Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mobile Phones

You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carli Manardo, who is awesome. We worked with another great writer who helped us out with this thing a great deal. His name is Nils Parker, and it was just a big team effort and it's really really cool.

We love how it's turning out. Yeah, we do. So anywhere you can buy books, you can go pre order the Stuff you Should Know Colon An Incomplete Compendium of mostly Interesting Things, and then after you do you can go on over to stuff you Should read books dot com and upload your receipt and get that order poster. So thank you in advance for everybody who is pre ordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you.

Stuff you should read books dot Com pre order. Now, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Charles, Charles in charge. Bryant Man. We might need to take this one over again, Chuck. I don't think I've ever laughed like that in my entire life. Yeah, and you can't link me to Scott bay Oh god, oh that's true. That's true. Well because of his acting or I don't like him in real life.

I'm just kidding. I know he was great as Bob blab blaw. That's true. I'll give him that. Okay. Uh, that's the common ground we can all reach on Scott bay blah blah blah. So this is Stuff you should Know. The podcast not about Scott Bayo, but about something that I would wager there's about a nineties six percent chance that Scott Bayo has used, uh that's right, cell phones. But before we talk about cell phones, we do want

to address a GE's a controversy. I hope not. Uh, you know, we got a book coming out this fall, The Stuff you should know. Uh, Colon, not the stuff you should know. I always get this wrong. What's my problem? The rock stuff you should know? Colon a a great book about lots of great stuff. It's it's called and you came up with the title for Pete's sake. I know, I always get confused when I'm in the moment. An

incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And we've been plugging this pre order gift, which is a cool little custom poster, and we just learned recently that if you live outside the US as of now, that is not available to you. Uh. And we're trying to make that available to people outside the U S And we're working on it, and it's complete more complicated than you would imagine it really is. We don't like things to be complicated. We just like

to be able to say things and then they become true. Yeah, but that has not happened in this case because we've run into the juggernaut that is um international intellectual property rights. Yeah, it's weird, it's different, but we're trying to but we don't want to dissuade people outside the US from preordering, because pre orders are very meaningful to booksellers. And book buyers,

and it means, it means a lot to us. So but at the same time, Chuck, we just laid it on the line to not cheat people out of something they thought they were going to get. So I feel like we're stand up guys here. We're doing our best, so we'll try to do what we can. But in the meantime, yeah, I mean, you're still going to get the book even if you don't get the poster, how about that. Yeah, and the book is really kind of

the good part. Sure the poster is cool too, but the book is really what's going to knock your socks right off your feet, that's right. And one day you will even be able to read this book on your mobile phone. Segue complete colon, I mean period period. So, um, we are talking mobile phones and this is like such

an enormous behemoth of information. We just first of all, have to say hats off a million times to our buddy Dave Rouse who managed to like whittle this down into a manageable shape and still a pretty comprehensive shape if you ask me. Yeah, I agree. Um. And he starts off with stats, which is one of my favorite things because I always wonder like, how many people have smartphones and cell phones at this point? And of Americans have cell phones in this day and age. I imagine

adults is and a lot of kids. But I would assume this is an adult average, I would think for everybody, because kids have their own phones these days. Two it's nuts. Yeah, But I don't think they would factor in like three year olds, would they? If the three year old has a phone, why would you leave the three year old out? You know, I'll tell you what. I got a five year old and she can certainly use it. Yeah. Yeah, But I mean there's that whole screen time thing too

that you've got to be concerned about. Two right, Yeah, not really, I mean not all day long or anything. But we grew up on screens here, were just creditor, that's true. Let me ask you this though, Um, so, is is she generation Z? Or is she something brand new? Oh? I don't even know. Huh, Well, I don't know what gen Z is. I guess is that behind right behind millennials? No, I don't think she would be then. I don't even know how that stuff works. It's all fake. Well we'll

find out and report back sometime. So so one thing I want to. I want to throw in there though, Chuck is uh and by the way, generations are not fake. We did an episode on it. Yeah, it was a good one too, um, and I think we conclusively established that they are real. Um. But the the worldwide cell

phone ownership is something like sixty one point seven yeah. Yeah, and that's just that's cell phones, though like smartphones, it's it's less, but it's just a little less, especially considering that smartphones have only been around a relatively short time compared to cell phones, which, by the way, as we'll see, have been around since the seventies. Yeah, I think it's smartphones. And nineteen was about in the US, up from thirty five uh seven, eight years previous to that. And I

think it's about forty worldwide. So a lot of people have a phone, I think is the overall point. We're trying to drive home here. Yeah, and we'll get into phone addiction late in the episode. But I did see stats that people look at their phone and check it eighty times a day and uh touch it or I'm sorry, um yeah, touch it times a day, And the math there works out to about thirty five touches per check, which seems about right, Okay, that makes sense. I didn't.

