Bittersweet Infamy - #148 - Get Ur Phreak On

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Josie tells Taylor about phone phreaking, a.k.a. hacking the phone lines, and how it became part of the history of telecommunications in North America.

Welcome to Bittersweet and Feud. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and in me. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet.

Josie, your rapist president is hassling Canada again. Apologize. I'm so sorry. Why did you do this to us, Josie? We thought we were friends, eh? I know. I know. about knocked our tukes clean off with these tariffs.

It's rude stuff. It's really rude. It's rude stuff. An American. Down right. An American. The gist of it is that Trump came with a bunch of, hey, let me control who you trade with. And by the way, do you want to be our vassal state shit? Carney took a walk. And now here we are. How's it feeling down there? I mean, there's a lot of shit. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just, it's a fucking. mess. I feel like some of the tariff news isn't quite getting into the local news down here. Yeah, no, it's crazy how little Americans, no disrespect. How little Americans seem to know about, like, let's say why the negotiations broke down. Right. And I think it might be different if we were like in Michigan or Minnesota or North Dakota, where the main trading partners are with Canada, but, you know, our main training partners, Mexico. So that might attribute a little bit to it. But even still, it's national news. It's not regional news. It's a national issue. But you know, Josie, I have some good news.

Did you say you have some canoes? Is this canoe related? Sort of in that it's Canadian news. That's specifically canoe related, but it could be some canoeing. Okay. We've been chatting about doing a little trip up to the Yukon next year because I so enjoyed it. And don't hold us to this. You know, we've made travel plans before that have fallen through. But I want you to know that I was watching a YouTube video of this nice. American gentleman who hadn't been out of the United States before and his first time was driving up

to Nelson B.C. Oh, lovely. Good spot. Good spot. Lovely. Lovely. But he was so concerned that Canadians were basically going to jump him on site and much like yourself, he'd be like, doly so. Oh, yeah. If you beat the shit out of me, I'd see where that would come from. And so of course, the comments are full of people being like, no, man, don't worry. Come up here. Enjoy yourself. Thank you for, you know, thank you for being a good guest and promoting our country and so on. Yeah. I was in the comments of that, and I mentioned that we were going to be doing this Yukon trip with potentially with some friends from Texas. Someone from the Yukon was like, you tell your Texan friends, y'all come over here. Y'all come on over here.

Yeah. Y'all come. Aw. I'm excited for the Yukon. I'm going to. Yeah. Y'all come up here. Did I ever tell you my mom used to throw these parties when she was in college and they were called y'all come parties?

It's just anybody, everybody, y'all come. Doesn't matter. Y'all come. Does she give you like a hand job to help with that? I think that's the like underlying tone, like the little joke. But, uh, right. No, I think that. Well, I don't know.

I wasn't there for those parties. Good. Good. I will neither confirm nor deny. I do not know. I do not know. How about we chat about how we've been lately? At some point,

we should just say how we've been lately. Do you have you been? I've been good how you been. I've been okay. Did you all get the Percy had meteor shower down there? I don't think so. At least if we did, I didn't see it. Rui and I went to go like Mission BC area to go kind of like lie down in a park and catch the Percy and Meish.

But everybody was, this was so popular. It was like basically a festival atmosphere, but it's people lying down. in the dark in a park at one in the morning. It was really interesting. Wow, that's like rapture shit. That's cool. It was. It was. And you'd see like, speaking of rapture, you'd see, like, there were some that were very, very faint and you had to really squint to see them. But every now and then, you'd get a really fucking bright one crack across the sky. And you just hear the wave of people in this line going, ooh. It was cool. It was fun. Oh, that's so cool. It may have been down here. I guess I could look it up. But Houston light pollution is pretty gnarly. So,

We had to get out of pretty much any city. You can't be near a city. You have to be like in an agricultural area. And then Houston is like the size of Delaware. So then it's kind of like, well, Delaware missed it, you know. How have things been down in Houston? I believe it's pronounced. Yes, in Houston.

That's an interesting way to say it because we have been looking for new houses. You picked up what I was putting down. That's cool. That's cool. Yes, we are looking to move within the city. but finding a spot that has two toilets would be great. Is that what it is? That's the dream.

It's a two toilet dream. So do you want them to be in the same bathroom, like facing each other? No, facing away, but like a... Like a love seat. Yeah, like a love seat, but, you know, like... I know, yes. Like there's an S, there's an S. And you're each in like a little look of the S.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. We're in the same sheet of music. Yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah. Same sheet of toilet paper. Really, yeah. So what are you looking for in?

your new place. Are you limiting yourself to houses, for example? Yes. We live in a little house now and a little bungalow. And we're looking for kind of like another little bungalow, but just not as little. Got it's the size. You've outgrown it. It'd be really great to have a guest room that is like just a guest room and then an office and then our own bedroom.

Right, right. I live in a studio apartment, Josie. I have one other room. It's the bathroom. Yeah. With how many toilets though? Yeah. Four or five, honestly.

couple urinals on the wall, too. It's great. You can make a toilet out of anything. Tampon machine. Yeah, yeah. The works. Place to put your sharps, no judgment, no judgment. Be safe. It's important to be safe. Yeah. Take a condom on the way out. No, I think some of it is like if my mom comes and stays for longer, then she can like actually stay in the house. Yeah, that makes sense. We've been in this house since 2019. So it's been a minute. Yeah, a long time now. Yeah, we like it, but it's also like, yeah, we just need another toilet.

Fairfax. There's just things that, like, the bathroom probably needs a refresh. Like, the tiles are cracking and, like, the shower just, like, can't get clean anymore. You know what I mean? There's just stuff that, like, if we weren't here, our landlords would probably update, do a few refreshes. But I think because we are here. So basically, you're letting this house become its best self. This is selfless.

We're doing it for the house. It's like when Ash released Butterfree and Pokemon, you know, if it's love, they'll come back. Yeah. That kind of thing. One time, Corey Basso was trying to undermine me to Dan. So he told Dan Taylor cried when Ash released his Butterfree, but the joke was on him because Dad doesn't know what the fuck that means. That was gibberish to him. You might as well have said, Fleepey didn't get her nor be.

He doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about. He doesn't know who Butterfree is, you fucking clown. I just, for some reason, I went the whole opposite direction. I was like, and then a single T. fell down Dan's face when he heard the news. Oh, no, fuck that shit. I'm still a weeper. I still like to, I still like a good cry when I'm watching a TV show.

It's important. It's good. Squeeze a few out, you know? That's what I say all the time. I got it on a monogrammed handkerchief. Speaking of monogrammed handkerchiefs, did you get one for your birthday? You just had a birthday, birthday boy. Oh, fuck. Josie, you're so good at Sags now.

Sags. I've learned from the best. You're the Seggmaster. Thank you, thank you. You've been sitting under the learning tree. Sorry about all the rotten fruit, man. I thought someone's going to come clean it, but, you know, booking. That's how you learn. Yeah, I did have a birthday, the Big 3-7. Big 3-7. How does it feel?

You know, I'm lucky that people often tell me, and this sounds like such a fucking wank, but it's true. People often tell me that I don't seem to be as old as I am. Because you're so immature. Whether or not that's a compliment. But point being, I'm quite fortunate that people are like, oh, you don't look 37 or you don't. You don't. I pegged you for like a dude. I thank you.

I appreciate it. What's your skincare teen? Don't go outside. Don't have any friends and don't go outside. Beautiful. That's my skin care. Wow. Yeah.

It works. The system works. I had a clue themed birthday party. So fucking bad. R.P. Tim Curry. And this was right before his birthday birthday birthday birthday birthday. I killed him. I'm sorry.

No, he felt he could. good release. Once you had done that, he was like, finally, he let go. He died the day after my birthday is the thing, so. Yeah. Kind of, yeah. Not me taking credit for fucking Tim Curry's death. Calm down, Taylor. The... Credit. Uh-oh. Oh, yeah, I know. I know. It's a weird move all around. The party was just come over, play all the different versions of Clue I have with me because you need X amount of people to play clear. You need six. So it's like, let's play Simpsons Clue. Let's play Golden Girl's Clue. It was great. Golden Girls Clue's fun. Yeah, which one's the most fun?

You know what? I'm such a sucker for classic clue. Yeah. I think it's like a perfect formula. It's just hard enough that you're not going to win every time, but it rewards you for paying attention, these sorts of things. I love the entire trappings of it. I have the little weapons tattooed on the back of my leg. I love those little weapons. I love it. If you're wondering about the order, it's rope wrench lead pipe, revolver knife, candlestick. Oh, wow. The chapters of your memoir. Think about it. Yes. Oh, fuck yes. Yeah. In a time of AI. handmade things are king and I really wanted to express gratitude to my guests for coming to my party. So I hand-painted each of them a masquerade mask in the color and theme of the character that they

were arriving as, which it was just like wear the color of your character. You don't have to dress all up, but like wear purple if you're plum, et cetera. And people did. Though somebody really dressed up, did they not? Rui kicked the show. And I specifically requested this too. And without hesitation, Rui agreed. Love it. Rui decided that they were going to be Mrs. White. Uh-huh. And I said, Rui, if you're Mrs. White, will you come as a sexy cat boy maid?

And that's what I got, Rui. And, like, looking fab with, like, shaved long, beautiful legs. Oh. In a slutty maid outfit, like, crotch length. Yeah. With little furry paws and little furry ears. Little Frank Shamed. It was amazing.

Wow. One of my favorite birthday, I guess I've got. Get you one of those. Yeah. Get you one of those. That's amazing. Look in a treat. As good as I've ever seen, Rue.

look, honestly. That's so nice. Wow. Oh, what a gift. Yeah. But yeah, at point being, I got to use the Poskas on the masks. I say it's always a good day when you get to use the Paskas. Amen. Amen, brother. But yeah, I had a lot of fun doing that. And thank you so much to my friends. I feel very grateful to be among Fuenes these days. You have friends. See? I know. Just a couple. Just a couple, but they come to my Clue Party. That's the skincare routine. Is a couple good friends that'll come to your clue party. The act of going through the deduction, it keeps your brain young, which keeps your body young. Yes, yes. Take it from Miss Scarlett. Yeah. Sexy femme fatale, right? That's me all over. Yeah. So, let's do a little bit of housekeeping, okay? Okay, I'm ready. You filthy animals,

let's do some fucking cleanup. Okay. We'll dive into our usual promo for the film club, etc. shortly, but before we can go there, got a little couple of housekeeping notes as I used to call them when I would do like cabaret, I'm seeing. It'd be like, hey, just a couple housekeeping notes here, gang. The bathroom is... No shoes on the couches. Out to the left. Yeah.

