Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Junk Mail

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by podcast host/producer Jody Avirgan (‘This Day In Esoteric Political History' podcast, '30 For 30' series) and actor/comedian Benny Wayne Sully ('My First Native American Boyfriend' short, 'NDND' YouTube channel) for a look at why junk mail is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, this is Alex, and I'm very excited about this weekend. If you're listening the week this drops, hang out on Saturday, because that's when we're doing the second ever live episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. That live show has an incredible guest lineup of David Christopher Bell, John Cullen, and Caitlin Gill. Three amazing guests, all online with me. We're doing it Saturday, February 26th at 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. This Saturday, February 26th, patrons get in free. Patrons get a recorded version sometime

afterward in case they can't make it. And it's all online. You don't need to go anywhere to see it. Patrons also get immediate access to the recording of the first live SIF episode with guests Katie Golden, Adam Todd Brown, and Andrew T. So you also get that. You really get two live shows right away just by signing up. Please join up at SIFpod.fun to see that show, get a whole bunch more benefits too, and thanks. Junk mail. Known for being annoying. Famous for that. Just that. That's it. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why junk mail is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by two wonderful guests, Jody Avergan and Benny Wayne Sully. Jody is the co-host of This Day in Esoteric Political History. That's a show from Radiotopia, co-hosted with Nicole Hemmer and Kelly Carter Jackson, where they just take such amazing dives into such specific things. A lot of things you've heard of and could know more about, a lot of things you've heard of and could know more about, a lot of things you've never heard of and will be thrilled to discover. It's just a really good show. You might have also discovered Jodi's work from WNYC or from FiveThirtyEight Audio or from

30 for 30, which is an incredible audio and visual documentary series that ESPN did. I love the Michael Jordan one. I love the Christian Laettner one. There's a lot there. It's great. And then Benny Wayne Sully is a wonderful comedian and actor. He currently stars in the short film My First Native American Boyfriend with co-star Kylie Brakeman, directed by Joey Clift. He's also part of the cast of an amazing YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is called NDND. It's a group of Native performers doing a funny and awesome tabletop role-playing game. So a lot of ways to see Benny's work, and you can hear him today. I'm so glad he and Jody are here for a topic that you're probably receiving in your mailbox, unless it's Sunday. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and

used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that Jody and I each recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Benny recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash and Fernandinho-Tataviom peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about junk mail. That is a patron chosen topic for the month of February. Thank you very much to Anjali S for that excellent suggestion. Also, FYI, this episode is heavy on United States stories. I'm always thinking about

that international audience for the podcast. This one is very heavy on US stories, not just because me and my guests are from the US, but because the US is a true pioneer of this stuff. It may be surprising or incredibly unsurprising to you, but the United States is a junk mail pioneer, and your mail and internet have been influenced by that if you live elsewhere, wherever you live in the world. So please sit back or continue delivering mail on your route, because some letter carriers listen to this podcast, and it makes me really happy.

Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jody Avergan and Benny Wayne Sully. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jody, Benny, it is so great to have you. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start. But how do you feel about junk mail? I'll go ahead. When I initially was told that it was junk mail, for like the first five days, I was just assuming it was like spam emails. I had forgot.

Yes, me too yeah i forgot that physical junk mail existed because in my life it only exists as like there's a trash can by my mailboxes in my apartment building and it's like most of the mail that i pull out of my mailbox just goes into there and that's just like paper that's that's all that is to me i forget that that's you know something that that everybody receives me. I forget that that's something that everybody receives. Yeah. Oh, my God. Thank you for saying that. I was going to ask, my first question was, how do we define this? But then I've also spent the last couple of days thinking about the kind of parallels between how we treat paper junk mail and how we treat spam email. And I would say,

unsubscribing to an email is one of my favorite activities in the world. I try and like unsubscribe to five things every Friday. And it's just like a great way to end my week. Oh, that's awesome. And I try and do that. And I think I get the same hit from doing that with paper, like going paperless or whatever, or just asking someone to take you off their mailing list. But, yes, I have the same experience that mostly is just straight into into the recycling. But I've been fighting my wife's student loan provider, in theory, has a paperless option. But we have yet to, like, be able to crack that code.

And for years we get two things a week from them. Nelnet. I will say them out loud. Nelnet, if you're listening. Throw them under the bus. I want to go paperless and you won't let me. It's unbelievable. But it's just been this like every single week. It's like the Nelnet thing comes and we tear it up because I'm like, oh, maybe there's some identifying information and it goes directly into the recycling. I have that exact experience, but my bank has changed.

My bank has been bought by other banks like four times in the past year. And so I keep having to switch banks and get new cards, and they keep sending me my paper statements. And so I keep tearing them up because I'm like, I don't know what's on this. I'm not going to open it and look. And then I just throw it away. And I keep trying to go paperless. But then a new bank comes through and PNC all of a sudden is like, no, we're not paperless. I'm like, what are you guys doing?