I thought touch was like when you reach for it and touch it. So this this is like people did that times a day. Yeah, but then they only actually interacted with the thirty five of those times. That's what I thought. Now I think it's eighty times you'll pick it up and touch it thirty five different ways, which is I'll never mind. I'm not gonna make that joke. But but it's like Kama Sutra esque. Well that's where I was headed. It wasn't really way to put it.

Did I really read your mind? Well? It was sexy in nature? Sure? Okay, sure? Well if I if I can't read your sexiness on your mind, I don't know what I can read about you. You know, and you're just in one ear hole, that's true. Same same to you, buddy, left mind your left or your right. I have an earbud in my left ear, and we don't even look at each other when we do these. You're on my left right now too? You know that? Love? Yeah, Kama Sutra style. So I think we should dive into this history.

I thought this. I frankly thought all of this was super fascinating because I learned a lot of things. Uh, and a lot of it was just simple stuff that you know. I never knew what G stood for her LTE or a lot of this stuff. I just never really even knew what it stood for. I know, it's pretty awesome. So we can finally tell everybody the G and all of like the cell phone and cellular technology stands for Gary. I thought it was Grandma that's had

different research. It's Gary. So you have first Gary, second Gary, third Gary, UM, and so on all the way up to five Gary, which we're about to really start to get into. Five Gary started coronavirus. It did, how so well, that's one of the conspiracies about five G. Out of all the wacky conspiracy is about five G is that it started coronavirus and then was put in place to keep people at home while they secretly go out and install a bunch of five G things. That's how the

world works. It's all so the five Gary is it's all five Gary's fault. So this Gary guy, we we need to have a talk with him, especially because in reality G stands for generation. Sorry Gary, but UM, which makes a lot of sense, But a generation is not just like UM it's often applied to specific technology like uh, three G Celluh iPhone is the third generation iPhone, but it was technically a second generation mobile phone, which gets

a little confusing. But when you're talking about mobile phone technology, um, and you're talking about generations, a generation basically defines all of the underlying technology from the network to the actual devices that are designed to operate on that network. That typically describes a generation when it comes to telecommunications technology.

And they can come really fast, they can come achingly slow, like the five G is right now, um, but they do come eventually, and uh they seem to be worth waiting around for because they have advanced us by leaps and bounds as far as being able to sit around and touch our phones thirty five different ways twenty undred times a day. Goes. That's right, But we can go back to zero G. If you want to talk about the origin of a phone that was mobile, we have

to go back to the nineteen forties. And uh, you know, this sort of made me think of army phones and like field phones, and I was like, what were those things operating on? And you know the ones in the tent that you see with the general are you know, wired, but the ones out on the field worked on radio waves, and and my dad actually had a couple of those when I was little that we used when we were camping. Really, yeah, it was neat that it was sort of a later model.

It wasn't like a World War two thing that was a big block with a hand set that you stick on. Uh. It was. It looked like a giant walkie talkie. Basically, I think I've seen what you're talking about, and I mean that that kind of technology, it's just basically used the same kind of radio wave that um, you would use to broadcast like say a ham radio, except it

was a much more portable technology. And actually we use that that technology, like analog radio wave technology for our cell phones up until I think basically, um the two thousands maybe, so this initial like we weren't logging around these clunky radio phones. We weren't using radio phones that are basically like many radio broadcasters. But we were using the same form of technology, which is an analog radio wave.

That was the whole thing. But what's set the radio phone apart from what we later become a cell phone is the kind of network that the radio phone interacted with, right Yeah, the first radio telephone network was in St. Louis in the mid nineteen fortiesh and that just had one radio tower could handle about calls at once. UM. And they're, you know, they're routing this thing. Operators are

routing this thing to land lines basically or other radio phones. UM. But they were like, this has got to change, Like there's if we want a mobile phone, we gotta be

able to call from anywhere. Uh. And then I think Bell Labs was working on a project and a man named d. H Ring believe it or not, wrote a memo based on some uh I guess research by a guy named an engineer there named William ray Young that said, Hey, what we need to do is build a network of these towers, lay them out in a hexagonal pattern, and they'll just hand off basically, you know, as you move around, they will hand off the signal to the next tower.

And that's that was the first sort of network created, right, which which I mean that would make a mobile phone actual mobile phone. You didn't have to basically stay in just in proximity of that radio tower. You could move around, you could actually be mobile. And that was what you say, Yeah, And I said, created I should say the idea was created, it was a long time before it was actually created. Yeah, because that memo, it was just a memo. It was

published internally only at Bell Labs. But um, it is, you know, definitively the the first idea for a cell phone network. But it wasn't until like you said, a little while later, until the sixties, that some more Bell Lab engineers, a new generation of them, if you will, a new gary of Bell Lab engineers, were the feeling that's gonna stick came along and they they said, hey, this is really good. Let's let's figure out how to

actually make this work. And so they took d. H. Ring and Willie ray Young's design and turned it into the first like actual here's how you do it kind of paper, um and research. And I couldn't see that they coined the term, but they they seem to be credited with, if not coining the term cellular, at least describing something that would very soon become known as cellular, because it's not the phone that's cellular, is actually the network. Yeah, and here's the thing. If you want to well, actually

