Endless Thread - The Anvillain

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Fast-and-cheap shipping is now foundational to the American way of life, thanks in large part to Amazon Prime. Still, when producer Grace Tatter sees a video of a man claiming that he's continuously ordering and returning an 110-pound anvil from Amazon with no repercussions from the tech giant, she has questions. Is this legit, or is it a Wile E. Coyote-level scheme? Unlike an anvil, the answer can't be found online. Show notes: "this guy has been buying and returning 110lb anvils on Amazon for 8 months now" (Reddit) This man keeps buying and returning 110- anvils on Amazon (Fast Company) Johnbo's TikTok This episode was produced by Grace Tatter, and co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Ben Brock Johnson, and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.  

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The link to the survey is in our show notes, so go get her done. And thanks. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Producer Grace Tatter. You have a story for us today, I hear. Grace, what up? As usual, I've been scrolling TikTok, and I want to tell you all about a TikTok video. This one actually, my friend Andrew sent me. How much do you pay Andrew to digest and curate TikTok for you? My undying and enduring friendship.

Okay, cool. Priceless. So Andrew sent me this TikTok, and it was posted by an Amazon customer. It's been 10 months. 10 months of continuously buying and returning anvil on Amazon. That's 263 orders, 28,930 pounds of freight. That's almost a whole truck, maybe even two. Every day I click add the card on that anvil and every day I think maybe today they'll finally disable my mom's account. I know this guy and I love this guy. You've seen this guy? I've seen this. I've seen this.

I've seen this. I know this. He is saying anvils, right? Anvil, yes, as in a very heavy piece. Wiley Coyote. Meem. This video that Ben has also seen was posted by a guy who identifies himself on TikTok as John Bo Stockwell. His handle is Stocklet.

And as John Bo is talking, he clicks through his Amazon order history. And indeed, you can see several pages worth of orders. returns of a 110-pound anvil that costs $227.31. What's the shipping charge on that? It's free baby Amazon Prime. Ben, it sounds like you were also entertained by this. Yeah, I mean, this is the nihilistic, anti-capitalist, cartoonish vibe that I appreciate in the boring dystopia that we live in. So, yeah, I too was also intrigued, and I think it's because I think about Amazon a lot in my relationship with Amazon.

You're going to say anvils. Anvils, I think they know, anvils all the time. They're always on my mind. I'm always looking out for them. But the recycling room in my apartment building is constantly overflowing with cardboard Amazon boxes. I like the idea of shopping local, but I feel like so often I'm like, this is the only place I can buy this. random item. And I am not the only one in 2024. Do you want to guess how many orders Amazon delivered per hour? Oh, my God. This is going to be a terrifying number. I'm going to say 600 million.

I'm going to say every hour there's an order for each of the seven billion people on this planet. Okay. Well, the good news is it's not that many. The goodness is we're both ridiculous. 700,000 orders per hour. And that's in the United States, I should add. But that's still a lot. That's a lot of orders. That's a lot of packaging.

That's a lot of dumb blue tape. Yeah, and a lot of people are getting that free shipping through Amazon Prime. Okay, so this video with John Boe showing how he's been ordering this anvil back and forth, back and forth, ordering returning for 10 months. We see his order history. and then he tells his viewers that he started a new anvil-related project. Every time an anvil arrived at my home, I chipped a piece off. And every time I chipped a piece off, I'd welded to the other pieces I'd chipped off until eventually, well, I'm not just buying anvils anymore. I'm making them.

What do you all think about that? because I'll admit, I was with John Bo in the first part of this video. I believed him. I saw that order in return. I was like, okay, he's really doing this. But once he said he was forging a whole new anvil, one piece at a time, I personally was skeptical. Although I will admit, it does look like he's doing some real metal forging or something. He's making sparks fly, but he's got his back to the camera.

So we can't see what he's doing. I believed him hook, line, and sinker in terms of what he was doing, but I found it to be slightly more problematic, where it's like, if you're just in the game to screw over Amazon, okay. But if you are then, one could argue stealing by chipping off pieces, then I feel like that's a little more morally questionable. Okay, so there are a lot of unanswered questions here. Is this guy actually trolling Amazon 100-pound anvil at a time? Or is he trolling us? I'm Grace Tatter. I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

I'm Amory Severson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, The Ann Villain. Okay, so Ben, you think that Jombo is potentially treading into some morally questionable territory with all this buying and returning of anvils, but you're not skeptical that he's actually doing it. I was not skeptical like you and Amory were, but you guys are smarter than me. So maybe I should have been skeptical. Well, my friend Andrew wasn't skeptical either. I said to him, I don't know if this is real.

