1-800-PODCAST

Chuck and Josh dive into the wacky world of 800 and 900 phone numbers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's us and we're here to talk to
you about get this our book. We have a Stuff
you Should Know book coming out this November and you're
going to love it and you can preorder it now.
That's right. It's called Stuff you Should Know, Collen, an
incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things, and it's been a
lot of fun to work on and we're really, i

(00:20):
mean genuinely excited about how this thing has come together.
It's twenties six chunky Harry chapters that are just going
to knock your socks clean off. And yes, Chuck, we
are indeed proud of this book. It is truly, indubitably
the first Stuff you Should note book and it's coming
out this November and you can order it now, pre
order everywhere you get books, So do that, and we

(00:43):
thank you in advice. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W.
Chuck probably there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff
you Should Know. Thank you for calling my eight hundred podcasts.

(01:07):
Go ahead, Collar, Oh, that would be great, Chuck, right
to get that. We need to get that before we
released this episode, because some somebody, somebody, maybe a rest
boorg person is going to snag that and we'll have
to pay through the nose for it. I thought there
were so many very interesting things about this very seemingly

(01:29):
mundane topic. And uh, I just think it's interesting that
eight hundred numbers seem like something that would have gone
the way of nine hundred numbers, but they're still around
in the days where the Internet is thriving and the
Yellow Pages or I don't even did they still have

(01:49):
Yellow Pages? I think, yeah, I don't know. I think
I think I remember this one comedian years ago, I
was talking about the phone books when people are still
getting phone books, and he was like, the joke was
something about dropping out. Let me drop off four pound,
very small portion of the Internet on your front board.

(02:11):
But then they just stopped doing that altogether. Yeah, I
know that they were doing it as recently as a
few years back, because they say would get dropped off
once in a while at the mailboxes that are condo
and um so I mean within the last ten years
for sure, five years maybe, I think is the last
time I saw one. So maybe they stopped because I
haven't seen it in a little while, but yes, so

(02:33):
toll free numbers, eight hundred numbers, they persist, they do,
and they really do. So this this how stuff works article.
I think the last the last number they had was
from two thousand eight, and it said that there were
twenty four million working toll free phone numbers in North America.
And if you don't know what we're talking about, we're
talking about free phone numbers. Apparently in the United States

(02:55):
we call it toll free numbers. Everywhere else in the
world is called or the English speaking roll. At least
it's free phone numbers. So, um, there were twenty four
million in two thousand and eight. But get this, since
the advent of eight hundred numbers, they've released one, two, three, four, five, six,

(03:15):
seven different prefixes of toll free numbers, everything from eight hundred, eight, seven,
seven all the way down to eight three three is
where we're at now. And I did it, did a
little math. I'm kind of proud of myself for this one.
Chuck Sell. If you bear with me for a second,
for a seven digit number, you have nine million total
possible combinations because it starts technically with one million and

(03:40):
goes up to nine million, nine ninety nine, So you
have nine million total combinations in there. So each of
those prefixes allows for nine million combinations. So there's at
least there's seven prefixes. That means that there's at least
fifty four million plus a toll free number is in

(04:00):
use in America to day. To justify that many prefixes,
you know what, I can't wait for what that mass
person to write in and correct you do it? No, no, no, Josh,
that's you forgot about blank. I will argue with you
all day long. I got this right. I got it
right for once. Uh, lots of toll free numbers, and

(04:23):
like you said, they go down to eight three three
Now I think eventually they're going to get eight to
two eight eight oh eight eight seven at eight eight
nine involved never eight one one or eight nine nine.
Apparently yeah, supposedly. Uh, someone found an ancient text in
Aramaic that predicted that if eight one one were ever instituted,

(04:44):
that's when the universe ends. Can't do it so when
you dial a number. What this is all about, and
actually two things. What it used to be about was
largely for when calls costs money to make long distance
it was a way to route that charge back to

(05:07):
the person you're calling. Yeah, it was automatic collect calls.
That's right. So if you were you know, they advertise
it as toll free. You don't have to pay a
toll on it. We're gonna eat that cost and you'll
know it because it's an eight hundred number. Then, over
the years it became more and more of a sort
of just if you want to be a legitimate business,