here's two things. At your next dinner party in two years, you can you can be this guy or that guy, and that's gender neutral of course. Uh, you can be the guy that says, you know what, they call them cellular networks because they were laid out in a grid, uh, this hexagonal grid that looked like cells in the human body. And people will say, that's so cool. I never knew that. Or you can be this guy who says, so technically, it's a mobile phone communicating over a cellular network, not

a cellular phone. Right, don't be the second guy. Don't be that guy. No. I mean, he's right, and he'll probably get into heaven just for being right all the time, but people won't like him here or there. You know. So, um, you've got a cellular network that's starting to be developed in the sixties, and I guess words started to get out because um, the the US, I guess the FCC started working with Bell Labs, um, and they started to say, Okay,

we're gonna build this network. Everybody gets to making devices that can work on this. But it turns out I don't know if they were inspired by it, or if it's just kind of like a side track, or this is all going on at the same time, Like there seems to be some sort of um ripple in the zeitgeist at the time that everybody wanted to develop a mobile phone network. And it wasn't Bell Labs in injunction with the FCC that created the first one. The first

one wasn't in America. It was actually, as far as anyone can tell, the first genuine mobile phone network was UM in Finland, their audio radio Politan. I think I just nailed because I made it sound like Buyork at

the end there. Yeah, they were the first ones, and uh, you know, they have the advantage of being much smaller obviously, but that was the first nationwide mobile phone network in nineteen nine, and by the late seventies, I think they had everything covered with a hundred and forty stations and uh thirty five thousand users in the mid eighties, which is not too bad, which is it's nothing worth sneezing at,

but it's still technically not a cellular network. It's a radio phone network because they just had a bunch of radio phone towers that were placed far enough apart that you could kind of move around. It was not a cellular network. So we do go back to the United States now and find the first cellular network um developed in the world as far as I could tell, but astoundingly as that word got out that everybody need to

start developing devices that could work on cellular networks. Um, they actually got the car ahead of the horse, and the first cell phone actually debuted before the first cellular network in the United States. Yeah, it seems like I've never had a motorola, but it seems like they've always kind of been on the forefront of things without a lot of hoop la um, like like the razor was a big deal, and the I think they they had

the first brick phone and bag phone. Even I didn't know about the bag phone, but they definitely had the brick phone. The one that Zack Morris had the Din Attack was the very first cell phone, at the very least ever make a cell phone call in the United States. Yeah. That was nineteen seventy three. And this guy, Marty Cooper had been an engineer engineer there for a long time and big competitor with a T and T obviously, and so this he took this two and a half pound

phone that's ten inches long. Everyone knows that great beautiful brick phones and went out on the street corner in Manhattan, supposedly and called Joel Ingle, which was one of those two guys I don't think we mentioned them by name who kicked off a T and T S program and he was I guess, sort of the arch rival at Bell Labs. And he called him up and I don't know what he said, like, hey, sucker, what do you think of this? Yeah, chump, want to peel yourself off

of the ground and get to work for me. Um. And I saw there's a great Popular Science cover from July seventy three with that Dynatech phone on it and it said the new did you see this thing? The phone? Or the cover? The cover? It said the new new take Along telephones? And I just thought how funny that would be if that's stuck, you know, and we would be like, have you seen my take Along? I can't

find it anywhere? And we had the exact same kind of cell phone, like it never evolved past the Dana tech. That would be even better. Uh. And by the way, another UH story in that issue was solving the mysteries of the Northern lights, right are they? God? Sources say yes, so, Um, we've got finally with the first cell phone we still haven't gotten the first cellular network. Apparently Marty Cooper Um possibly made a call in Manhattan connecting to a radio

tower from from Bell Labs. We're not sure, but he still came up with the first cell phone. It wouldn't become a genuine bona fide cell phone for a few more years though, until and I say, because we've finally reached the first generation of cellular networks, Chuck, we should probably take a break. All right, let's do it. M hmm, Okay, we just leapt friends from zero G to one G. We're we're finally at our first Gary and he's doing great. Three. He's showing a lot of chest hair, got a couple

of medallions. He's uh just auditioned for a new show called The A Team. Doesn't get it, but he still feels pretty good about the work that he put in in the audition. I was just trying to call it to face his name, the actor who played him, Dirk Benedict. Oh wow, was that it? Yeah? I just see Gary like going Dirk Benedict always getting my parts. Well, they

looked a lot alike. Uh, they did, especially in three. Uh. And like you mentioned earlier, this was still on um analog radio signals at this time, right, No, just not great. Oh yeah, you're right. I'm sorry, I'm right. So, yes, it was analog signals. Do you say you're right? I'm right. Yeah, everybody wins, Um it was it was analog signals. But now these radio towers were all part of a genuine cellular network. So yes, you're right, and it was analog

for sure. Yeah, which is you know, analog is great in a lot of applications. If you're talking about guitar amps, uh, to vamps and things like that, analog is great. But uh and record players, and there's a good argument to be made for analog technology. But if you're talking about cell phones, uh, they can only handle a certain amount of calls. There's no like virtually no security. You can tap into one of those calls back then pretty easily if you know what you're doing. But it was, you know,

it was the first attempt. It was, and from what I saw, the sound qualities actually clear. But the problem is it's clear because there's not as much loss because you're not compressing anything. Right. Yeah, And so so analog had a lot of drawbacks and it still has a lot of drawbacks whenever it's used, UM and it. But it would stay that way for UM quite a while actually,