Yeah. Gender neutral. Gender neutral washrooms down into the left. Please put your phones on silent and enjoy this reading of 20-year-old grad students. Still got it. Still fucking got it. So, first of all, new episodes of the podcast. Famously, in the past, we have been biweekly in the way that means once every two weeks.

Yeah, in that one. Not the other way to say biweekly, which means the complete opposite. Which is stupid. Nowadays, I think I'm going to update our little description on the side to say episodes released as soon as they're finished, semicolon, check back on Sunday. Because I still think we should release on Sundays, but lately it's been about every three weeks usually. And I think that's just a reflection of like the times, plus we kind of burned ourselves out on that last schedule. So we're taking a little bit this season to, you know, release things. in a way that we can assure that they are the quality that y'all deserve.

We want your listening experience to be easy listening, and part of that is, like, us doing it on a schedule that is sustainable with our lives, with our ever-growing and frightening lives. Yeah, terrible, terrible economy. Housekeeping note number two. Whoa. We've been letting the towels pile up. We've been letting the sheets be ruffled. We need housekeeping.

Get our shit in order. Stanky in here. Josie, when they announced that Survivor 50 was going to be all returning players, they still hadn't yet aired Survivor 49. So when you were listening to Survivor 49, there was sort of this idea of like watching, whatever, fuck you. There was sort of this idea that, you know, we're kind of really just waiting it out till 50. And in a lot of ways, our listeners are just waiting out us until 150, our landmark episode 150. Can you believe that shit? No.

Cool. So. Yes, and cool. And that's going to be a Josie episode. So this is your last episode before the Big 15. Josie, what can the listeners look forward to for episode 150? A little classic base foundation of what you've come to know and love from Bittersweet Infamy. And then a little like sprinkle seasoning.

powdered sugar, cheese, something fresh, something different, something like, what? cheese and sugar? This is wild. Have you ever had those corn dogs? The Korean ones that have sugar all over? They're fantastic. It's going to be like that. So a Korean, a Korean corn dog of an episode looking forward to.

Yes. Should say you may be used to us, our dedicated listeners, maybe used to us doing the melties every 50 episodes. We've decided that we're going to reserve that going forward for big round numbers. So, like, if we make it to 200, damn sure we're doing the melties. We're going to make it to 200. We're not going anywhere. But for 150, Josie's just bringing a damn good episode.

I'm bringing a damn good episode. Sweet and salty situation. Korean corned up. Point number three. Oh, yeah. If you are a listener who listens to the podcast specifically on Spotify, you may have noticed a couple of episodes are missing. They're not there.

We're looking at episode 141. Fresh one. It's the factor fiction. kidding around episode. It was my April Fool's episode, Deliverin'em to Josie. And 136, Mary Mishmus, where Mitchell's entire story kind of revolves around the Natalie and Bruglia song, Torn. Very good. You should go listen to this, not on Spotify, because we got copyright strike. And that's, it's educational. Natalie, Natalie, Natalie. Come on. I know it's not you, Natalie. I wouldn't hold that against you. She's sitting there fucking reporting individual users, dude. That's 100% what she's

doing. And then the wiggles, the fucking wiggles got us for the April Foolson. Yeah, yeah. Because I decided to include a brief post-credits clip of Bounce Your Balls. Was it worth it, Taylor, to bounce your balls? Yeah, kind of. Yeah, kind of. And then the other thing that we should say is, like, we could have appealed this, but both of us were too slow to, like, notice that the email had come in. So if you want to hear those great episodes, go to other streaming services. Really, really wild west out there for what people use for their podcast services. Hey? Yeah.

You'd think it would have been centralized by now. Apple Podcasts is probably the biggest. It's like bed sheets, though. You know, everybody has like the bed sheets they like or they're just kind of like, whatever, this one's on sale. You know, it's very personal. Pod Bay. Right.

Yeah. Very personal, but very different. Everyone's very different. Silk sheets. Some people enjoy a silk sheet. Preserve that curl pattern. Exactly. Point four out of four, thank you for hanging in there with me.

Give us a review. If you like us. If you like us. Yeah. If you don't, then stop listening. Don't leave us a review. Your life is precious. Goshess, dog.

Yeah, run around in a field. That will offer you far more than we can... Honestly, that's good advice for anybody. While we've still got the outdoors, while the data centers haven't ruined it yet. Don't worry about the review. Just go outside. Text grass.

That's fine. Yeah. Review that. Review that. Review that. Yeah. We want... If you love the show,

you leave us five stars on whatever your podcast services of choice. Please and thank you, and we appreciate it. It helps us get discovered. And if you're just like, I don't even know these words you're talking about. Tell a friend.

The good old-fashioned way. That's the best one. Honestly, word of mouth is the best one. Leave us a review, but before you leave us a review, tell a friend. That's the best one. Go get some grass. Yeah. Get some grass clippings.

Glue them to your body. Menace your friend as a grass monster, as a prank. And then when they're down on the ground screaming, you tell them about bittersweet infamy. Full fucking proof. Yes. Next profits. That's what happens.

Yeah. No. Josie, that's my fucking housekeeping. My housekeeping is done. I'm actually new in that same little like French maid outfit that Rui had on. Sexy maid, sexy maid outfit, absolutely. Bittersweet, uh, bittersweet infamy house cleaning. Well, I'm tired of fucking talking.

You want to take it away for the film club? I want to tell everybody about the film that we're watching this month because it is, in true standing with the show, it's bittersweet. Yeah. We mostly bitter. Well, yeah. There's a little sweetness because we get to watch the film Straight Talk, starring Dolly Parton. RIP. IP.

Beautiful big up on the screen, Dolly Parton. A whole movie that is basically to, like, showcase Dolly Parton being like winsome and charming. Isn't that nice? Exactly. Tune in on our coffee account so that you can hear not just us saying, hey, it's good, but we have more details. We have more intelligent and much like Dolly Parton's character, whimsical whimsies to say. Just because Cat has babies in the oven Don't make a biscuits. That's the kind of shit that we say over there.

Amen. This is honestly a movie that I'm so glad that we're doing because, shockingly, I would say I've watched this movie about four times. Like, this is probably my fourth time watching this movie. Oh, it's a great... It would always pop up on TV. And then every now and again, like, every like three or four years, they'll be like, I should watch Straight Talk. That's a good movie.

Yeah. A 1992 flick about Dolly Parton accidentally being mistaken. for a radio psychologist, and she takes over and gives people her wisdom, and Chicago falls in love, right? As do we all. As you do. Yeah. It is nice to see Dolly on the screen, and it's pretty sad that she's no longer with us. She's remembered as a musician so much, but she has a very likable screen presence as an actor as well. Totally. I mean, she's a fucking genius musician. I've really never seen an outpouring of grief like this for, like, any other celebrity in recent memory. People are, like, We're in day like three, four, people taking it real hard that Dolly is dead. That really, I guess, speaks to her appeal to everybody.

I mean, she saved our butts in COVID. She subsidized the Moderna vaccine out of Vanderbilt University. What a gal. It's insane. Insane. She's so... Helping children be literate for free? A fucking socialist queen, we adore it. What a gym. What a loss. RIP. Yeah, that was a sad one. Even more so than someone like Betty White, because I think with Betty White, Well, she's kind of 99. That's a shame. With Dolly Parton, I think that we imagine perhaps that we had more years left with her. And I think her kind of boundless optimism was part of that.

She had released some statements that she was, you know, y'all, I can't come out. I can't do this. My doctor says I can't. But I'll be there. I've got lots of plans and lots of more living to do. Yeah. Oh, Angel. It's just like, oh, sad.

And 80's like, 80's an older age. But it's not the oldest age. Yeah. No, I get where you're coming from. I agree. I will say, and this is going to be, you know, probably like a too oak to function thing, but I do want to say it. Since there have been lots of really bad celebrity deaths, you know, not bad, but like Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, Yaioi Kusama, the artist. People are, like, really, really sad, right?

I do observe the, like, outpouring of social media grief or celebrities and think, oh, perhaps that might be better applied to some of the people who are being starved or killed in other parts of the world. Do you know what I mean? Yes. But the two are separate thoughts, I shouldn't conflate them in that way, but I kind of do in a way that I'm like, oh, of course, like, the wealthy and famous will be mourned more than the anonymous Sudanese or Palestinian child, you know? It's true. I'm troubled just by the world, I think.

It's a question of the media. The level of focus is sometimes hard. Yeah. It's not that I want less Dolly Parton morning. I think I just want more mourning of the rest, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's all. Count me among the many who think that,

Dolly Parton fucking kicked ass. Like, I'm a big, big death. So don't, don't, let's, let's be clear with Shannon Doherty and Dolly Parton in heaven, frown. Yeah. And come and celebrate all Dolly, or, it's not all Dolly. Come and celebrate. Yeah, James Woods is in there for some reason. Yeah.

We'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah, you're going to see, exactly. This is what you're missing out on if you don't join us over at the Philadelphia Club. And we should say, it's not just this episode, which by the way, these are video episodes where We're very loose and they're much less edited than the main show. So they're very candid feeling. And it feels, we're trying to make it feel like you're kind of hanging out with us chatting about the movies.

We've got a bat catalog as thick as your wrist. Yeah, 25, 26. Yeah, this is gonna be our 20, straight talk is gonna be number 25. Rint a car. Number 24, we just chatted about Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man. And we should say this was at the suggestion of our subscriber, Terry McCann. So if you subscribe and become a member of the Bittersweet Film Club at coffee.com slash bittersweet infamy. That's K-O-S-I dot C-O-M. Don't let that trip you up.