(05:29):
and especially a regional business or national or international business,
then you kind of had to have an eight hundred number.
Even once tolls, uh, phone charges and things and long
distance kind of became a thing of the past, it
just became sort of a i mean, sort of a
calling card, for lack of a better word, as Hey,

(05:49):
we're a legit, big company. We've got an eight hundred number.
We're the third largest maker of bonking trundle beds. Here's
our eight hundred number. And in the old days, I
mentioned the yellow pages where you would advertise it's so
quaint to think about now is where you would advertise
in this big yellow book about your business and let

(06:10):
your fingers do the walk in. But back then it
was also eight hundred numbers were away that you could
save money by not having to advertise in the yellow
pages because you've got you know, one eight hundred you
know house painter right. Or this article, this how stuff
Works article cites a construction company called Asphalt Sources, Inc.

(06:31):
Which got I guess that catchy eight hundred number and
downsized their Yellow Pages add and saved more than twenty
seven thousand dollars by doing so. And to be honest,
it probably didn't hurt that they were also cited in
a house stuff Works article about toll free numbers. Yeah
that was that was clunky, but definitely an example of
how things used to be. Yeah, but but that's the

(06:54):
point of eight hundred numbers. And that's also from what
I can tell. The reason that they still persist today
is that if you have a catch eight hundred number,
like you said, it makes you seem like a player
as far as business goes. But also, um, it's a
way to advertise, like I haven't seen the Empire today
add in three to five years, but I can tell
you that the numbers still eight hundred five eight eight

(07:17):
to three hundred Empire today. You remember that one cars
for kids? I don't remember that one in eight seven
seven cars for kids. I've never heard that one, really,
but I would probably remember that one. Yeah, I mean,
and we'll get to that a little in a little
more depth. Those are called vanity numbers, UM, but yeah,
and there are statistics and they are pretty um stark

(07:40):
and how much people remember that compared to just some
regular old number. Right, So there's reasons for eight hundred
numbers and the fact that they're still around. There's reasons
for that too. But they started all the way back
in seven. And it's like you said, it was a
way to UM to make it easy for people to
place collect calls, which was there were two ways to

(08:02):
to make a long distance call. Either you paid for
it yourself it showed up on your phone bill, or
you could call the person you were calling collect, which
meant that you could you dialed the operator you said
you wanted to place a collect call. The operator called
that number for you and said, hey, I've got Josh
and Chuck on the line. Um, will you accept the charges?
Is what they asked, and the other person would inevitably

(08:24):
say no and hang up. If it had been somebody else,
they might have said yes, and then that person who
was receiving the call, they would be build for that.
That takes a lot of time and effort for a
phone call or for a phone company's operators to do that.
So the whole point of eight hundred numbers was to
automate the process, to take the operator out of it.
And so the person would say, I'm receiving these calls

(08:46):
at this number, go ahead and build me for them,
just without even asking. Yeah, and and I think that
story illustrates why I believe my theory is correct that
Gen X is the greatest generation. So great man, because
we we saw those early days that now feel like
we were in the nineteen twenties with stuff like this

(09:08):
and three TV channels growing up or three major networks rather.
But we're also we're young enough to where the um
technological boom didn't confuse us or pass us by or
pass us by, and we we've got we could dip
our toe into both. You know, we could grow up
on seventies music and also go to a E. D

(09:32):
M concert right without like being weird. Yeah, I think
you're right, Chuck. We we might be the greatest generation
where the perfect generation perfect, That's right, I guess greatest
generation is taken. So yeah, of course, um in sixty
seven it started, like you said, in the very first
business to have an eight hundred number apparently was a

(09:52):
company that just hosted numbers for other companies, mainly like
car rentals and hotels and stuff like that. I think
they were like a call center. Yeah, and so they
went out of business, and then all those businesses that
were using them said, oh, well, we gotta get eight
hundred numbers now ourselves. Right. But the thing is is
a T and T was the only one with eight

(10:13):
hundred numbers because back in the day, a T and
T also known as mob Bell was like the basically
had a monopoly as far as telephones were concerned in
the United States. And so yeah, and so, um, if
you wanted an eight hundred number, you went to a
T and T. You got your eight hundred number, and
then you paid through the nose for it. They would

