1124 – Do Connections Right: Tom talks Bluetooth Survival Guide

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode of Screw the Commute, Tom Antion explains how Bluetooth works, common problems users experience, and practical ways to improve reliability.
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What Bluetooth Is
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless communication technology that uses low-power radio signals (primarily in the 2.4 GHz band) to connect devices such as:
• Smartphones
• Earbuds and headphones
• Speakers
• Keyboards and mice
• Smartwatches
• Hearing aids
• Car audio systems
Typical range is about 33 feet (10 meters), although real-world performance is often less.
Origin of the Name
The term Bluetooth comes from Harald Bluetooth Gormsson, a Scandinavian king whose nickname was "Bluetooth" because of a discolored tooth.
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Pairing Explained
Bluetooth devices must first be paired, which:
1. Creates a connection between two devices.
2. Stores that connection in memory so they can reconnect automatically later.
When pairing information becomes corrupted, devices may need to be removed and paired again.
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Common Bluetooth Problems and Fixes
1. Too Many Saved Devices
Problem:
Devices remember old pairings that are no longer used.
Fix:
• Remove unused devices.
• Use the "Forget Device" option.
• Reboot devices if connections become unstable.
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2. One Device Connected to Too Many Things
Problem:
Headphones or earbuds may be paired with:
• Phone
• TV
• Car
• Computer
• Tablet
This can cause:
• Random switching
• Audio interruptions
• Connection confusion
Fix:
• Disconnect unused devices.
• Disable multipoint connections if problems occur.
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3. Good Music Quality but Poor Zoom Call Quality
Problem:
Bluetooth headsets with both speakers and microphones often switch into a lower-bandwidth mode during calls.
Symptoms:
• Music sounds excellent.
• Zoom or video calls sound poor.
Fixes:
• Use Bluetooth only for listening.
• Use a separate microphone for speaking.
• In Zoom:
o Disable Auto Volume.
o Set microphone volume manually.
o Change Noise Suppression from Auto to Low.
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4. Unreliable Connections
Bluetooth shares radio frequencies with many devices, including:
• Wi-Fi networks
• Microwave ovens
• Smart home equipment
• Cordless devices
• Other Bluetooth devices
This can create radio interference.
Fixes:
• Turn off unnecessary devices.
• Move to another location.
• Reduce nearby wireless traffic.
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5. Distance and Obstructions
Bluetooth performance is affected by:
• Walls
• Metal objects
• Water
• Human bodies
A notable point:
Since the human body is mostly water, carrying a phone in a back pocket can weaken the signal to earbuds because the signal must travel through the body.
Fixes:
• Keep phone and Bluetooth device closer together.
• Use front pockets instead of back pockets.
• Buy higher-quality devices with better antennas.
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6. Car Bluetooth Issues
Common causes include:
• Old firmware
• Older Bluetooth standards
• Aggressive auto-connect settings
Symptoms:
• Calls unexpectedly switch to the car.
• Devices reconnect when not wanted.
Fixes:
• Update vehicle firmware if possible.
• Disable automatic connection features.
• Manually select the desired device.
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Best Practices for Better Bluetooth Performance
Keep Firmware Updated
Update:
• Earbuds
• Headphones
• Phones
• Computers
• Vehicle systems (if supported)
________________________________________
Rename Devices Clearly
Instead of:
• iPhone 1
• iPhone 2
Use descriptive names like:
• Tom's iPhone
• Podcast Headphones
• Suburban Stereo
This reduces connection mistakes.
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Avoid Pairing Everything to Everything
Only pair devices that you actually use together.
More connections = more opportunities for confusion.
________________________________________
Reboot When Problems Appear
Many Bluetooth issues disappear after:
• Restarting the phone
• Restarting the computer
• Power cycling the Bluetooth device
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Keep Batteries Charged
Low battery levels can reduce Bluetooth performance and stability.