Dot C-O-M-S-Bitter-Sweet Infamy. Absolutely. And if you subscribe monthly, I think it's like three bucks unless, you know, Donald Trump. But you can access all of these back episodes of the Film Club, and we are really, really grateful for your support. Always and forever. And you get to suggest films. Give us your movies. Join us. Join us and perpetual special guest, Mitchell Collins. Mitchell's there.

My mom, as always, complimented Mitchell on the last episode. Aw, I will forward sex compliment. She says, I always like to hear Mitchell's input. That's what she said. Aw. She said this from the jump. Every time Mitchell comes on, she's like, oh, I really like that, Mitchell. So I think she just likes the cut of his jib, you know?

Aw. Okay, well, when we come up to the Yukon, we'll stop in Vancouver. And, well, I haven't seen your mom in years. Yeah. Last time she gave you that leather jacket. No, it was like a little, like, nylon motorcycle jacket that I wore the other night. I was love that thing. It has the, like, the vibe of a leather.

The structure of a leather jacket kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, like a little bomber, but it's like a little nylon motorcycle. It probably has lasted longer in my hands that way. And I just love it. You hear that, Anna? She loves the jacket. Now you've got to leave this in the episode because my mom will be happy. Isn't that what we're all trying to do here at the end of the day?

It's true. Is Mr. Wall there? Not sure. To whom am I speaking? Well, I'm looking for Mr. Wall, Mr. or Mrs. Wall? I think you've got the wrong number, my friend. No walls here other than the ones holding up the house. Then what's holding up your roof?

I got ahead of you. I got ahead of you. I was being naturally charming. I didn't even think that I was stepping on your punchline. Damn it. Taylor, tell me about all the prank phone calls you've ever made in your entire life. Oh, the only prank phone call that I ever did, because as we've discussed, I hate pranks, even though I often commit them, but like not knowingly.

I just, I don't realize till after the fact that what I just did was a prank. I think it's just me being a silly goose. It's like you prank the prank phone caller. Exactly. I wasn't even trying. Wasn't even trying. As a result, I never really did too many prank phone calls, except for you. for one time when I was hanging out with a couple of friends.

Uh-huh. Always. We decided that we were going to prank our other friend by prank phone calling her with a Marge Simpson soundboard. So it was all like Marge saying things like, bad baby, Homer, Homer, Bad baby, Homer. Was there like a little keyboard? I was an app or something on the phone. I don't fucking remember either way.

The victim of this prank call did not receive it well and was kind of disturbed by it. I was like, oh my God, who's stalking me? Or like, I need to help please right now. And then we had to like, when we explained afterwards via text, oh, that was just us playing a prank. That didn't go over super well either. So again, this is the problem with the prank is you have to calibrate it just so. I remember prank calling more like in like fifth or sixth grade.

And it would be like a girl's sleepover. And we would have the little directory book from our elementary school and be like, let's prank call, you know, so-and-so, Rob Schmaltz or whatever. I won't use real names here. Alias is only. So to be clear, that was my character that I was answering the phone with, Rob Schmaltz. Rob Schmaltz came back. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I understand it because he was clever. He knew, he like, he could drive, totally. I don't even know what we would say. It would probably just be like, I don't know. Like, do you know the muffin man or something stupid? And then we would all giggle and then like, hang of the phone. Do you, is your jacket wet?

Just dumb shit, idiots. Yeah. Are there any watermelons in your house? Fucking idiocy. Yes. I know it. Wow. It was so fun.

It was so fun. Nowadays, if you make like a prank phone call like that, ice comes to your house and shoots you in the head. It's true. Sorry. That's horrible. Well, he's crass, but is he incorrect? You know?

Yeah, true enough. Well, today's story, Taylor, won't involve as much giggling wildness as maybe some of the prank calls of our yesterday years. But we are going to be talking about a phenomenon that only had a very narrow time period based on the technological advancements that created this scenario. Have you ever heard of phone freaky? And freaking, I will point out, is spelled P-H-R-E-A-K-I-N-G. You know what? Phone freaking. When I was spelling it with an F in my head, I thought, yes, maybe.

But now that you've told me that spelling, I would remember that spelling. So I've certainly never seen it written down that way. Okay. It sounds, it rings maybe a distant bell, but I could just be lying to myself. Hey, Waka, Waka. I could just be lying to myself, though. Maybe I'm imputing that, and I actually have never heard of this. But I'm going to hear about it now, I'm sure.

Yeah. So phone freaking and we'll get, we'll get into it, but you can maybe enter the story knowing that it is the seeds that later germinate into what we know is hacking, computer hacking. It sounds like it. You imagine like blue orbs going across wires in like a big black expanse, maybe like a grid in the background, the distant background. This is what we're talking about. You're describing Tron. That's what it's happening right now. It was going to be Tron and then my next thing was going to be The Matrix. like falling three numbers. And then, I'm sure I must have expressed this on the podcast before, but one of my goals in life is to be the person who designs the unnecessarily 3D and futuristic search engines that they use on shit like CSI.

So it'll just have like a rotating 3D model of a car and the fingerprint will like jump off the screen and fly and then it'll, you know, that's what I want to do. That's a beautiful dream. I think it's achievable. I think it's achievable. I think it is too. I think you can do it. I think it would be great.

Thank you. That's gorgeous. I'm so excited for that future. But phone freaking happens, like I said, in this narrow time frame, we're looking at like mid-50s to kind of early 80s. It sounds like 90s in its cadence freaking. That doesn't sound like a 50s thing. Interesting.

It's the seeds that germinate into it. So you'll see it'll feel maybe a little bit recognizable as a 90s, 2000s vibe. But I think it's because it's what created that. So before it's time, baby, phone freaking. Phone freaks, pH. Couple of phone freaks. Yeah, that's us. Not really.

I hate talking on the phone. Yep. So to understand phone freaking, we have to learn a little bit about how it came to be, which means we have to know a little bit about how the phone system in general came to be. Is that a question I see in the back? Yes, I've raised my hand. Yes. It is a matter of some national pride that Alexander Graham Bell has a Canada.

connection. So we get told a lot about like early phone shit. We're going to start with the telegraph and then we're swiftly going to move into Alexander Graham Bell. So I thought so. Okay. So we're going to start in 1837, pretty early in the scheme of technology. We'll say that. What were you doing? What were you doing in 1837 if you recall? Oh gosh. I feel like I was probably in a Frenchmaid costume cleaning, right? Like that's what women did. Dead of sepsis, you know. Okay. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Cool. That's nice. So this was the year when the electrical telegraph was patented in the U.S. and in Britain. So the same year. The electrical telegraph, you can think of it as having a battery and a switch and miles of wire with a sounder, with something to amplify sound.

It's essentially just a device that clicked when electricity ran through it. So if you know any Morris code, which I don't, it's just a series. Okay. Can you? Yeah. dots and dashes, as I'm sure Josie was just about to tell you before I bragged. I thought you were going to start to go like beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. It would be a false boast to say that I'm like fluent in Morse code. I played any number of adventure games. The one that jumps out to me right now is Nancy Drew's Secret of the Scarlet Hand from which I've called much knowledge. One time we got put into an escape room where the whole thing was you were trying to find out what the Morse code was saying. But because I already knew Morse code, I was like,

oh, that's an SOS. We can just go through. We can... So that is, that's the telegraph. And it needs a wire, a physical wire, to make that connection happen. It becomes really popular because up to that point, there's really no other way to communicate with such speed. You can send letters, carrier pigeons, smoke signals. There's some early technology that involves like visual Morris code kind of stuff, but very clunky, takes a very long time. Semaphore. Yeah, yeah.

It's like ancient nearly, right? And then the telegraph, and especially the electrical telegraph, brings this new dawn of communication. It's like when flip phones got T9. Exactly. Yes. Just spend the whole thing up. It's so much faster. So Western Union, you might recognize that name, was and still is a company.

But in 1867, it had the biggest telegraph network in the United States. It carried 5.8 million telegraph messages in 1867 at its height with a revenue of $6.6 million. Or if you translate that to today, $700 million. A lot of money. That's a big chunk of change. Less every day. Less every day as the economy collapses. Yeah, I know, I know.

So the cool thing with the electronic telegraph is, okay, great. You can communicate with somebody across the country, especially if they've built in the lines to do so. The one not so great thing is that one wire, one physical wire, held one telegraph message at a time. So that means that it was just a little slow. It was a little clunky. You had to wait for one line to open. And if it was a busy, you know, of a natural disaster. We need more lines. We need more lines.

We just need more lines. And so what they were thinking was, well, we've added a lot of lines. The country is covered in these electrical wires. What we would really like is if we could get one wire to hold multiple telegraph messages and what they called a multiple telegraph. It was clear if somebody can figure out how to do this, they're going to make Buku fucking bucks. So inventors get going. Do what you got to do.

And that's when we meet Alexander. Grand Bell, who heard of them, Taylor? Yeah, of course. You must understand that everything Canadian is fetid in Canada. F-E-T-E-D, not F-E-T-I-D. Are you sure it's not P-H-E-G-T? Lesser every day. My favorite of these kind of Canadian-things is we have what's called the Heritage Minute,

so they'll play like a minute-long skit about like an important woman suffragette or the first female doctor or the explosion in Halifax or the invention of basketball, all of these things. And they're very, they're very charming and you should go and watch him. Yeah. So give us the Heritage Minute, please. I don't remember specifically what the Heritage Minute would have been for this one, but certainly there would have been an Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone heritage minute.

And I think it specifically, I believe that Alexander Graham Bell, I apologize for any of this if it's wrong. I believe that he was born in Scotland, made his way through America, and then just sort of like set up camp and naturalized in Canada, like found it very much to his liking Canada and just sort of became Canadian. It's beautiful. What I know of him and research is that he was a Boston professor, an amateur inventor before he got started with this. He was a teacher of the deaf. And so he studied very closely hearing, sound, music, and specifically human physiology. So how humans hear sound and music and all of this. So from what I know of early invention of the phone, he did figure it out in the U.S. Like the first phone was invented here. But you know what?

