This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's one Friday, my name is Jafs Andu, if that's one thing we can be sure of on this show is that the future is always better. Every week called Pops Man, Amadege pops by to tell us that while the sun may not come up tomorrow, it will be back eventually. Even if humankind is dead by then.
So why, you may wonder, is he suddenly declaring that the old is better than the new? Well, it's time to Matt's plate. Hey Matt, so I guess you finally turned into that crabby old man obsessed with the good old days. Hey Jeff, I'm yeah, because things were really good back then.
In fact, then kids didn't have to go to school because there was no point. Most of them would be dead from disease or get stuck in chimneys or looms before they ever reached their teens. You didn't have to lock your doors because you couldn't afford anything that anyone would want to steal. Oh, well, the people more neighbourly then?
Yeah, what's mine was yours because neither of us actually had anything. And it's true, people look out for each other. They would make sure you were really dead or at least heavily sleeping before they stole your boots. And if you couldn't afford a funeral, the local parish would give you a generous send-off by flinging your body into a midden pit.
Not like today where everyone worries about nutrition and clean drinking water and getting an education. Life's become way too complicated. Let's go back to basics. Let's go back to the important stuff.
Work, steal some food, die, young and deformed. Fun Friday folks. Can we assume from your sarcasm that not everything was better in the past? Of course it wasn't, but we can go too far in the other direction and we can get caught up with some shiny new thing rather than sticking with the technology that may be less exciting, but actually works really well.
Okay, so what brought this on? Because I read a story about GPS. Yes, you can hear the excitement. Wow.
And then, as seems to be the case almost every week, Elon Musk jumped into the story. Not literally in terms of GPS, but the weird reaction he had to the team of divers in Thailand who declined to use his experimental miniser to rescue the school kids from the cave. And that kind of gave a new perspective on the riveting GPS story. Alright, so let's unpack these one by one GPS versus what's the issue?
Well, we've talked about GPS and the dangers of being over-rilite on it on the show before. You know, we take GPS and its satellites for granted, but as a system, it's actually pretty fragile. There was a sitcom in the mid-90s called Comrade Dad, which you can find on YouTube if you're interested. And it reimagined the UK as a communist utopia.
But in the show, everyone believed that satellites were listening to what they were doing. And watching what they were doing. I mean, it was fantasy, of course, but that's kind of what we actually expect GPS to do. And remarkably, only 30 satellites comprise the entire GPS system.
And that makes it actually very easy to manipulate. And these vulnerabilities are not actually new discoveries. A few years ago, we reported on the show that the US Navy had realized that its personality become so reliant on the system that they had to restart training them in the use of sextants and navigating by the stars, because they didn't have the ability to go anywhere without a GPS. But there is actually an older, more robust, and equally accurate system that is just sitting on a shelf waiting for the dust to be blown off.
So Elon Musk, where does he fit into this narrative? Well, I don't want to get into the he-said-she-said stuff that gets musk a bit hot under the collar. But however well-meaning, Musk's mini-sub system should always and only have been seen as a last resort. It was untested, it was really complicated.
And in the same way that we don't use SpaceX when we order something from Foodpander, because a motorbike is cheaper and easier and more reliable. When someone's life is on the line, your first port of call are the things that you know actually work, which is a team of divers, staging points for oxygen tanks, and you have a set of logistics that the rescue teams understand and can actually follow. And if we followed that logic, then nothing would ever change. But that's not the same as being static or resistant to change.
What you do is test the new technology in non-critical circumstances. Teams are trained to use it, and they're trained to assess the circumstances in which to implement that new solution. And there's always going to be a first time that it's used to save lives, but you don't arrive at it by rolling a dice and just taking a guess. It's something that you're trained to use, you're comfortable working with.
And Musk's team may have been confident of succeeding, but if something had gone wrong, would the Thai rescuers then have had the expertise to go in and remove a sub and rescue the kids as well? And sometimes you have to make that leap take the risk. And totally, the Thai cave rescue was remarkably successful, largely against the odds. And we've seen experimental solutions also being used very successfully, like the Ebola vaccine, which was rushed through in weeks.
But even then, it was still morally and ethically dubious. But that was balanced against the disease rapid spread, its high mortality rate, and West Africa's underfunded health systems. As a result, those who made those kind of decisions thought it was actually worth taking the risk, and the gamble paid off. And you don't think that the Thai kids were in that kind of danger?
