4.07 | 12.17.20
In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.
“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”
Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker of your digital existence. But today we live, more or less, in the world Cooper conceived. So if Cooper says the wireless revolution is still just in its opening stages, and that mobile technology promises to help end poverty and disease and bring education and employment to everyone, it’s probably worth listening.
In this episode of Soonish, we talk with Cooper about the themes and stories in his book, and explore why even the disasters of 2020 haven’t shaken his optimism about the future.
Before the 1970s, Motorola was known mainly for making the two-way radios used by police dispatchers and the AM/FM radios in the dashboards of cars. But Cooper, head of the company’s communication systems division, was convinced that the company’s future lay in battery-powered handheld phones tied to a network of radio towers, each broadcasting to its own “cell.” Moreover, he knew it would take a spectacular demonstration of such wireless technology to keep the Federal Communications Commission from giving AT&T the huge chunks of radio spectrum it wanted to build its own network of in-dashboard car phones.
Cooper convinced his bosses to let him lead a crash, 90-day program to build a prototype cellular phone that it could show off to the media and the FCC. The project to build the DynaTAC (for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was a success, and in the end AT&T never got the spectrum it wanted.
It took another decade for Motorola to commercialize the technology, largely because of FCC foot-dragging over spectrum allocation for the consumer cellular industry. But Cooper’s 1973 demo opened the door to the world we now know—including, many generations of devices later, the rise of podcasting.
Cooper will turn 92 at the end of this month, and he still buys every new model of every brand of smartphone, just to try it out. He thinks there’s lots of room left for improvement—and that the next generation of mobile devices may not look like phones at all, but will instead go inside our ears or even inside our bodies, where they’ll help to detect and prevent disease.
When someone has had had a front-seat view to so many decades of high-tech innovation, perhaps they can’t help feeling rosy about humanity’s ability to think its way out of present-day challenges like the pandemic, climate change, or inequality in educational and economic opportunities.
“The problems are big enough so it's going to take some time to get them solved,” Cooper says. “But there are people around who are doing the thinking and who are addressing these problems. Pretty much the only advantage the human brain has over machine is that it keeps making mistakes. And we call those mistakes creativity. So I think that's going to save us.”
Mentioned In This Episode
Cutting the Cord: The Creator of the Cell Phone Speaks Out by Martin Cooper
The Father of the Cell Phone, 60 Minutes, CBS News, 2010
Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We Speak: Patrick and Kavita, Episode 1 of 4 in the “We Speak” series from Subtitle
Additional Reading
Why Do I Confuse Left and Right? Psychology Today, March 2019
Motorola DynaTAC, Wikipedia
Motorola DynaTAC, Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Chapter Guide
00:08 Soonish theme
00:24 Officer of the Deck
01:42 Left-Right Confusion
04:06 The Father of the Cell Phone
06:52 Geeking Out
08:41 Living in the Future
10:50 Disproving Technological Determinism
17:19 An Alternative History of the Cell Phone
19:45 The Fate of All Monopolies
23:35 Midroll Announcement from The Lonely Palette
24:46 Why Phone Makers Still Don’t Have It Right
31:49 The Sources of Cooper’s Optimism
37:42 End Credits and Acknowledgements
39:19 Promo: Subtitle’s “We Speak” Miniseries
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.
If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Full Transcript
Audio Montage: We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
[Newsreel music]
Wade Roush: It’s 1952 and a Navy destroyer called the USS Cony is cruising in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Korea, with a mission to disrupt the flow of arms and ammunition to the north. The officer of the deck on the Cony is a young ensign in his 20s. His job is to keep the Cony steaming alongside an aircraft carrier that’s zigzagging to avoid imaginary submarines as part of an exercise. Depending on how the carrier is turning, the ensign needs to order the helmsman of the Cony to steer left or right to stay parallel. There’s just one problem. The ensign can’t remember which side is his left and which side is his right. So he has to come up with a workaround.