(10:36):
charge many, many times more than they would have charged
the caller had the caller just had been build themselves
for placing this long distance call, just for this toll
free service. Um. And that's just the way it was
until I believe it was four when truss Buster Ronald
Reagan saw to it that mob Bell was broken up

(10:58):
into all the regional else Yeah. So then, of course
when that happened, that opened up the world of competition
and the telephone industry in the United States kind of
for the first time. And then, of course what happens
is the cost to get an eight hundred number goes
way way down. You can get a lot more businesses
getting them, and then it just sort of became the
standard for any business that wanted to be even like

(11:23):
I said, a regional business. There was also a really
big innovation that gets overlooked too that was actually created
by a guy named Roy Webber who was an a
T and T engineer, and Roy Webber basically figured out
how to use eight hundred numbers, not as phone numbers
that were connected to a certain point in the telephone system,
but as a basically a code that could be translated

(11:47):
at a database into instructions. Are like, hey, here's this
number they put in, what are the instructions for this?
And in doing so he figured out how to make
toll free numbers go from regional to truly now, because
up until nineteen eighty you had to have a regional
toll free number for each region, and if you were
a national company like say Hurts or something like that,

(12:09):
you had a dozen or more toll free numbers that
you had to manage. Thanks to Roy Weber, who patented this,
but a T and T owns the patent um, so
he saw jack from it besides the salary um. This
changed everything and made a truly national thing to where
one one single eight hundred number could serve the entire
country for a business. And it made the whole thing

(12:31):
a lot um technically smoother too, from what I understand. Yeah,
that was sort of one of two big things that happened. Um.
The other one was in nineteen ninety four when the
law was passed that said you can port your phone
number between carriers. So if you're with one carrier and
you're not too happy back in the old days pre
ninety four, that meant you had to change your telephone number,

(12:51):
and that was no good for a business that was
trying to grow or a business that was already big, especially,
And so that law ga and teed that portability, Uh,
you could take your phone number with you, and that
was a really big, big kind of sea change in
the industry. Yeah, you could pick up your phone number
and carry it across land to the next body of water.

(13:13):
That's right. Should we take a break? Yeah, all right,
let's do that, okay, chuck um. So we're at when

(13:43):
we could poured our phone numbers. Yeah, And that was
kind of the last big change. That's when things started
growing so much that they had to I think in
ninety six they introduce eight eight. It seems like every
couple of years they started introducing new um what do
they call prefixes? Yeah, yeah, prefix exchanges. So we're down

(14:04):
to eight three three, right, I think that's where we
are currently. And then I've never seen that I have not,
not that I've ever noticed. But now I don't I
don't even pay attention. I don't call anything. I just
go online if I have to call out call. But
I don't like it at all, And most of the
time when I do, I'm just looking it up on
my phone and clicking like the call thing. I very

(14:26):
rarely type in a number anymore. And yet, bizarrely, E
numbers haven't gone anywhere, and again, apparently it's because of
the the whole um marketing thing UM, which is why
they're still around today. And then one other kind of
like um connection to the information age, the age of
the Internet and computers and all that stuff. Um that

(14:49):
eight hundred numbers have is that there was a period
from about two thousand seven, eight nine maybe up until
about two fourteen where the cons sept of uh uh,
say like a provider paying for your data when you
went on too a certain website, say they had a
website where they wanted to teach you all about their

(15:10):
new phones or something like that. You would not be
you you wouldn't be using any data while you were
on that site. And they originally called it one eight
data for interesting, and then they dropped that around two
fift and that was that. So here's something that I
found that is so boring, that I found so weirdly fascinating,

(15:35):
and that is the notion of the responsible Organization. Uh
maybe it's because it's the name. It just sounds really weird.
It sounds like a scientology like subsection or something the
rest org. So when you call a well, first of
all, all all these all these numbers, all these eight hundred

(15:56):
numbers are housed in a database called the eight hundred
Service Management System, the SMS eight hundred, and they know
every single exchange of the eight hundred variation and if
it's available, if it's being used, and how to route them.
And if you want one of these, you have to
contact something called a responsible organization. And that's just not

(16:20):
a descriptor like alright, I'll contact UNI SEF because they're
pretty responsibles. It's called a responsible organization. It's it's basically
like a domain name registrar for telephone for eight hundred numbers.
And it could be a company that does this, or
you could be a human being at home in your
basement that has set yourself up to be a rest org. Yeah,