But it's clearly still, I mean, Alex, you probably know, it's clearly still got to be a huge part of people's business. I mean, I can't imagine that a big corporation would not try and find every angle to save money. And so I guess from a marketing standpoint or communication standpoint or whatever, like the junk mail is still worth it at some level for a lot of companies. And there probably are still a lot of people who rely on the mail.

There are. But I've been thinking about the junk mail, the person who runs the mail distribution center at some company and just kind of like a titanic-esque job you know you're just sort of sitting there you know your days are numbered but you know whatever do your job just playing violin in the office sadly like well I can. I don't know. Send out these mailers. Yeah, apparently there's not like a super specific number for all of industries, but apparently about two to three percent of people who receive what I'm loosely defining as junk mail, but like a company mailing advertising in a massive way that you didn't ask for. Apparently two to three percent of recipients act on it as like a general marketing rule of thumb, which is way more than I expected. And also, I think it explains how most of us can feel like we respond to none of it. And it still gets sent

because somebody does, you know? Right. But, but what, like a really good email marketing campaign gets a, like click through an open rate of like 40 i mean the numbers are different but maybe it's just something about the i don't know yeah and like you said maybe some people are more focused on their regular mail like they're exactly yeah older or old fashioned or some other reason and they're like great the mail came very exciting you know i i don't know much about marketing but two you said two to three? Yeah. That seems abysmally low. Like, I would look at that and I'd be like, no, that's not worth it to figure out the few people who are actually using that stuff and send it to them only. But 98% of people don't look at it at all?

Yeah, per campaign, I guess. Yeah. Wow. If you send out enough, though, the numbers get pretty good. I mean, if 2% of, what, like, Super Bowl viewers bought the product that got advertised, that company would be doing just fine, right? That's true. That's insane. Yeah, I feel like some forms of marketing, they're really happy with humongous failure.

It's like how, how you know a great baseball player fails 70 of the time approximately you know like it's it's that kind of thing with some of these like holy cow one percent of people replied to our letter and they're all high-fiving what's the quarterly review like oh we went up from 1.7 to 1.99%. We're throwing a huge party. Drinks are on me. I wish I could be that hype about any personal failures I have. Yeah, I got a 2% on the test, but man, that's so much better than last time. Yeah. I have a similar junk mail experience, I think.

We live in an apartment now, and when I go down the stairs to get the mail, I'm much closer to the outdoor recycling bins than our apartment. So there's a first step of just chucking most of it in the bin outside and then bringing up what's good. It's the way it goes. Why bring it into your house? Why clutter?

Yeah, right, right. I'm fighting clutter and I'm also realizing I never tear it up like jody does so my info is probably out there for everybody at this point uh yeah i mean which oh well someone's gonna start digging through your trash i don't think the fact that it's been torn into two pieces that are sitting right next to each other is gonna really deter them right like if they're in your trash they'll probably just take the two pieces go home tape it and get the information yeah right but penny i know you you tear it into like 15 different pieces and then over the course of a week you drive to different parts of the city

and drop the pieces yeah around and scatter them so there's no possibility yeah and i i figure out what piece is like the centerpiece and i just burn that one because that feels like it's the most important. Yeah. Right. Then you eat the ends. Yep. Burn the metal. Eat the bottom.

And then I have a weekly route of recycling centers I go to for each individual scrap. You're like shaking it out the bottom of your pants like in Shawshank Redemption, yeah. Well, guys, I think we can get into the first main chunk of the info in the show, because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called

No Stats Till Sif Pod! and this week that's in a segment called no stats till sif pod no stats till sif pod and uh probably should have worried about the shouting that name was submitted by paul garaventa thank you paul we have a new name every week please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit to sif pod on twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. Yeah, stats and numbers here. The first one is the number 1872, which is a year. 1872. That's the year when Aaron Montgomery Ward created the first mail order business, which became Montgomery Ward, the brand in stores.

Oh, wow. That's crazy. 1872 not that long ago that's like the the uh type of business where it's like you get a catalog like uh what is it like sky mail essentially and and you like say oh i want this oh sky mall oh is that what it is yeah sky mall right i've never i've only seen that in like tv shows uh but so it's like that where you're like oh this is the thing i want you mail it off and then you get it yeah it's the original internet shopping basically yeah yeah sweet and i mean that was presumably facilitated by the fact that now there was like a cohesive mail system in the united states and just i mean i know that system in the United States and just,

I mean, I know that like in the 1870s and into the turn of the century, like mail became just like a real force in every, in every sort of part of life. Exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. The, the system was built up enough and also Aaron Montgomery Ward, his first catalog was a single printed page. The whole catalog was just one piece of paper, so pretty cheap to mail. But his goal was to buy items in bulk and sell them cheaply to rural, like rurally located Americans, do it by the mail. And the business took off. By the turn of the century, they were mailing out millions of huge catalogs every year. And from there, competitors like Sears copied it, and it became kind of an

entire business in the United States. When I was at FiveThirtyEight, I did a whole series on the history of political data. And one of the earliest efforts was William Jennings Bryan, in the 1890s, did basically the first mail order. Maybe this is on your list, Alex, but you know, did the first basically like voter outreach by mail. And he was sending like 2000 letters a day and collecting people's demographic information and all this stuff. And it was just like this incredibly sophisticated thing in the 1890s to build up voter files and then reach them by mail. And then obviously like direct mail in politics has been a thing, you know,

that's just been like totally revolutionized politics in the 20th century. But yeah, that stuff's powerful. People used to have to work so much harder. Yeah. Just to reach someone. But you could order a house through the mail. I guess you can order a house on Amazon now. But yeah.