It's not that they weren't. It's just with Ebola. There wasn't really any other solution apart from isolating people and evacuating them from areas that they thought it might spread to. There were still options for the cave kids.
I'm calling them cave kids in the same way that the people were mole women in Kimi Schmidt. So as we've said on the show, human beings should not be a beta test for Silicon Valley's latest funding gamble. It may be that Elon Musk has devised the greatest rescue technology since the live vest. Equally, we may never see or hear from his mini subs ever again.
But what matters is that the kids got out safe. There shouldn't be any ego involved in how they actually got out. Because we haven't seen the makers of the Ebola vaccines doing the rounds of the late night chat shows, or bringing themselves up to their 22 million followers on Twitter. And there's an ego link to GPS?
Of course, because it's all navigation, isn't it? You know, cave systems, satellite positioning, and satellite positioning is definitely an ego issue in Europe. The EU has spent billions on its own satellite-based alternative to GPS, which is called Galileo. Now, a lot of people don't realize, and I didn't really know either, but GPS is actually a US-operated standard, not a global one.
Russia's got its own version, which is called GLONASS, China too. They do. All of them have roughly the same number of satellites around the 13th arc. So if some clockwork version of this system in his shed that's left over from the Second World War, and it costs about $1.50 to operate it, then there are going to be a lot of countries with egg on their faces.
We're going to be talking about more than navigations in systems here, right? Because that might be a little narrow for some of our readers. I know I get obsessed with things, but no full programme on the merits of competing navigation systems might be pushing it. Yes, it is a jumping off point.
We present a lot of new technology on this show, and we explain why technologies are better than the thing that came before. But part of that is also accepting that not all inventions and not all technology are fit for purpose or better than the things they're supposed to replace. I was having a chat with an optical therapist this week. Now, he uses touchscreen 3D TVs as part of his treatment for patients, but the machines are starting to get old and he's having trouble finding replacements.
Because the electronics industry touted 3D TV as the next revolution in viewing, but has pretty much abandoned it since. And why? Because no one except optometrist has any use for it. So what is this groundbreaking mothball technology?
Thank you. I thought you'd never ask. As I mentioned, sat-nav signals are easy to jam and spoof. They use a very narrow wavelength transmission, which is really far away on the outer edges of our atmosphere.
So GPS signals are actually really weak. And that means the jammers that can be used to jam them can fit in your pocket. They're very, very small. And that's great for hackers, great for hostile state actors, like Gemma, but we have another older and potentially more reliable system.
One that was developed during the Second World War, called Long Range Navigation, which is shortened to Lauren. It works actually in a very similar way to GPS in that masks transmit a synchronized radio signal and a receiver that the user has plots its location according to the time it takes to receive that signal. It's accurate to about one-one-hundredth of a nanosecond, which is not quite as accurate as GPS in the atomic clocks it uses. But it is good enough for the electrical circuits in most of our electronic devices.
And when did we stop using it? Well, that's the thing. Most people have never heard of it, but we actually stopped using it relatively recently. It was only in the 1980s that Lauren started to be phased out and replaced by GPS, by satellite systems.
But back then, nobody even knew what GPS was. Either mobile phones then were so big you needed a car to fit them in. Nobody had invented unicorn coffee, so you didn't need to geotag your fry up and your mug of instant. But by the early noughties when we started to integrate GPS technology into our phones, we just assumed that that was the system that had always been there.
If you're listening to this show and wondering where we are, I can confidently say that we're all lost. Maybe not physically, but definitely spiritually. After the break, I promise to stop Matt talking about GPS. Stay tuned, BFM 89.9.
Breaking Financial Matters, BFM 89.9. And we're back. It's fun Friday. Matt is Matt's complaining about old tech is better than new tech.
And before the break, we spent far too much time talking about navigation systems or GPS. Matt, can we now put them to bid? Nearly. I'm very nearly done.
The EU has spent $10 billion on its GPS system, Galileo. Lauren is very cheap. It uses radio masks. Best of all, it uses powerful signals with a long wavelength.