(16:43):
you just have to be certified by the FCC. Um,
I'm not sure how. I didn't get to see how.
But once you are certified, then you have access to
this database and you can legally say, now this number
is now taken by this person, right as nicely. Right, Um,
they're watching you, and if if you help an old

(17:06):
lady or man across the street in front of the
FCC building in DC, they take notice you're responsible. Just
one big test. But the the rest borg, I think
what bothers me is that stupid abbreviation for yeah, rest
boorg and the O is capitalized even though it's one
word and as an abbreviation. But the point is it

(17:28):
can be anybody. At first, it was just phone companies
that were able to do that, and then it kind
of became more democratized in the nineties. Um, and that
from that point, at the moment it became democratized, it
became corrupt almost immediately. Yeah, I mean corrupt in the
sense that, um, it's I think some ne'er do well,

(17:49):
some non responsible people. Hey, this would be a pretty
easy way to take advantage of people, um by acting
as a middleman and charging someone fifty bucks to say,
I can find them a toll three number. Here you go,
here's your number, right, which that in and of itself,
there's no problem with that, And apparently the SEC doesn't
have any problems with that. If you set yourself up

(18:10):
as a service, if you're really doing it. Yes, so
if you if you say, okay, you can come to
my website and you can look up a number and
I will try to find it for you, and if
it's available, I will I will get it for you,
and I'm going to charge you a fee for that.
There's nothing wrong with that morally, legally or otherwise. The
problem comes in where some of these rest boards say yes,

(18:31):
it's fifty bucks to search, and then oh, yeah, this
this number that ends in pain p A I in
that's gonna cost you an extra grand. That totally flies
in the face of the FCC rules surrounding phone numbers
of any kind, including toll free numbers, which is that
they're they're meant to be totally neutral. You're not supposed

(18:51):
to be able to profit off of a phone number whatsoever. Um.
You can profit off of like the search and all
that stuff, but a particular phone number is not. Its
supposed to be doled out on a first come, first
serve service basis with zero zero dollars attached to it whatsoever.
And that's just not how it works. Yeah, so you
can't goose somebody if Dr Paine once eight d or

(19:15):
tea pain, tea pain, tooth pain, No, just tea pain.
Your dentists can't get that one because t Pain's got it. Well,
they like you might get it, but they can't pay
extra for it. It's first come, first served always. Um.
You were only allowed to subscribe to the amount of
toll free numbers that you actually intend to use, so

(19:36):
you can't just go get a bunch, like lock up
a bunch, kind of like you can do with domain names. Actually,
now that they think about it, yeah, you can't do
that with eight hundred numbers. Can't do it. Uh. You
also to prevent this kind of hoarding, the mandate that
you allocate that reserved number within eight months, So it's
got I guess it's got to be in use within deadlines.
They have terms for this. Actually, brokering is selling and

(19:58):
profiting from numbers. There's hoarding, and then there's warehousing. Warehousing
is where you you take numbers even though there's there's
no one that you're directly getting at four. And then
hoarding is getting a bunch of numbers, sitting on them
and selling them. And this is a big no no.
But for a very long time it seemed to UM
the FCC and the people running the FEC that it

(20:20):
was not worth enforcing until I guess it got kind
of um kind of wild westy, and there was a
company called I T Connections that was fine three point
seven million dollars into the Oh yeah, these are all
like spam kings who came up with a sideline of
like selling telephone numbers, and their whole thing is no,

(20:43):
they're just performing a service. And then when the FEC says,
well then why isn't your service the same regardless of
any number, they say, well, this is all just supplying demand. Well,
there's not supposed to be any supplying demand. It's supposed
to be first come, first serve um. But that's and
apparently they just look the other way until I believe
two thousand seven ten, when the I T connect or

(21:05):
Connection Company got hit with that fine. You know, those
types of places discussed me more than just about anything. Yeah. Yeah,
it's the ones that like, uh, you know what I'm
talking about, Like the people that are like looking just
looking for the loopholes to exploit so they can rip
someone off the Yeah, the kind of people who carry

(21:27):
like a neck brace in their back seat at all
times in cases, or like I P trolls and uh yeah,
I mean we can't go down that road too much.
But the podcast industry, you know, kind of went through
a pretty famous situation like that a few years ago.
And I don't know, man, people that just just go
out and do some hard work. Yeah, you know, stop

(21:48):
stop speculating, don't look for the angle, right, do you
know to get rich? Yeah, because you're not creating anything.
You're just sucking the life out of stuff. God, it's
just so upsetting. Uh. Like you said, the FCC wasn't
paying a lot of attention. So these things have been
sold on eBay two at big fat price tags. Um.