A tiny home. Yeah. Yeah. order a house on Amazon now, but yeah. A tiny home. Yeah. Yeah. But is this, Alex, is this, is this catalog where we started to get those like mail order, like houses and all that stuff, or was this more like home goods? I mean, who was, what was the target here? What was? Ward's idea was people in rural places, they only have one or two like physical stores near them. So if I can just sell them basically everything, but I think short of houses, Sears was the big house seller.

But either way, these businesses said, if we can just be a one stop shop like like Amazon, basically for everything. Yeah. Then we can make money on sending, you know, a multi hundred page catalog to everybody we can get an address for and put in a list. Even though, like Benny said, that sounds like horrible toil. I really wouldn't want to be doing that business at all. See, I love that the first thing he sent out was just one sheet, one piece of paper. That's efficient junk mail. That's just mail at that point, not even junk yet. It's once it becomes the catalog that I, like, when my junk mail is like five or more pages,

trash. Easy. I think that I can, like, if it's one thing I'm, I might peruse it, but that's, I like the efficiency that he started out with. And then he immediately went downhill. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it immediately expanded.

Right. And then all of a sudden it's like, you can order everything. I mean, it is, it is like, obviously Amazon is revolutionary in so many ways but people treat amazon like oh you can get anything on amazon it's like well you know over 100 years ago well over 100 years ago you were getting this catalog that had i don't know have you have you dove into the catalog and seen what's in there but yeah my impression these catalogs they have everything right i mean you could get your you know you could build your entire house and livelihood from through one catalog. Yeah. Like food, tools, books up to Sears houses. And, and it also,

it is this thing where Ward, I think they just expanded and expanded until they peaked and then that was it. You know, like they, cause they, I knew Montgomery Ward as a store when I was a kid, but it was, it still existed as a department store. But they, you know, so they went from catalog to bigger catalog to stores. And then just eventually they went bankrupt in 1997 because there was just too much competition from Target and Walmart and other discount stores. And it makes that William Jennings Bryan thing even more amazing to me because he's not an endlessly growing store.

He's just going to run a couple times on the data he gets and then stop. That's incredible. Yeah. But well, yeah, except for I don't know if this happened to his, but, you know, a database of a political database is an incredibly valuable thing. And that those things get passed down, you know, from campaign to campaign and political generation, political generation. So I wonder, oh, man, that would be such a good thing to figure out is if there is still

some mailing list out there that has the DNA of William Jennings Bryan, a very original mailing list. Because Rand Paul's mailing list, somehow you could trace it all the way back. It'd be insane. Right. Rand Paul's office, they're like, why are we mailing stuff to people who are anti-McKinley? That doesn't make any sense. Exactly.

That's weird. People have very old-timey names. There's a lot of Mortimers. I ended up in a Sears mail-order house over this last summer in the desert in California outside of Death Valley. There's a little town and I was visiting the town and I walked into a house and the person

who I was with said, you know, this was a mail order house. My great grandfather got it in, I think it was in the 20s and they shipped it to like the middle of the desert, built it for them overnight and it's still there. There's a couple little additions there, but it's like 100 years later, it's still standing. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. I feel such deep 2020s jealousy of that, too. Like, you could just get a house in a catalog versus not at all.

Oh, wow. Cool. They're already built, and we have no access to them. You're showing us, I mean, flashback 10 years. You could get a house on a subprime mortgage overnight like that. I could get it for you. You could get a house in a development in Florida, no problem. Flip around, come on.

But that's so cool. Did the house, when you were inside it, did it feel old, I guess is my question? You said there were additions to, but yeah. So, but so you could sort of clearly tell where the original house was and then the other additions that built out around it. And I mean, obviously like the original house was very small and you know, what was originally the house where I think like, you know, six kids grew up and a whole family lived, you know, is now just the dining room for this larger house that was built around it. But yeah, you can see it. But I mean, from what I could tell, you know is now just the dining room for this larger house that was built around it but yeah you can see it but i mean from what i could tell you know the the bones of it we're still we're still kicking it's pretty it's pretty cool especially for like the middle

like the harshest climate it was like out like you know a mile from death valley like yeah yeah and it's still just there but you know this is one of those towns that same thing it's like one of those towns that used to have a railroad that went right through it. And that was just everything. Right. And so that meant industry. That meant commerce. That meant connection.

And then, you know, the railroad went away eventually. And the town really got cut off, you know, cut off. And then it started to come back a little bit. But, yeah. Wow. Well, and we'll in the bonus show, we'll talk more about Sears. So we'll come back to this. It's very exciting.