Marty Cooper: Could you imagine me controlling this destroyer in the middle of the fleet? And they're all depending upon me to make sure this ship ends up in the right place at the right time. Little did they know that I was going through all these processes, thinking actually see which way is east and which way is west. I'd have to shake my hand because I knew that I wrote with a pencil with my right hand, and that was right. That was the only way that I could tell what right from left was.
Wade Roush: That’s Martin Cooper, and he was that ensign from almost 70 years ago. He managed to keep the Cony from colliding with the carrier. And he says nobody else on the bridge ever noticed the delays while he was figuring out which direction was which. Today Cooper’s condition is called right-left confusion – or, left-right confusion – and it’s not that uncommon. Ten to 20 percent of people say they experience it, including me. Educators group it with similar disabilities like dyslexia and dysgraphia. Cooper’s left-right confusion comes up in passing it in a memoir that he’s about to publish. So I asked him about it.
Wade Roush: I've done a little bit of research on this. And people say that this left right confusion has to do with how much asymmetry there is or how much lateralization there is between the two hemispheres of your brain. And it overlaps to some extent with dyslexia, which was fascinating to me because I know a lot of dyslexic people and a lot of them actually are completely out of the box thinkers who not only see the world differently and, you know, take in information differently, but think differently from everybody else. So I was just kind of curious whether you think that left right confusion that you describe in the book, do you think it was a sign of perhaps your your other qualities.
Marty Cooper: Oh, that's a really profound comment you just made, because I've always, I shouldn't say always but I didn't discover this left-right thing until I was in my 30s. Because I thought that everybody was like this. It would amaze me to find out that people knew which way, right and left. I thought everybody was like that.
Wade Roush: Like they just had to work really hard to memorize it, and they had done that, and you hadn't somehow?
Marty Cooper: Yeah. So I've always assumed that this when I did learn the fact that I was different, I assumed that it was a defect. And I don't mind having defects because my observation is that people that have defects somehow compensate in some way and have strengths that other people don't have. So I've been struggling for years trying to figure out what my strengths are. But it takes a podcast like this to convince me that maybe I do have some things that I can do better than other people, to compensate.
Wade Roush: I think it’s safe to say that there are some things Marty Cooper can do better than other people. If you haven’t guessed it already from the title of this episode, Marty Cooper is the inventor of the first handheld cellular phone. It was called the Motorola DynaTAC. You’ve probably seen pictures of it. People called the The Brick because it was the size of a brick and almost as heavy. It was Cooper’s idea to build the DynaTAC, and he led the team inside Motorola that actually created it, along with radio infrastructure needed to make it work.
It was all part of a crash 90-day effort in early 1973 to convince the Federal Communications Commission that Motorola was actually ahead of AT&T in the new field of wireless telephony. AT&T was asking the FCC for gigantic chunks of radio spectrum to build its own wireless business. But Motorola wanted to prevent that. The project worked, and that’s how Cooper’s name ended up being the first one on Motorola’s patent.
That’s also how, on April 3, 1973, Cooper ended up making world’s first public cell phone call, from a street corner outside the New York Hilton at 6th Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan, as part of a demonstration for a local radio reporter. The person Cooper called, by the way, was Joel Engel, the engineer in charge of building AT&T’s rival cellular system.
Marty Cooper: I said, ‘Joel, this is Marty Cooper.’ ‘He says ‘Hi.’ ‘I’m calling you from a cellular phone. But a real cellular phone. A handheld, portable cellular phone.’ There was silence on the end of the line.
Morley Safer: You could not resist rubbing it in.
Marty Cooper: Oh, no question about it.
Wade Roush: That was Cooper re-creating the moment for Morley Safer of 60 Minutes back in 2010. To Cooper, Joel Engel was basically the quarterback of the opposing team. So that first public call was also the first epic troll of the wireless era. And the call was a first in another sense too. Cooper almost became the world’s first pedestrian killed by traffic while talking on his phone.
