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[00:03]
Dena Temple Raston
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here.
[00:16]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
The phone to me was the closest thing to God on earth. As I was growing up
[00:23]
Dena Temple Raston
as a kid, Joe and Grecia spent hours on the telephone, mostly listening. Joe was blind and growing up in the 1950s, there were plenty of places the world told him he didn't belong. But the phone was different. It answered, it made sounds. It had rules. And Joe discovered that if he listened carefully enough, it would reveal things to him. Eventually, Joe learned how to make the telephone do things no one expected, things the phone company definitely did not want wanted to do.
[00:57]
Phil Lapsley
Joan Grecia, you know, the blind whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend.
[01:07]
Dena Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here, the show about how technology is changing everything. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and today a story of a kid who heard something in the telephone system that only almost nobody else could. A sound that would change his life and in a small but important way, the technology that came after him. We'll be right back.
[01:37]
Notion/1-800-contacts Advertiser
This show is supported by Notion. Agents are getting smarter every day. But even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and the right tools. That's where Notion comes in. With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Notion's developer platform gives developers and coding agents the primitives to extend what's possible on Notion and take it beyond. Connect to external systems, bring context in, take permissioned actions across your tool stack and expose custom agents capabilities to to any system that needs them. It includes new primitives that allow teams to sync any data source into Notion. Build any tool for your Notion agents and orchestrate any agent in Notion. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today@notion.com PRX that's all lowercase letters. Notion.com PRX to try notion's developer platform today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show.
[02:46]
Dena Temple Raston
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
[03:02]
Notion/1-800-contacts Advertiser
And breathe.
[03:03]
Dena Temple Raston
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order 1-800-contacts. Joe Ingrecia was eight years old when he started correcting the phone company.
[03:32]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
And I remember calling up a telephone office and telling them that I couldn't get dial tone. And they said, oh, your line's probably just busy. Sometimes the line finders get overloaded.
[03:42]
Dena Temple Raston
The phone company had an explanation. Joe had a better one.
[03:47]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
I said, well, no. Why would it get dialed on right away when I pick it up again? Well, yeah, you've got a point there, I guess.
[03:54]
Dena Temple Raston
He was 8, and already Joe had figured out something that would shape the rest of his life. And that was if you listened closely enough to a machine, sometimes it would tell you things that even the people who built it didn't know. Joe had been listening to the telephone almost from the moment he learned to use one. Just ask Rachel Morrison. She directed a documentary about Joe called Joy Bubbles. It premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
[04:25]
Rachel Morrison
His mother showed him how to use the telephone when he was a young kid. And he was just fascinated with the fact that he could pick up the handset and call someone and reach someone, you know, a real human being at the end of the line.
[04:43]
Dena Temple Raston
And you can understand why that would matter to him. Because the phone didn't just connect Joe to people who were far away. Sometimes it helped him get away from what was happening right next to him, things he didn't want to hear.
[04:57]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
Daddy would slam mother and hurt her and break things, and there'd be things thrown around and lots of scary sounds and stuff at night. And sometimes I'd hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone, the soft hum of the dial tone that was always there. What a wonderful thing a telephone is, especially during those long nights.
[05:23]
Dena Temple Raston
And home wasn't the only place Joe was made to feel different. This was the 1950s, a time when blind kids were often separated from everyone else and sent to special schools and treat it as fragile or worse. But the phone, it didn't treat Joe as less than. In fact, it was one of the first places where Joe discovered he knew things other people didn't. The longer Joe listened, the more he learned. And eventually he would hear something that almost nobody else could. Joe's breakthrough came when he was about 7, doing what he always did. Listening. One day when he was on a long distance call, Joe heard something. A tone, a very specific sound buried in the line. And because Joe had perfect pitch, he did what came naturally. He tried to copy it by whistling. This is a recording of him doing it. And then something strange happened. The call Dropped. A moment later, the dial tone came back. For most people, that would have been the end of it. A weird glitch. But Joe couldn't let it go. So he tried it again and again. Eventually, he realized the phone was responding to his whistle. Because that tone wasn't just a sound. It was a command. The phone system was listening for instructions in those tones. And completely by accident, Joe had learned how to speak its language.
[07:16]
Jennifer Strong
Operator.
[07:17]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
Hello?
[07:18]
Dena Temple Raston
In the early days, phones were connected by human operators. This is long distance.
[07:23]
Jennifer Strong
May I help you?
[07:24]
Dena Temple Raston