Awesome. And the next number here is 1955. This is another year, 1955. That is the year when the US Congress passed a law banning unaddressed junk mail, specifically unaddressed junk mail, because apparently before 1955, and especially in the early 50s, what companies would do is they would bring like batches of promotional mail with the postage paid to the Postal Service and say, just drop this at every house on these streets, or just drop this at every place in this whole neighborhood. And, you know, like a mail carrier can do that if they're just like, okay, one of these each spot. But Congress outlawed that. And that's why today's

US junk mail still always has a specific address on it. They actually have to figure out each house number and everything. Interesting. Wow. How do they, like, in terms of, like, an apartment building, how do they figure out how many apartments are in that building? I mean, do you know? Oh, like today? Yeah. I mean, do you know? Oh, like today? Yeah, like if there's a new apartment building that goes up,

how do they know the numbers of the units and everything within it? I believe it's partly based on census data. Oh, I guess that. Because we'll talk later about pre-sorting that they do now. But it's, yeah, they're able to get the best records they can. We also are, this is just an anecdote, but our building, it's not very many apartments and we keep getting some mail for apartment nine E and we're not nine floors. There's just not that many. So I think there's just errors too, where people mix this up.

But that, that indiscriminate junking, uh, I mean, that still exists with like flyers, right? I mean, I get, you know, I live i live in brooklyn and local restaurants will just walk someone will walk down the street and just put a flyer with a menu on every car or in every in every door so you still kind of get that just like paper the entire neighborhood vibe yeah my my dad used to clean carpets and i used to do that and i remember like getting yelled at by an old man one time in my subdivision because he was like, that's a federal offense. I'll call the cops on you. I was just like, my dad just wants some money, man. I'm sorry.

Go clean your carpets. Let little Benny Hand stuff out. Well, you got to go find that guy. Circle back to that guy and be like, you know what? You yelled at me all those years ago, but I just did this podcast and you know what? You know what? You're right. It is a federal offense. In 1955. Yeah. You know, I've actually turned a cheek on that one. I'm with him. He was right. Yelling at me like a little seven year old kid. Yeah. You just turn yourself in at his police station whatever it is like well is this the for have

you ever alex have you ever done a citizen's arrest on this podcast oh take me away i'll never catch him he has so many junk mail drops he's he's all over the place it's wily yeah you'll never find the recycling center I'm hiding out at. Hey, folks, is Alex popping back after the release of this episode? Because I learned about an additional story that goes with all this. Thank you to listeners Donald Pratt and Jonathan Burgers and at Dave underscore blogger for all tipping me off about this. I'm sorry if I missed somebody else who did, too. blogger for all tipping me off about this. I'm sorry if I missed somebody else who did too. So that story about a 1955 law against unaddressed bulk mail in the U.S., that is a true story.

Also, there was a new development in 2013. So way after 1955, 2013, the U.S. Postal Service rolled out Every Door Direct Mail. Every Door Direct Mail is kind of a modification new version of that unaddressed bulk mail practice. Companies work with the Postal Service to batch mail things to a neighborhood in a way that's optimal for the Postal Service too. So thank you to those listeners for finding that, bringing that to my attention, making the show better. I also think it fits in really well with what we're going to cover later on in Takeaway number one. Until then, here's more stats and numbers. And then there's one more number here, but it's a set of numbers. Numbers are $48 million, $34 million, and $3.5 million. These are all US, but $48, $34, $3.5 million. Those are separate penalties that were paid in separate lawsuits

by publishers clearing house they were repeatedly sued especially around the turn of the millennium for you know kind of deceptive junk mail that among other things led people to believe they want to sweep stakes when they didn't i forgot about that aspect of junk mail there's like yeah walk us through the scam how exactly would it work and it's a and it's something people might kind of remember publishers clearinghouse they started in 1953 and they were a company that used direct mail to sell magazine subscriptions then in 1967 they started sweepstakes and then did massive advertising of the sweepstakes where like Ed McMahon or someone would run up to your house with a big check and say you've won. But starting in the 1990s, some states started suing them

on the grounds that one accusation was that they implied you had a better chance of winning by buying more magazines because legally it had to be no proof of purchase necessary. You just had to be available to win, otherwise it's a lottery. And then they also sent out lots of mail with, for example, you won in giant block letters on the front to try to get you to open it. But that wasn't really real or accurate. And then in 1999, Congress passed the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act, which is considered mainly just targeted at Publishers Clearinghouse. And from there, they lost some class action lawsuits about, like, more or less tricking people into being interested in buying magazine subscriptions. But that stuff happens all the time now. You get the stuff that looks like a bill or it's like colored red or it says important you

know and then it's just it's just a regular mailing yeah yeah spectrum we'll throw them under the bus they do that all the time they're like important document enclosed open immediately and it's like hey will you please get our live tv subscription i'm like no right or or any credit card company that's that's like, you've pre-qualified. And I'm like, I know I haven't because my credit's bad. There's no way I'm going to qualify for this, Discover. I wouldn't want any credit card that would take me, that would pre-qualify me. I don't trust you already.