And he was like, I'm pretty sure it is. And when I started looking in the comments on TikTok and Instagram, I realized I was in the minority. Many, many people seemed to think that this was real, including this person on Instagram with the username Tay, T-E-U-Skore Erica. This man is trolling Amazon workers, and it's not funny. Imagine these workers who have to deliver the 100-pound anvil and then return it back to the sender. He is stressing them out for no reason and then laughing about it. That is not cool. I don't know how much you all know about Amazon delivery workers conditions.

Many of them aren't getting any benefits like health insurance or pay time off, at least not from Amazon. I actually thought this was interesting. UPS and FedEx drivers average $35 an hour in pay. Amazon drivers who are driving like the blue vans average only $19. So that's a pretty big pay discrepancy. And that's why a lot of the commenters. Might be mad on behalf of the workers, right? Because they're like, they already seem like they have a tough job.

And lugging an anvil might just make that job even tougher. That's one camp of why people are mad at Jonbo. Other people are mad because Amazon doesn't own the anvils. A smaller company does called V-Vor. And they just use Amazon as a marketplace. They're a third-party seller, and their business could take a hit from all of this ordering and returning, ordering and returning. ordering and returning. They're obviously not operating with the same margins as Amazon. Then there are the people who are mad about the impact on the environment.

Probably takes a lot of fuel to transport something that heavy. And finally, there were people who are mad on behalf of themselves. I'll have you read some of their comments. Yep, and that's what's going to cause Amazon to stop shipping stuff back for free. And people's going to have to start paying to ship stuff back to them. So yeah, that's a great idea, dude. And people wonder why the world is the way it is because of people like this. Okay, here's another one.

Someone says, it's because of people like this that refund policies become more and more strict. People with less IQ than room temperature should not be allowed to buy online. That's doing a lot of work. Less IQ than room temperature. And here's this one. Great way to drive up prices for the rest of us. Doing your part to increase inflation, question mark. I would say all of these random people, just how mad they are, whether it's about the workers, the environment, or the risk of themselves losing free shipping.

You're not that mad unless you're really buying the story, right? But that's one thing. These are random people on the internet. I don't know their expertise in Amazon shipping and logistics. But I also found several threads about this from people who actually do work in this world. And many of them also seem to find Jombo's scheme plausible. On an Amazon hosted forum for third-party sellers, someone posted Jomba's video and called him abusive. Others called him disgusting. I think it's more complicated than anyone and everyone is laying it out to be, right? People's reaction to him, like accusing him of being part of the problem of why Amazon kills its pre-returns policy or whatever, that seems maybe a little out.

outsized in the assumed impact. But it's, yeah, it's all, it feels very messy. It doesn't feel very clear. It's not, you know, Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner is a lot more, you know, clear who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. But in this situation, I'm not sure because I feel like what Jombo is doing is in some ways, it's forcing us to think about something. and that seems valuable.

John Bo posted his first video about this way back in June. So I was not the first journalist to become interested in this. Fast Company did a piece, and the headline to that is, this man keeps buying and returning anvils on Amazon. Another publication called The Daily Dot did a story that was then republished by Yahoo News. Man self-declared war on Amazon involves shipping back 100-pound anvils one at a time. Both of these articles, these headlines are kind of framing it as like, this is something that's actually happening, right? And certainly neither article debunks the story.

But neither of them exactly confirms it either. Okay, so these articles come out and he has kept releasing new videos about these Anvilles since? Yes, he's kept releasing new videos and did not give at least these journalists any quotes. So if this is real at all, this would mean that Amazon is not, there's. Their spidey senses are not tingling. They have not picked up the fact that this person is doing this. Not enough to, as he said, shut down his mom's account. Which is like another little detail in all of this is like, and you're doing this from your mom's account. Okay. At this point, we have news articles. We have people who work in this business seeming to think that this is actually happening. I had noticed that Jonbo had tagged his location in the video. He said he was based. in Chicago. And by sheer coincidence, the morning that Andrew sent me this video, I happened to be flying to Chicago that very evening. So I messaged Jonbo on TikTok and asked if I could see this anvil for myself, if I could go by his house and see if I could catch a sight of a big box on

his stoop or something. And I didn't expect to hear anything because he hadn't talked as far as I could tell to any other journalists yet. But he replied right away. Oh, Grace, a journalist after my own heart. And so, much like an Anvil available on Amazon Prime, I showed up at his door the very next day. I feel like I should give you a tour of the place just to be polite. Okay, so that's John Bo. He actually goes by John in real life.