So if you want to jam that signal, you're going to need something huge and bulky. So if I go back to the original point, it's that we replaced a really robust and accurate navigation system with something that was state-of-the-art really complicated, very expensive, and easy to compromise. So if you're looking at reasons not to replace something, that's pretty much a comprehensive list of the things you shouldn't do. Okay, so can we just junk the satellites and go back to Lauren?
There are a few pilot schemes going on in the UK at the moment, which are trying to resurrect the system and then you version called e-Laurin. The US has passed legislation which gives $10 million of research funding into new Lauren systems as well. The biggest problem is that most countries have turned off their old Lauren transmitters. And rather than mothball them so that they could resurrect them if they needed to do, some EU countries, faced with enormous amounts that they've spent on Galileo, namely $10 million, have simply blown up the old masks so that resurrecting them isn't an option.
I know there's a point lurking in there somewhere. It's that satellite positioning has become our standard technology. We would rather trust a disc perched in space than a mast outside our house. Even when you can demonstrate that that mast is just as accurate and far more robust, we trust something that we can't see or touch rather than something that we can fix with a screwdriver and a wrench.
We make the reflex assumption that the new technology has to be better, because it replaced the old technology, we can't be seen to be going backward. What else have you replaced with an inferior version? Well, don't worry. I'm not going to say something stupid like music was better when it was on vinyl or cassette or CD or when we had VHS recorders.
The way we consume music and TV and video and film and all that stuff to date is fantastic. I love vinyl and CDs, but if you ask me to choose between them and the streaming services, I don't even need to think about it. It's the global jukebox in my pocket every time. But the phone that we use to listen to that music and watch those videos on isn't necessarily the greatest way of making calls.
The landline? Well, whenever you watch one of those disaster movies, and I went to see skyscraper last week, cliche, dumb, riddled with butt holes, and all the more enjoyable for all of those things, it was awesome. There's a point in most disaster movies when everyone's phones fail. The power goes out and the cell transmitters go dead.
Well, guess what? That doesn't happen with landlines. Those old couple wire systems use so little electricity that they keep working as long as the wires aren't cut. Most of us, though, who still have landlines, even those lines are now mostly digital, they use the same connectivity as the internet.
And of course, that makes sense. It makes the calls cheap. It's digital, so cool quality is high. And we need that internet infrastructure.
So why pay extra to maintain a costly and parallel telephone system? Because we need a backup when things go wrong. Yeah, sometimes it's good to have that simple and robust system, like with Lauren, rather than GBS. So when phone networks were first installed, there were actually a lot of competing systems.
Certainly in the US, I think it was only after the Second World War that the phone companies started to consolidate and harmonize the networks. And in fact, some of the earliest telephone systems cut out telephone companies completely. It was a model that didn't work so well for cities, but in the countryside, one thing they had a lot of was wire, fencing stretched for mile after mile after mile. And your telephone signal could be sent along the barbed wire that kept your cattle in the field.
You know, admittedly, it was more of a party line. You pick up the phone and you'll be able to hear anyone who's using the system at the same time. But that's how simple a functional telephone system can be. Rather than the one that we have right now, they rely on electricity to power the phones then and also the transmission systems.
Yeah, you know, and we can do a lot more with our phones now, because they're really miniature computers. But in terms of the basic ideas of making calls on a robust infrastructure, you can argue that we've taken a step back. And it's the same thing with a lot of our electronic devices. Regular listeners will know that I love my smartwatches, but are they really better at telling the time than a wind up analog or quartz watch?
I've been reading a lot of magical realism fiction recently, nothing weird, standard stuff, you know, police procedurals with wizards, alcoholic fairies, you know, every day, every day tales of super natural country folk. But in one of the series, analog watches are a sign that someone may be a magic practitioner, because magic blows up electronic circuits. This is the first time we've had to tell you, man, magic isn't real. Once again, you've fallen into my cunning trap.
No, I know magic isn't real, but there is something that's almost magical and definitely unreal about my smartwatch. It needs another invisible wizard, which is electricity to cast its spell before it exists. You know, we have that old saying, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But with an uncharged smartwatch, all you've got is an ugly bracelet.
Now, I can't be all about electricity. Well, it isn't away. Earlier this week, I needed to leave a note for someone. It wasn't somebody I knew.
I didn't have their phone number or contacts. I just needed to leave a simple note saying I'd be back to see them in a couple of hours. So I reached into my bag, I grabbed a pen, and I realized I had nothing to write on, because generally for work, I take all my notes on my computer on my phone. And I've become a lot more slack about carrying a physical notebook.