We're starting this. The foundation of this relationship is rocky discover card yeah i think they probably those companies read the entire deceptive mail prevention and enforcement act and skirted it because also publishers clearinghouse is still a company and they do basically new versions of what they used to do but more within this law to try to manage it man what's the point of laws at this point? Jeez. Okay, now we got a citizen's arrest.

Now we got to do it. That's just... The clues are all here. Well, and from here, there's two big takeaways for the main episode. So let's get into them. Starting with takeaway number one. across the world. But in the 1970s, not a lot of people know the U.S. privatized its postal system. And from there, it needed to officially turn a profit. So junk mail spiked like crazy.

Yeah. I mean, what percent do you know what percentage of mail right now is considered junk mail? Yeah. I mean, obviously, like you have to assume Amazon and that kind of stuff is a huge, huge, huge part of the puzzle. But I'm curious what junk, how much junk mail is, you know, it's a mutually beneficial arrangement, I'm sure. The numbers I've got here, and there's a few different sources for this section. The main ones are the book, Neither Snow Nor Rain, A History of the U.S. Postal Service by Devin Leonard, and then also Undelivered by historian Philip F. Rubio about the 1970 postal strike. so undelivered by historian Philip F. Rubio about the 1970 postal strike. But I think it's Leonard's book says, in 1972, 25% of US mail was considered to be junk, some kind of solicitation or ad.

Then by 1982, it was all the way up to 32% from 25 to 32. And then as of 2019, junk is about 63% of U.S. letter mail. So since the 80s, it's about doubled, and it's approaching two-thirds of all our mail is something that qualifies as junk. Two-thirds of all mail is considered junk. Yeah. Like we were talking about having a practice of immediately throwing things out when we receive mail. That seems to have not been a thing even as early as the 1970s like most of your mail was on purpose in some way well i mean it just makes you think if two-thirds of the mail is junk you got to figure a good part

of the remaining third is packages or things you've worked i mean like what percentage of mail is in some other category at this point which i guess is basically people sending letters to each other which just does not happen anymore um we should bring that back let's yeah let's be pen pals fellas let's do this i'll be a pen pal with you let's do this we'll figure we'll figure this out after the thing we'll start writing that's the new patreon that's a new patreon level yeah i guess we will hand write you a letter, which you will probably mistake for junk mail. You will tear it up and throw it in the trash. But nevertheless, for $19 a month. Yep.

I know you're joking, but early in the Patreon, I sent everybody cards and stickers, actually. I really did that. That's very nice. How long did that take? It took multiple weeks, I would say, to write them and send them. Wow. I did. It was a pretty big endeavor and really fun.

I got to like see people's addresses and stuff and like be like, hey, how is it in Nunavut? Or wherever they were. You know, it was great. Yeah. Nice. I did a project on a show I hosted once where I had people send in postcards and it was amazing for weeks just getting five or six postcards a day. It was lovely. I have them framed and they're hanging upstairs.

It's really, yeah. When you get an actual piece of mail these days, it is quite the good feeling. is quite quite the good feeling the uh older lady who lived in this apartment before me she still gets mail all the time and sometimes it looks like personal letters and she like she she she passed in this apartment and so like i'm always like oh do these people not know that should i open this but also that's like but those are the only personal letters i get and then i just order myself packages for the dopamine rush and that's that's about it no postcards over here wow do you i wonder what the best thing to do with those personal letters is probably just wrong address return to sender and let them figure out the rest yeah i typically just yeah that's

definitely the most ethical it's not necessarily what benny does though we're starting to learn some things about you benny yeah a lot of time it goes with the junk mail um but you know if it's a handwritten letter i i've set it on my table for a couple of weeks before I throw it away. Well, there you go. Yeah, I really. Wait, but seriously, if you will allow for some earnestness here. Will you promise the next time this happens to hand write a note back to this person and say, this person has passed away. Here's put it back in and mail it back. I will cover your postage.

I'll send you. Jody, that's so generous. I will absolutely do that just for you. And then, okay, I would love that. And then you never know. You may develop a pen pal yeah oh my gosh that'd be great yeah this this is the best thing a podcast has ever done folks this is the greatest result yeah that says more about podcasting than uh than what we've what we've accomplished. That's so sweet. And yeah, as far as the change in the postal system, from the time of President George Washington until the early 1970s, the U.S. postal system was a government department. Like the postmaster general was in the presidential cabinet. It was all publicly run, publicly handled.

And then there was a huge postal strike in the spring of 1970. It started with a wildcat strike in New York. Eventually, it was over 200,000 postal workers at 671 post offices all stopped working. And President Richard Nixon sent the National Guard to be postal workers in some locations and just keep some of the mail going. But apparently, according to Smithsonian, in that year, there were 270 million mail pieces moving through the U.S. per day. So like a quarter of a billion pieces of mail needed to move. The National Guard couldn't do it. do it. And even though the government could have just fired all the postal workers, like Ronald Reagan would later fire air traffic controllers because it was not legal for them to strike, according to the law. Instead of doing that, they made a deal. They did a salary increase for them and then also gave them another salary increase in exchange for signing off on new laws to reform

the Postal Service. But this was a nationwide mail crisis in 1970. The postal workers were overworked, underpaid, and struck, even though it was against the law. Imagine being in the National Guard and being like, oh, I'm being deployed. Oh, it's to my local post office. Yeah. Gotcha. Right. Yeah. Gotcha. Right.

