How could you ever bet against humanity?

Put humans on a rock and give them sticks and water, and 10,000 years later, they somehow make Bluetooth. When we connect our AirPods to our phone and press play, somehow our AirPods are able to pull music out of thin air. This is no short of pure magic. Let's put on some special glasses to see what the AirPods are receiving when we press play. When you press play, your phone turns the song into ones and zeros and send them to your AirPods' radio waves.

These waves sit outside of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to our eyes, so they're invisible to us and these waves are long enough to penetrate walls. Your phone sends a slightly higher frequency wave to represent a 1 and a lower frequency wave to represent a 0. Your AirPods read about a million of these every second and turns these waves back into

your song. But the waves from your AirPods aren't the only thing that's in the air. On a crowded train, every phone, every pair of earbuds and the train's WiFi are sending waves just like yours, all in the same narrow slice of radio. If your phone sends your whole song along one channel, another wave would eventually crash into it and your music would cut out.

So Bluetooth splits that slice into 79 separate frequencies and cuts your song into thousands of tiny pieces. Your phone sends each piece to a different frequency, jumping to a new one up to 1600 times per second, and your AirPods make the same jump. If another wave crashes into one of these frequencies, it destroys the single piece sent

there and your phone simply sends that piece again in the next jump But that creates a new problem If your phone jumps frequency 1600 times per second how does your AirPod know how to keep up When your phone and AirPods first connect your phone sends them two things Its address, a number no other phone has, and the exact time on the clock.

Both devices feed those two variables into the same formula and out comes the same list of lanes. From then on, both move down that list together, landing on the same lane every jump. But there's a catch. Your phone sends the address and clock in the open air. So an eavesdropper sitting on the train could catch them, run the same formula,

and follow your music from lane to lane, so your phone needs to scramble your music with a secret code. When you first pair, your phone and AirPods each pick a secret color that only they know. Out loud, they agree on a starting color, like green, and the device's mix is a secret color into the green and sends the mix color to the other.

Then, each add its own secret color to the mix it receives. The result is the same final color that becomes a secret code for their communication. The eavesdropper saw both mixes during the exchange, but you can't unmix paint, so it can never figure out what the final color is. Instead of colors though, your phone and AirPods use this very large number that will be used to encrypt and decrypt every message that it exchanges.

So every time you press play, your phone turns your song into a million ones and zeros per second, scrambles them with a code that only your AirPods know, and jump between 79 channels a thousand six hundred times per second to deliver the music to your ears. All of this began with sticks, rocks, and the ingenuity of the human mind.