Stuff You Should Know - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mobile Phones

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Today we deep dive on mobile phones, wonders of the modern world! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello friends, we have a book coming out finally, and it is awesome. You're gonna make me say the title again? Yeah. Fine.

It's Stuff You Should Know, Colin, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And get this Chuck, you don't have to wait to order until the book comes out. You can do what we in the book biz call pre-ordering it. And then when it does come out, you'll be the first to get it, or among the first. Well, and not only that, you get a pre-order gift.

You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carly Monardo, 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, Colin, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And then after you do, you can go on over to StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com and upload your receipt and get that pre-order poster.

So thank you in advance for everybody who is pre-ordering. That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you. StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com, pre-order now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. I Heart Radio's 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.

Oh, because of his acting, or? No, I don't like him in real life. I'm just kidding, I know. He was great as Bob Loblaw. No, that's true, I'll give him that. Okay, that's the common ground we can all reach on, Scott Bay. Bob Loblaw.

Yeah, so this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast, not about Scott Bay, oh, but about something that I would wager, there's about a 96% chance that Scott Bay has used. That's right, cell phones, but before we talk about cell phones, we do wanna address a, geez, a controversy? I hope not.

You know, we got a book coming out this fall, the Stuff You Should Know, colon, not these Stuff You Should Know. I always get this wrong, what's my problem? The rock? Stuff You Should Know, colon, a great book about lots of great stuff. For real, it's called, 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. Nailed it. 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,

and we're trying to make that available to people outside the US, and we're working on it, and it's 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, but that has not happened in this case, because we've run into the juggernaut that is international, intellectual property rights.

Yeah, it's weird, it's different, but we're trying to, but we don't wanna dissuade people outside the US from pre-ordering, because pre-orders are very meaningful to booksellers and book buyers, and it means a lot to us. But at the same time, Chuck, we just laid it on the line to not cheat people out of something they thought they were gonna get, so I feel like we're stand-up guys here.

We're doing our best. Yeah, so we'll try to do what we can, but in the meantime, yeah, I mean, you're still gonna 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's cool too, but the book is really what's gonna knock your socks

right off of 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 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 Ruse, who managed to like whittle this down into a manageable shape, and still a pretty comprehensive shape, if you ask me. Yeah, I agree, 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 96% 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 too. 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 gotta be concerned about too, right? Nah, not really. I mean, not all day long or anything, but we grew up on screens, they were just cruddy-er.

That's true. Let me ask you this though. So is she Generation Z, or is she something brand new? Oh, I don't even know. Well, I don't know what Gen Z is. Is that right behind Millennials? Yeah. 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 one thing I wanna throw in there though, Chuck, is, and by the way, generations are not fake. We did an episode on it. Did we relate? Yeah.

It was a good one too. And I think we conclusively establish that they are real. But the worldwide cell phone ownership is something like 61.7%. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And that's just, that's cell phones though. Like smartphones, 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 70s. Yeah, I think it's smartphones in 2019 was about 81% in the US, up from 35%, seven, eight years previous to that. Yeah, and I think it's about 45% 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 80 times a day and touch it, or I'm sorry, yeah, touch it 2600 times a day. And the math there works out to about 35 touches per check, which seems about right.

Oh, okay, that makes sense. I thought touches like when you reach for it and touch it. So this is like... See how people did that 2600 times a day? Yeah, but then they only actually interacted with it 35 of those times. That's what I thought. Now, I think it's 80 times,

you'll pick it up and touch it 35 different ways, which is, I'll never mind, I'm not gonna make that joke. But it's like Kamasutra-esque. Oh, that's where I was headed. Was it really? That's the best way to put it. Did I really read your mind? Well, it was sexy in nature, sure. Okay, sure.

Well, 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 earhole. That's true. Same to you, buddy. Left or right? 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. This is amazing. You know, that means we're in love. Yeah, Kamasutra-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 and a lot of it was just simple stuff

that, you know, I never knew what G stood for, 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 in all of like the cell phone and cellular technology stands for Gary. Oh, I thought it was grandma.