Yeah. I don't think there was a single person in the National Guard who ever thought that was even a possibility. That's amazing. You would think, yeah. And it was even kind of for keeping the regular military going, because in 1970, the Vietnam War was happening. And the postal system was how draft notices went out and so right there were apparently some locations where because there was a strike and there wasn't enough national guard support the draft was essentially suspended because nobody was

getting the notice so they could legally be like i didn't get the notice i'm not going yet you can't make me wow wow that's yeah it's a weird year insane so so after they they did their their striking it in in like direct consequence of that it became privatized yeah that's right so they there were several different unions involved in organizing postal workers, but they signed off on receiving pay raises and then also letting the government pass what was called the Postal Service, USPS. And it went from being a government service to like an independent corporation with a mandate to do letter mail, and then also the ability to do parcels and other mail. And so ever since then, it's been technically separate from the government and the Postmaster General is not in the cabinet anymore. And from there, they... But still appointed by the president, right? So,

yeah. Yeah. It's weird vestiges. But man, I mean, I wonder what percentage of people really understand that dynamic. And I think some people did a little bit during the pandemic and realizing that Trump had appointed a truly incompetent person to sort of run the post office. People maybe realize that, but that dynamic, I think, I think that's the, I'm sure there's just this lingering idea that the post office is part of the government. And I'm sure that a lot of people get angry at the government when the mail doesn't work well as it often doesn't. And it's probably fuels a lot of sort of skepticism of government efficiency, even though it's not, you know, as you're saying, it's not, it's not a government institution.

Yeah, right on. Fellas, I got to come clean. I thought that it was part of the government. I didn't realize that the post office was privatized. I thought, you know, USPS, it's United States, got to be government. I guess that's just incorrect. Yeah, it's not. I think I thought that until I remember there as a kid, we went to our post office and there was some kind of poster up with a big red picture of a penny and then some kind of ad copy of like not one red cent of tax dollars goes to the postal system.

Right. And then I asked my mom and she told me what she knew about it. And then and then from here, I have researched this podcast. Like, I think most people don't come across this information because, like you say, they're even like wearing red, white and blue with eagles on it and stuff. You would think it would be government stuff, but it's separate now. That's crazy. I don't know how I feel about that. Yeah.

I don't know how I feel about that. Yeah. And they, and when they did this, they immediately panicked about it because what happened is they, they made it an independent corporation. The postmaster general is still presidentially chosen, but now is not in the cabinet and is kind of quasi private. But they also told them, Hey, 1970, you're now independent. By law, by 1985, 15 years from now, you need to start turning a profit. Because before this, the government partly met a shortfall with tax dollars most years. But they said, hey, you need to turn a profit right after giving every postal worker a large pay increase, and also having USPS buy a lot of new letter sorting technology to try to speed it up. So it basically created a perfect situation for the Postal Service

to lose a lot of money right away, right when they were supposed to make money. And in 1974 alone, they lost half a billion dollars. In 1975, they lost a full billion dollars. And everyone in the Postal Service and the government freaked out. Apparently, New York Congressman Taddy Estolski said, quote, no one expected the transition of the post office department to the U.S. Postal Service to be easy. But on the other hand, neither did anyone expect it to be catastrophic. Oh, my gosh. What a burn from the congressman. Yeah.

But, you know, it's just like I just think not everything needs to turn a profit. Right. Like, why do we expect the way that, you know, especially, you know, up until fairly recently, as if we think of it as a vital civic institution in a way that we connect with each other, that doesn't there's plenty of other reasons to support it other than it should turn a profit. Yeah. Of the many, many, many kind of what ifs and missed opportunities and sort of tragic, tragic comedic outcomes of the last two years. One of my big, big, big what ifs

that I just keep coming back to was that there was a plan in the spring of 2020 to use the USPS and mail every American a mask. And I just sometimes find myself thinking like, what would have happened if, you know, the government had sort of taken that stand? What would it have done to the way the masks got politicized? What would it have done to sort of this notion that we never had, that like every American is in this together? You know, just like that, just that one simple move for me felt like it was such a missed opportunity and could have like, I don't know if it would have changed the course of everything.

But man, and then conversely, I also feel like sort of shocked that like a billionaire like Bloomberg or even a less altruistic billionaire didn't like slap their name on a mask and mail one to every American. I'm just surprised that like there hasn't up until this point, the entire pandemic, until I guess a few weeks ago when Biden is now there's the the tests that the Postal Service wasn't used in this sort of kind of this is the one way we can reach every single American with something. And this is one of those moments where every single American needs to feel engaged and rowing in the same direction. For like 40% of America, that mask would have just been with the junk mail. That's true.