He probably like summered in Halifax or something. And it was he's in, I'm telling you, you go to this man's Wikipedia page. It says he was a Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor. Oh, I believe it, maybe. Quit stealing this man from us. Like you steal 50% on our wood or I don't know how the tariff's right, but it's not good news, folks. It's bad shit. It's shitty news. So besides his Canadian connection, what is so interesting about Alexander Graham Bell is people kind of tap him as like, you're an amateur inventor.

You know a few things about sound. Why don't you this multiple telegraph thing? That could make us millions in the mid-18. And he's like, okay, let me give it a shot. But he's much more intrigued but the idea that like, wait, wait, wait, if you can send multiple sounds over a telegraph wire, what if you could send different tones? What if you could send essentially, instead of having a machine tap out clicks and beeps and dots and sounds, what if you just sent a human voice?

Now you're talking crazy. This is heresy now. This is devilry. His investors were like, you know, just could you just do the multiple telegraph thing because that'll make us money? But he, more curious than that, is much more interested in learning about how to send a human voice. And this plays into his studies of sound and music and specifically human physiology. Vibrations, folks, vibrations. The vibrations, the good vibes.

So 1876, he invents the first telephone. And this prototype telephone is a dinosaur compared to what we can even think of as an old phone. Because essentially what it was was a transmitter with a funnel-shaped mouthpiece that connected then to a flexible diaphragm. So a thing that could vibrate. Sure. connected to the diaphragm was a wire made out of platinum. Ritzie. That sat in a container of corrosive acid, like battery acid, car battery acid.

So if you want to steal the platinum wire because of its beautiful lester, you reach down, bam, your hands in that acid. That's what Alexander. That's karma. Karma's a bitch. That's what Alexander Graham about was thinking. And then they were like, can you please just do the multiple telegraph thing, man? This is getting bizarre. This is so weird.

So he took this platinum wire. It runs through car battery acid. And then he runs it through his wall. So the first telephone is from one room in the house where Alexander Graham Bell is into the next room. Okay. So what happens is the acid helps the vibration move through the wire. And then that vibration hits the diaphragm. And then that creates a sound box situation so that you can hear it.

Fascinating. I don't even know how one would get to that level of understanding of the materials and forces involved. It is kind of insane. But one thing that Alexander Graham Bell says of his own process of inventing it, he says, I now realize that I should never have invented the telephone if I had been an electrician. Which you might think, oh, yeah, like an electrician or an engineer would invent the telephone. Instead, what he says is, quote, what electrician would have been. so foolish as to try any such thing. The advantage I had was that sound had been the study of my life,

the study of vibrations, end quote. Vibrations. Yes, the vibes, if you will. Yes, it's a vibes piece, man. Good vibes only. Yeah, exactly. Or bad vibes, you can transmit them all via the telephone. It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, it's a tool. It won't care. So he blows past the multiple telegraph and he invents something much more grand. So he goes to Western Union, the biggest telegraph company in the world, and they have all these wires all over the fucking place. And he says, dog, look what I invented. Like, you want this.

You know you want this. I'm going to sell to you for this much. Like, we're all going to, we're all going to be so happy. Mind the car asses. Yeah, yeah. We'll figure, we'll figure out to make that safer. Be careful. Splashing around.

Be careful. Yeah, yeah. Don't let it get on the lead paint that's on the wall. Yeah. That kind of thing. And Western Union replies, what would we do with an electronic toy? We're not, no, no, no. We want this multiple telegraph situation.

Lord. And so Bell, Alexander Graham Bell and his investors were like, well, fine then. And so they start going on lecture series. They start advertising. They start laying. their own telephone wires, and they're demonstrating that you don't have to just send clicks and beeps and lines and dots over electronic wires. You can send the human voice. You can say hello to Nana, you heartless fucks.

Yeah. Call your fucking mom! Yes! She doesn't want beeps and dots. She wants a hug, you prick. Exactly. The hug of your voice. Yes, the vocal hug. we see the founding of the Bell telephone company, which is the mother of it all. These very first phones functioned. I think the battery acid by then had been encased, the sulfuric acid, but they were quite clunky. You had to rent them from the telephone company. And not only was that equipment not yours and in your home, but every single wire had to connect

to one other phone. So let me give you an example. 1877, you live, maybe not too far. You live across town, but your office is, you know, I don't know, you're a title company or you're a lawyer or whatever it is. And your office is on the other side of town. You want to be able to call your office. So what you have to do is you have to pay the bell telephone company to set up a wire, a physical wire between your office and your home. And you have to purchase or rent a phone for your home and a phone for your office. When you pick up either, you can only contact the other one. Think of it almost like a tin can, like the tin can telephone. I was going to say that exact thing.

So it can only vibrate down that wire. So you can only talk to one location, which not ideal. With a telegraph, you could contact whomever you want. You went to a telegraph operator and they wrote your little message and sent it over the wires, right? So they needed to figure this out quickly to make it at all worth the time and effort. of laying all of these wires, essentially, and getting people invested in telephones. So they decided that instead of having a single wire that connects to just one other place, what if there was a single connection point in town?

You have one connection and it's to that. But that connection point can switch your wire. Operators. And connect you with someone else. Yes. That's actually a really elegant solution to that problem. It is. Yeah. And now, too, they have this operator is a human. This is a person who can be the face or rather the voice of the telephone company and provide you with some customer service and oh, yes, have a good day, you know, quick service, blah, blah, blah. Funnly enough, originally the design was, you know, for these operators, we're going to hire all teenage boys because they're fast, they're quick. It's like, it's like newspaper. Newspaper boys, right?

Like newspaper delivery. Yeah, let me put your call through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Extra, extra. Like that kind of idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy. Yeah. And they're like, great.

And then we don't have to pay them very much. This is going to be fan fucking-tastic. Turns out teenage boys are crass and impatient and really rude. Of course. Of course. You sound fat. That's the kind of shit that they would say. Yes.

So fat. Why do you want to call them? Ew. So we pivot, I assume, here. Well, who else can we pay small wages, but then expect some better customer service practices? Teenage girls, teenage girls. No, dog, just women in general. Don't matter if they're teenage or not.

That's where this image of like these huge switchboards with all the wires coming out, and it's just lined with women sitting on stools, pulling, yanking, moving, little headphone operator, hello, yes, who'd you like to call? Hello, yes, who'd you like to call? It's 7.59 p.m., yes. You know, all of that. Very good. The late great Kronpoo survivor, Linda Basso, used to be a switchboard operator.

Really? Yeah, she told me about the time that she connected. Oh, I forget if it was her mother and her grandmother, but basically she called them both up and just put them on the line together because they were so far away from each other. That it wasn't like feasible for them to call. So one time my granny used her switchboard clout to just like patch both their phones ring at the same time and they pick it up and it's the other on the line without them knowing about it. Without them having to pay for it? I would assume that's the gimmick.

Nice. Little off the book switchboard operation perhaps. That's what we want. But for a good cause. Yeah. Yeah. Now if you did that, ICE would shoot you in the head. He's crass, but he's not wrong, y'all.

Sorry. No, you're good. Again, you're not wrong. What starts happening is more and more people, like any technology that actually works, right? More and more people start adopting it, which means that more telephone wires are put into place. Operators are doing more work. It's not just connecting the lawyer to the doctor's office. Okay, great.

You want to talk to Dr. Smith? Uh-huh. Yeah. Now it's like multiple people, multiple lines. But I want you to kind of imagine all of these electrical lines in the way that. that most kind of intricate systems might work. It's kind of like a tree situation where the leaves are the individual phones

and people's homes and offices, and then those lines gather and bundle to branches. And then those branches, they turn into a huge trunk that connects to another major city. So we're trying to go out to all the little, all the little tributaries. Arisome.

Arrizome, yes. Indeed. Arizome. It's where I used to do those readings that I was making fun of Arizona. Yeah, I love Verizon Cafe. I was bummed when it. RIP. That spot rotates out like your mother's panties.

That spot's always rotating. Ah. So this idea of like branching, leafing, trunking becomes kind of integral to the language of the telephone system. Because even today we have what's called trunk lines that are these big, massive, like a whole city can get kind of distilled into a trunk line. So kind of flag that because it'll come up later. At first, you, when things weren't intricate and you didn't have these trunk lines, you and I was saying this before, you just like picked up the phone and you're like, hey, can I talk to Taylor? Can I talk to Rob Schmall?

Rob Schmaltz. Can I talk to Rob Schmaltz? Can I talk to Rob Schmaltz? Yeah. I got a prank go on. Yes, my fridge is good looking. What? Actually, the quality of these are some of the first phones, probably weren't too great. So it probably was like, what? Speak up. Speak up, young. Is that you? Is that you, Sheriff? I sound fat. What? But as things got more complicated and more people had phones, they realized, okay, well, we have to kind of name these trunk lines, or another aspect of it is called exchanges. Let's say I wanted to call somebody in, I'm in Houston, somebody in Dallas. So I pick up the phone and I say, the name for the exchange, and then I give five digits. Great.

Butterfield 8, that kind of shit. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to call it Betterfield 8, please. And then as things got more complicated, you need an area code for the city. We decided to go ahead and drop the alphabetization, the word that you would say. The Butterfield. The Butterfield. The Butterfield. And that gets converted into numbers, T-9. It's T-9, essentially. Do you have recollection of having a phone that didn't have an area code, a phone number without area code? We used to. What was it? For local calls, you didn't have to use the area code. I think that was ours, too, because we were just 5908-241. Yeah, 454-6203. Which I still remember, right? This is all on the internet. You Google us, and it's like somewhere weirdly in there. Yeah, it's bad.

Oh my God. AI is making images of us milking each other. It's fucked. I'm sorry, milking each other. You heard me? What? That? What? I'm back. No! The fingerphone does not work in the podcast scenario, but... We're probably the last generation that does the finger phone, because we're the last generation that would have those kinds of receivers, right?