Yeah, I want to call area code. Later, as Joe was growing up, switching systems took over. And those systems used tones to tell one another what to do. And one of those tones, 2600 hertz, meant a call had ended. That's the tone. Joe whistled perfectly, it turns out. And when he did, the system thought the call was over. But the the line stayed open. And that's where things got interesting. Joe discovered that he could then make a second call. Now, back then, long distance calls were expensive. A local call might cost a nickel or a dime, but a call across the country could cost real money. And Joe discovered he could make a local call, do that whistle, and get the dial tone back, and then place a long distance call. And because the network still thought he was on the original local connection, he could make long distance calls for free. Today, a hacker might call that exploiting a vulnerability. But imagine being seven years old, blind, holding a telephone receiver to your ear, and realizing that a machine millions of people used every day had a secret. And somehow you'd figured it out. It must have felt like magic. Joe didn't set out to become famous. He didn't even set out to become a hacker. He was just a kid who discovered something unusual, something entirely his. And for years, he mostly kept it that way. Then he went to college. And one day, almost casually, Joe told another student what he could do. The student didn't believe him, so Joe showed him. Which is how Joe discovered something else about his whistle. It didn't just make the telephone behave differently. It made people behave differently, too. That's after the break. Support for Click Here comes from Servil. Every company says AI will make employees more productive. But most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access and password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. SERVL was built to change that. You describe what you want in plain English, and Servl builds it for you. No complicated workflow, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everybody down. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. And unlike traditional automation tools, Servol doesn't require consultants or long implementation cycles. Servol positions it as the AI powered operational backbone of the company, not just a support function. Learn more or start a free four week pilot at cerval.com clickhere that's S-E-R-V-A L.com clickhere servol.com clickhere how do we
[10:41]
Jennifer Strong
maintain a strong defense in a world that's rapidly changing? Join us on Strength in Numbers, a podcast from UVA's National Security Data and Policy Institute. I'm your host Jennifer Strong. In each episode, we'll take a look at the materials powering today's most advanced technology, how it's being used on the battlefield, and ask how the United States can stay competitive against potential adversaries.
[11:04]
Dena Temple Raston
Voters should be concerned about all this. We want America to be strong, but we've got to be strong and smart.
[11:09]
Jennifer Strong
That's all. Coming up this season of Strength in Numbers. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
[11:24]
Dena Temple Raston
The first person Joe told about the whistle didn't believe him. And really, why would he? A blind kid tells you he can make free long distance calls just by whistling. It seemed far fetched on the face of, so Joe showed him. He listened for the tone, matched it perfectly. Here's Rachel Morrison, the documentary filmmaker.
[11:45]
Rachel Morrison
Again, my impression is that, you know, kids started just running over to the payphone. They're in the dorms. It created a whole scene.
[11:56]
Dena Temple Raston
You can almost picture it. Kids sprinting down dorm hallways toward the payphones, dragging friends behind them. Try it again. Call California. No, call Europe.
[12:06]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
One other student heard about it.
[12:07]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
And another one.
[12:08]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
And another one. One night it was about 40 people wanting phone calls, some to Israel and places I'd never heard of. Like, one had me to call Abu Dhabi.
[12:17]
Dena Temple Raston
It sounds so retro now, college kids crowding around a payphone. But you have to remember how expensive long distance calls were at the time.
[12:25]
Rachel Morrison
A lot of students probably really never called home or made calls really at all. And so this was a huge deal.
[12:34]
Dena Temple Raston
And suddenly this guy who'd spent much of his life on the outside looking in, had something everybody wanted. And Joe got something he wanted, too. For the first time in a very long time, people were coming to Joe not because he needed help, but because they did. Because he could do something they couldn't.
[13:01]
Will Butler
I think that's relatable for blind people, is feeling like people are always doing things for you, sometimes even without you asking them.
[13:12]
Dena Temple Raston
This is Will Butler, one of the producers on the Joe Ingrecia documentary. And when he says, this is relatable, he means that literally. Will is blind, too.
[13:23]
Will Butler
You get into a rhythm of not being the giver, but just feeling like a receiver all the time. And I think college was the first time where he thought, maybe I have something to offer. When this group of people excitedly gathers around him and he's able to give them these opportunities to connect with their friends and family, he felt like he finally had something to give.
[13:48]
Dena Temple Raston
Maybe that's why the whistle mattered so much. Not because it got people free phone calls, but because it gave Joe something he'd wanted since he was a kid, back when he was holding a telephone receiver in the dark, to be the reason people called to have something to give. But attention has a way of attracting more attention. One night, a student used Joe's whistle to make a free long distance call. And afterward he forgot to hang up the phone. So an operator in Canada overheard the students talking about Joe and his ability to make free calls. So now the phone company knew about Joe, too. This is filmmaker Rachel Morrison.
[14:32]
Rachel Morrison
Again, they call the university, you know, so the telephone company and the university, you know, they come knock on his door and they think about kicking him out of school and arresting him, but that ends up not happening. But it does create this whole media sensation.
[14:48]
Dena Temple Raston
One day you're a philosophy student trying to fit in, and the next reporters are calling, television crews are showing up, and everyone wants to talk to the blind kid who can whistle his way through the telephone system.
[15:00]
Rachel Morrison
Abc, NBC. He was on BBC. He went to the UK and was on, I believe it was itv. So, I mean, this was like national and even international news.
[15:15]
Dena Temple Raston
All of that attention had an unexpected side effect. Until then, Joe had mostly thought of the whistle as his thing. A strange talent, a curiosity. But now he was meeting people who were fascinated by the telephone the same way he was. People who wanted to know not just how the system worked, but what happened when you pushed it a little further than it was supposed to go. And it turns out around this time, the late 60s and early 70s, there was a community of people quietly experimenting with the telephone telephone network. Some used homemade electronic devices. Some used tape recorders. Some, like Joe, relied mostly on their ears. And they called it phone freaking. Phil Lapsley literally wrote the book on the phone freaking movement. It's called Exploding the Phone so if there were a Mount Rushmore of phone freaks, who would be up there?