I think until the early nineties. So we went from where the first cellular network was set up by A T and T UM into the early nineties, a good decade where everybody was just using analog cell signals. And finally sometime in oh, I guess about one or two UM, the second generation came along. And this is an enormous leap forward as far as telecommunications technology went. Like zero G, two one was kind of edging forward, and it was mostly about the creation of the cell phone and then

figuring out how cell phone network would work. Two G was like, Okay, let's see what we can do with this puppy, and and taking a a dumpy loser short order cook and turning him into um to what Dirk, what's his name, Benedict? Yes, hey, I don't want to insult any short order cooks out there. No, No, it's you know who I was describing as Barth from you can't do that on television. I thought you were gonna say the guy from Alice Victor back was not dumpy

my friend. Uh So to G what they did was they digitized everything, and they squeezed all that stuff down and all of a sudden, apparently could fit about ten and this is a rough estimate, but about ten digital phone calls into that same band with as the one analog call. And this was a big leap forward. And this was in Europe is where things got started and um and also where text messaging got started. I didn't know what SMS stood for until yesterday. I had no idea.

I never see I just never tried to figure this out. I never thought about any of this stuff. I yeah, it didn't really matter enough to me to stop and think about either. I have too much to do. Stands for I want you to know. I think you should all right. It stands for short Message service because the first text could only be a hundred and sixty characters. And this was, like I said, rolled out in Britain. And when I think back to my uh my first European trip in that is when I first saw a

widespread cell phone use. Yeah, it was in England and I was like, what is going on here there? Like it wasn't ubiquitous, but a lot of people were using cell phones in the mid nineties. Yeah, and using them to text too, right, I guess, I mean they were. I didn't really you know, I couldn't. I didn't even know what texting was at the time, but they had

the ability to. Yeah. Um, you me spent some time in Japan in the nineties, um, and she said, like it was just nuts what they were doing with cell phones, especially texting, And then came back to the States and had to waited like a couple more years before it really caught on here, because apparently it was. The epicenter was Europe thanks to some some engineers with what's called the group Special Mobile, which was formed back in the eighties to like create a euro like a europe wide

cellular network. Well, one of their engineers created SMS, so it started to take off there. But apparently, um, it took off in particular because of Vota Phone, which is like a pay as you go phone service, and the first SMS set um message ever sent was sent by a Vota Phone engineer from what I understand, Yeah, and I think was that the one where he sent Mary Christmas to his boss. Yeah, he did, and his boss said, I'm Jewish, You're fired, right, get back to work. Yeah,

but you you mentioned the pay as you go. I think that sort of democratized it, and that all of a sudden you didn't need a credit check or you didn't have to have this recurring monthly payment drawn from a bank accountter credit card or something. You could just if you had some money, you could get a phone a lot of times for free and just pay for the calls and the text that you made, and that

that really made it spread kind of far and wide. Yeah, and if you were a criminal, you could pay for your phone in cash and use it until you figured the cops had a beat on you and trash that one and get another one. What are those called burner phones?

That's right. Um, So the sms started take off in part because, like you said, the cell phone itself was democratized, but also because they started adding like alpha numeric key pads, not just numeric keypads, because initially, when you wanted to text, you had to you had to just use a keypad, just like remember when you had to spell out something with a rotary phone like ABC were associated with one,

you had to do that. And so everybody's like, I'm not texting, And in fact, at first, apparently if you were in America, you sent about point four texts a month. You didn't even bother to finish an entire text or even half of a text in a single month, and then just in a few years, five years, four years later, it was up to something like, um, I think thirty five texts a month, which is still pittally compared to today, but you can see how much it took off because

they started to add those alpha numeric keypads. Yeah, I was way way late to texting. UM. I remember when I was working as a p a with my little handheld Nokia, which was great because you didn't have when I first started peeing, you had a pager and they would paid you and you would have to stop and find a pay phone and call the production office. You had this no Ki, and all of a sudden I

could talk to them. But I remember them sending me text occasionally, and I was one of those was like, I'm not gonna take time to go, you know, hit number one three times if I want the letters c uh. And when the smartphones came out, I wasn't even texting for a while, and I was a little annoyed that people were texting, and I was like I don't want to do that, can just call me. So I was kind of a holdout and finally I was like, all right, and I gave in. And now I totally see the

value in it. Sure, you don't have to talk to anybody exactly. You could have long fights on a text. Man, that's the worst. No, those are Those are pretty bad. Do you remember those lamos who associated texting with with being girly up until oh yeah, it was a thing. Was that a thing? Yeah, that was a thing. Now like text yeah, so like I'm not gonna text, don't noted girl. And then now they associate like recycling and other like eco conscious things with with girliness, which is

super healthy for our systems. Gotcha, Okay, I know you're talking about now. But ironically they express their disdain for recycling via text to other dudes, so maybe they'll eventually come along. And now they text pictures of their barbed wire tattoo on their bicep. Are people still doing that or is that just a throwback thing? Oh? I don't know.