That's, I had different research. No, it's Gary. So you have first Gary, second Gary, third Gary, and so on, all the way up to five Gary, which we're about to really start to get into. But let's- You know, five Gary started coronavirus. It did, how so?

Well, that's one of the conspiracies about 5G, out of all the wacky conspiracies about 5G. That's right. 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 5G things. That's how the world works. So the five Gary is, it's all five Gary's fault.

So this Gary guy, we need to have a talk with him, especially because in reality, G stands for generation. Sorry, Gary. But, which makes a lot of sense, but a generation is not just like, it's often applied to specific technology, like a 3G cell 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 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 5G is right now, but they do come eventually. And 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 35 different ways, 2600 times a day goes.

That's right. But we can go back to zero G. If you wanna talk about the origin of a phone that was mobile, we have to go back to the 1940s. And this sort of made me think of army phones and like field phones. I was like, what were those things operating on? And the ones in the tent that you see with the general

are wired, but the ones out on the field worked on radio waves. And my dad actually had a couple of those when I was little that we use when we were camping. Really? Yeah, it was neat. It was sort of a later model. It wasn't like a World War II thing

that was a big block with a handset that you stick on. It was, it looked like a giant walkie talkie basically. I think I've seen what you're talking about. And I mean that kind of technology, it just basically used the same kind of radio wave that you would use to broadcast like say a ham radio, except it was a much more portable technology. And actually we use that technology

like analog radio wave technology for our cell phones up until I think basically the 2000s maybe. So this initial, like we weren't lugging around these clunky radio phones and we weren't using radio phones that were basically like mini radio broadcasters, but we were using the same form of technology which is an analog radio wave. That was the whole thing.

But what set the radio phone apart from what would 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 1940s. And that just had one radio tower could handle about 25 calls at once.

And they're routing this thing, operators are routing this thing to landlines basically or other radio phones. But they were like, this has got to change. Like if we want a mobile phone, we got to be able to call from anywhere. And then I think 47, Bell Labs was working on a project and a man named DH Ring, believe it or not,

wrote a memo based on some, 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, as you move around, they will hand off the signal to the next tower.

And that was the first sort of network created. Right, which, I mean, that would make a mobile phone, an 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'd you say, 1947? 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 it is definitively the first idea for a cell phone network. But it wasn't until, like you said, a little while later until the 60s that some more Bell Lab engineers, a new generation of them, if you will,

a new Gary of Bell Lab engineers were... I have a feeling that's gonna stick. They came along and they said, hey, this is really good. Let's figure out how to actually make this work. And so they took DH Ring and Willie Ray Young's design and turned it into the first, like actual, here's how you do it, kind of paper and research.

And I couldn't see that they coined the term, but 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, it's actually the network. Yeah, and here's the thing.

If you wanna, well, actually here's two things. At your next dinner party in two years, you can be this guy or that guy. And that's gender neutral, of course. Sure. You can be the guy that says, you know what, they call them cellular networks because they were laid out in a grid,

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? Yeah. So you've got a cellular network that's starting to be developed in the 60s.

And I guess words started to get out because the U.S., I guess the FCC started working with Bell Labs 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 ripple in the zeitgeist at the time that everybody wanted to develop a mobile phone network. And it wasn't Bell Labs in conjunction 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 in Finland.

Their audio radio pooholin, which I think I just nailed because I made it sound like Bjork at the end there. Yeah, they were the first ones. And they have the advantage of being much smaller, obviously, but that was the first nationwide mobile phone network in 1969. And by the late 70s, I think they had everything covered with 140 stations and 35,000 users in the mid-80s,

which is not too bad. Which is, that'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 developed in the world as far as I could tell. But astoundingly, as that word got out that everybody needed to start developing devices that could work on cellular networks, they actually got the cart 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 hoopla. Like the Razer was a big deal and I think 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 Zach Morris had, the Dynatac, was the very first cell phone at the very least to ever make a cell phone call in the United States. Yeah, that was 1973 and this guy, Marty Cooper, had been an engineer there for a long time and big competitor with AT&T, obviously. And so he took this two and a half pound phone that's two and a half pound phone that's 10 inches long,

everyone knows that great, beautiful brick phone and went out on the street corner in Manhattan supposedly and called Joel Engel, which was one of those two guys, I don't think we mentioned them by name, who kicked off AT&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. And I saw there's a great popular science cover from July of 73 with that Dynatac phone on it. And it said the new, did you see this thing? The phone or the cover? The cover. No, I haven't.