[16:12]
Phil Lapsley
That's a great question. Mount Rushmore of phone freaks. I think we can only have four names, so I think that first would be Joy, Bubbles, Joe, and Grecia. You know, the blind, whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend.
[16:28]
Dena Temple Raston
Legend. And Joe wasn't the only one.
[16:31]
Phil Lapsley
John Draper, AKA Captain Crunch, was one of the most famous phone freaks. A contemporary of Joy Bubbles, Cap' n
[16:38]
Dena Temple Raston
Crunch got his name in a way that tells you something about this whole world. There was a toy whistle that came free in boxes of Cap' n Crunch cereal, and someone discovered that when you blew it into a phone, it made the same 2600Hz tone Joe could make with his mouth, which meant this vast, enormous, complicated telephone network could be fooled by a toy from a cereal box. A few years later came Kevin Mitnick, who would go on to become one of the most famous hackers in the world. And you can start to see what
[17:10]
Phil Lapsley
this was becoming a question of, you know, if I do this thing, what happens? And can I. Can I come up with a creative way of finding a hole in the system and being able to make the telephone system do something it wasn't meant to do?
[17:24]
Dena Temple Raston
It was about asking a deceptively simple question. Are you sure this is the only way this has to work? And once people started asking that question, it didn't stay inside the telephone system. In the early 1970s, two young men in California read an Esquire article about phone freaking, the thing that Joe was doing. And they became fascinated by the tones people were using to control the network.
[17:58]
Phil Lapsley
And the two of them drove over to the library, and they looked around until they found the technical specs they needed, and they built what was called a blue box.
[18:05]
Rachel Morrison
The blue box, which could make the tones the Joy Bubbles could whistle. It was actually the first thing they made and sold together. Even though it was illegal to sell it, they were selling it to people at Berkeley.
[18:17]
Dena Temple Raston
That's Joy Bubbles film director Rachel Morrison again, and the two young men she's talking about, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Years later, Steve Jobs told his biographer that if they hadn't made those blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.
[18:40]
Rachel Morrison
Kind of like a funny start to, like the history of Apple.
[18:46]
Dena Temple Raston
Funny, but also a pretty direct line. Because the thing the phone freaks figured out wasn't just how to make free calls. It was that technology comes with rules, and those rules are worth testing.
[19:00]
Phil Lapsley
I do think that phone phreaking led to some things that we take for granted in terms of cybersecurity and network security.
[19:08]
Dena Temple Raston
Phil points out that when the telephone companies built the first long distance networks, they weren't thinking about hackers because there
[19:15]
Phil Lapsley
weren't any network hackers. Right? You can forgive them for that. But what the fun freaks really taught us is that there are going to be people who are going to be looking at whatever you're building, and it doesn't matter what the product is.
[19:28]
Dena Temple Raston
Today that lesson feels almost obvious. If you build it, people will come and then try to take it apart. That's true of phone networks, it's true of the Internet, and it's likely true of whatever comes next. Joe and Grecia understood that long before most people. He spent much of his life navigating systems that weren't designed with him in mind. But that outsider's perspective turned out to be its own kind of advantage. He listened differently. He noticed things other people missed. And in a technology millions of people used every day, he found possibility hidden in plain sight. Not because he was trying to break the system, but because he was curious enough to hear it differently. Later in life, after the phone freaks had faded and the world had moved on to computers and the Internet, Joe went back in search of the thing that drew him to all of this in the first place. Connection.
[20:33]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
I began to get kind of lonesome, and I just had to find a way of having loads and loads of good people from all walks of life to call me. And I'd ask people, hey, how can I get lots of people to talk to and lots of people calling me?
[20:47]
Dena Temple Raston
So he came up with an idea. A phone number anyone could call. And if you dialed it, you'd hear him tell you a story.
[20:55]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
And sometimes even years after that, when we'd mention those balloons and the security guard, the way he ran and everything, sometimes we'd still laugh over that.
[21:06]
Dena Temple Raston
Or maybe a Poland.
[21:08]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
The little old man said the little boy. I often cry. The little old man nodded. So do I.
[21:18]
Dena Temple Raston
Or words of encouragement.
[21:21]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
Stay strong and take care of each other and find some time to play around.
[21:28]
Dena Temple Raston
This time, he changed his name to Joy Bubbles. Legally. For some callers, Joy Bubbles became a late night companion, a kind of telephone Mr. Rogers. And maybe that's why it worked.
[21:42]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
It's because I love the phone so much. If you love anything enough, it'll love you back.
[21:47]
Dena Temple Raston
For Joe, Joy Bubbles, the phone was never really the point. It was the connection. The phone was just a way in, a way to build a world that felt a little less lonely. And maybe that's what Joe kept discovering over and over again. The thing a technology is designed to do and the thing people actually need from it aren't always the same thing. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonke. I'm Dena Temple Rastan, and thanks for listening. You're more than just one thing. Your vehicle should be 2. More connectivity when you're the boss.
[23:14]
Notion/1-800-contacts Advertiser
Hey Google, when's my next meeting?
[23:15]
Dena Temple Raston
And more space when you're the mom. Everyone in the all new Mazda CX5 more to move every side of you. Google is a trademark of Google llc. Sequences shortened and simulated.
[23:25]
Jennifer Strong
If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.