Marty Cooper: Well, it really happened. Because, you know, most people that do demonstrations, I do them as I'm sitting here in a chair. And when I got the information that I was going to get interviewed by this reporter, I said, well, let's do it out on the street in the real world. We're out there. And if you can't tell, I tend to get a little enthusiastic and I'm talking away, telling him about this technology and stepped into the street and nearly got nailed by a taxi. He grabbed me and pulled me back. So it might have been better for me to be hit. I would have been much more famous.
Wade Roush: [Laughing] But it would have changed history. So I think people would be going back in their time machines to prevent that.
Wade Roush: In today’s show we’re going to get to know Marty Cooper and learn more about how he thinks and why he’s such an indefatigable optimist. He’s the perfect guest for this moment at the end of a horrible year, when I think we can all use a bit more optimism.
If you’re interested in how technology evolves, you’ll want to get his book Cutting the Cord. It comes out in January. But before we really dive in, I just have to geek out a bit more about how cool it was that I got to interview Marty Cooper.
And he is Marty, by the way. If you were able to go back in time and meet Thomas Edison in person, you probably wouldn’t address him as Tom. If you met Marie Curie, she’d be Madame Curie to you, not Marie. But Cooper is one of those people you meet who instantly feels like an old friend. So, yeah, he’s Marty.
And I think there’s a strong case that if Marty hadn’t convinced Motorola to build the DynaTAC, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast right now. After all, the DynaTAC kicked off a long transition from the age when every phone was an analog land-line phone to the age when almost every human on the planet owns a digital smartphone.
Along the way, almost every aspect of media and communications got swept up the digital revolution. Podcasting was born around 2003 as a way to get spoken-word content onto people’s iPods and other music players. Of course, music players eventually got folded into smartphones. In 2014, Apple decided to build the Podcasts app into the operating system of every iPhone. That was what kicked off the real explosion in podcasting, of which this show is one small part.
So there’s no question that Marty Cooper is the father of the cell phone. But at the age of almost 92, he’s also one of the great-grandfathers of podcasting.
Wade Roush: This is a podcast about the future. So when I came across that quote near the front of the book where you said the following, I was really intrigued. And what you wrote was, "I dream so often about the future, I frequently think that I live there." I'm wondering, when you were working on the DynaTAC and when you were doing those first demos in 1973 and making that first public cell phone call, did you have any inkling about how we you know, about how by the early 21st century, almost everyone on the planet would be carrying around a mobile device—these powerful little supercomputers in our pocket making calls, connecting to the global computing network, taking pictures, sending videos?
Marty Cooper: Well, I have to confess that we never anticipated a smartphone, but we did tell a story that some day, when you were born, you would be assigned a telephone number. And if you didn't answer the phone, you had died. So we were convinced that everybody was going to have a cell phone. It would have been really a stretch to anticipate today's smartphone because we're talking about primitive times. 1973. There were there was no Internet. There were no large scale integrated circuits. There were no personal computers. So these were, as I say, primitive times. But so we couldn't anticipate the smartphone, but we sure knew that everybody was going to have a cell phone.
Wade Roush: And that was in contrast to the vision from AT&T and from all the consultants, right, who said maybe there was a worldwide market for like 900,000 cell phones.
Marty Cooper: Forever. And in a way, Wade, they were right. It turns out that their vision of a cell phone starting in 1946 was a car phone. And the reality is that the maximum number of cell, the car phones that were cell phones ended up being about a million. So what they didn't anticipate is the freedom that you get from having a phone that you could hold your hand and it goes everywhere with you.
Wade Roush: From our perspective today, that point Marty just made is a no-brainer. A true mobile phone should be small enough that you can hold it in your hand and take it everywhere. Obvious, right? Well, that idea wasn’t actually obvious to everyone in 1973. And that’s worth pausing on for a minute.
I think I’ve mentioned before on the show that back in the 1990s I got a PhD in the history of technology from MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society, or STS. And when you’re a baby graduate student in STS, one of the first things you talk about in class is the concept of technological determinism.
To boil it down, it’s the idea that technology is a driving force that comes from outside our society and that values and our institutions shape themselves to conform to the reality that technology creates.