I just saw a funny meme today that said you're anti masker starter kit and it had a barbed wire tattoo, A pair of Oakley's sitting on top of a head a goatee, and then those big chunky white tennis shoes that I'm not even sure who makes them, but you know what I'm talking about. I think every brand there is makes them. Oh has one of those? Those are the ones that float with this articulated feet in um in the the what's that sound body of water off

of British Columbia. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Hey, one of the best starter packs I ever saw it was the oh my gosh, that smells amazing, what are you cooking? Starter pack? And it just had a picture of a garlic and a picture of an onion? Is love that so much? Man? Is that? Is that a meme starter pack? Yeah? Okay, I don't know about any of that stuff. So apparently you do, because you know, like the anti mask or starter pack thing.

I just saw it today for you. You should text it to somebody. Yeah, so after text, we're still done talking about text. Everybody, just buckle up because at first, if you wanted to text somebody, like you said, you had a hundred and sixty characters, you couldn't even text from your phone. Your phone could get a text like some some dumpy barthesque pager, right, but you couldn't actually do texting even if you wanted to go to the trouble of just using your numeric keypad. Um. So eventually

we started to leap forward. The big leap forward was going from SMS to m M S, where all of a sudden you could now text more than just text. You could text pictures, you could text music, you could text all sorts of stuff. And the person on the other end had just been days upon weeks downloading a single file that you sent. It would frequently get interrupted, and it was one of the most aggravating things you

could possibly engage in. But it was like the promise of this future where this wasn't aggravating and it was ordinary and every day to do. Yeah. And the first camera was the Sony ericson T sixty eight. I had an attachable camera, which is adorable. Uh. And those I remember seeing some of those early picks that were very creddy and grainy, uh yeah, and small. But it's sort of just married the idea of a camera with a phone. Um. But I have to say, man, when I look at

those old when I see that Sony Ericsson. I long for that thing. Oh, you can get those. They're they're called dumb phones. And like a lot of people, as we'll see, are are kind of making the switch over to that just because they just want a phone that can maybe text, maybe take a picture, and make calls. Well, there I found one that I I might get. Uh, there's something called the light phone. Have you seen that.

So the first version of the light phone had I think you could make calls, and it had, um, maybe a clock and an alarm and that's it. And the idea was is that you use it as a companion phone, so you still have your smartphone, but leave that thing at home a lot of times when you go out,

take this light phone and engage with the world. Um. And now the light Phone two is out and it can actually text, and it has a clock and I think minimal directions, no apps at all still, but it does have bluetooth and a headphone jack and it's meant to just sort of replace the smartphone for people that are kind of done with the distraction of it. I don't know, man, it sounds like the light phone is is going down a slippery slope here. Yeah, I mean I started looking at my phone. I was like, what

do I really need? Like I would want to call text mhm and take pictures? What about email and directions and get email? And I think I could live without the rest? So like, what do you use for directions? What app? I just used the Maps app on the iPhone? Do you I use Ways almost exclusively? Yeah, because I almost never walk. You know, Atlanta is not a huge walking town, so when you when you drive, Ways is definitely the preferred app. Well, I don't never drive very far,

so Ways didn't really come. But I'm looking at all these dumb apps and like all that stuff could wait really for me? Oh totally their distractions. Yeah, I could wait till I get home to check my laptop for the most part. So I need I need a web browser, phone, text, an email. I could probably do fine with that. It would be nice to have Ways, but you can always just get like a you know, yeah, but the web browser is at all those things. That app just makes

it easier to do. No, it's true, it is true. I guess, um, yeah, I'll give up my web browser. Okay, you don't have to. I don't have to. Late, I already said, I was going to al right, so let's let's get back to it. Here. Where are we? Here? Are we? All right? We're at three? G Now we're at three Gary's I think. Yeah. So so second second generation leapt ahead in a lot of ways, and then

third generation basically took it and kept going. And this was the um generation that really said, oh yeah, that that whole like texting, video and pick ers and music and all that, that's a really good idea. How can we improve on that. So if if the first or if the second generation was all about um, you know, kind of leaping forward with these bright ideas, the third generation was all about like perfecting them. And this is

where the first smartphones started to come in. Yeah. I feel like this is when they were like, you know, everyone really loves the Internet, so let's put it in your pocket. Exactly because everybody was really super into the Internet in the late nineties. Everybody's like, I love this, asked Jeeves thing, he knows everything. I love Lotus notes, CC, your whatever it is that email application. Like people were into the Internet and like this idea of moving it

onto your phone. It just just seemed like a good idea to everybody. Isn't it so weird that we can already have nostalgia for early Internet? Isn't it weird that there's entire groups of people who are now adults that have never lived in a world without the Internet. I know, Hey, actually hold on, I need to go get my web van. Order order van van that's going on today. They were just ahead of their time. Oh yeah, of course, poor guys.