And he lives with his wife, Rebecca, who was also home when I got there. Yeah. I'm constantly getting texts, like, did he really do that? And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about yet. So John and I, we walked outside to his garage-turned workshop where he was supposedly welding this new anvil. And when we entered the garage, I was pretty surprised by what I saw. So I'm seeing actually multiple anvils, which I didn't expect.

I thought I was just going to see one. Oh, my God. Okay, what Grace discovered in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out. about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

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There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So before the break, intrepid producer Grace Tatter was in John Stockwell, aka John Bow's garage in Chicago, trying to find out if this guy who'd gone super viral on TikTok for seemingly buying and returning a bunch of 100-pound anvils on Amazon was telling the truth.

So this is the one that I actually purchased. Oh, it's the right. And you kept it. I kept one of them. Okay. It makes a really lovely noise, too, when you ding it. It's just like... Oh, that is. It's beautiful.

So here's the truth. John did order an anvil from Amazon and then return it and then order it again. I ended up on some TikTok where they were talking about, yeah, you can get an anvil on Amazon. And I saw that. And it was like, what? And I looked it up and, like, on top of... being able to buy an anvil on Amazon, you get free shipping, which makes just incomprehensible. Like, there's just, there's, in no world does that make logistical, economic, or any sense.

So, John is a stand-up comedian. And he joked about ordering an anvil on Amazon and then immediately returning it for one of his shows. But then he thought, you know, it would be funnier than joking about ordering and returning an anvil on Amazon repeatedly, actually doing it. So he floated the idea to the group chat, as one does. And some of his friends were like, no, no, don't do not do that. I bought it like with probably within 10 minutes of sending that message. I didn't even really wait for their feedback. It came next day in the afternoon. It was like, it was stupid fast. Posted a story on my Instagram just being like, yep, time to ship it back.

And then more discourse erupts in the chat. A little more critical of me at this point, which, you know, justified. Like, I wanted to go about doing this, like, legitimately. But, like, just from a fundamental perspective, like, Amazon 100% would just, they have measured. Right. that would just automatically, you know, ban my account. My mom would be pissed, you know, and then on top of that, you know, there's just all of the other, the potential for harm, you know, maybe I should not do this.

Let's do the next best thing. Let's lie about it. Let's make people think that we're doing it. How can I do that? John needed a fake orders page that he could click through to show all of the anvils that he had supposedly ordered and returned. Luckily, in addition to being a comedian, he is also a software engineer.

So I wrote a Chrome extension that updates the content of the orders page when you have it installed on your computer and you navigate to that orders page on Amazon. And I was just like fiddling with that. It looked

pretty good. It looked damn decent. Which I would agree. It fooled me. Same. So John clarified that the two times he did have the anvil delivered, it was delivered by UPS. So those drivers are paid a little bit more than the Amazon contractors. And they had special equipment.

No workers were harmed in the purchasing of this anvil. The UPS guy pulled up on a dolly, dropped it on my front step and just walked off. He seemed, it was quite leisurely. He strutted, actually. Also, returning the anvil actually wasn't free. John had to pay $6 for UPS to pick it up again. Really great deal for returning an anthem. Yeah.

Really great deal. When John posted his first viral video about this back in June, he was surprised by how many people took him seriously because his page is mostly just him doing comedic bits. Medieval Times wants to treat me like a king? Okay. Let me behead a peasant then. I want to behead a peasant.

And even his anvil videos contain elements that are obviously untrue. And one, he claims to reveal where he lives while standing outside of what he claims is his house, he's standing in front of a sign that states the area is protected by the U.S. Secret Service. Look, if you don't like what I'm doing with with the anvils on Amazon, come out of my place. 5046, South Greenwood Ave, Chicago, Illinois. If the Secret Service signs weren't already a giveaway, you. You can Google that address. That is the Obama's Chicago House. Oh.

John posted the video that went the most viral in October. That's the one we heard earlier, where he claims to be making a whole new anvil, the claim that made me so skeptical. I started with like a wood frame with chicken wire. He used insulating foam and car paint. He put a metal frame on it so he could actually make the sparks fly for that video. I had to shave this.

the shaping of it and then start sanding it. And then it just, it started to get tiring, like, dealing with it. So I was just like, fuck it. I got to just put it out. See what happens. And we know what happened, right? It went super viral, even more viral than the videos he had posted before. And yeah, and a lot of people believed it.