(22:08):
And beyond just the FCC not paying attention is apparently
there's rest boards. It's it's just hard to keep track
and they can be disorganized. There's no real system to
get it all cleaned up, and so inadvertently this can
happen to Yeah. There was one famous case though, two
that that went to circuit court. I think maybe I
don't remember, but there was a Mercedes dealer in in

(22:31):
Minneapolis and St. Paul who had since the eighties eight
hundred Mercedes, and it went to his gold his Yeah,
when he said that, he think he he cites that
as reviving um just kind of a ho hum Mercedes
dealership that that phone number. So he wasn't about to
give it up. When Mercedes came around and said, hey,

(22:52):
we want that for our national customer service, he said no,
and they sued him for it. They basically tried to
get him on copyright and for a mint, and I
guess the judge of the jury found like, no, you
can't like, like a toll free number is not copyright infringement.
And so Mercedes to this day you have to call
eight hundred four fo R Mercedes, which does the other thing? Chuck?

(23:15):
You know my famous um dislike of acronyms that don't
include a word. Yeah, a phone number, a toll free
phone number that includes letters that go beyond the number
of possible numbers you can use. That really bugs me too,
I think because it was it wasn't until I was
in my twenties that I figured out what was going on. Yeah,

(23:38):
Like I would type the whole thing out and be like,
you know, connect and I'd be like, I'm not done
dialing yet. I But it was satisfying for that judge
to be able to shoot down a big corporation like
that under the you know, prior settled law of you snooze,
you lose, Sorry Mercedes, just because you're huge sorry finders

(23:58):
keepers and you snooze you loose. Man. Wouldn't court be
like kids Court? I didn't that a show Captain Kangaroo Court? Yeah?
Come on? So um, I think it's high time, Chuck.
Since we were talking about the eight hundred Mercedes case,
that very famous legal case in the United States, we
talked about vanity numbers because that is as vanity and

(24:22):
number as there ever has been. The singer Vanity could
have a phone number and it still wouldn't be more
of a vanity number than eight hundred Mercedes. Yeah, and
you know we we mentioned it earlier. These are pretty
tremendous advertising perks for a company if you get it.
If you land on a eight hundred Flowers or one

(24:43):
eight hundred go fed x um, you've struck gold because
that will stick in someone's head. They have done studies
over the years. There was one where they showed an
eighty four percent improvement and recall over newmeric phone numbers
and from like a TV ad or a billboard, and
if you're listening to the radio, it goes from SEV

(25:05):
recall to five recall. If it's got a catchy little jingly,
especially when there's a song attached to it, a toll
free vanity number. Yeah, that's it. I'm a huge, huge difference,
absolutely true. I can't imagine how much money F t
D has gotten from that Flowers phone numbers that there's Yeah,

(25:27):
I think they even have I think their website is
Flowers dot com. They got in there early. I guess
all these yeah, all these generic ones, you're there. They
know how to work the system and push people around
better than Mercedes lawyers too. Yeah, they send in the
guy with a little winged hat and loincloth, what starts
shoving people around? Didn't that One't that? F tds uh

(25:50):
oh yeah yeah, describing You're like, why do you have
a video camera on me? Right? Yeah? No, it totally was.
He was that herms Hermes are Mercury. I think, um
so I mentioned, you know, those good generic ones. It
is great if you have one eight hundred Flowers, of course,
but uh they interviewed someone for this house stuff works

(26:12):
article who knows a lot about this stuff, and they
say and Quimby says, yeah, you know, these generic ones
are fine, but they're all taking. What you really want
these days is to get in there and actually try
and say something about your company as well. So instead
of one eight hundred car loans, it's one eight hundred
quick loan or one eight hundred fast Closer. That to

(26:35):
me would be a red flag to stay away from
that mortgage company fast closer. Yeah, one hundred fast closer, Yeah,
which is and you'll note that it doesn't have to
be seven digits. It can be over seven digits. Obviously
drives me bad. Why just because the extra number. Yeah,
it's it's just not it's not it's not it's missing

(26:58):
the mark. Anybody can be one to three, so that
would be fast cloth. Yeah, just go with that, and
then and then make it part of your ad that
this is silent or one eight quick loan would be
one eight hundred kuai kakloa. Yes, I would remember that.

