ZM's Fletch, Vaughan & Hayley - Fletch, Vaughan & Hayley's Lil Bitta Pod -15th December, 2025

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

On Today's Lil Bitta Pod; Gen Alpha will never know the struggle of this...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the Zedium podcast network, it's Fletchforn and Haley's Little Bit of Pod. Welcome to A Little Bit of Pod. I was recently asked, there's actually been a couple of incidents lately where I've had to explain the technology of our ancient forefathers. Oh, you just mean our childhood. Yep, the 90s, the 90s, and early 2000s. My children asked me what I meant by, Wined Down the Window. Well, Indy said, why is it wind down the window? I said, do you want to wind that one?

I actually said, can you wind that window up? Oh, no. And she's like, why do we say wind? They've never experienced an actual manual wind-down window. I guess that's true. Like, your cars, when they were babies, all had electric windows. And most cars, for the last 20 years have. And my Land Rover's, my old 67 Land Rover's windows slide.

Oh, yeah. So they predate the old winder, or it was too hard of technology for Land Rover to put in cars. And so they slide. So they've never actually had that wind down the window Or jumped into a car where someone's like Don't put that window down Because it doesn't go back up Oh yeah

Also it's kind of like with phones How when we mime a phone We've got the two ends And they're mime it Like they're holding an iPhone Yeah But if we were to do a funny skit In our improv group that we have

We haven't really talked about that very much But you still kind of have that thing To be like wind down the window Yeah You know what I'm like hey how are you The other thing was We're at my parents' place And I found old cassettes

Because my parents Which, by the way, are coming back in. It's not going to last. Cassettes won't last. CDs can make a big hot. Medidiscs, I reckon, give them another red hot, though. Those are a bloody nice piece of tech. Oh, tapes are annoying because you'd have to listen to, if you wanted one song in the album, rewind.

Yeah, rewind. Yeah, and some of those tape players didn't have a rewind. They only had a fast forward because they only had the motor and then that could go forward. So you'd have to flip it over or go forward as a way of reversing. Anyway, I found them and I was like, oh my God, like, they were labelled mixtapes that said things like, slow jams, hip-hop. Yes. And I was like, wow.

And the girls were like, play at them for us. And I was like, okay, I don't know how. We don't have the technology. Oh, yeah, because who has a cassette player anymore? Unless you're like, your parents have an old... So I found one in the garage. Yeah. But it had been so long, the motor that turned the tape had seized.

Yeah. Like, it was... So I had took it apart and had a little fiddle and blew a little bit of CRC in there to get the, get the little motor to go. And then I could fast forward it. And I was like, click. and I played it simply you know what I needed I needed a tape head cleaner

remember a tape head cleaner wild after a while of running a magnetic tape strip it would just get dust and stuff on the little thing that read the magnetic writing on it so you'd need to run a tape cleaner through to clean all the parts and it just looked like a cassette except the tape was like

cleaning strip and so yeah I didn't have one of those cleaners so we listened to a very very muffled version of Nali Fittato's fly like a bird like a bird Was that on slow jams? She's had a rough year, remember? She's retired again.

She sounded even rougher on this because it was like that. So according to the British phonographic industry in 2022, and this is even in 2022, cassette sales in the UK reached their highest level since 2003. And there's a similar trend in the United States where cassette sales were up 240. percent. When something's like three a year, it's easier to go up to a year and four percent. I mean, that US is a total of 63,000 units. Oh, but.

Jesus, okay, I wasn't expecting 63,000 cassettes. I mean, I saw the other day, I think it was real groovy. I was online looking for something, and I saw, like, on the online store, like a three pack of cassettes. I was like, what the fuck? It's 2025, like, this is nuts. Is it going to be that thing where, like, you know, a lot of people collect records, but they don't have a record player?

maybe they just collect his sets but they won't have a way of it's just more of a collector's thing it's like how the city walkmans became cool with Gen Z as well they see something and they're like well that's retro we can make that call again yeah crazy eh

it's no it's not good don't do it it's nostalgia it's roasted nostalgia and imagine when they experience the first time when the bloody tape gets caught and you pull it out of the machine and you're like

well you can hear it chewing it when it goes and you're like no no no no no no no I don't know.