So UM. One of the big things that allowed like the third generation to move everything forward was there were um some people working on how to get basically faster speeds. And in the late nineties, UM there was something called the Third Generation Partnership Project, and they created two things that really kind of changed everything, uh, something called wide band code division multiple access and high speed packet access.

And basically these were just ways that figured out how to take the information that you were sending, compress it and transfer it into smaller pieces, UM so that you could transfer more information faster, which is the whole point of of moving forward, generally from generation to generation figuring out how to move more information or data at faster speeds.

Because the more you can do those two things, the more um connected the world can be, the faster everything moves, and that's just basically the steps that we just keep taking with each new generation. Yeah. So three G Broaderbound brought around a true mobile broadband network, and it really kind of set the stage for that first smartphone. Even though in the mid nineties we did have the Simon and we had p d A S and stuff like that. Simon was pretty awesome. Actually it's kind of cool. But

did you look it up? Oh yeah, okay, I like the Simon. I mean it was genuinely the first smartphone and it was from had a touch screen for PiZZ sake, Yeah, I had an interactive touch screen screen. But in two thousand seven, with the launch of that first iPhone is when that first big splash was made because of a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was the

introduction of the app store and apps. And I remember the app I mean people still use their apps, but at first I remember just all of those dumb apps that everyone was just like, look at this super cool app that does this really dumb thing that you'll do once and then never do again. The laundryminder. Yeah. And now, like my apps, I have a lot of them, but they're all just useful interactive things like Venmo or my Sonos app or my Delta apps, stuff like that. It's

none of them. Are I feel like that the early apps were just kind of dumb? Yeah, for sure. But I mean that's how technology happens. Like somebody has an idea. It's not the best idea, but it's a it's a proof of concept. And then other people say, oh, that's a great idea that in particular was a terrible idea, and you need to retire. But we're gonna take your idea and convert it into something that people actually want. That's how it happens, you know. That's how it happened

with devices, That's how it happened with the networks. That's how I happened with app two. Should we take another break? All right, we'll take another break, and we'll introduce you to a little guy named for Gary right after this.

Mm hmm, okay, we finally reached the present. Actually, sadly, because we entered four g um in about two thousand nine, we've been languishing in hell there since because we're technically still in the four g era, and the four g era didn't do a lot except increased speeds, and it increased speeds a lot. But that's really basically the finding um characteristic between four G and three G. Yeah, it was about ten times or is about ten times as

fast as three G was. Uh. And what this brought about kind of the big thing it brought about, aside from just transferring pictures and stuff quicker, was you could actually finally stream HD uh, like live sports and HD movies and stuff like that, if you want to watch something like that on your phone, which I never have or want to, but a lot of people do for sure. UM. And the big technology associated with four G is called LTE,

which stands for long Term Evolution. Didn't know UM and LTE, at least in the U S that's the big four G technology. But LTE basically runs on two kind of breakthroughs in data transfer technology. Ones called orthogonal frequency division

multiplexing can get a Glavin please hey. And the other one is called MEMO multiple input multiple output, which makes a lot of sense because basically what it is is multiple antennas on your device, say your router or your phone or whatever, and it transfers data UH from the device and accepts data and coming to the device at the same time. It doesn't like switch back and forth. Like do you remember back in the nineties or early two thousand's when you could watch data transfer going on?

If you had something uploading and downloading at the same time, you could watch your computers little um a task bar, that's not what it's called. What's the thing the bar that kind of grows star maybe status bar? Yeah, you could watch it flip between uploading and downloading. Well, that all went the way of the dinosaur when Memo became um prevalent or widespread, because you could do both at the same time without sacrificing speed, which made your transmission

speeds a lot faster. Yeah. So Memo is the human centipede of cell phone technologies. I forgot all about that movie, Like I literally forgot in my head that that movie existed. And it was a good one too. I didn't see it, but when I saw multiple input, multiple output, that is the very first thing I thought of somehow, huh, oh, you should see it, for sure. I think every human alive should see Human Centipede at least one time. Every human over the age of eighteen. How about this, every

human that has a phone? Oh boy, so Um, technically my daughter has a phone. I gave her my old phone just and took everything off but the camera so she could take pictures and stuff. Very cute. She's like, why is this cracked and you never fixed it? Uh no, it's not correct. It actually works pretty well. That's impressive. Uh I've seen I honestly, I've never seen a cell phone that is not in use anymore that doesn't have a crack screen. Oh. Really, well, you should come over