And there is something to that idea. Technology is a powerful force. I’d even say technological change is the main thing that makes the present feel different from the past. But what STS students end up learning very fast is that the reality a lot more complicated than that.
It’s true that many technologies have certain decisions or intentions embedded in them. That’s kind of what we mean by design. But those intentions always get put there by somebody. Designs have designers. Inventions have inventors.
And part of the reason I love the story of Marty Cooper and the DynaTAC is that it pretty much shatters the idea that technology is deterministic. The more you talk to Marty the more you realize there was nothing inevitable about the handheld cell phone.
Wade Roush: To me, the core of the book, sort of, dramatically, and the truly fascinating part of the book, is the chapter where you talk about sort of the 90 days leading up to that demo. That decisive period when you were leading a team trying to pull together all the technologies required to pull off that demo. And so you make the point in that chapter that you could never have succeeded unless almost all of the important sort of technological pieces were already in place inside Motorola, and that you were one of the only people there who was aware of all of these different elements. And so your role was sort of as maestro to kind of bring them together and adapt them and get them all to fit inside this handheld package.
Marty Cooper: First of all, you must know that I did not come up with the idea of having a phone that somebody could carry with them and would talk everywhere because Dick Tracy did that first.
Wade Roush: That's right. The wristwatch video phone.
Marty Cooper: So there are a couple of elements. I am enchanted by technology, just as you are. And not only was I aware of what was going on, but I helped start many of these programs trying to encourage people to reach out and look at the technology. But the other element that as I, you started out our discussion by talking about my ability to fantasize. But I'm also the world's greatest optimist. And I must tell you that when I started, I think I expressed this in the book, when I went to the team and told them, this is what you're going to do in three months, nobody believed me, including Don Linder, who is an extraordinary engineer. And he was responsible for putting together the most challenging part of this portable. And he really didn't believe that he could do that…and Don Linder's supervisor, also a wonderful engineer, named Brian Richardson, told me afterwards that you know Marty, you keep convincing us to do things that we never thought was possible. And that was an extraordinary compliment. And it all comes back to the fact that I am overwhelmingly optimistic about everything and that optimism has served me well. I'm still here at the age of almost 92 and and I'm still productive. I still every once in a while still come up with an idea.
Wade Roush: I think it's interesting to hear you say that it was your optimism that allowed you to pull off this 90 day feat. But at the same time, you talk a lot in that chapter about how, you know, your job was sort of to roam around your division and other parts of Motorola and to know what people were working on. So it's possible you were the only person inside the company who knew that all of these different parts and components and systems that that were critical to the DynaTAC were actually on the cusp of being ready. And all it required was for somebody to come along and push the teams to work together and to integrate them into a package that that was actually hand-held. And so it you know, you call optimism. What I'm proposing is that wasn't the whole story. Right. You also had a bunch of information and knowledge and experience of having worked on previous projects inside Motorola, so it was like struck me that it was a mix of all those things that put you in that position to be able to pull it off.
Marty Cooper: Well, you have to be right, because my optimism is usually founded upon bases. I have been everlastingly grateful to the managers at Motorola because they let me get away with that. And they allowed me to to be optimistic and to reach out and to make mistakes, which was one of the fundamental aspects of Motorola. The founder, there was a sculpture of the founder in our lobby. His name, obviously, was Paul Galvin. And it was: "Reach out. Do not fear failure." And I lived that and in fact, ended up failing. And I think I mentioned that several times in the book. There's an optimistic thing for you to write a book and tell about your failures as well as your successes. But to go back to your original premise. I am a techie through and through it. So I really did understand what the real nature of the technology that we were developing was. And there was a technical basis to my optimism.
Wade Roush: Let's do a counterfactual or alternative history. If, say, your boss at Motorola had said no, Marty, that's just impossible. That's a dumb idea. There's no way we can finish that demo in 90 days. It'll take too many resources. We're not going to do that. In that history, who would have who would have invented the handheld cell phone? Would it have been AT&T? And what would that history have looked like?