Yeah, that's true. Dying art. Is it strange that when we're on Zoom or Riverside that we're using, we don't do this? Well, I can hear... Hello? No, it's... I can hear you fine. She just hung up the hand receiver, folks.

The telephone company, it's taken off. Things are getting more precise. Phone numbers are getting longer. But the telephone company, what we know is the Bell telephone company, is still the major player. They eventually get to a point where they fucking buy out Western Union. They take it over because Western Union had all these electronic wires that they could use. So they just hopped on those. They realized, though, that in 1890,

Alexander Graham Bell of Canada's fame, his patent for the telephone was going to run out. They knew that other folks' independent companies could move in on their turf. So they started hatching plans to ensure the company's longevity. And so they created a new subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company, known as American Telephone and Telegraph. AT&T. Exactly.

Yeah. Fuck. I know. We fast forward a little bit to 1913 when the Bell Telephone Company is under antitrust investigations, because this is an era. Remember those? Yeah. Remember those? No.

An era where monopolies were deemed as bad and needed to be looked over. But I'd have to say, they don't do much in the way of preventing the Bell telephone company or AT&T from taking things over. because in 1913 with judiciary oversight, they're like, okay, okay, you're right. Monopoly is bad. Yeah, the board game. We love that, but we get it. Flip the table. Yeah.

No more houses, no more hotels, no more Baltic Avenue. Yeah. They decided that they would go ahead and divest themselves of Western Union. We don't, you're right. That's a big chunk. We can get rid of that. Right. But in lieu of that, they said if we give up Western Union, then we're going to

take over the potential for this long-distance phone call situation. Because we think that we'd be best suited for that. And it's small. It's not even existing right now. So we'll just, you know, don't worry. Don't worry about that. It's far away long distance, right? Yes, exactly. But then what happens is that long-distance telephone calling becomes much more feasible with the new technologies that get invented and becomes extremely lucrative. So, AT&T under the Bell telephone company just essentially is a U.S. government condoned monopoly, even though they were under investigation. Imagine that.

Right. Yeah. They don't become a target of the judicial system. They're like, well, you know, we need telephones. So let's just. So, yeah. Let's just, yeah. Yeah.

That makes sense. You know what? Yeah. I mean, they could, the U.S. government could have taken it over. and made it a government agency like the U.S. Now you're talking communism. Now you're talking communism, Josie.

Well, hello, U.S. Postal Service. Is communism, Josie? That's great. So this is where the name for this huge monopoly comes into play. Bell Telephone Company, AT&T, gets referred to as Ma Bell, M.A. I was going to ask. So, 100%. In my head, I was like, I hope she explains what Ma Bell is in this,

because I've never quite understood what that is a reference to, but it comes up in Crossword puzzles all the time, you know, these sorts of things. Maybe we're just on that edge of the generation. In my research, it came up without explanation. It would just be like, oh, yeah, now Mar-Belle, blah, blah, ma-bba, ma-bett, ma-bett. And I was like, who the fuck is this bitch? Yeah. Does she have a blog?

What is this? Yeah, I was like, what about Alexander? Like, what, huh? And then I realized. Is it his mother? It's his mother. It's your mother calling. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah. Ma Bell, total monopoly. Oh, shit. But the technology advances and advances. And they get to a point where they realize they need to cut down on the number of operators they hire. It's a cost-saving measure. They're firing my grandma. Don't, yeah.

Fuck. Don't pay a person. Do you have a computer do it? Imagine that. Yeah. We might know a little bit about that. But the automatic switch that was invented to help with phasing out the human operator was invented by an undertaker in a small town. Damn.

Whose business was suffering because the other mortician, his wife, worked for the telephone company. She was an operator. And according to the legend. Lore has it. Laura has it, that any phone call that she got being connected to an undertaker and there were two in town more than one, she would say, oh, yes, sure. And then just connect to her husband. So smart. So simple, so smart.

Well, this almond brown stroger is the other undertaker who was like, wait, what the fuck? I'm here too. The understudy more like, boom. So he's the one who went off and, through his anger, built a switch that would automate phone calls so that you didn't have to talk to an operator. It was a revenge switch. A revenge switch. The Strohiger revenge switch, exactly. Damn, classic revenge switch. Yeah.

You see it all the time. All the time. He got his patent for that in 1891, which seems kind of early. because there were phone operators well into the 30s and the 40s. But you have to remember that this is like, we're talking about the entire system. So not just like the really high tech centers where there's a lot of money to turn over technology and infrastructure. We're also talking about like way out in the sticks, like small little town in, you know, North Dakota kind of vibes. So when it comes to like switching over systems, it's a very long process to do this.

You got anything in your suite here about party lines? Yeah. What do you know of party lines? Party lines are, if you were a gossip in the 1930s, party lines were the shit, because you could just pick up your phone and hear a conversation that two of your neighbors were having about, oh, Janice has chlamydia. Then you were fed for weeks. Yeah, and you lived way out on a fucking farm and you only went into town once a month. that was life-giving, the tea. As part of one of my jobs, I interviewed older folks, right?

And I spoke to people who came up in that era, and they were all farm people, like you're saying, who have, like, memories of being the last to switch from the party lines. So a party line is one of these connecting lines. Everybody in an area would have this number to get to an operator to connect. But at some point, that number was discontinued. So when you call the party line, there would actually be a recording from the telephone company saying, like, this line has been disconnected. Please hang up and dial another number.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That wasn't verbatim. It's okay. It's okay. I'm winging it, Doug. But that recording typically on these disconnected lines kind of way out in the sticks was really, really quiet. So you sometimes didn't hear it at all, depending on the party. line, but it was so quiet that you could easily talk over it. So it's a huge conference call,

essentially. Fascinating. I didn't know. I'm so interested to know that this is the Genesis and how the technology works. Yeah. Yeah. It's meant to be kind of a dead end, but... It's a wide open feel. God bless humanity. Sometimes we don't suck. Often we do. Sorry, I'm you can tell the frame of mind I'm in. It's okay. These days. Doggy, it's August 2026. There's nothing super glitzy glam to celebrate, so. Party lines. I feel like they're like their early chat rooms essentially. Yeah, yeah.

And I think the party line is a good example too of like the slow role of advancements in technology. It's an older version of the telephone system. But it carries over into the 1930s, even though it was a much earlier type of technology, it carries over because it was just so hard to get to roll. places and replace and totally revamp the infrastructure. And we see it now. Like there's a huge range of technological advancements across the society because of what you can afford, because of what's available in your town or your city or your, you know, whatever it is. So we had the Strogher switch, the revenge switch that automated some of this dialing so that you didn't have to deal with

a human operator. You as the phone user would operate. You, as the phone user, would operate. the system to get you where you wanted to go. Then AT&T, in all of their wisdom, invented another type of switch called very fancy name, the number 4A crossbar switch. To call her by her Christian name. Yes, exactly. Yes. Got you. Which if I knew more about electronics at all, I could maybe explain, but I'm not even going to attempt because in the research I did, like people said, like, even folks who work for the telephone company, engineers who worked for it for years, didn't fully understand it.

What did Mitchell say at the end of our last episode? Sometimes love is showing up for yourself and not doing that research. Exactly. Yes. So the number four A crossbar got rolled out in the 1950s. And what we have to know about it is that it automated. the fuck out of the system. If the stronger switch was like, okay, we're not going to deal with Little Miss mortuary over here. This was going

to reduce the number of operators exponentially. And part of this, like we mentioned, was paying fewer people, but the other layer of it is that phones were becoming so popular and they were being encouraged and people, you know, they're becoming a necessity

more or less for communication. If you were to support the entire population with the old system of telephones, every third person would have to be a telephone operator to get it to work. Right. Like the numbers just weren't leading towards a sustainable system where everybody had a phone, which maybe that makes it unsustainable. Yeah, how troublesome, how troublesome, because you don't want to leave people in communi

other. Right, exactly, yeah. So this fully automated system worked with... a whole different idea of how to utilize the phone system. Now, it's still used Alexander Graham Bell's ingenious way of using the human voice, of carrying the human voice over wires. But what it was is that if you wanted to access, say, your grandma in Halifax, you typed in a number and the sound of the numbers, the sound associated with the numbers,

the tones, along with some other tone situations to click in, to click out, that kind of thing, is what automated the system. So it could still use all the same lines, all the original technology, but now you had a system that functioned with only the user being able to contact who they wanted to contact. They did not have to talk to an operator. So if I'm getting this right, you're specifically talking about like the boop, boop, boop, boop, that kind of shit? Yeah. Okay. See, I had always thought this was like an accessibility thing for like blind people making a phone call. That's interesting you say that. Yeah. It's critical to the whole thing.

Yes. Now, I mentioned in that explanation that there was like certain things you had to like click in to get on and like get onto the line, see if the line was available, get in the line. Steve Jobs hadn't been born yet, folks. It wasn't minimalist yet. Not quite yet. And so interesting you say, Steve Jobs. I'm saying a lot of interesting things. You are. You're smart. cookie over there. I didn't know I knew this much about phones. I know. It's very cool. That's very cool. Who knew? They automated the system using these tones. And obviously I'm simplifying this because it's pretty advanced technology, which is kind of wild to think about that like this whole system is this old and this advanced. It's kind of sending me through a loop. How I think of it is so antiquated.

Yeah. We have lost our sense of whimsy about like the wonders of physics. You know what I mean? Fuck, that voice going on a wire is, I know it's crazy to go up in the air to a satellite and come back down or however the fuck that works. Yeah. But the wire thing is crazy too and you can touch it with your hands. Yeah. But don't touch it with your hands. That's dangerous. Do not touch that with your hands.

You put your thumb up and your pinky out and boom, you can talk to anybody in the world. Boom. That's insane. Call someone. Grab a banana. Huh. An interestingly shaped piece of wood or stick. Sure.

We do the banana thing with B-Man a lot, but like pick up a banana and be like, hello? Hello? And he barks whenever he hears somebody saying hello. He likes your banana man routine. He loves the banana. Every time. Every time it lands. Got it.