some time and uh she'll take a picture of you. Okay, I think that's the deal. You can throw it down and break it, right, I would be now you're normally so. The big advantage of lt E four g l T T lt E, of course is capacity, and that is basically how many, um, how many calls you can serve at the same time. And that's a big problem, you know, depending on where you are. I remember, even um in recent trips in the past couple of years to New York and l A, thinking, why do you people even

have smartphones? Because none of you can use them? It's so lame. How slow it is. DCS is pretty bad too, Actually, it's just really really slow because there's so many people all trying to use data, and I mean on a transmission frequency, like there's only so much bandwidth and if you you know, out in des Moines doesn't matter, Um, nothing matters in des Moines, really, but there's so few people who are trying to use it comparatively speaking that

you know, you can have relatively good transmission rates. In New York they have a huge network, but there's so many people trying to use the network it once, it just drags the whole thing down, and everybody's Internet is really slow for now, for now, because I would suspect if it's not already going on, um, New York will be among the first cities that are ushered into the true bona fide age of five G. Yeah, so that the one big thing are actually two things that five

G is gonna help with. We mentioned capacity. Uh, the other thing that four G improved upon that five gary's is really going to improve upon is lower latency. And latency is that delay when data is bouncing back and forth across the network and you want to you want to low latency. And four G l T E LTE has a latency about forty milliseconds real time is fifty milliseconds, and that's what they're hoping that those five garys can accomplish. Right.

And so the big deal with five G is that it uses a completely different range of the spectrum, the broadband spectrum, right, So it uses between the thirty and three hundred giga hurts range um, and it's called the millimeter portion of the spectrum because the wave links between those ranges are about one millimeter to ten millimeters, So that's why they call it the millimeter wave portion of

the spectrum. And because there's so much bandwidth between thirty and three hundred giga hurts um, you can have a channel that takes up something like eight hundred megahurts, right, that's a huge enormous channel. And because you have a huge enormous channel and you have a bunch of them, what that now allows is that huge that big next step forward of the same progression, which is transferring a whole bunch of information at really high speeds. Again, that's

the progress of all telecommunications these days. That's where we're going. And so this five G change over to the millimeter wave spectrum is um is going to allow that. So we'll be going from what did you say like tyty millisecond latency to something like um less than one second for latency, which is that's it's like happening in real time. Basically, it's reality UM as if you were standing there watching something a foot away, it might actually even be faster

than that. Yeah, So I guess the idea there is is you can you can send someone a a song and it you send it and they get it and it's done. Sure. Sure, if you really want to set your sights low, Yes, that is what it would do. It just sounded like a grandpa. I don't know what happened there. You can send a picture of your light phone to your neighbor and they'll get it immediately. The bad part, or that gets the drawback about those signals is they don't travel that far. They travel about eight

hundred feet. So the idea with five G is uh is will have these big cell towers, but then there will also be thousands of little tiny while they're not tiny, but small low power transmitters um kind of all over the place, buildings on rooftops. I guess they'll climb pine trees and and nail them in those. But I think also remember our episode on the Internet of Things. How it's like all made up of sensors and transmitters and

just stuff that's aboard everything. I think that those will also double as transmitters too, So it's kind of like you know those mesh networks that you can put together

with your home router. I got one of those, okay, So I think it's basically that, but on like a national or global scale, where because of all these different sensors and interconnected wireless transmitters, we like everything will have that, which means everything will be connected, which means we'll be living amongst one big mesh, which means just walking into

your kitchen will give you COVID nineteen. That's right, And I think in about thirty five cities right now they have the high band five G as opposed to the low band five G, which I think the low band is just sort of working off those four G LTE tours and the five the high band will be this this meshed network I guess, right where where everything is connected and because of that incredibly low latency where things just are communicating back and forth just faster than you

can even describe it. Um, we'll have things like that genuinely connected Internet of things where everything is constantly monitoring everything else in the background, and our our world is perfect basically, which actually it sounds funny, but the Internet of things is going to be the thing that lays the groundwork for an intelligent AI that can run that Internet of things for us in the background, and that can control things like the weather where the amperature of

the beach, the water at the ocean, like just stuff that we can't even begin to conceive of. That will

lay the groundwork for that. On the shorter term, we're gonna have things like smart roads where your car is communicating with other cars so that you just aren't going to get in an accident because that low latency and ubiquitous connectivity means that that a car will never come in contact with another car because they're communicating with one another constantly while you're sitting there reading the paper traveling in your car. That's a that's good, that will happen

very soon. That's probably a ten or fifteen year off thing. Or you'll just be sitting at home going, oh my god, Chuck just sent me a song. Oh wait, he sent me another song. He sent me another song. Yeah, Or augmented reality. There'll be another one. Remember we did an episode on that. Yeah, and I was very skeptical and always have been about a R and VR kind of

overtaking the world. Uh. And there's an argument to be made that it hasn't yet because something like five G wasn't around and those data speeds weren't where they needed to be. But I'm still skeptical for the reasons I outlined to previously. I think we talked about that in the actual episode two, but we did. So you you mentioned about about um people being addicted to smartphones, and that's like, you know, that's a common concern. I think Nicholas car back in two thousand nine a really great