It said the new take-along telephones and I just thought how funny that would be if that stuck and we would be like, have you seen my take-along? I can't find it anywhere. My take-along. Instead of just calling it a cell phone. And we had the exact same kind of cell phone, like it never evolved past the Dynatech.

That would be even better. And by the way, another story in that issue was solving the mysteries of the Northern Lights. Are they God? Sources say yes. So we've got finally the first cell phone. We still haven't gotten the first cellular network. Apparently Marty Cooper possibly made a call in Manhattan

connecting to a radio tower from Bell Labs. We're not sure, but he still came up with the first cell phone. It wouldn't become a genuine bonafide cell phone for a few more years though, until 1983. And I say because we finally reached the first generation of cellular networks, Chuck, we should probably take a break. All right, let's do it. The difference between signals.

The difference is that we könt toppled. So we're still at the Dynatech side of the Federal Lights ban on YouTube for a longer period until the show was imposed on TV. So hopefully we'll get that right on. Everyone else? Everyone will remember you. Like voice, RID, especially William Scott.

and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, we just leapt friends from zero G to one G. We're finally- No Garry's to one Gary. We're finally at our first Gary.

And he's doing great. It's 1983. He's showing a lot of chest hair, got a couple of medallions. He's 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 up Face's 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. They did, especially in 1983.

And like you mentioned earlier, this was still on analog radio signals at this time. Right. No, no. Which was not great. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. I'm right.

So yes, it was analog signals. Did you just say you're right? I'm right? Yeah. Everybody wins. 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, tube amps and things like that, analog is great. Sure. But in record players,

and there's a good argument to be made for analog technology. Yeah. But if you're talking about cell phones, 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 quality is actually clearer, but the problem is it's clear because there's not as much loss because you're not compressing anything. Right? Oh, that makes sense.

Yeah. And so analog had a lot of drawbacks and it still has a lot of drawbacks whenever it's used. But it would stay that way for quite a while actually, I think until the early 90s. So we went from 1983, where the first cellular network was set up by AT&T into the early 90s, a good decade,

where everybody was just using analog cell signals. And finally, sometime in, oh, I guess about 1991 or two, the second generation came along. And this is an enormous leap forward as far as telecommunications technology went. Like zero G to one G was kind of edging forward. And it was mostly about the creation of the cell phone and then figuring out how a cell phone network would work.

Two G was like, okay, let's see what we can do with this puppy and taking a dumpy loser short order cook and turning them into Dirk, what's his name? Benedict? Yes. Hey, I don't want to insult any shorter cooks out there. No, no, those are my favorite kind.

You know who I was describing as Barth from, you can't do that on television. Oh, I thought you were going to say the guy from Alice. Vic Tabak was not dumpy, my friend. So two G, what they did was they digitized everything and they squeezed all that stuff down and all of a sudden apparently could fit about 10. And this is a rough estimate,

but about 10 digital phone calls into that same bandwidth as the one analog call. And this was a big leap forward and this was in Europe is where things got started. And also where text messaging got started. I didn't know what SMS stood for until yesterday. What'd you think it stood for? I had no idea.

I never, see, I just never tried to figure this out. I never thought about any of this stuff. Yeah, it didn't really matter enough to me to stop and think about either I have too much to do. You want to tell everybody what it stands for? I want you to. No, I think you should. All right, it stands for short message service

because the first text could only be 160 characters. Sounds familiar. And this was, like I said, rolled out in Britain. And when I think back to my first European trip in 1996, that is when I first saw widespread cell phone use. Yeah. Was in England. Yep.

And I was like, what is going on here? They're like, it wasn't ubiquitous, but a lot of people were using cell phones in the mid 90s. 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. Sure. But they had the ability to.