Marty Cooper: Very likely that would have happened. Because at that time, the Bell System, it's unimaginable today, but they were the ultimate monopoly worldwide. They were the biggest company in the world by every measure, by a number of people, the sales, profits and by every measure they were. And Bell Laboratories was an extraordinary organization…So if divestiture had not happened, if the Bell System had not been split up, somebody at AT&T would have decided that the technologies were all ready and they would have made a handheld phone. So I think all that we did was bring the cell phone five or 10 years sooner than it would have happened anyway.
Wade Roush: I wonder whether it would have looked the same, though, because AT&T had a vision of mobile telephony that was more built around car-based phone calls, didn't it?
Marty Cooper: From the very moment the fellow that came up with the concept of cellular--and I think you know what cellular is, it's having radio transmissions and small areas instead of big areas, reusing the spectrum in each one of these areas--the fellow that suggested that there could be a great thing to apply to cell phones, literally called out car telephones, and somehow he kind of legislated that in the Bell System and they never got off of it. We inducted Joel Engel into the Wireless History Foundation, which is a foundation that my wife started some time ago, and Joel says, and I don't mean this in a negative way, he says, I have a cell phone…. I turn it on, when I want to make a phone call and I turn it off again. So he still hasn't got the message. After 40 years, he still doesn't understand the freedom that you get when you can be anywhere and still stay in touch.
Wade Roush: So there you have it. If Marty hadn’t convinced Motorola to build the DynaTAC, the FCC might have ended up giving AT&T all the spectrum it wanted for its car phone system, and the first few generations of cell phones might have been attached to car dashboards.
Then again, as Marty points out, AT&T’s idea for a nationwide network of car phones probably would have been blown to bits by the same event that destroyed AT&T itself. I’m talking about the 1982 antitrust action that broke up the Bell System into nine regional Bell operating companies or Baby Bells.
The company we know as AT&T today includes remnants of four of those Baby Bells. And it’s a big company, but it’s nothing like the behemoth that the Bell System used to be.
To Marty, there’s an important lesson there that applies even to today’s leading technology companies. Even the most powerful monopolies can come crashing down if they stop innovating or if they lose sight of what customers want.
Wade Roush: In your version of history, AT&T comes up over and over again as the sort of personification, as the corporate sort of embodiment of a specific kind of technological arrogance or corporate arrogance. And I wanted to dive into that a little bit because I think this question about the power of monopolies is with us all the way up to the present. So could you explain a little more what danger AT&T represented in your mind, especially during this period in the 60s and early 70s, when you were trying to convince government regulators to spread the spectrum more evenly and not give huge chunks of it to AT&T?
Marty Cooper: Well, you know, it's true of all corporations and governments, by the way. Their main motivation is to perpetuate themselves. And that doesn't necessarily to serve their constituency. And you just pointed out that that's a form of arrogance, when you forget what your purpose is. And the purpose of, the real purpose of any company in a capitalistic environment is somehow to serve a constituency better than somebody else is doing. [00:25:32] And why, as soon as you lose that you're in trouble. But that's one of the evils of capitalism, is you become so hooked on serving your shareholders and making sure that you're profitable and that you forget that your purpose is to reason for existence is to serve your consumer, the person that is using the products that you're making. As soon as you forget that and you stop taking chances, stop taking risks, then you're in trouble. Very hard for big companies to take risk. So I have a conviction in in my real world, which we already have determined is an optimistic world, that sooner or later the pseudo monopolies, and we have a bunch of 'em, you know, Amazon is out there. My goodness, you just have to buy stuff from Amazon. Google. Sooner or later, they will get captured by this requirement to keep getting their profits up. They'll stop taking the risk. The risk takers will come in with things that we, the public will like better. And we are fickle. Google may think that they've got us captured. Somebody is going to come along with something better and they're going to lose us very quickly. Or they're going to adapt. One or the other. And it's going to be to our benefit.