Summary4 min read

Podcast Summary: Click Here – "Calling JoyBubbles"

Date: July 14, 2026
Host: Dena Temple Raston (Recorded Future News)

Overview

In this episode of "Click Here," Dena Temple Raston explores the remarkable story of Joe Ingrecia—later known as Joy Bubbles—a blind child whose fascination with telephones in the 1950s led to one of the most legendary exploits in the early history of hacking: phone phreaking. The episode blends Joe’s personal journey with the broader implications of curiosity, outsider advantage, and how early 'hackers' unwittingly paved the way for today's digital world.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Joe Ingrecia’s Childhood and the Appeal of the Telephone

Joe, blind from birth, found solace and empowerment through the telephone.
- Quote: “The phone to me was the closest thing to God on earth. As I was growing up.” – Joe Ingrecia (00:15)
In the 1950s, society frequently marginalized blind children, but the phone offered Joe connection, rules, and, crucially, consistency.
- Quote: “The phone didn't just connect Joe to people who were far away. Sometimes it helped him get away from what was happening right next to him, things he didn't want to hear.” – Dena Temple Raston (04:42)

2. Discovery of the 2600Hz Tone

Joe’s perfect pitch enabled him to isolate and replicate an obscure tone used by the telephone system to signal a call's end (2600Hz).
By whistling this precise note, he could “trick” the system into allowing free long-distance calls.
- Key moment: Joe discovers by accident that the phone responds to his whistle by dropping calls or giving a new dial tone. (05:23–07:10)
- Quote: “That tone wasn’t just a sound. It was a command.” – Dena Temple Raston (06:36)

3. From Personal Curiosity to Social Revelation

Initially, Joe kept his whistle trick to himself, but in college, sharing it created a sensation.
- Friends crowded around payphones, eager to witness the magic.
- Quote: “One night it was about 40 people wanting phone calls, some to Israel and places I'd never heard of. Like, one had me to call Abu Dhabi.” – Joe Ingrecia (12:05)
For Joe, this was less about exploitation and more about finally offering something to others, reversing typical dynamics for blind people.
- Quote: “Maybe I have something to offer…he finally had something to give.” – Will Butler (13:22)

4. The Origins and Impact of Phone Phreaking

Publicity surrounding Joe’s feats led to widespread curiosity and media coverage (ABC, NBC, BBC).
Joe’s story became central in the emerging subculture of phone phreaks—tinkerers who explored the limits of technology.
- Quote: “Joan Grecia, you know, the blind whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend.” – Phil Lapsley (00:57, 16:11)
The culture inspired future icons:
- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, influenced by phone phreaking, built and sold “blue boxes,” ultimately shaping the founding of Apple. (18:05–18:17)
- Quote: “If they hadn't made those blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.” – Rachel Morrison paraphrasing Steve Jobs (18:17)