That's great. This system of tones was not only to automate the connection, but this is America. This is a monopoly. We got to be able to build these people. Mm-hmm. We got to make some money. This whole system, as well as connecting people, also has a way built into it to track where they're calling for how long they're calling.

How fucking drab. I know. But you'll be happy to know that this intricate and highly advanced system and this number four, a cross switch. Cross bar switch. Exactly. Had some loopholes in it. This whole network was built, but they were a few little entry points. This is how we steal cable, of course. Yes, yes.

And at this point in the story, I will say that if you want to know more and learn more about the phone system and the phone network and get a much more detailed and I'm trying to be as accurate as possible as always, but I... But you're a layperson who learned this for this story. And I think having my thumb and my pinky out does create a wire connection. That's the limit of the expertise is the hand phone. And the banana phone. I got two. I got two. Range. A queen with range. But if you're interested to learn more, I really, really recommend the Connections Museum based out of Seattle, Washington. Ooh. It is an interactive archive of all of this stuff. They have really great, like, YouTube videos. That's what I was accessing and photographs of their archive. But it seems like if you're really, really interested, go to Seattle. You're close by, Taylor. Go and like touch the shit and see the stuff. Try not to cross the border these days. I'm sorry.

No, that's fair. That's fair. I'm sure that there is a Canadian equivalent. But how about this? Wherever you are, support your, like, local museums and archives and art centers and cultural spaces because this, this, you know? Yeah. So they could use the help just as much as anyone else. And these are important things to have so that you can go and see things that, like, make your mind broaden and teach you things. Yeah. The wonders of the world. I'm a big museum goer. Whenever I'm on put it to this way. When I went, to Seattle. I went to the Museum of Pop Culture there. I really liked it. Very good. Really good. So there we go. Now in Seattle, you've got two places to go. Yeah. You're welcome. Okay. So you might be wondering, Jesus Josie, that was a very long telling of the phone network system. I was so into it. No, you misread me. Okay. I could have gone another 20 minutes on that. I found it extremely interesting because it's just like,

wait, what? This antiquated shit? Yeah. But now we get to our phone freaks, our pH freaks. Yes, yes. Put your condoms on, folks. We're going freaking. 2026. Hey. So it's the 1950s when the telephone system,

and we can refer to it as Ma Bell, if we soak shoes, has more or less integrated these automated systems. There are still operators, but they function within the phone system itself. So you're not really as a phone user meant to call these operators. You're no longer front facing. Exactly. You can think of the phone freaks as realizing that this system has perhaps a loophole. And the loophole is that if you can play certain tones on the phone, it triggers the automated

system to allow you access to the entire network. So simple, so smart, honestly. So simple, so smart. So the idea is in order to get to these access lines, you would call a toll-free number. The reason you call a toll-free number is because then you won't get charged. And these lines kind of vary. We see a lot more toll-free number. I feel like when we were maybe young, we saw a lot more toll-free numbers.

Yeah, kind of a dying art. 1-800, but-b-b-b-b-b-b. But if you called a toll-free number, you wouldn't get charged. But if you were on the toll-free line and could still access the network, then bada-bibing, bada-boom, as the hackers say, we're in. Damn. So they really are freaking the phone. They're freaking the phone.

Now, when you think of a phone freaker, you should know that it's mainly dudes. Has that energy? Yeah. It's mainly like college age, college dropout, very smart and curious. curious, don't quite fit into the rigid structures of academia, hence dropping out. Typically, nerds who are very curious about the phone network, not necessarily because they have a whole lot of people to call for free. Hey, now, Josie, come on.

No, this is just like, it's repeated, like, all of these phone freaks. Like, well, I didn't. Just calling each other. I just wanted to, you know, see who I could call. Freak the phone. I didn't really want to. I just wanted to fucking freak the phone. phone. I don't want to talk to somebody. God, that's horrible. Jesus. But in that way, the phone freak culture is pretty much like curious and willing to

break a few rules to experiment and understand the phone network. But generally speaking, it's good, clean fun. There's not a lot of damage that a phone... We're not using this to eavesdrop on the Ruski's yet or anything like this. Right. This is cold. War era. So there is a little bit of like flirting with that line. And then there's a lot of institutional concern about that happening. Probably the most egregious phone freaking issue was a prank call in 1974. Dan Schmaltz. Yeah, Rob Schmaltz. Yeah. Rob Schmaltz. Dan Schmaltz is his brother. Oh, no, it's his dad because this was in 74. Yeah, you're right. You're right. There you go. Perfect.

A family legacy of receiving prank phone calls. Well, it's a little bit more because it did involve some phone freaking where you would jam two lines together. And then that way you could hijack an entire area code almost. Fuck yeah. What ends up happening is they do this to the Santa Barbara area code. So any call that goes into Santa Barbara gets a recorded message that says you cannot reach Santa Barbara at this moment. Santa Barbara has been decimated by a nuclear bomb. This is 1974.

Yo, Santa Barbara. Damn. I had even get a chance to say goodbye. Shit, I didn't know that. I mean, it quickly got squashed. If you don't know, Santa Barbara never had a nuclear attack. It's still there. Still party central.

Thank God. Still there. Yeah. Wine country. Boohoo. But that's maybe one of the more egregious pranks in this counterculture. It falls a little bit more into that vibe where. it's the vibe. It's against the man. It's kind of poking at the bear, but not angering it too much.

The same people who would be in anonymous these days or something. You know what I mean? Like this. Yeah. Little hacker boys. Little hacker boys who are also extremely smart and can figure out that number four A crossbar switch. They understand it through and through. And I'm kind of using phone freaks as a general term because there wasn't necessarily a centralized group that learned how to do it and then like disseminated information. Like anonymous. Exactly. Because what ends up happening is like some guy in rural Washington goes to central Washington state university and is like, wait a goddamn second.

There's a library? Oh, I'll go to the library. Wait, there's a Bell technology journal. And apparently in this journal released by the Bell telephone company, there's an article widely published and easy enough for an engineering student to read and understand about how this entire automated system works. It was too clear. It was too clear.

It was too helpful. Yeah. You got to have your 11 secret herbs and spices that you don't tell anyone, man. Yeah. But that probably was a symptom of them being a monopoly. So these college kids would learn the whole system and then be able to crack into it pretty easily. If they did get caught, the phone companies could still track phones and kind of see suspicious areas, suspicious activities. So if they did get stopped by the police or the feds, typically those conversations in the small little police office room, you know, with the bear bulb was like, how did you learn this?

Who are you connected to? And it'd be some pimple kid who's just like, I don't know, I read a book. I went to the library, sir. Yeah, exactly. Got it. Yeah. It's like, who are you working with? It's like, Tommy. As they're updating systems, there's a lot of antiquated phone infrastructure that they can get for free. You know, if they just kind of like ask the right person or put an ad in the school newspaper. It's very decentralized.

The only barrier to the phone system is its complexity. And if you're willing to wade through that complexity, if you are a very puzzle-minded individual and a lot of folks who like to tinker with electronics are, then it's good, clean fun to break into Ma Bell and see what you can get away with. Yeah, crack open that belly, see what's inside Ma Bell. Yeah. It reminds me so much of my brother who used to like take apart the TV remote control and like, and all this stuff. And like, he builds his own computers and tinkerers. Tinkerers. The world needs tinker. Yeah, the mechanics. Yes. There are some people who do want to use the phone freaking situation. Not because they're curious about technology, but maybe they're interested in making some money.

There are quite a few bookies. Grey hat phone freaks. Gray hat phone freaks. Yes. Connected to mobster networks, situations like this. Black hat phone freak. Oh, no. Yes.

So a bookie takes bets from people, right? And they need to talk to a lot of people all the time. Now all of this is all on the internet and weirdly becoming. legal than a lot of states in the U.S. No more regulations. That's okay. They get in the way. They get in the way.

So bookies are constantly on the phone. And if you're thinking about the price of long-distance telephone calls in particular, that's going to fucking add up and eat into your profits. So there is a large community of bookies who are trying to figure out how, okay, there's the nerd kid down at the college. How could I get him to help me with this? And to give you a sense of how expensive this is, think of it this way. In 1965, it was $12 to talk on a long-distance line for three minutes. Damn. Not even worth it at that point. If you translate that into today's money, it's $118 for a three-minute phone call.

Someone better have been born or died. Yeah, exactly. Because that's the only thing I can think of. Well, have you ever seen that old Super Bowl commercial? Bob, we out of baby eats a boy, that one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A dying reference, perhaps, that one, dying with our generation. RIP, we'll call it up sometime. Remember the good days. Those prices drop as you get further along because the technology gets more advanced

and it doesn't cost as much to do. But in 1965, that's still a fuck ton of money. And if you're a mobster, a bookie, a college student who needs to call home, then these are really high prices that you want to try and understand. undercut as much as possible. So let's talk about actually how you get into the phone system. I mentioned earlier that if you can play certain tones, then it triggers the automated system. Funky town.

Do do, do, do, do do do do. I think that's a Towley joke. I think Towley did that in South Park. That's where we're sitting today. Just a wash nostalgia. Let's get on the party line and talk about Towley, yeah. Remember Towley? Better days.

Somehow. There are multiple ways to enter the system. The ones that were probably most known with phone freaks is something called a blue box. And it's a very small electronic device that I would say is probably no bigger than your phone now. It might be a little chunkier, maybe not as wide, not as flat. A little brick of a guy. A little brick of a guy. And it had the nine digits on it.

Okay. And it's a very simple electronic build. I could never do it, but people out there can in their garages. Never say never. You know, that's true. He did sing Acapella at the World Cup final. Nice. I think that I remember one time he pissed in a mop bucket.

Again, never say never. And he left his monkey in Germany because customs took it and he was like, fuck this. I mean, who among us? You know, who hasn't left their monkey in Germany? It happens which time, which time? Yeah, which monkey? these blue boxes would play a simple 2,600 hertz tone, which I looked it up and I was like, oh, I'll play it for Taylor. But it's actually quite high-pitched. And I don't think anybody

listening to a podcast who wants that in their ears. So if you are curious, you can go Google. It's very easy. There's a YouTube video right at the top of the search. You call the toll-free line. And then you have your blue box play the 2,600 hertz, little e-e that I won't play. That signals to the receiving end, the line that is knocking at the long distance receiving end, has disconnected. But the system, because you're still on the phone, you still have your thumb and your pinky up on the phone. You're still in the system, but it's being read as you having hung up, but you haven't hung up. You're the ghost in the machine. You're the ghost in the machine.