________________________________________
Things Bluetooth "Hates"
According to Tom, Bluetooth performs poorly around:
• Walls
• Water
• Metal
• Human bodies
• Cheap electronics
• Crowded wireless environments
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Key Takeaway
Bluetooth is generally reliable when:
• Devices are updated.
• Old pairings are removed.
• Batteries are charged.
• Interference is minimized.
• Devices are not overloaded with unnecessary connections.
Most Bluetooth problems can be solved by:
1. Removing unused pairings.
2. Rebooting devices.
3. Reducing interference.
4. Keeping devices physically closer together.
5. Using better-quality hardware.
The episode serves as a practical, non-technical guide for improving everyday Bluetooth performance and troubleshooting common connectivity issues.

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Episode 1124 – Bluetooth Survival Guide
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1124 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today is going to be your Bluetooth survival guide. Bluetooth is something that, well, not too many know exactly what's going on. I can't claim that I do either, but I'm going to tell you how to use it, how to improve it, what to do when something goes wrong, why it goes wrong, things like that. All right, hope you missed episode 1123. That was how to borrow money when you should, when you shouldn't. What's good debt and what's dumb debt. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, the episode number. How to borrow money was 1123. All right, pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest. And I always am reminding people until I get episode four or version 4.0 out. Is that short keys that I have been promoting forever that saves you millions of keystrokes is not a program anymore. It's a browser extension, but it's still powerful as all get out. All right, let's talk about Bluetooth. Here's a little bit of trivia. The the name Bluetooth came from a 10th century Scandinavian king who had what appeared to be a dead tooth that looked kind of blue. His name was Harald Bluetooth. That was his nickname Gormsson. And Harold is spelled HARALD. It's a cute story if you want to read about it, but that's where the term came from.
[00:02:07] The guys that were developing this were reading about this, and they just needed a name for it. They called it Bluetooth. All right. So what is it? Well, basically it's a short range, very short range wireless technology. It's low power. It's a radio wave and it's used to connect gadgets like smartphones and headphones and keyboards and smart home appliances. And it goes only up to around 33ft. Now there's some times it'll go further. Sometimes it won't even go from your back pocket to your mouth or to your head. All right. So. So it's got some quirks that we're going to talk about today. So it's used for audio like to take wireless earbuds or headphones or speakers. Even hearing aids are using Bluetooth and connect them to phones and TVs so that you don't have to have any wires. It's also used to connect things, what they call peripherals, like your mouse or your keyboard or your printers to your computer. Now, in your car, it helps with hands free calling and then sending the music from your your car's stereo system to your headphones or earbuds. And it's used quite a bit in health and fitness, like heart rate monitors and smart watches connected to your cell phone. Now, the first thing you got to understand about this is, you know, because some people have never even done this before and they don't have any idea what they're doing.
[00:03:51] So when you get one of these devices, it's going to say, well, you got to pair it. It's called pairing. Pairing. And that's basically connecting some of your things together, whichever you want to connect. But the second part of that is it remembers the connection. So you only. Well, I'm putting air quotes around it. You only have to do it once until it messes up. And then you got to do it again. All right. But that's what you're doing. You're connecting two devices. Now I'm going to go through a bunch of the troubles and why they occur and what you can do about them. And then at the end, I'll give you a bunch of just general things that can make your Bluetooth experience way, way better than, than it may be right now. Or if you haven't done this at all, you can get started on the right foot. Okay, so here's some troubles. Well, too many remembered devices. So you got you've done a whole bunch of different devices paired and maybe you don't use them. They're old and you, you leave them there in your devices. So no, you don't want to do that. Or you have a corrupt connection that's easy to fix by rebooting. Maybe you have old firmware. People don't keep up to date with their stuff, especially in your car, because I don't even know how to do it in my car.