5. Legacy: Lessons in Curiosity and Connection

Phone phreaking demonstrated vulnerabilities and the necessity for creative, adversarial thinking in technology.
- Quote: “It was about asking a deceptively simple question. Are you sure this is the only way this has to work?” – Dena Temple Raston (17:23)
- Quote: “Phone phreaking led to some things that we take for granted in terms of cybersecurity and network security.” – Phil Lapsley (18:59)
Joe’s later years focused on fostering connection through a "storyline" phone number, offering stories and encouragement to anyone who called.
- Quote: “If you love anything enough, it'll love you back.” – Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) (21:41)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

On the power of listening:
“If you listened closely enough to a machine, sometimes it would tell you things that even the people who built it didn't know.” – Dena Temple Raston (03:54)
On inclusion versus isolation:
“The phone…didn’t treat Joe as less than.” – Dena Temple Raston (05:23)
On the essence of hacking:
“Can I come up with a creative way of finding a hole in the system and being able to make the telephone system do something it wasn't meant to do?” – Phil Lapsley (17:09)
The Joy Bubbles philosophy:
“Stay strong and take care of each other and find some time to play around.” – Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) (21:20)

Important Timestamps

00:15 – Joe describes the spiritual allure of the telephone.
05:23 – Joe escapes family trauma by listening to dial tone.
06:36–07:10 – Discovery and explanation of the fabled 2600Hz tone.
12:05 – College students rush to exploit Joe’s newfound ability.
14:31 – The phone company and university get involved.
16:11–18:05 – Phone phreaking’s Mount Rushmore; intro to Captain Crunch, Wozniak & Jobs.
19:07 – Phone phreaks’ influence on cybersecurity.
20:32–21:47 – “Joy Bubbles” era: sharing stories and connection.

Flow, Tone, and Takeaways

The episode weaves together personal vulnerability, technical ingenuity, and cultural impact, narrated with warmth and curiosity. Through archival recordings, interviews with filmmakers and technologists, and reflections from blind advocates, “Calling JoyBubbles” illustrates not just the story of a hacker, but the power of listening deeply, the importance of outsider perspectives, and the lasting human hunger for connection—even (or especially) in a technology-driven world.