Wade Roush: I’ll be back with more of my conversation with Marty Cooper after this quick break.
Tamar Avishai: Hey there. This is Tamar Avishai, host of The Lonely Palette, and though you may not know this about me, the former chair of the event planning committee at my pre-podcast corporate job. Which means that I know the importance of corporate events, and specifically how important they are when it comes to team-building and maintaining a robust corporate culture. So, why am I telling you this? Because a whole lot of people have been working at home throughout the pandemic, and not being able to run into each other around the water cooler can really take a toll. So why not plan a firm-wide “outing” by booking me to lead your company on a virtual tour of art through the ages—from the Mona Lisa to Dogs Playing Poker. I strive to make art history fun, un-snooty, and accessible, with customizable objects, a tailor-made list of cocktail recipes to make from home, and most importantly, a safe and enjoyable event for your company. Learn more at thelonelypalette.com/virtualtours.
Wade Roush: If you ask Marty Cooper today what kind of smartphone he uses, you might get a different answer every month. That’s because he’s still fascinated by how wireless technology is evolving, and he always wants to try out the latest phones from every company, including his old employer Motorola.
But he’s a tough audience, and he’s rarely impressed. And in the next part of our conversation Marty explained why he thinks today’s smartphones still have some huge shortcomings, and how he’d like to see mobile device designers take a different path.
Wade Roush: If you if you look at the history of wireless technology and start with the DynaTAC in 1973 and then fast forward it, from my point of view, the next big event was in 2007. What I’m talking about, of course, is when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. How big of a turning point do you feel like that was in the history of wireless?
Marty Cooper: What Steve Jobs did was come up with a user interface that really was intuitive and easy to do. And if you think about all the different technology that it took to make a smartphone in retrospect, it doesn't seem like it was that great a contribution, but it just shows you how the little details are important. You got to, when you create a product, you really have to get everything right. And the one that's most neglected by us engineers is the user interface.… What appears today to be a detail is really important. They still haven't got it right. Apple is regressing. The user interfaces are terrible. Since you were nice enough to read the book, you know, about my “Curator” that is going to be the future cell phone where the cell phone is going to look at you, analyze your habits, understand your requirements, and create your own apps. Because this idea that a human being can go and buy an Apple phone and select among two million apps, which ones that are ideal for that human being, is insane. So we're still suboptimal. The phone ought to be able to solve your problems without your becoming an expert on the phone.
Wade Roush: You're right. I think we're caught in this spot where the new complexity that is enabled by smartphones hasn't been simplified yet, hasn't been brought down to the level where we don't have to learn anything about the complexity and we can just go straight to the thing we need to do. So that actually leads me to a question about about your argument in the book that we're still just at the beginning of the wireless revolution. Considering we're almost 50 years in, that's a pretty remarkable thing to say. But I think you really believe it. And, you know, to me, it feels slightly different. I feel like we're stuck on a plateau. We were just speaking to this point. Right. The basic form factor of a smartphone hasn't really changed since 2007. They've gotten bigger and faster. They better processors. They have…faster broadband. But the fundamentals are the same. I am curious what you think the next big leap might look like after this sort of slab of glass thing that fits in our pocket. Is there another form factor or another approach to wireless technology that you think will define the next generation of our experience with mobile?
Marty Cooper: Absolutely. First of all, you are right about our being on a plateau now, but it's not a permanent plateau. You know, that's the way the world goes. It's never a continuous progression. And the biggest manifestation of that is sitting on my desk right now. They have carried the shape and characteristics of a cell phone pretty much to a limit…And I experiment with every phone that ever comes out and I happen to have this Motorola Razr. So I have been using that Razr for the last few days. And it turns out we don't really need a folding phone. It is harder to use. So what is your future phone? First of all, the biggest problem with the existing cell phone is it makes an assumption that we are all the same. And I got news for you. We are all different….And yet the manufacturers come along and say, this phone is what you want. And everyone wants one. That sounds exactly like Bell Labs in the old days. What we're supposed to do, we entrepreneurs and engineers, we're supposed to go and look for a problem and solve it. So the new phone's got to be customizable. It's got to be adapted to what the individual is. And so I look at what the problems are that the phone's going to solve.