The only piece of paper I had was the takeaway menu that someone had pressed on me as I was walking through more early that day. And obviously, I couldn't leave the person a note on my phone. And I certainly wasn't going to leave them a note scrawled in the margins of some menu. That's fine.
They're always going to be gaps in the technology. And I'm assuming that no one died because you didn't have a note pad? Sure. I mean, I left the child tethered to a counter with its asthma medication around its neck.
So I'm sure everything was fine. But you know, how much simpler would it have been if I'd just had paper and pen? It's great that society is a lot less reliant on paper because that's great for the environment. But a system that served us really well in however many iterations for thousands of years since we first learned to autograph rocks isn't something that we should dismiss quite so lightly.
How do you feel about combustion engines? Surely replacing them with electric drivetrins is the way forward. Well, it is. But I'm still really conflicted.
You know, I think we're at that point where a hybrid is probably the most practical compromise. We're really good at making combustion engines. We've been doing it for around 150 years. We haven't got anywhere close to winding the kinks out of the electric motor, especially when it comes to battery packs that can catch fire.
Last year, I think, an electric supercar that was being featured on the car show, Grand Tour, crashed and caught fire. And apparently it burned for days because the lithium cells burned in a chain reaction. They didn't catch fire at once. So fires would spring up after everyone thought they'd been put out.
And I've got to be honest, I've never thought that electric cars were anything but a stopgap solution on the path to a better and greener transport solution. Are there any examples where people are dumping the supposedly better technology for the old drive and trusted? Yeah, books. It seems that ebook readers are only popular with middle-aged folks like me.
Book sales have been picking up. It seems that the supposedly attention poor millennials love the physicality of books. And I can understand that. Books are nicer to hold and read than ebooks.
That said, ebooks and audio books are the only way I can read. So I don't want to see that technology disappear. But another technology that has gone backwards in a way and one that might surprise people is actually air travel. Are you about to slam budget airlines?
God, no. We may not like them, but they've changed our lives, mostly for the better, not just because we can now afford cheap getaways to previously unimaginable places, but because they really are allowing everyone to fly to paraphrase a certain airline. That makes it much easier for foreign workers to go home, for people to be more connected to families as those families disperse and spread and the physical distance between them grows. But most people won't know that a lot of airplanes are slower than they were two or three decades ago, and we've practically given up on commercial supersonic travel.
That's because it's so expensive. Well, yeah, modern jets have traded efficiency and increased load for lower speeds, and that efficiency and extra capacity has helped budget airlines and other airlines to reduce ticket costs. I mean, practically to let them plummet. Most people will be happy to spend an extra 30 minutes or an hour on a flight if the ticket price has halved in real-term.
So before we wrap up, can you give us one more backwards technology that people still seem to love? Yeah, I've got one which brings us back around to Lauren and GPS, and that of course is us, radio. And weirdly, as we were coming into the studio today, we were told that the studio was being taken apart and dismantled because we're moving to shiny new studios in a few weeks time. And that's kind of cool.
It's kind of sad as well. A lot of the stuff that we've been using for the last kind of 10 years is just going to be recycled and used for parts. But the radio continues. And you know, we're in this internet age, we have TV and movies on demand, we have streaming music, and here we still are.
People listening to nothing but our voices, even though we're in the middle of this multimedia age. And yes, I know a lot of people are listening to us online, but the principle is still the same. You know, we're hardly a potpourri for anyone's senses. And better still, because of podcasting, we can share these stories with listeners all over the world and they can listen to them at their own time zones.
They don't have to be tuning in when we broadcast live. And here radio still is. No matter what technology is thrown at it, it's endured, it's prospered, this radio station's moving to a new studio, and everything is still looking fit for the future. Guess what?
You might be right then, you know, old tech is better tech. Anyways, culture box, man, amity, we'll be back with Dixbox after this, also you can check out culturepops.com for transcripts of the shows. And you can also find out how to bring a little bit of Matt's blaming to your company. If you missed any parts of this episode, you can download the podcast at dfm.my or get the app, you know, digital age, digital radio, bfm.my or the Apple App Store, or Google Play, we'll be right back.
89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the business station.