(27:23):
I would remember that. I feel like we should get
an eight hundred number. I had the same thought. Actually,
did you really? Yeah? What could we do with it?
Eight hundred podcast is actually perfect? But we do with it?
I don't know. We could We could leave messages on
it once in a while. We could do a nine
hundred number. Yeah, it makes some cash and we'll talk

(27:43):
about that right after this, So chuck your right. A

(28:08):
nine hundred number makes way more sense because we could
be rolling in it if it were. Yeah, I think
younger listeners might not fully appreciate the fact that there
was a point in time. How many years did this?
This was less than ten even hey, yeah it was.
The heyday was basically seven to I think about ninety.

(28:30):
People really figured out what a rip off it was
about six years. There was a time, a six year
period in this country where you could set up a
nine hundred number that was it could be anything, but
it was basically an audio message of some kind and
people would pay a ton of money to call in

(28:55):
to speak to hear about the Kiss Army, or to
hear about Iffany the Singer, or Grandpa Munster, or the
Psychic hot line or the board sexy roommates like you
name it. Yeah, yeah, a lot of them especially were
um uh what would they call them? Phone sex That's right, No,

(29:21):
well they so there was this, there was this idea
that so early on a lot of them were, and
then it spread out into more and more ideas, but
it was stuck. It was kind of saddled with that
idea that it was all just phone sex lines unfairly,
but that was the reputation it had. But yeah, you could,
you could do anything. And the whole thing started very
simply and primitively, I believe, with um not it wasn't

(29:44):
the first one. NASA wasn't the first one, but NASA
had one of the first successful ones, which I just loved.
It was called dial a shuttle and one nine nine NASA.
You could listen to conversations between ground control and the
astronauts on the S shuttle, which was a huge There
was like a million people called in in nineteen eighty

(30:05):
two alone, um, and every single one of those people
were paying, from what I saw, a minimum of two
dollars a minute when you call the nine hundred number.
Two dollars was the was the base that I think,
like your phone company was going to charge for the service,
and then whatever extra beyond two dollars it was was
what the the entrepreneur, the nine hundred number information provider

(30:28):
was charging. So if you paid a minute for every
minute of content that you sat there and listened to
on your phone, you were paying that person who was
just some schmo who record, had somebody record some stuff
for a nine hundred number. They were getting a dollar
a minute for every single person that called in. And
very quickly from when this started in seven, when AT

(30:48):
and T started a program that said you can provide
your own content and get your own nine hundred number. Um,
it made a lot of people very rich, like very quickly. Yeah,
it was a way to make a lot of dough fast. Um.
I think there was this one meeting. Uh, I don't
I was about to call it a famous meeting. It
wouldn't famous at all. It was Appalachian. Yeah, it was

(31:09):
this meeting that they referenced in this article. At least
where'd you get this price snomics? Priceonomics? Man, God bless them?
This is by Seawan Revive. Yeah, it was a good article.
It's very cool, the rise and fall of the nine number.
But this was a telecom strategist named Bruce Kushnik who
helped Sprint start their own nine hundred service in the
late eighties, and he said that he remembers a meeting

(31:32):
where they had twenty five or so of the first
developers that did this in a room and said raise
your hand if you're a millionaire, and like almost everyone
raised their hand, and they were just they were They
had to know that it was a short window, I think,
which is probably why they they weren't just like, yeah,
I'll just do this one number. They were like, it's
a gold mine out there for probably five years. Yeah,

(31:53):
and if you were like a celebrity like Whole Cogan
or yeah really any w w F Wrestler, Glow Wrestler
or New Kids on the Block or DJ Jazzy Jeff
in the Fresh Prince, like some guy would come up
to you and say, Hey, I've got this business idea
for you, and we're gonna charge three and we're gonna
split a dollar ninety five. All you have to do