[00:05:22] Or sometimes it's only like a little dirty connection on your, uh, like a little corrosion or something on your device that your headphones or earbuds or something where the battery hooks in or I don't even know. And one of the other big troubles is one device is trying to connect to multiple things. Now, this is a good thing. And if you're not having trouble, great, don't mess with it. But a typical thing would be that you try to connect your earphones to your car, to your cell phone to your TV at home, your computer at home, and you've got all these things connected to one device. And if it's working fine for you, don't mess with it. But if it isn't, that's a different story. You might have to disconnect some of them because your device can't handle it, or your situation or your environment can't handle it. Where do you hear about some of the things that affect Bluetooth? And an example of a piece of trouble is maybe your earbuds connect to your spouse's cell phone. All right. That can be that could be bad depending on what you're doing. All right. So here's another trouble. It might sound great. Your let's say your headphones or your earbuds sound great for music, but terrible on Zoom calls.
[00:06:49] Well, maybe it's not earbuds on your Zoom calls. Maybe you use a headset, let's say. And what happens is, is most headsets that have both a boom mic or like a microphone and the and the speakers in the same device, they switch to a low bandwidth mode. And so you're saying, man, when I listen to music, it's awesome. But when I try to get on a Zoom call with the same headset, it really sucks. Well, the reason I mean, the expected reason is, is that one device is trying to go two different directions instead of just hearing things. That's one direction. You're sending things back to your computer. That's two directions. So an easy fix for that is you just listen. Or you could listen on your headset, but you go into Zoom and on the microphone settings, either set it to your, um, you know, your internal Laptop, microphone, or it's always best to have a separate microphone, either a lavalier or like I'm using a studio microphone here. That way the Bluetooth is only working in one direction and that usually takes care of it. So other some other things you can do, especially on Zoom, is you can disable, you go into the settings for the audio and you disable auto volume as you're going to use a microphone and set it yourself. And then from the noise suppression, I believe the default is, is auto noise suppression.
[00:08:36] Switch it to low. And if you do these things, you'll probably get a beautiful signal now or sound quality on your Zoom calls or any other streaming kind of stuff you're doing. Okay. Another trouble is that your Bluetooth is unreliable. Well, okay. Let's see some of the reasons that this could happen. Well, Bluetooth shares, your WiFi, microwave ovens affected smart home stuff. Devices affect it. Other cordless devices or other Bluetooth devices near it. And it's on the 2.4GHz range, which is not the latest like the five gigahertz. I mean, 2.4 and five is a lot of the Wi-Fi has both of them now, but the Bluetooth, um, the latest information I got is it works on the 2.4. And when all this stuff is, is competing, it's kind of like an electronic rush hour. Something's got to give. All right. So one thing you can do is turn off the other devices when you have trouble. Now you know your microwave. It's probably only going to bother you when it's running. Okay. But other things might be running continuously and and bother them. So. See what other devices you have that you could turn off that you're not using regularly. And also another thing is just move to a different location. Okay. That'll that'll help out. Now distance. How far will your Bluetooth work? Well, you might have walls in between you.
[00:10:24] You might have a cheaper device that has a poor antenna. Where do you hear this one? You might have trouble if you stick your cell phone in your back pocket, as opposed to your front or, like, lapel pocket. Why? Well, Bluetooth hates water. And so your body is mostly water, right? So if you put your cell phone in your back pocket, it has to the signal has to go through your body, which is full of water and that can that can mess up your your reception, even turning your head. If, if you have, um, a device in your ear and you turn it one direction, it could be further away from your cell phone and have to go through your head and your, and your, which is water to see. So those kind of things can mess it up and cheap. You know, you should if you're going to use Bluetooth, you really need to use reliable devices because you can get super cheap stuff that claims to be Bluetooth, but the electronics is super, super cheap and crappy, and it's probably going to cause you a lot of trouble. Now, another trouble is I mentioned earlier about multi connections or multi-point connections to many other devices. And this can it's like, like I said, your your earbuds are connected to four, five, six, seven different sources. And what you can get is random switching between the sources.
