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Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) is a human search engine, racing around the world to reveal How We Got the traps and trappings of the modern world.

Graffiti, Divorce Lawyers, Las Vegas Casinos, Fast Food and Email. How We Got shows that the most modern ideas answer the most basic human needs, but the web of connections to get from cave painting to modern graffiti culture is a tangle of international ideas and inventions only Max Headroom could unravel.

The series looks at things that we think of as quintessentially modern (yet not always “new and improved”) like mobile phones, hip hop, credit cards, university, the news, movie stars, etc. and explores the things that had to happen throughout history to get to this point. For instance, to get Vegas you need: cards, dice, gambling, air conditioning, hydroelectric dams, entertainment spectacle, gangsters, highways and so on… a pyramid of ideas, technology and history reaching back to the most basic human hopes, dreams and a desire: to get rich quick.