I'm skeptical there's anyone alive who made an analog phone call over thousands of miles. Local calls yes, but even so I'm pretty old and I never made one because I had no friends on the same CO as my parents' house.
He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was all-analog? You would have had to be making LD calls in the 1970s probably.
East Coast of the US to London, UK, in the early 1980s. Over three thousand miles. Quite expensive. Quality was dreadful.