Torn up. I'm like, Trump, put your logo on that mask. I don't care. Like, you know, just like, just get it out there. Sign each one. Like the stimulus checks. Oh, that guy, that would have been he would have loved to spend his time doing that.

Kidding me? Mr. President, you have to sit here. We bought you 700 Sharpies and you're going to sit here. We're going to put on SportsCenter in the background and you just need to sign 8.2 billion masks. Or whatever it is. And he's like, oh, no problem.

No problem. Government sent us a muzzle. I like imagining that his main response to that ask would be complaining about some SportsCenter anchor or something. I feel like he's so fixated on TV media above everything. Like, that's Sage Steele. I don't know. I don't know. Like, that's all he has to say.

Side, side, side. But, yeah, this system, I don't know if we would have found an alternative to it. And, like, today, right, you can order a few free masks from the government. It's how a lot of states vote, just period, like they send all the ballots that way, you know, but in the 70s, it seemed really, really shaky. modern pre-sorted junk mail. That was what they came up with as a way to just have a lot more traffic would be the internet word, but just have a lot more to do and to send and to buy. When you say pre-sorted, what do you mean by that? Yeah. And so this is a thing. In 1978, Jimmy Carter selected a new postmaster general named William F. Bolger. And zip codes already existed. If people have heard the postal codes episode, they heard about that starting in the 60s and then ramping up in the late 70s.

Bulger expanded zip codes from five digits to nine digits. And if you've ever seen a lot of business mail in the US, it has those nine digits. And the deal Bulger offered companies is if you put full nine digit zips on all your mail and like sort it bundle it prepare it so our people can just pick it up and deliver it we'll give you a huge discount so that's that's what pre-sorting is like a business that's going to send junk mail basically does postal worker work right in exchange for a deal. Interesting. And this was new in the 70s, but it's how basically everything gets sent now. And I think regular people don't know their nine-digit zip,

but businesses find out yours because that's how they can cheaply mail you stuff. So that's like you get your five-digit zip, then it's like a hyphen, and then four, yeah, I have no clue what mine is. But Billy Bulger, he really changed the game, huh? Yeah. And he was, his story is sweet because he, according to Devin Leonard, William Bulger was a career postal employee. Like he served in World War II and then came back and became a postal clerk. He

worked at a post office and then spent his adult life working up to being the postmaster general. He was so passionate about the system that occasionally he would swing by the complaints department, grab a stack of individual customer complaints and be like, I'll do these. I'll just take these and personally sort them out out what a stand-up guy wow yeah loves the postal system but was this pre-sorting idea the thing that like launched him is that how he worked his way up the ladder or did he have it after he'd already climbed up he already climbed and then it was like great i'm the postmaster general of a dying postal system what do i do right so now i have yeah got it but but i think

his time in the trenches probably helped him come up with this very clever solution exactly right yeah and then uh and then businesses really liked it too because in order to pre-sort their mail they had to get a lot of data from the u.s census and like set up systems to cross-reference um census data with addresses to figure out where they were sending stuff. And with that, they could target their mail to specific demographics. So richer customers or particular kinds of customers for particular products. Everybody sort of won with this, and it immediately became most of what you get in your mailbox in the United States. became most of what you get in your mailbox in the United States. And USPS went from a shortfall to in 1983, they had a surplus of over $800 million. And they told the government they could stop

giving them the subsidy that they were giving them a few years early. They were like, no, we're good now. We have junk mail. Oh my gosh, junk mail saved the post office. More or less. Yeah. That's awesome. And made it what it is today. Like, it's still here, and they send you a lot of flyers and credit card stuff. Yeah. But is there any worry that junk mail is going away?

Or is it also just being replaced at an equal rate by Amazon and so forth? I'm not sure. Yeah, I didn't come across anything saying that it's declining or anything. Yeah, and it seems like Amazon is the other big thing. And also Amazon, they have to bring you entire boxes, and junk mail, they can just give you letters. So I would imagine that's an easier lift, all the junk mail. I guess my main worry about junk mail is like the environmental ecological like aspect of it and like how much paper is just being made just to be thrown away.

Especially if it's like 98% of it just gets tossed. It's like, it's got to build up. Right. That's why you, I know this about you you get all of your junk mail on the blockchain yeah exactly when you want to get a flyer you just this is like it's about it's about 48 hours of data mining in bulgaria yeah and then it comes and then it comes your way in my mind i think that's a lot better for the environment yeah but i'll be honest i don't know that much about blockchain so i might be sorely mistaken we'll see i i think that fits

actual blockchain people they're like this sounds cool yeah great off of that we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace.

Because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And and off all that, I think we can go into the other main takeaway for the main episode,

because here we go. Takeaway number two. One successful barrage of junk mail built the Internet. And won't keep people in suspense suspense we're going to talk about 1990s aol cds which are maybe the most successful and maybe also wasteful junk mail campaign ever to happen because they send you an entire cd or before that a floppy disk but it didn't work it did work it went it went really well for them. Yeah. Yeah. So wait, why wasteful? I mean, wasteful in that you're sending out, but how else were they going to get people to sign up, right? Yeah. It turns out before they did that, there were a bunch of

companies, including them, just trying to convince people. And one marketing person at AOL thought of this and it built the entire AOL company. They were tiny before they started doing that. And then Chief Marketing Officer Jan Brandt came up with a campaign where in the spring of 1993, they mailed three and a half inch floppy disks to about 200,000 people. And we were saying before, most junk mail, it gets like 2% to 3% uptake. This got 10% of customers to sign up. And so they said, Oh, this is the most lucrative junk mail campaign anyone's ever done.