[00:12:04] If you're close, you could get pauses in the reception interrupted audio. So if there's trouble, usually you can turn off what they call multipoint, especially if you don't need it. See. And another thing that happens, you might get out of your car and walking away from your car on a cell phone call, and then all of a sudden the call got switched back to your car, right? And you're walking through the parking lot and wondering what the heck happened, say. So some of the things you just want to turn off multipoint and cars can be particularly difficult because who. Who ever updates the firmware in their car unless it does it automatically. See? So you might have old Bluetooth standards. See, Bluetooth started just totally pitiful and it's evolved over the years. So if your car is older and is using an old standard, you're going to have trouble. Your car may have what they call aggressive auto connect. In other words, it's going to grab hard to get the signal into the car rather than other places you might want it to be. So you might have to figure out how to turn that off in your particular car or. Yeah, I mean, that's a tough one. Uh, cars typically, you know, can have weird firmware in them that's only proprietary to that brand of car, let's say.
[00:13:40] So you might want to disable auto connect on your, the device you're trying to use so that you're not running into these problems. Or you can. If you have the problem, then you can reduce it by disabling auto connection. In other words, you have to tell it what device you want to connect to. Here's a bunch of just simple things that will make your life easier with Bluetooth. Rename your devices and then pair them again with the new name. But make sure the name is really clear. Um, don't put iPhone one and iPhone two. Okay, so maybe I might have Tom's iPhone podcast headphone suburban stereo. So so you don't have similar words in the name. I know that sounds crazy, but that can help knock out problems and keep your firmware updated on all your devices that you possibly can. You're here, your earbuds, your headphones, and so forth, and avoid paring everything to everything. Thinking, oh, I'll be ready for wherever I go because you might just be asking for problems, especially if some of the things you do, if you're on the road all the time, there's no reason for you to have your your home smartphone. I mean, not smartphone. Your home TV and home computer connected. Just turn them off. If you're going to be on a road trip or something, and then use the forget device function because a lot of people have really old stuff that they haven't used for years, still stuck in the the memory of their phone.
[00:15:34] So go to that item and forget that device. In other words, eliminate it from the device. And sometimes it's just like our computers. Sometimes, you know, if this Mac, that doesn't give me much problem at all. But if it starts acting wonky, I just reboot. And that a lot of times fixes everything. Uh, same with a PC. Just reboot first and then see what happens if the problem is gone. You just cleaned up the bunch of messy cobwebs electronic cobwebs inside the device. Now here's some things that Bluetooth hates. It hates walls. It hates water. Remember, you're made up mostly of water. It hates metal, and it hates human meat. In other words, you know, if you put your devices have to go through you, then it's it can be trouble. And then also avoid cheap devices. Use only reputable devices, especially if this is really important to you. Uh, don't leave everything in pairing mode forever, especially if you're in some kind of public environment. Somebody else can pair with your stuff. See? So be careful there and understand that in crowded places, it's like a giant electronic traffic jam. You're likely to have troubles that you might not be able to fix. And lastly, keep everything that you're using as charged up as possible because low battery life can also affect Bluetooth.
[00:17:22] So. So this is a good primer. I mean, you can go really, really deep into Bluetooth stuff. But hopefully these things that I just outlined for you will make your Bluetooth life way, way better. Just like I would make your life way, way better if you got into my mentor program. How'd you like that segue there? Because we help you one on one and exactly on your problems. We don't lump you in with a bunch of people, so check it out at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com. And if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to my school, the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world, certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning, and it'll probably save you a couple hundred grand by, you know, either going to or sending one of your loved ones to one of these, uh, four year indoctrination camps. And then they end up competing for jobs. I usually say it's Starbucks, but, you know, Burger King has an aggressive hiring program too. So all right, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Uh, go out there and, uh, hopefully you don't turn blue from using your Bluetooth. All right, catch you later.