End of Summary

Loading summary

Transcript70 lines

[00:03]
Dena Temple Raston
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here.
[00:16]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
The phone to me was the closest thing to God on earth. As I was growing up
[00:23]
Dena Temple Raston
as a kid, Joe and Grecia spent hours on the telephone, mostly listening. Joe was blind and growing up in the 1950s, there were plenty of places the world told him he didn't belong. But the phone was different. It answered, it made sounds. It had rules. And Joe discovered that if he listened carefully enough, it would reveal things to him. Eventually, Joe learned how to make the telephone do things no one expected, things the phone company definitely did not want wanted to do.
[00:57]
Phil Lapsley
Joan Grecia, you know, the blind whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend.
[01:07]
Dena Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here, the show about how technology is changing everything. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and today a story of a kid who heard something in the telephone system that only almost nobody else could. A sound that would change his life and in a small but important way, the technology that came after him. We'll be right back.
[01:37]
Notion/1-800-contacts Advertiser
This show is supported by Notion. Agents are getting smarter every day. But even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and the right tools. That's where Notion comes in. With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Notion's developer platform gives developers and coding agents the primitives to extend what's possible on Notion and take it beyond. Connect to external systems, bring context in, take permissioned actions across your tool stack and expose custom agents capabilities to to any system that needs them. It includes new primitives that allow teams to sync any data source into Notion. Build any tool for your Notion agents and orchestrate any agent in Notion. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today@notion.com PRX that's all lowercase letters. Notion.com PRX to try notion's developer platform today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show.
[02:46]
Dena Temple Raston
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
[03:02]
Notion/1-800-contacts Advertiser
And breathe.
[03:03]
Dena Temple Raston
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order 1-800-contacts. Joe Ingrecia was eight years old when he started correcting the phone company.
[03:32]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
And I remember calling up a telephone office and telling them that I couldn't get dial tone. And they said, oh, your line's probably just busy. Sometimes the line finders get overloaded.
[03:42]
Dena Temple Raston
The phone company had an explanation. Joe had a better one.
[03:47]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
I said, well, no. Why would it get dialed on right away when I pick it up again? Well, yeah, you've got a point there, I guess.
[03:54]
Dena Temple Raston
He was 8, and already Joe had figured out something that would shape the rest of his life. And that was if you listened closely enough to a machine, sometimes it would tell you things that even the people who built it didn't know. Joe had been listening to the telephone almost from the moment he learned to use one. Just ask Rachel Morrison. She directed a documentary about Joe called Joy Bubbles. It premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
[04:25]
Rachel Morrison
His mother showed him how to use the telephone when he was a young kid. And he was just fascinated with the fact that he could pick up the handset and call someone and reach someone, you know, a real human being at the end of the line.
[04:43]
Dena Temple Raston
And you can understand why that would matter to him. Because the phone didn't just connect Joe to people who were far away. Sometimes it helped him get away from what was happening right next to him, things he didn't want to hear.
[04:57]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
Daddy would slam mother and hurt her and break things, and there'd be things thrown around and lots of scary sounds and stuff at night. And sometimes I'd hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone, the soft hum of the dial tone that was always there. What a wonderful thing a telephone is, especially during those long nights.
[05:23]
Dena Temple Raston
And home wasn't the only place Joe was made to feel different. This was the 1950s, a time when blind kids were often separated from everyone else and sent to special schools and treat it as fragile or worse. But the phone, it didn't treat Joe as less than. In fact, it was one of the first places where Joe discovered he knew things other people didn't. The longer Joe listened, the more he learned. And eventually he would hear something that almost nobody else could. Joe's breakthrough came when he was about 7, doing what he always did. Listening. One day when he was on a long distance call, Joe heard something. A tone, a very specific sound buried in the line. And because Joe had perfect pitch, he did what came naturally. He tried to copy it by whistling. This is a recording of him doing it. And then something strange happened. The call Dropped. A moment later, the dial tone came back. For most people, that would have been the end of it. A weird glitch. But Joe couldn't let it go. So he tried it again and again. Eventually, he realized the phone was responding to his whistle. Because that tone wasn't just a sound. It was a command. The phone system was listening for instructions in those tones. And completely by accident, Joe had learned how to speak its language.
[07:16]
Jennifer Strong
Operator.
[07:17]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
Hello?
[07:18]
Dena Temple Raston
In the early days, phones were connected by human operators. This is long distance.
[07:23]
Jennifer Strong
May I help you?
[07:24]
Dena Temple Raston