(32:14):
is read this you know, five minutes script, you know,
once a week or once every two weeks or something
like that, and then that's it. We're gonna split this money.
And it made a bunch of money. It was really
popular for for a very brief time. And the reason
why it was popular was because it was um as
Sean Revie puts it, it it was like a proto Internet,

(32:37):
except rather than everything being free and then advertising driven
where you get the content free, but you you know,
have you're subjected to ads. Sounds vaguely familiar for some reason, Um,
you paid for this free content. Yeah, and it but
it had such a range, like you were talking about
everything from like Dj Jazzy Jeff doing something too, uh

(33:01):
vote for Miss America or some legitimate things like and
I don't know how good or legit it was, but
you can get tax helper, insurance advice or whatever, or
tech support to play wheel of fortune like Interact a
Wheel of Fortune, or farm commodity prices. It was just
all over the map. People realized we can get information

(33:23):
to people and charge a lot of money for it,
and especially if there are children involved, you can basically
trick them into running up a huge bill that their
parents are gonna have to pay. Yeah, man, that's Santa.
When do you remember that? I remember, man, totally. So
there was this Santa line, Chuck, you gotta tell about
the Santa line. Well, the Santa why because I called it? Yeah? Yeah.

(33:48):
This was a Santa Claus hotline that asked kids to
hold up their phone to the screen, and when they
did that, there was a tone, a programmed tone that
automatically dialed the number that I guess your phone would hear.
And then all of a sudden, this kid was hooked
up to Santa Claus hotline where it was probably I mean,

(34:08):
what do you think? It was probably just some Santa
Claus saying that he was working very hard on everyone's
gifts to be a good boy for minutes and minutes
and minutes for two or more a minute, So the
kid didn't even dial the number like the ad dialed
it for them with the tones. Yeah, and that was
one of the one of the big fraudulent things about
a lot of these, And some of them are legit.

(34:30):
They might have been dumb, but they weren't like literally
ripping you off by causing these long delays. But a
lot of them would do these long delays. And I
don't know about the Santa one, but I could totally
see like, what's your name, son, Well, let me see
what I've got for you, and then for the next
ten minutes like, well it's not this one. Let me

(34:52):
look in this other room over here. Yeah, and like
a kid would sit there for thirty minutes waiting to
see what Santa had for him. Yeah, there was, there was.
It was pretty perennial. Um the headlines or articles about
some family that got hit with like a ten thousand
dollar phone bill or something like that. Um. There was
one girl who famously called um the two Corey's hotline

(35:15):
two hundred and sixteen times commercials on YouTube. Yeah, there's
actually there's a BuzzFeed article called thirty of the weirdest
nine numbers from the nineties, and they mentioned one that
I hadn't heard of before that I'm not convinced isn't
an Internet meme, like a fake Internet meme, But it
is the crying number, where this ad mentions it's like,

(35:40):
why are all these people crying to find out call
this number? And these people are having like this kind
of cathartic sobbing cry on the phone, and it looks real,
but it's so tantalizing lee wrong that it isn't quite nineties.
It's way more of the twenty one century and like
the idea of it than interesting than at So I'm

(36:00):
not sure it's real. I couldn't find anything about it either,
other than there's this ad that exists. There was nobody
on the internet who's like I called this and yes,
this is totally real. Yeah. Um. The Prisonomics article mentions
another one whether it was and I think these were
pretty common too, And this is the just the worst
when you're like praying on someone that needs work, when

(36:22):
you would call a nine hundred number for driver jobs,
um at twenty dollars a call. But what they didn't
tell you was there was only like two or three positions,
so they get all these people calling in at twenty
bucks a pop for the same three positions, right, just
so mean. There was also a hotline that you could call,

(36:42):
a nine hundred number that charged you twenty five dollars
to learn how to set up your own nine hotline. Yeah,
that one makes sense that one might have paid off.
And then the phone sex it was that was a big,
big thing. And um, I never called any of those,
but those uh. In the in the Robert All movie Shortcuts,
you know, Jennifer Jason Lee was a phone sex operator,

(37:02):
and some very funny scenes of her, like with a
baby in one arm and a cigarette and like doing
her ironing and okay, house cleaning while she was like,
you know, talking dirty. I was trying to remember what
what movie it was. It was Shortcuts. I was thinking
it was. It isn't um Punch Drunk Love. Yeah, there's
a sex line subplot in that one too. Who is it?

