, well Chris Skull is gonna drown in the channel. Yeah. Are you trying to turn this into Nostradamus pod?

What's going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nostradamus. Is it history pod? Is it history pod? Not a future pod? It's a direct opposite of what we should be doing. Yeah, both Tom and I will attend Chris's funeral

after he tries to swim the channel to prove how efficient his backstroke is. Well there you go, if you want part two you can become an O What A Time full-timer, go to owhatatime.com otherwise we'll see you tomorrow. Bye! So Thank you.