Marty Cooper: If your problem is health care, which is one of the biggest opportunities for the cell phone, what you're going to end up carrying with you is not a cell phone—by the way it is ridiculous that we call this thing a phone in any way today, because many people never use the phone part of it—but this device will consist of a server, which is some gadget that you've got on your body that connects you with the rest of the world. Because at least for the foreseeable future, there has to be a way of connecting you into the network. But connected to that server are applications and the applications are customized to you and optimized for you. An optimized phone might be something that is suck in your ear or under your skin. You start not with trying to build a universal device, but you start with what the problem is. In healthcare. We know what you're susceptible to. I think we are going to be able to sense every disease before it happens. Well, here you now have the potential of stopping every disease. Disease in the future will not exist. But in order to do that, you have to be able to sense people as individuals. And what's going to do that? What we used to call a cell phone is now this server and sensors that are assigned to your body based upon your genetic susceptibilities. So that's one example.
Wade Roush: I guess what you're saying might be that the next generation of this thing, the descendants of this iPhone I'm holding up, the next thing that follows from this, is not really going to look like a phone. It's going to be perhaps distributed around your body or shaped to your ears and your mouth and your needs, really. So it's the fragmentation and distribution of all of these technologies back into the places they really ought to live. Instead of all being jammed into this one little slab of glass, they're going to go back out to the places where they really belong.
Marty Cooper: You know, I really needed you when I started this book because you capture all my ideas and say them so much better than I did.
Wade Roush: My final question for Marty Cooper was about how he hangs on to his sunny outlook about the future. And his answer turned out to be a real shot in the arm. Which, hopefully, is something we’ll all be getting pretty soon.
Wade Roush: The thing that does leave the biggest impression on me from reading the book is the depth of your optimism. And it wasn't a surprise to me that you would be so optimistic. I mean, after all, you've kind of lived through the most dramatic and amazing period of technological advancement, at least in the area of communications and computing, in all of human history. You know, what you've witnessed has been incredible. So, of course, that, you know, witnessing your particular slice of 92 years of time would leave you very optimistic. But I think we're in a period like right now where people are finding it a little harder to hang on to their optimism, myself included. …You know, we've seen the downsides of communications technology being so ubiquitous. I mean, now that everybody has Facebook on their phone, it's a lot easier for misinformation and disinformation to spread across entire countries or entire parts of the world and interfere with elections and cause all sorts of suboptimal outcomes. And cell phones certainly haven't saved us from climate change or the coronavirus. Right. So we're dealing with all of these new challenges. I think it might be a good time to remind people why you're so optimistic.
Marty Cooper: Well, you know, one thing, call me an optimist, but in retrospect, it turns out that my optimism has worked out. So is it possible that I'm a realist and that you guys are pessimists? Because I don't agree with you. I think we've got some huge problems to solve, the cell phone being one of them. But sooner or later, these things are going to happen and the problems are big enough so it's going to take some time to get them solved. But there are people around who are doing the thinking and who are addressing these problems. And that hasn't stopped. Creativity has not stopped. People's minds, that's pretty much at this moment the only thing, advantage, the human brain has over machines, is that it keeps making mistakes. And we call those mistakes creativity. So I think that's going to save us. That and self-optimizing systems. Take heart, Wade, things are still getting better and better all the time. If you look at the statistics, we are on a trend. There are fewer poor people, disease is less than it has ever been before, all the trends that are in that direction. How can you be so arrogant as to say that these trends are going to stop? What's the matter with you, Wade? Shape up!