Yeah, I want to call area code. Later, as Joe was growing up, switching systems took over. And those systems used tones to tell one another what to do. And one of those tones, 2600 hertz, meant a call had ended. That's the tone. Joe whistled perfectly, it turns out. And when he did, the system thought the call was over. But the the line stayed open. And that's where things got interesting. Joe discovered that he could then make a second call. Now, back then, long distance calls were expensive. A local call might cost a nickel or a dime, but a call across the country could cost real money. And Joe discovered he could make a local call, do that whistle, and get the dial tone back, and then place a long distance call. And because the network still thought he was on the original local connection, he could make long distance calls for free. Today, a hacker might call that exploiting a vulnerability. But imagine being seven years old, blind, holding a telephone receiver to your ear, and realizing that a machine millions of people used every day had a secret. And somehow you'd figured it out. It must have felt like magic. Joe didn't set out to become famous. He didn't even set out to become a hacker. He was just a kid who discovered something unusual, something entirely his. And for years, he mostly kept it that way. Then he went to college. And one day, almost casually, Joe told another student what he could do. The student didn't believe him, so Joe showed him. Which is how Joe discovered something else about his whistle. It didn't just make the telephone behave differently. It made people behave differently, too. That's after the break. Support for Click Here comes from Servil. Every company says AI will make employees more productive. But most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access and password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. SERVL was built to change that. You describe what you want in plain English, and Servl builds it for you. No complicated workflow, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everybody down. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. And unlike traditional automation tools, Servol doesn't require consultants or long implementation cycles. Servol positions it as the AI powered operational backbone of the company, not just a support function. Learn more or start a free four week pilot at cerval.com clickhere that's S-E-R-V-A L.com clickhere servol.com clickhere how do we
[10:41]
Jennifer Strong
maintain a strong defense in a world that's rapidly changing? Join us on Strength in Numbers, a podcast from UVA's National Security Data and Policy Institute. I'm your host Jennifer Strong. In each episode, we'll take a look at the materials powering today's most advanced technology, how it's being used on the battlefield, and ask how the United States can stay competitive against potential adversaries.
[11:04]
Dena Temple Raston
Voters should be concerned about all this. We want America to be strong, but we've got to be strong and smart.
[11:09]
Jennifer Strong
That's all. Coming up this season of Strength in Numbers. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
[11:24]
Dena Temple Raston
The first person Joe told about the whistle didn't believe him. And really, why would he? A blind kid tells you he can make free long distance calls just by whistling. It seemed far fetched on the face of, so Joe showed him. He listened for the tone, matched it perfectly. Here's Rachel Morrison, the documentary filmmaker.
[11:45]
Rachel Morrison
Again, my impression is that, you know, kids started just running over to the payphone. They're in the dorms. It created a whole scene.
[11:56]
Dena Temple Raston
You can almost picture it. Kids sprinting down dorm hallways toward the payphones, dragging friends behind them. Try it again. Call California. No, call Europe.
[12:06]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
One other student heard about it.
[12:07]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
And another one.
[12:08]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
And another one. One night it was about 40 people wanting phone calls, some to Israel and places I'd never heard of. Like, one had me to call Abu Dhabi.
[12:17]
Dena Temple Raston
It sounds so retro now, college kids crowding around a payphone. But you have to remember how expensive long distance calls were at the time.
[12:25]
Rachel Morrison
A lot of students probably really never called home or made calls really at all. And so this was a huge deal.
[12:34]
Dena Temple Raston
And suddenly this guy who'd spent much of his life on the outside looking in, had something everybody wanted. And Joe got something he wanted, too. For the first time in a very long time, people were coming to Joe not because he needed help, but because they did. Because he could do something they couldn't.
[13:01]
Will Butler
I think that's relatable for blind people, is feeling like people are always doing things for you, sometimes even without you asking them.
[13:12]
Dena Temple Raston
This is Will Butler, one of the producers on the Joe Ingrecia documentary. And when he says, this is relatable, he means that literally. Will is blind, too.
[13:23]
Will Butler
You get into a rhythm of not being the giver, but just feeling like a receiver all the time. And I think college was the first time where he thought, maybe I have something to offer. When this group of people excitedly gathers around him and he's able to give them these opportunities to connect with their friends and family, he felt like he finally had something to give.
[13:48]
Dena Temple Raston
Maybe that's why the whistle mattered so much. Not because it got people free phone calls, but because it gave Joe something he'd wanted since he was a kid, back when he was holding a telephone receiver in the dark, to be the reason people called to have something to give. But attention has a way of attracting more attention. One night, a student used Joe's whistle to make a free long distance call. And afterward he forgot to hang up the phone. So an operator in Canada overheard the students talking about Joe and his ability to make free calls. So now the phone company knew about Joe, too. This is filmmaker Rachel Morrison.
[14:32]
Rachel Morrison
Again, they call the university, you know, so the telephone company and the university, you know, they come knock on his door and they think about kicking him out of school and arresting him, but that ends up not happening. But it does create this whole media sensation.
[14:48]
Dena Temple Raston
One day you're a philosophy student trying to fit in, and the next reporters are calling, television crews are showing up, and everyone wants to talk to the blind kid who can whistle his way through the telephone system.
[15:00]
Rachel Morrison
Abc, NBC. He was on BBC. He went to the UK and was on, I believe it was itv. So, I mean, this was like national and even international news.
[15:15]
Dena Temple Raston
All of that attention had an unexpected side effect. Until then, Joe had mostly thought of the whistle as his thing. A strange talent, a curiosity. But now he was meeting people who were fascinated by the telephone the same way he was. People who wanted to know not just how the system worked, but what happened when you pushed it a little further than it was supposed to go. And it turns out around this time, the late 60s and early 70s, there was a community of people quietly experimenting with the telephone telephone network. Some used homemade electronic devices. Some used tape recorders. Some, like Joe, relied mostly on their ears. And they called it phone freaking. Phil Lapsley literally wrote the book on the phone freaking movement. It's called Exploding the Phone so if there were a Mount Rushmore of phone freaks, who would be up there?