So then with your blue box, you can dial the number tones to get. get wherever you want to go. Surfing the fucking information super highway, but it was a phone. Exactly. And if you could figure out, and this was part of the curiosity and kind of the puzzling of it, if you could figure out where the trunk lines were and where they connected, you could get overseas. You could get as far as you wanted.

Wow. Yeah. Interesting. I have a question, and it may be something that you come to and it may not be. Okay. Do you have anything about like the etymology of the name phone freaking with a pH? It's a very distinctive word and a very distinctive spelling. Do you have any thoughts?

I don't. I don't. I think it may have been like a 1950s, 1960s countercultural, like, you know, like, we're wild. Oh, yeah. Weepy gravy shit. Yeah, got you. Yeah.

We're freaking the phones, dude. Exactly. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Got it. It's like that's the etymology. Just that tone.

We should call this phone freaking. brother. Yeah, I know. I know. I've met that guy. It's okay. He's fine. He's okay. Would you call him? We should call him up? Oh, depends. Am I freaking the phone or not? Is it just a vanilla phone call? Yeah, that's the thing. Once you've been freaking the phones, having a vanilla phone call must be so dreadfully dull. Right. Yeah. Where you like pay money to call somebody. Rough. So that's the blue box. There's a black box. which is a resistor on incoming phone lines, which essentially kind of does the opposite.

And so that the calls would not be billed to the caller. So it kind of reverses it and shoves it on somebody else. There's red boxes. Those were specifically for pay phones. And pay phones functioned on a slightly different system where when you inserted coins, there was a tone associated with each coin so that Bob Bell would know how much.

money you put in. Did you put in enough? Okay, I'll connect the call. So you would play the tones on the red box and it would be like, okay, you've put in two quarters and five nickels and you're ready to go. Wow. Interesting. That one comes with a caveat because a physical pay phone can only hold so much change. It's, you know, it's a physical entity. So if you like dumped a whole bunch of sound money of this fake tone money and it was over the amount that a pay phone could actually hold, then the cops would come around. The system would alert. Yeah. This is a fine line that we're dancing on here. But the cops would come and do what? I don't know. Taylor. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it, guys. I'm not freaking any phones, man. I'm not freaking any phones, dude.

You're so good at that voice. There's some voices that just, like, comes so easy to me. That requires no effort on my end. What a useless talent. What a useless talent I have. Yeah, what would the police do? That's a very good question. So the phone company could track these things.

They saw some unusual activity. It's like, why is this one number in Miami calling a disconnected toll operator and clean a clean British Columbia? This is weird. Yeah. Like, what is happening here? And not just like calling like once every while, like hundreds of hours over the course of a few weeks, right? So they would try and track them down.

They would try and scare them shitless, you know, send them the feds and be like... Send them the Napster letter. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, yes. We don't want to have to sue you for 200 grand, but we fucking might. So keep your nose clean. Or worse, we're suing you for 200 grand. Right.

And there were attempts to get people on. wire fraud with the idea that they're frauding the phone company using wires, cross-state wires. Is this where the term wire fraud comes from? No, actually. Damn. But wire fraud is connected to telephones. But the original wording of the law that we're talking about in the 1950s and 60s was actually just to protect consumers so that you wouldn't get called up and be like, hi, this is your

bank. And we just need to verify all of your important information. Could you tell me your social security, all of that? Like, that's considered wired fraud. But even the judicial system, when Ma Bell tried to use this law to nail the phone freaks, the judicial system was like, wait a second. This law doesn't protect the phone company. It protects the consumer.

So this is not. It's kind of like with mail fraud. The laws of mail fraud do not protect the postal service. Commies, a bunch of fucking call me thugs. Right. Yeah. Don't get me started on the U.S. Postal Service, Josie. You don't like what I say.

So Maubel tried really hard to find a way to nail these guys, but it wasn't quite working until it did. We'll say that. But for a period of time, the laws in place were like, listen, none of this is actually illegal. And again, this is kind of a system of the monopoly. There were no real safeguards put in to protect. the information because they're like,

fuck it, we've been a monopoly for a hundred years. We've been through a whole shit bag of storms, so we're going to be fine. People don't know what we've seen. We hear all the phone calls, buddy, all of them. Yeah, a little bit. You put your fucking hand to your fucking jaw? I hear that.

Thumb up, pinky out, every single word. You pick up a banana? I hear that. Many of the phone freaks, as we discussed, are curious nerds. They're interested in poking the bear and disrupting the monopoly. You know, think of that word disrupting and disruption too and how it kind of feeds into our modern tech culture. Sure, yeah, very much a word that you use when you're someone who's trying to shake up the established way that things are done in a particular space. Yeah, and not necessarily for like totally extractive or totally evil intent just because you can.

Steve Jobs. Yes. Yes, my dog, yes. One of the phone freaks that we do know about, who many of them remained, the big ones will say, remained anonymous and still do. Good, like Mexican wrestling. That's how it should be. If you look at like any Reddit conversations, if you go on any of the party lines, there's always going to be somebody in there who's like, oh, I did phone freaking. I knew how to do that.

I knew how to build a blue box. I didn't pay for any calls in college or something like that. Like, it's very ubiquitous. But the folks who like stand out, one of whom was a man named Joe Ingressia, who as a phone freak had a handle because it's hacking, you know, and we do that. As handle was joy bubbles. Cute. Him and his sister were born blind. And he had some special talents, some special interests.

I was just going to say perfect pitch. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Boom. Yes. Yes. No flies on me, Josie Mitchell.

You tell Ma Bell, I'm ready. I'm ready for this fight. He also had a strange fascination with shower curtains, according to his sister. Okay. How did that manifest? I think he would just like swish them open clothes or swish the one in their bathroom constantly. Got it. He loved the sound.

Apparently he was also really into brassiers as well. They would always kind of have to like bring him inside and be like, Joe, can you take the bra off your head? Let's get you out of the neighborhood sight. This is a man who knows what he likes. Yes. And he fucking. He likes shower curtains and he likes putting bras on his face. Loves the phone, too.

Hey. Even from a really young age, she's like super fascinated by it. And being blind, which you kind of mentioned earlier too, being blind, he had the same access that anybody would to the telephone, to speaking on the phone, to then later the network. And is someone who will be used to using his observations gleaned via listening? Exactly. To get places in his life. He went off to college.

He didn't quite know what he was going to do there, why he was there. But, you know, it's what you do. The shower curtains minor didn't really exist. He was trying to find it, but it wasn't showing up. No, Braz neither. And through some other folks at the college he was at, he learned about phone freaking. And he was just thrilled. And he, with his perfect pitch, did not need a blue box.

He could pick up the phone and sing a. perfect. Stop it. That's crazy. All with his voice. What a generational gift, dude. Yeah. Yeah. And what a gift that is like perhaps only useful for this exact thing in this context, right? Yeah. I'm trying to think of anything else that you could like, maybe you could disarm a safe this way. It's hard. Right. I'm struggling. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very particular talent. And he's very, very good at it. He doesn't quite finish college. He drops. He dropped. out and he realizes that the chances of him getting like a nine to five kind of standard job are low. He doesn't have his college degree.

He's blind. And he's, you know, really into shower curtains and telephones. So, you know, he's a fun guy. So there's that, yeah. And so he rationalizes, you know what? I'm going to go out of a limb here and I'm going to freak the fuck out of the phone with the idea that he wants to get caught. He wants the attention of the phone companies and of the feds so that he can parlay that

Into becoming a white hat phone freaker. Exactly. So simple, so smart. Lucky for Joy Bubbles, it does happen. He does not recommend it as a route to a job. He says it is stressful. That's easy for you to say, buddy. Do as I say not as I do?

He goes whack-a-doodle he calls the Moscow embassy. He's like racking up all of these phone calls across. the continental U.S. and to Canada across the world. And so finally, they come a knocking. And when they do, he gets in some trouble. He has to pay a fine. There's some judicial stuff. But like we were saying, the laws weren't really in place to nail the phone freakers. So he instead, like he planned, is just like a highlighted it boy of the phone network. Again, what we've referred to as like mushroom dispensary territory. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Well, you know, it's a Tuesday, so it might be legal today. It's with so many different opinions. Yeah. My grandma does them. It's fine. Yeah. It's fine. The psychiatrists are saying they're good now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I'll say too about Joe and Gressia. He has a long-storied history that goes well beyond that. In his older age, she actually legally changes his name to Joy Bubbles. Sick. Yeah. Do it. Get a tattoo.

Get a tattoo that says Joy Bubbles, man. Do it. Joy Bubbles, like, ring. and shower curtains or something? That'd be cool. There is a film coming out that I did want to find and see, but I couldn't. Hey, when that happens. It just came out at like Sundance or something, so it's not widely available. But I'm going to recommend it without seeing it because this guy is just so interesting.

The movie is called Joy Bubbles, and it's directed by Rachel J. Morrison. So keep an eye out for that. Sweet, yeah. Sounds interesting. Another notable phone freak is a man named John Draper, not to be. Confused with Don Draper, yes. Yeah, okay. We don't know how much booze this one, Drake. We do know, though, that he didn't often go by the name John Draper.

Instead, he went by the name Captain Crunch. Fuck yeah. Such a hacking culture already. It's wild. I'd be Captain Crunch. Fuck yeah. That's amazing. Why do you think that this man was called Captain Crunch?

Because he liked to eat Captain Crunch. He did, yes. Good. But even... And. And? Yes, and. Yeah, yes, and.