Yeah, you and me spent some time in Japan in the 90s. 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 wait 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 80s to like create a year, like a Europe wide cellular network. Well, one of their engineers created SMS. So it started to take off there. But apparently it took off in particular because of Vodafone, which is like a pay as you go phone service and the first SMS that message ever sent was sent in 1992 by a Vodafone engineer

from what I understand. Yeah, and I think was that the one where he sent Merry 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 mentioned the pay as you go. I think that sort of democratized it

in 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 account or 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 texts that you made. And 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 figure the cops had a bead on you and trash that one and get another one. What are those called? Burner phones. That's right. So the SMS started to take off in part because like you said, the cell phone itself

was democratized, but also because they started adding like alpha numeric keypads, not just numeric keypads. Yeah. Because initially when you wanted to text, you had to just use a keypad, just like you 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 in 1995, if you were in America, you sent about 0.4 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, I think 35 texts a month, which is still piddly 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. I remember when I was working as a PA with my little handheld Nokia, which was great because you didn't have, when I first started PAing, you had a pager and they would page you and you would have to stop and find a pay phone

and call the production office. You had this Nokia and all of a sudden I could talk to them, but I remember them sending me texts occasionally. And I was one of those that was like, I'm not gonna take time to go, you know, hit number one, three times if I want the letter C. Right. And when the smartphones came out,

I wasn't even texting it for a while. And I was a little annoyed that people were texting and I was like, I don't wanna 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 can have long fights on a text.

Man, that's the worst. No, those are pretty bad. Do you remember those LAMOS who associated texting with being girly up until now? Oh yeah, it was a thing. Was that a thing? Yeah, it was a thing. Now the thing is- Like only girls text?

Yeah. So like I'm not gonna text because I'm not a girl. And then now they associate like recycling and other like eco-conscious things with girliness, which is super healthy for our system. Gotcha. That's what 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,

your anti-masker starter kit and it had a barbed wire tattoo, a pair of Oakleys sitting on top of a head. Yeah. 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 the, what's that 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. It's funny. I just love that so much, man. Is that a meme starter pack? Yeah.

Okay, I don't know about any of that stuff. So apparently you do cause you know like the anti-masker starter pack thing. Hey, I just saw it today. Breaking news. Good for you. You should text it to somebody. Yeah.

So after text, we're still not done talking about text, everybody, just buckle up. Because at first, if you wanted to text somebody, like you said, you had 160 characters, you couldn't even text from your phone. Your phone could get a text like some dumpy Barth-esque pager, right? But you couldn't actually do texting,

even if you wanted to go to the trouble of just using your numeric keypad. So eventually we started to leap forward. The big leap forward was going from SMS to MMS 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 to spend days upon weeks downloading a single file that you sent. Yeah. 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 everyday to do. Yeah, and the first camera was the Sony Ericsson T68i had an attachable camera, which is adorable. And I remember seeing some of those early pics that were very cruddy and grainy. Very small. Yeah, and small, but it sort of just married

the idea of a camera with a phone. 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 called dumb phones. And like a lot of people, as we'll see, 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, I found one that I might get. There's something called the light phone, have you seen that? No. So the first version of the light phone had, I think you could make calls and it had 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. And now the light phone too 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 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, 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 use the Maps app on the iPhone. Do you, I use Waze almost exclusively. Yeah, cause I almost never walk, you know? Atlanta's not a huge walking town.

So when you drive, Waze is definitely the preferred app. Well, I don't ever drive very far. So Waze 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, they're distractions. Yeah, I could wait till I get home to check my laptop for the most part.

So I need a web browser, phone, text, and email. I could probably do fine with that. It would be nice to have Waze, but you can always just get like a, you know. Yeah, but the web browser is all those things. The app just makes it easier to do. No, it's true. It is true.

I guess, yeah, I'll give up my web browser. Okay. Yeah, you don't have to. No, I don't have to do anything. It's too late. I already said I was going to. All right, so let's, let's get back to it here. Where are we here?

Are we, all right, we're at 3G now. We're at three Garys, I think. Yeah, so second generation leapt ahead in a lot of ways. And then third generation basically took it and kept going and this was the generation that really said, oh yeah, that whole like texting video and pictures and music and all that. That's a really good idea.