[16:12]
Phil Lapsley
That's a great question. Mount Rushmore of phone freaks. I think we can only have four names, so I think that first would be Joy, Bubbles, Joe, and Grecia. You know, the blind, whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend.
[16:28]
Dena Temple Raston
Legend. And Joe wasn't the only one.
[16:31]
Phil Lapsley
John Draper, AKA Captain Crunch, was one of the most famous phone freaks. A contemporary of Joy Bubbles, Cap' n
[16:38]
Dena Temple Raston
Crunch got his name in a way that tells you something about this whole world. There was a toy whistle that came free in boxes of Cap' n Crunch cereal, and someone discovered that when you blew it into a phone, it made the same 2600Hz tone Joe could make with his mouth, which meant this vast, enormous, complicated telephone network could be fooled by a toy from a cereal box. A few years later came Kevin Mitnick, who would go on to become one of the most famous hackers in the world. And you can start to see what
[17:10]
Phil Lapsley
this was becoming a question of, you know, if I do this thing, what happens? And can I. Can I come up with a creative way of finding a hole in the system and being able to make the telephone system do something it wasn't meant to do?
[17:24]
Dena Temple Raston
It was about asking a deceptively simple question. Are you sure this is the only way this has to work? And once people started asking that question, it didn't stay inside the telephone system. In the early 1970s, two young men in California read an Esquire article about phone freaking, the thing that Joe was doing. And they became fascinated by the tones people were using to control the network.
[17:58]
Phil Lapsley
And the two of them drove over to the library, and they looked around until they found the technical specs they needed, and they built what was called a blue box.
[18:05]
Rachel Morrison
The blue box, which could make the tones the Joy Bubbles could whistle. It was actually the first thing they made and sold together. Even though it was illegal to sell it, they were selling it to people at Berkeley.
[18:17]
Dena Temple Raston
That's Joy Bubbles film director Rachel Morrison again, and the two young men she's talking about, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Years later, Steve Jobs told his biographer that if they hadn't made those blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.
[18:40]
Rachel Morrison
Kind of like a funny start to, like the history of Apple.
[18:46]
Dena Temple Raston
Funny, but also a pretty direct line. Because the thing the phone freaks figured out wasn't just how to make free calls. It was that technology comes with rules, and those rules are worth testing.
[19:00]
Phil Lapsley
I do think that phone phreaking led to some things that we take for granted in terms of cybersecurity and network security.
[19:08]
Dena Temple Raston
Phil points out that when the telephone companies built the first long distance networks, they weren't thinking about hackers because there
[19:15]
Phil Lapsley
weren't any network hackers. Right? You can forgive them for that. But what the fun freaks really taught us is that there are going to be people who are going to be looking at whatever you're building, and it doesn't matter what the product is.
[19:28]
Dena Temple Raston
Today that lesson feels almost obvious. If you build it, people will come and then try to take it apart. That's true of phone networks, it's true of the Internet, and it's likely true of whatever comes next. Joe and Grecia understood that long before most people. He spent much of his life navigating systems that weren't designed with him in mind. But that outsider's perspective turned out to be its own kind of advantage. He listened differently. He noticed things other people missed. And in a technology millions of people used every day, he found possibility hidden in plain sight. Not because he was trying to break the system, but because he was curious enough to hear it differently. Later in life, after the phone freaks had faded and the world had moved on to computers and the Internet, Joe went back in search of the thing that drew him to all of this in the first place. Connection.
[20:33]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
I began to get kind of lonesome, and I just had to find a way of having loads and loads of good people from all walks of life to call me. And I'd ask people, hey, how can I get lots of people to talk to and lots of people calling me?
[20:47]
Dena Temple Raston
So he came up with an idea. A phone number anyone could call. And if you dialed it, you'd hear him tell you a story.
[20:55]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
And sometimes even years after that, when we'd mention those balloons and the security guard, the way he ran and everything, sometimes we'd still laugh over that.
[21:06]
Dena Temple Raston
Or maybe a Poland.
[21:08]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
The little old man said the little boy. I often cry. The little old man nodded. So do I.
[21:18]
Dena Temple Raston
Or words of encouragement.
[21:21]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles) or close acquaintance
Stay strong and take care of each other and find some time to play around.
[21:28]
Dena Temple Raston
This time, he changed his name to Joy Bubbles. Legally. For some callers, Joy Bubbles became a late night companion, a kind of telephone Mr. Rogers. And maybe that's why it worked.
[21:42]
Joe Ingrecia (Joy Bubbles)
It's because I love the phone so much. If you love anything enough, it'll love you back.
[21:47]
Dena Temple Raston
For Joe, Joy Bubbles, the phone was never really the point. It was the connection. The phone was just a way in, a way to build a world that felt a little less lonely. And maybe that's what Joe kept discovering over and over again. The thing a technology is designed to do and the thing people actually need from it aren't always the same thing. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonke. I'm Dena Temple Rastan, and thanks for listening. You're more than just one thing. Your vehicle should be 2. More connectivity when you're the boss.
[23:14]
Notion/1-800-contacts Advertiser
Hey Google, when's my next meeting?
[23:15]
Dena Temple Raston
And more space when you're the mom. Everyone in the all new Mazda CX5 more to move every side of you. Google is a trademark of Google llc. Sequences shortened and simulated.
[23:25]
Jennifer Strong
If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.