Wade Roush: Well, in my defense, Marty, I am I am generally an optimist. I always say on the show that I'm a long-term optimist, but sometimes I'm a short-term pessimist. And I think that 2020 has been a really tough year for a lot of people and has shaken our faith in some basic institutions. …I think you've got the advantage over me of having witnessed some things like World War II and the boom after that and the incredible innovations of the 60s and 70s that I don't remember. Right? I think your generation lived through a period that was so remarkable in terms of the fundamental advances that were that were yet to be made and that were made. And so many of them happened in a very short span of time that I think it began to seem normal to you, to your generation… Truth be told, that's why I wanted to talk to you, because you're more optimistic than me. And I needed a boost.
Marty Cooper: No, I really understand what you what you have encountered in 2020, because the part that is devastating to me is the polarization that is going on now. And you're right, I do have a lot more experience than you do just having lived through it. But I can still remember World War II, where everybody was galvanized on one mission, and that was to get through this war and to survive and beat the other guys. And in order to survive, everybody worked together. We planted victory gardens and we took first aid courses. It was one massive cooperation. But I also believe in our system. I think of the guys who came up with the with the American democratic system, it's a very imperfect system, but it certainly has been demonstrated to be better than any other system. Everybody in the world has copied it, of course, and copied all the mistakes too. But it is a self-optimizing system. It's got checks and balances. And when things start wandering …corrections happen. And the things that devastated us in 2020 are going to get corrected, maybe over-corrected. S o things are going to get better. I don't know what's going to happen to 2021. It may take a while, Wade. But hang in there.
Wade Roush: All right. We will shortly find out. Martin Cooper, thank you so much for your time. This has been a pleasure and an honor talking with you.
Wade Roush: It's been my honor, Wade, you have helped me in so many ways and taught me so much of this one hour I can't express my gratitude. Pleasure to meet you, Wade.
[Music]
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush. Our intro music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. The outro music and all the other music you heard in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
You can follow Soonish on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find a transcript for this episode as well as the full show notes. I’ll put a link in the show notes to Marty Cooper’s new book Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone Has Transformed Humanity. It comes out on January 5 from Rosetta Books but you can pre-order it now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound.
Soonish is an independent podcast supported in part by you, our listeners. And I'd like to thank everyone who supported the show in 2020, including our top-level donors: Dave De Bronkart, Victor and Ruth McElheny, Warren and Lucia Prosperi, Kent Rasmussen and Celia Ramsay, Paul and Patricia Roush, and Jamie Roush and Jen Athey.
Your donations on Patreon help me stay independent and keep making more episodes for everyone to enjoy. A reminder: all Patreon supporters get access to one of our coolest rewards, Tomorrow's Episode Today. That means access to every new episode of Soonish, one day before everyone else hears it. It's like living in the future! And at the $10 per episode level, I'll send you the new Soonish coffee mug with the Season 4 logo and motto: “We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.” If you'd like to support the show, please go to Patreon.com slash Soonish. And thanks!
Soonish is one of 10 indie podcasts that have banded together to form the Hub & Spoke audio collective. And this week I want to tell you about an amazing series of episodes from the Hub & Spoke show Subtitle. The series is called “We Speak” and it looks at how we acquire our accents and what they say about our identities.
Kavita Pillay, co-host of Subtitle: For the next four episodes, we're going to tell you a few stories about speech, how we come to speak, the way we do and what it means, how speech can be used as a badge of authenticity.
Tape: “Because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.”
And how speech gives us a sense of ourselves.
Tape: “For you, speaking Spanish is like it signifies something important to you for your identity, whereas for other people it's like a burden.”
And how we can overcome our own speech biases.
Tape: “Black people, they kind of think of you as an Oreo black, basically black on the outside, but white on the inside just because you talk proper.”
We make these judgments every day. We hear people's vowel sounds, the words they choose, the languages and dialects they favor, and we judge them for it. But as much as we obsess over all of this, most of us don't think of it as discrimination. Maybe speech is the last somwhat acceptable form of discrimination?
Wade Roush: You can find all four episodes of the miniseries We Speak at subtitlepod.com. And you can always check out the rest of the Hub & Spoke lineup at hubspokeaudio.org. That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. Have a safe and happy new year. And I’ll speak to you again… soonish.