How can we improve on that? So if the first or if the second generation was all about, 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 smartphone 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 90s, everybody was like, I love this Ask Jeeves thing. He knows everything. Oh, Jeeves. I love Lotus Notes CC or whatever it is,

that email application. Like people were into the internet and like this idea of moving it onto your phone it just seemed like a good idea to everybody. Isn't it so weird that we can already have nostalgia for early internet? Mm-hmm. 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. Your right order? My web van order. My web van.

That's going on today. They were just ahead of their time. Oh yeah, of course. Poor guys. So one of the big things that allowed like the third generation to move everything forward was there were some people working on how to get basically faster speeds.

And in the late 90s, there was something called the third generation partnership project. And they created two things that really kind of changed everything. 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 so that you could transfer more information faster, which is the whole point 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 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 3G brought around a true mobile broadband network and it really kind of set the stage for that first smartphone,

even though in the mid 90s we did have the Simon and we had PDAs and stuff like that. Yeah, the Simon was pretty awesome actually. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Did you look it up? Oh yeah. Okay, I liked the Simon. I mean, it was genuinely the first smartphone.

It was from 1994, it had a touchscreen for Pete's sake. Yeah, it had an interactive touchscreen. Screen? Yes. But in 2007 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 Laundry Minder. 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 app, stuff like that. It's none of them are, I feel like 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 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 it happened with apps too. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, we'll take another break

and we'll introduce you to a little guy named For Gary right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, we finally reached the present, actually, sadly,

because we entered 4G in about 2009 and we've been languishing in hell there since because we're technically still in the 4G era. And the 4G era didn't do a lot except increased speeds. And it increased speeds a lot, but that's really basically the defining characteristic between 4G and 3G.

Yeah, it was about 10 times, or is about 10 times as fast as 3G was. 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 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. And the big technology associated with 4G is called LTE, which stands for Long Term Evolution. Didn't know that. That's great. And LTE, at least in the US, that's the big 4G technology.

But LTE basically runs on two kind of breakthroughs in data transfer technology. One's called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Can you get a glaven, please? Hey. And the other one is called MIMO, 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 from the device and accepts data incoming to the device at the same time. It doesn't switch back and forth. Do you remember back in the 90s or early 2000s, when you could watch data transfer going on?

If you had something uploading and downloading at the same time, you could watch your computer's little task bar. That's not what it's called. What's the thing, the bar that kind of grows? Status bar? Status bar, yeah. You could watch it flip between uploading and downloading.

Well, that all went the way of the dinosaur when MIMO became prevalent or widespread, because you could do them both at the same time without sacrificing speed, which made your transmission speeds a lot faster. Yeah. So MIMO 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. 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 18? Sure. How about this? Every human that has a phone. Oh boy. So 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? No, it's not cracked. It actually works pretty well. That's impressive. I've never seen, 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 sometime and she'll take a picture of you. Okay. I think that's the deal. And you can throw it down and break it. You're right. I'll be like, now you're normal.

Say I told you so. So the big advantage of LTE, 4G LTE of course is capacity. And that is basically 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 in recent trips in the past couple of years to New York and LA thinking, why do you people even have smartphones?

Because none of you can use them. It's so lame how slow it is. DC's 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, it doesn't matter.

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 and 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, New York will be among the first cities that are ushered into the true bona fide age of 5G. Yeah, so the one big thing, or actually two things that 5G is going to help with, we mentioned capacity. The other thing that 4G improved upon,

that 5G 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 a low latency. And 4G LTE has a latency of about 20 to 40 milliseconds. Yeah. Real time is 50 milliseconds and that's what they're hoping that those 5G can accomplish. Right.