Atlantic article. If you've never read it, go read it now. It's called a Google making is dumb leg article and that so that article he basically says, like, um, I can't remember if we did an episode on it or not, but basically he says, you know, we we have changed our brains the way we absorb information. It's much more shallow, it's much less deep. So yeah, maybe it is making a stupid That kind of taps into this idea that

we've become addicted to our cell phones. Um, not so much that they're making a stupid but that they've actually kind of rewired our brains in a way so that we rely on them to essentially get happiness from that. We get it hits of dopamine from things like getting a text from somebody that we're hoping for, or hearing that we got an Instagram like basically everything you can get a push notification for. It's set up so that it maximizes whatever hit of dopamine it might release in

your brain. And just on that very basic level, answers the question whether we're addicted to our cell phones or not, And the answer is absolutely yes. It's actually designed that way. Yeah. And I don't have any push notification set and I never I wasn't trying to make some stand against it. I just it never occurred to me that I would want to know when someone made a comment on an Instagram post or whatever people get notifications for, like I'll I'll see that stuff when I go to those apps,

and it's fine, and I get my dopamine reward that way. Um. I just I mean, my cell phone just doesn't make any noise unless someone's calling me. Or texting me. Um. And in fact, I think people should hear what my text is. Can you text me real quick? Sure? What's your number? Jerk? And I'll just hold it up and here's my text tone. Okay, all right, here it comes next. Man. Did you hear that was that? Um? Dirk Benedict, No,

that was me. That's pretty great going text man, but great man, Yeah, that's what I hear when a text comes through. Uh, and I hear ring, ring, ring ring, it's you saying ring ring, yes, in a in a

British accent. I've got to figure that out because I have I have my ring tone on like the regular one, and I usually I just have my ringer off all the time because I don't like sounds coming from myself and um, but when it is on, it's like jacked all the way up because I forget to turn it down and say I'm mowing the lawn or something like that. And you may you may like jumped out of her skin yesterday and finally was like, okay, I'm I'm actually

trembling here. Can we please come up with another ring tone for you? So we went over and came up with a much more peaceful one. Um, it's just a normal ring tone, but it's like, you know, very tranquil. It's not like that ringing sound, so it should be all good. Now I'm happy to report everybody. Yeah, I've got text, man, I've got ring ring And then the only other custom when I have is for Emily. Um, I just got her to record her yelling baby, so whenever a text or a call comes in from her,

I know it's her. Very nice and so's a ing tones. Those are great ring tones, Chuck. But just to kind of put a button, as they say in Silicon Valley on the dopamine hit from your brain at that end of itself is an entirely different podcast. I promise, I vow we will take up some date because it's definitely interesting.

It's worth looking into in depth. But in meantime, just look up say Tristan Harris and some of the articles that were written on him in the last couple of years when he was making the news cycle, and it will be a pretty good entree into that subject. If it floats your boat and you're wondering why you can't stop looking at your phone even if you want to. Yeah, And in the meantime, that's mobile phones. Everybody take it or leave it. It was free, so just take it

and stop complaining. I said, stop complaining. It's time for listener mail, which also is free. I'm gonna call this UH stalking us, but not really. Hey, guys, been listening to a couple of years, and it randomly happened upon UH your show one particularly boring day at work, and I was hooked. Your funny, charming way of explaining sometimes quote boring topics got me through a rough time in my personal life and work much happier now with both. Although my new job, I don't have as much time

to listen. I just want to say thanks for being those familiar faces during a crappy time. But I was listening to the insidious abuse of stalking and I had to giggle myself. As I listen to you guys every day, I feel as if I know you quite well and couldn't help but stock you both on social media. Chuck Welcome to Instagram. Thank you Chuck the podcaster on Instagram. I hope, I hope you don't think I'm a creep, but it's nice to see a glimpse into your personal lives.

I think That's what Instagram is all about, right there, for look into my personal life, creeps a little peek. I'm looking forward to your book coming out in November. Although slightly pissed I can't get the pre order post in the UK yet. I think we just addressed that Nat head of this episode, she's drunk, slightly drunk that she can't get it. Uh, and can I ask once a pandemic is over, you guys come back to England. I'd love to take my dad and sister to see

you guys live. Yes, absolutely, you can see us probably four or five years from now, and she says, cheers, Nat. Ps keep those pet picks coming on Instagram. Nice Nat, thanks a lot, Um. We definitely will do that. What are you at, Chuck the podcaster at Instagram? Chuck the podcaster, I'm at josh Um Clark. So you can find us both. You can find our pets, you can find a little peek into our lives. I'm enjoying it. That too is

free as as well. Uh and again much appreciated. NAT will definitely be over there in the UK again someday and Uh. In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, like Nat did. You can send us an email, wrap it up spanking on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of

iHeart Radios. How Stuff works from More podcasts for my heart Radio is at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where every you listen to your favorite shows.