(37:26):
Who's the love interest in that? Uh? In Punch Drunk Love,
the love interest is it was Emily Watson, Okay? And
she was she yeah, she was. She was the one
who was doing the phone sex line and then Philip
Seymour Hoffman was like the owner of it. No, I
don't think she worked for him. Philip Seymour Hoffman was, Oh,

(37:47):
he was blackmailing Adam Sandler that way. I finally saw
Uncut gems Man. Jesus, Oh, yeah, did you like it
or hate it? I hated it? Did you really? I
hated it more than I've hated any movie in a while.
And because it's possible, those brothers listen to this, and
I know it must it was clearly they worked very
hard on it, and like they must be very proud

(38:09):
of it. But I hate that movie. Oh man, it
was my favorite movie the year. You're crazy. I'm not crazy.
It's a lot of people's favorite movie. Wow, I'm no.
I'm just saying, Chuck, I'm surprised that you think it
was the I loved it. Well, we disagree on that one. No,
I mean it's a divisive movie. I haven't met many people.

(38:29):
We've been a lot, We've done a lot of stuff
on that on movie Crush, and I haven't talked too
many people that are like, I don't know, I could
take your leave. It was all right. Most people are
like I loved it and I loved that those guys
bring that kind of intensity and stress to a film. Uh,
and some people are just like, uh uh it was
it was almost exclusively the ending for me, the very

(38:50):
very end. Yeah. Oh, I loved the ending. No, you
don't get to do that. That's against all the rules. Man.
Oh gosh, I thought it was so great. Now and
I liked Good Time. I thought that was a cool movie.
Yeah yeah, this but now this is a good good
Time followed the rules. This one didn't follow the rules,
and I hate that movie for it. I loved it. Well.
Since we um started talking about movies, I guess that's

(39:12):
it for toll Free and nine hundred numbers. Yeah, I
don't have anything else. It's uh, it's pretty think about that.
They're both sort of relics. But eight hundred numbers survived
and nine hundred numbers? Are there any anymore? I don't know.
We're gonna find out if there are. We might set
one up. Let's look into all right, okay, nine seven
six evil? But ours could go to charity or something. Sure,
sure half of it? So uh, I guess then, what

(39:37):
chuck is time for listener mail? It is this is
a WASP related the band. Oh if only Hey, Josh,
Chuck and Jerry or whoever is producing. That's what it's
come to see. I've been a listener for seven or
eight years, ever since I got an internship that put
me in a car four hours a day, five days

(39:59):
a week. You're some story about wasps reminds me of
my own childhood experience with a wasp. I was around
six or seven. I was swinging at my neighbor's house
when all of a sudden, my butt started to hurt,
like really bad. So I did what was natural, ran home,
screaming for my mom. I'm not sure where she was,
but my dad was upstairs and asked what was wrong,
and I just said, my butt really hurts, and he

(40:19):
sort of laughed, but he could tell I was in
serious pain. So he told me to drop my shorts
and he gasped. Uh. He said it was really red
and there was a wasp still in his underwear, still
stinging me. I guess he killed it. I don't really
remember that part, just being in the tub afterwards. Uh.
And you mentioned a wasp and sting up to ten times.
We counted thirteen stings on my left butt cheek. Gosh,

(40:42):
and that is from Michael Brown in Portland, Oregon. Man, Michael,
glad you made it through that one. I wonder how
you feel about wasps even after our episode on it.
Do you imagine being a little kid and running home
with a wasp in your underwear? No, I can be
I can't imagine being a wasp and some little kids
underwear while they're running home either. Yeah, because you know

(41:03):
that's not gonna come to a good end. You might
as well tell all the stings and you can I
feel a bath coming. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Michael.
If you want to get in touch with this, like
Michael did to let us know some horrible traumatic thing
that happened to you when you were a kid, we
love that stuff. You can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you

(41:25):
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff
works for more podcasts for my heart Radio because at
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.