And so the big deal with 5G is that it uses a completely different range of the spectrum, the broadband spectrum, right? So it uses between the 30 and 300 gigahertz range and it's called the millimeter portion of the spectrum because the wavelengths between those ranges are about one millimeter to 10 millimeters. So that's why they call it the millimeter wave portion

of the spectrum. And because there's so much bandwidth between 30 and 300 gigahertz, you can have a channel that takes up something like 800 megahertz, right? That's a huge, enormous channel. Yeah. And because you have a huge, enormous channel

and you have a bunch of them, what that now allows is 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. It's where we're going. And so this 5G changeover to the millimeter wave spectrum

is going to allow that. So we'll be going from, what'd you say, like 20 to 40 millisecond latency? Yeah. To something like less than one second for latency, which is that it's like happening in real time, basically. It's reality 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 you can send someone a song and 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. That just sounded like a grandpa. I don't know what happened there. You could send a picture of your light phone to your neighbor and they'll get it immediately. The bad part or I guess the drawback about those signals is they don't travel that far. They travel about 800 feet.

Yeah. So the idea with 5G is we'll have these big cell towers, but then there will also be thousands of little tiny, well, they're not tiny, but small low power transmitters kind of all over the place. Buildings on rooftops, I guess they'll climb pine trees and nail them in those. But I think also remember our episode on the Internet of Things,

how it's 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,

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-19. That's right. And I think in about 35 cities right now,

they have the high band 5G as opposed to the low band 5G, which I think the low band is just sort of working off those 4G LTE towers. And the high band will be this mesh network, I guess. Right. Where everything's connected. And because of that incredibly low latency where things just are communicating back and forth just faster than you can even describe it,

we'll have things like that genuinely connected Internet of Things where everything is constantly monitoring everything else in the background and 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 force in the background and that can control things like the weather

or the temperature 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. And the shorter term, we're going to 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 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 will happen very soon. That's probably a 10 or 15 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.

Or augmented reality, that'll be another one. Remember we did an episode on that? Yeah, and I was very skeptical and always have been about AR and VR kind of overtaking the world and there's an argument to be made that it hasn't yet because something like 5G wasn't around and those data speeds weren't where they needed to be, but I'm still skeptical for the reasons I outlined previously.

I think we talked about that in the actual episode too. Yeah, we did. So you mentioned about people being addicted to smartphones and that's a common concern. I think Nicholas Carr back in 2009 wrote a really great Atlantic article. If you've never read it, go read it now. It's called as Google making us dumb. Yeah, great.

Legendary article. So that article he basically says like, I can't remember if we did an episode on it or not, but basically he says, 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 us stupid.

That kind of taps into this idea that we've become addicted to our cell phones. Not so much that they're making us 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 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 notifications said

and I wasn't trying to make some stand against it. 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 see that stuff when I go to those apps and it's fine and I get my dopamine reward that way. I mean my cell phone just doesn't make any noise unless someone's calling me or texting me.

And in fact, I think people should hear what my text is. Can you text me real quick? Sure, what's your number? You jerk. And I'll just hold it up and here's my text tone. Okay. All right. Here it comes.

Text man. Did you hear that? Was that Dirk Benedict? That was me. That's pretty great. Going text man. That's pretty great man. Yeah, that's what I hear when a text comes through.

And I hear ring ring, ring ring. It's you saying ring ring? Yes, in a British accent. I've got to figure that out because I have my ring tone on like the regular one and I usually just have my ring off all the time because I don't like sounds coming from my cell phone either. And 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 made like jumped out of her skin yesterday and finally was like, okay, 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. 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 one I have is for Emily. 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 that's it. Those are my ring 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,

that in 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 the 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 that'll 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.

Agreed. I said stop complaining. It's time for listener mail, which also is free. I'm going to call this stalking us, but not really. Hey guys, been listening to a couple of years and a randomly happened upon 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 listened to you guys every day. I feel as if I know you quite well

and couldn't help but stalk you both on social media. Chuck, welcome to Instagram. Thank you. Chuck the podcaster on Instagram. 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's all about, right? That's what it's 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 net at the head of this episode. She's drunk. Slightly drunk that she can't get it.

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. Definitely. Yes, absolutely. You can see us probably four or five years from now. Yeah. And she says, cheers.

Nat, P.S., keep those pet pics coming on Instagram. Nice, Nat. Thanks a lot. We definitely will do that. What are you at? Chuck the podcaster at Instagram? Chuck the podcaster. I'm at Josh 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 well. Again, much-appreciated Nat will definitely be over there in the UK again someday. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us like Nat did, you can send us an email.

Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.