But also a lot of people talked about it. It made a lot of people think about this whole conceit of free shipping and if it's actually free. Hmm. Does he, do you know if he, uses Amazon himself? Like, was he using his mom's account because he doesn't have one? I think he does use Amazon himself because as I was leaving his house, there were Amazon packages on the stoop. They were not anvils. I mean, I didn't pick them up. That seemed. That seemed

maybe too intrusive, but they didn't appear to be anvil size. Okay. So the Amazon troll also seems to be an Amazon customer. Got it. Well, John does have some questions about especially the environmental impact of Amazon and fast and cheap shipping. He's mostly doing this for the bit. He is a comedian through and through. But one of the rewarding things for him that he didn't expect has been engaging with people about issues he does feel strongly about. So he would consider himself to be on the left of things politically. And some of his other content reflects that, particularly on Instagram. He made post protesting ice raids in Chicago last fall, post after Charlie Kirk was murdered that were critical of Charlie Kirk's rhetoric. Because of the viral videos, people reach out

and see, like, the things that I, like, support and will, they'll just, like, you know, message me, calling me a lib part, just, like, dumb things. John doesn't block or ignore these messages. He asked them, Why do you say that? Nine times out of ten, you come away still disagreeing and, you know, obviously not making much progress with folks. But like nine times out of ten, you recognize, like, this person will acknowledge like, oh, okay. Like, it always ends with like, it ends in the most dude way where it's like, you know, you and me, we got to get a beer. I can talk politics all day, all day with you, bud. To John, this means that even if he doesn't change someone's mind, they see him and maybe then other people who they disagree with as human beings.

So to him, it's a small chip off the anvil of political division. Well, I'm amazed that you found him and that you went and talked to him. Good on you, Grace. I'm, even though I would have believed the whole thing, I'm, I guess I, I'm still not shocked that it was a bit, right? Like it's, yeah, it seems like it's a bit that's good for the world. He's forging new relationships. Yeah.

And we encounter a lot of content that is kind of absurd or you can't tell someone's, even though sometimes it seems like people go through such great lengths, I kind of can't imagine having the time to convince people that something outrageous has actually happened that hasn't happened. I feel like that is a huge genre of internet content. Yeah. But often it's interesting or it's funny, but there's not a lot of substance in the discourse around like those kind of viral rage baity posts. And I did think that was something different about this one.

Like regardless of why people were mad, they were thinking a little bit about something that at this point we might all take for granted. Just because like we said, those Amazon delivery vans are everywhere. Yeah. I feel like we all feel beat down sometimes by this endless hammering of having to order things and having them delivered to us. So I feel like this is good comedic fuel. Well, maybe I'll be the voice of pushback here because while I can appreciate that this video generated maybe more. substantive discussion in the comments than many other viral videos. I also want to see that critical discussion turn into some action and some changes of behavior. And if you don't, if you support the

idea of trolling Amazon in some way, then I'd like to think that we wouldn't just all go along with our lives continuing to order however many packages from Amazon a week or a month that we do. You know? Maybe I'm just being cynical here. No, I think that's right. I think it's good to expect change from the world and want us to be like thinking about that stuff. I'll tell you a separate slightly funny story, which is that my neighbor, his wife has decided that she's off Amazon, which also includes Whole Foods. Mm-hmm.

And she caught him the other day because he had fine my turned on. And he was in Whole Foods. And she busted his ass. She was like, you went to Whole Foods to buy this whatever it was that he bought on the way home. And he was like, damn it. Yeah. So. That was a good use of spousal surveillance.

Exactly. And a relatively low stakes one, we can say. So, you know, Amory, just so you know. some of my neighbors, they're making the change. I get that we're all just doing the best that we can, but I also think at a certain point we need to draw some lines for ourselves and say, hey, if we're going to make Amazon the butt of our jokes or the source of our wrath, we actually do need to change our behaviors around what we buy and where we buy it from.

As of this recording, John is still not sure how the bit will end. He's made a few more silly videos about ordering and returning anvils without acknowledging that it is a bit. But he has a lot of ideas how to wrap it up. So maybe Amory, he'll take some of your food for thought into account. I'm seeing down the line, like, next narrative point, you know, this anvil company sues me. I'm looking for money. I'm looking for money fast.

I start selling products on the TikTok shop. I need to make up money so I can pay my my legal bills. We start subjecting products from the TikTok shop to the Anvil test, where I just, I get free samples and then I drop an anvil from my roof on the BBR. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Grace, Ben Brock Johnson, and me, Amory Seavertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franie Monaghan, our production manager, Paul Vikis, and our managing producer, Summa to Joshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between doing it for the bit and sticking it to the man. If you have an untold history, an unsolved Anvil mystery, or another story from the internet you want us to tell, hit us up.

Endless thread at WBUR.org. And if you were keeping track of all of, of the anvil puns that Ben was dropping on us in this episode, hit us up as well. Count them up. Let us know, endless thread at wbUR.org.