He liked it so much that he was able to collect all the little toys that came in the Captain Crunch cereal boxes, including the Captain Crunch Whistle. That, when you covered a certain hole on the whistle, played a perfect 2,600 Hertz note. Amazing. What can't the Captain do? The Crunchberry harvest is rich and bountiful. These are the good times. Damn, that's crazy. I love that. I love that. That's such a fun piece of, I hesitate to call it trivia,

but what an interesting thing, this Captain Crunchy. Yeah. Great little artifact. Yeah. And apparently the phone freaks that he ran with, there are stories of them like going to the airport or the train station with the whistle and going along the bank of pay phones and blowing the whistle so that it sent the signal to all of those phones to hang up the line. So they walk down and blow the whistle And all the lines would go click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

The Paul Revere of whistles. If you will, yes. If you will. Classic Paul Revere whistle. It's as common as the revenge switch. It's everywhere. There was another whistle that was really popular even earlier. It was the Davy Crockett whistle.

Oh, you can see the times going by in that, hey? Exactly. That's kind of sweet. Now it would be the Mr. Beast whistle. God, what does that sound like? Captain Crunch, though, he is a bit of a poster boy for phone freaks. He goes out online a little bit more, if you will. He is definitely the guy that you can imitate so well that will bring the police to your apartment.

No cops at my apartment, man. This is a pig-free zone. How's that? How's that? Okay, cool. Perfect pitch. You have a perfect pitch for... That unlocked the phone tree.

Exactly. I understand. So Captain Crunch becomes a little bit of the poster boy here. Because in 1971, there's an article in Esquire called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, written by Ron Rosenbaum. Captain Crunch, only referred to as Captain Crunch in the article, is featured heavily. And it's a lot of the no-pig zone, a high squeaky voice situation. Yeah, got it. Got it.

And article informs the public about phone freaking without getting into the schematics of it. Do you know what I mean? Like you can't read the article and be like, I get it. This article, the secrets of the little blue box, brings phone freaking to a larger audience, including an audience of young engineers, computer science engineers in northern California. Probably don't know them by their phone freak handles. Berkeley Blue and Oph Tobar. Sure.

But you might know them by their Christian names, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. The stevees. The steves. They invented Apple, by the way, if you don't know. I've always had a certain affinity for Steve Wozniak just because Steve Jobs was such a fucking attention. Oh, the mock turtlenecks everywhere. Ugh. And again, those were the good days somehow.

So Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, they read this article and they're like, oh, ho'et now? This is kind of cool. And fueled by the same curiosity, by the same kind of counterculture vibe, by the same drive to solve the puzzle. One of their first projects that they ever collaborated on together was building a blue box. They did go on to build a few more. Accounts vary on the economics of their blue box adventures. It is definitely a moment in time where they, as young men, got together and realized that they could work really well together. And they had a lot of the same interests and a lot of the same skill sets.

Hand jobs. Exactly. Probably a lot of... Mutual hand jobs. Barrage hand jobs. For sure. Y'all come. It's true.

Steve Hand jobs! Oh! Damn! It was right there in front of us the whole time. He must have been called that so many times in high school, don't you think? I'm sure old hailed, little fucking rim job. You'd say it. You would say it to him.

But Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, without blue boxes, there would be no Apple. Interesting. For the way that it introduced them to how to think differently, if you will pay attention to the ad campaign. So you might be wondering at this point, like, well, for fuck's sake, Ma Bell, you're a monopoly. Like, why haven't you nipped this in the bud yet? Like, this is kind of silly. Sure. They are working furiously to try and get the technology so that it is not so loopholeish.

But in the interim, mainly between 1964 and 1970, they develop an internal surveillance group at AT&T called Green Star Surveillance. 30 million phone calls get tapped by AT&T under the Green Star Surveillance. Fucking narx, dude, free the phone lines. It's so good. I hope the listeners like that, because it's been a few of those now. So at this point, the federal government was like, okay, you really shouldn't do that AT&T, but we also get it that we don't want this huge gaps in our telecommunications.

Again, this is the Cold War. Everybody is very concerned about the Rusky. and, you know, the pigs in the bay, all of it. So the federal government is like, okay, with Green Star, okay, this works, this works. We'll let this wiretapping happen. We'll figure it out in the justice system later. You did the thing. We'll make the laws legal so that the thing you did is legal.

Bitter's feet infamy law school turns out another genius. Exactly. Yes. Get ready for the bar, babies. Woo-bo-bo-bo-bo. It's a bar where we drank and talk about law. But we don't get all the details correct all the time. Kind of like flyover stuff just in general, just general law.

Like we don't need to get too deep into it. Right. Yeah. The like details? Nah, that's not where we live. Murder. That's when you kill someone, right? And then proceed from there, right?

AT&T, Mabel, estimates that during the phone freaking years, they lost $30 million, which if we translate that to a, today's wage, $170 million. Lost to phone freaking. Don't give a fuck. That's not... Fuck you. Should have been more.

I know. I'm like, really? That's it. All this freaking out. What heralds the curtain call of phone freaking is the advancements in technology. AT&T updates the telephone system from an electromechanical system to an electric. then as we get further and deeper into a totally digital switch situation.

Mm-hmm. iPads. Yes. If another way to think of it that's helpful, besides iPads, you can think of it as, like, they were able to separate all the lines. If they're digital, they're not physical anymore, you can make multiple. So you wouldn't jump on a line and then be able to fuss with it and enter the network. Right.

The line can be essentially fabricated along with the call and dissipate along with its ending. Exactly. But as we noted with the way that these technological rollouts happen, the last telephone circuit that was blue boxable, meaning you could get into the network, was dismantled in 2006 in rural Minnesota. So only 20 years ago. Wow. So phone freaking didn't necessarily disappear. It just became very boutique, you know. You can easily see the ways that Taylor's invented persona, they just came into being in there. this episode. One of the many. One of the many. Yes, one of the many. You can easily see through that and the way that phone freaking got started, its relationship to large entities, its curiosity,

its fascination led directly into computer hacking. Same shit, yeah. Many of the folks were really into phone freaking. I mean, early internet was all on phone lines too. So totally just transitioned into computer hacking. Hacking has graduated. Now there's like hacking of like hospital systems or the whole governments and asking for money and it does become not based in like, whoa, I can get into the system and like, isn't this such a curiosity that I can manipulate? Isn't that weird? And it does become more nefarious, certainly. Not all hacking is good kids. Stay in school. Don't listen to her. go start hacking, stay out late, don't listen to your mother. You know you want to.

And maybe that is why phone freaking always kind of stayed in this little niche of... Terrarium of itself. Yeah, this terrarium of curiosity and kind of like bad boy, but to a point. This is not so bad, but can we really send them to jail? Not really. What about community service kind of thing? Let's just flip them. Yeah.

Let's just flip them. It's easier for everyone if we just flip this guy instead of trying to figure out what law we're charging him under. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it was instrumental in pushing the technology and getting AT&T to try and cover their fucking asses. And it led to a whole different world where nerds are kings.

Now it feels like where we're dealing with this like Elon Musk culture of Moose Fast and Breakers. things without really thinking about all the consequences. And maybe some of it is like the phone freak vibe is about being the underdog and about tapping into a larger network. But what happens when that vibe becomes the network and is in total control? Then it's like, I don't want the network to move fast and break things. I don't want small towns across North America to dry up with no water because all the data centers are taking it. I don't want to freak the whole world.

I just want to freak the phone. Just the phones. Just the bananas phone. If there's a moral to be had from today's story, freak the phones, stop there. You've got to freak everything you see. Some shit is meant to be unfreeked. You ever been to look at like a brook that should be unfreeked? Have you ever seen a sunset?

Yeah. The night sky, don't freak it with ads. Just leave it unfreeked. Freak the phones. Yeah. That's really well put. I mean, you just saw the meteor shower? No, it's not, but thank you. Well, I can have my thing in. I think you are... Yes, thank you. We're our own hushes kittics. Thank you, thank you. Sorry, but yes, meteor shower. Yeah, you just saw a beautiful meteor shower that is an ancient, well before any phone network, well before any telegraph.

And well after. Yeah, and long, long after. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. At K-O-5Fi.com forward slash bittersweet infamy. But no pressure. Bitter sweet, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at Bitter Sweet Infamy.

Or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this episode include a video uploaded to YouTube by The Connections Museum. 2,600, how freaking really worked. Posted March 26, 2023. And the Connections Museum is my recommendation for a spot in Seattle to learn more about this or check out their YouTube page, their website as well.

I looked at another video uploaded to YouTube by Stuff. you should know, the episode title, Phone Freaking, The Advent of Hacking, posted July 24th, 2024. Another video uploaded to YouTube by The 8-bit Guy, How Telephone Freaking Worked, Posted October 24th, 2019. I looked at a video based on a story written by David Braw, who is also the narrator of the video. It's called Phone Freaking, Hacking Before the Internet. You can find this on Cybercrime Magazine's website. I read the article, Secrets of the Little Blue Box, the 1971 article about phone hacking that inspired Steve Jobs.

This one featured Captain Crunch heavily written by Ron Rosenbaum. I read it on slate.com, and it was republished there October 7, 2011. The sound effect of the dialing phone and ringing was found through a YouTube. video posted by Clean Sounds December 13th, 2020. It's called Phone Dial and Ring Sound. Lastly, and probably the most helpful sources, I've read the book Exploding the Phone, written by Phil Lapsley, published 2013 by Grove Press. If you would like to support the Bittersweet Infamy podcast, please head over to our coffee page. That's K-O-Fi.com slash Bittersweet Infamy. And And that's a way that you can throw us a few bucks.

Give us a little tip here and there. Say thank you with your dollars for an episode. As a monthly subscriber, you have access to the Bittersweet Film Club, where we talk about movies that you tell us to watch. Like we mentioned in the episode, our upcoming film club is about Warner Herzog's Grizzly Man. And then after that, we're going to watch a deli partner film. Straight Talk. It's a really good time.

And even better than that, as a monthly subscriber, you join the Highlands. hallowed ranks of our other dear and lovely monthly subscribers, including Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Joe, Sof, Dylan, and Satchel the Cat. Bittersweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Taylor Basso and me, Josie Mitchell. The interstitial music you heard was written by Mitchell Collins, and the song you are listening to now is T Street by Brian Steele.