We should keep doing it. And they took off from there. That's amazing. Yeah. I, uh, my, my family didn't have a computer. So I feel like that was probably something that if we got it it just got tossed right we could have given it to a neighbor or something give them a couple hours of internet or whatever that's awesome though 10 that's still a massive failure in my mind yeah especially apparently their approach was we don't have better internet than other people we just need to get to people first so if we mail them this thing and like 90 of customers were saying i don't need the internet i'm fine you know yeah and then later on maybe they already had it but initially they were like well the internet no thanks don't be i i'm i'm working on

a on a new series i'm helping get a new series off the ground um about the oprah winfrey show and the sort of history of the oprah winfrey show and the kind of like you know amazing some of the most interesting moments from the show but there's this great episode that i was just stumbling around online watching and she she's testing out an aol cd and you know on her show and sticking it in it's going on the internet and having a debate about why you want to be in it. And then of course at the end, the giveaway is everyone got a CD,

uh, uh, you know, under, look under your chair. She gave everyone junk mail. Of course. Basically.

She's famous for like giving everyone a car, but she's handing out junk mail. This is, this is the other amazing thing about the Oprah Winfrey shows. We think of these giveaways and we're like, oh, that one time everyone got a car, that one time everyone got diamonds. The vast majority of the gifts on the Oprah Winfrey

show, there was one. Someone was telling me about this. I haven't fact-checked it, but you know what? I believe there was an Oprah Winfrey show where everyone just got a tub of Vaseline. And it's just like you go in you're like maybe i'm gonna get a car or maybe i'm gonna get junk mail uh but it's it's remarkable the the oprah winfrey show itself works as an uh analogy for junk mail where you know 98 of the time it's junk but two percent of the time you get a car or an AOL CD or a demo disc.

There you go. Exactly. Yeah, and it just keeps coming to your house. I feel like some of the customer base is just, it's here. Okay. Yep. It's going on. I'm home.

It's on. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Wow. Jody, is there anything to link about that show i'm very excited about oh yeah the show well i did not mean to turn this into a but nevertheless uh the show is called oprah demics which is two academics talking about oprah uh and it's a radiotopia show and it's coming out

at the end of march and i'm helping like ep it's a little bit of a it started because we did an oprah episode on my other podcast and then my co-host Kelly was Like I'm obsessed with Oprah and then we found and so it's great. It's really fun and weirdly like if there aren't rewatch shows about Oprah out there and there aren't shows that are kind of like treating her like a Really significant sort of cultural and historical force. And so I think it's been really it's been fun. Yeah, so Oprah Demick's you'll find it I think it's been really, it's been fun. Yeah. So Oprah Demics, you'll find it.

Nice. That sounds great. Yeah. I have like, I have a few author friends and they were tweeting the other day about, does anything move books? And they agreed that Oprah's book club is the only modern thing that has moved books. Yeah. And it's been that way forever. I mean, it's incredible.

Oprah's book club. There's a professor at Fordham who teaches a class on Oprah's book club. And so he, we did an episode with him um but yeah that's pretty amazing oprah is secretly incredibly fascinating yeah she is not secretly she's yeah just incredible fascinating drop the s that's the if pod if fun yeah there were there were these things in the 90s like AOL that could just be titanic United States-wide things. And AOL, from this mail campaign, apparently before they started it,

they had about 200,000 subscribers. By the end of it, they had over 25 million. Oh my gosh. So truly, basically everybody who did that service then or now, it was from that. Oh my gosh. There's also there's a couple of things she claims that I can't fact check, but she says that at one point, about 50 percent of all compact discs in production worldwide were AOL demo CDs. Like, I mean, this is the height of CDs. Yeah. The height of music CDs. Right. So like Dwarf and Garth Brooks or whatever, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I guess. So what percentage of the mail at any given time was either an AOL CD or a Columbia House CD being mailed? Right, the United States disk system.

They just changed from an Eagle logo to a big CD with wings. Yeah. That'd be sweet. And she also says that at the peak of the campaign aol signed up a new customer every six seconds which means not only massive success but also just discs being put in cd trays all over the country all the time well that's yeah i mean that's the other thing is i'm sure someone tried to scam it or did, I mean, the risk of it being used for nefarious purposes seems really, really high.

We were so young. We were so naive. We would just stick anything in that drive. Like, I don't think a campaign like that could be successful nowadays. Because if they said, like, one, what would they send? Like a flash drive? Yeah.

Or an external hard drive like an external drive with a bluetooth or whatever it's like i'm not pairing to some random thing yeah absolutely not yeah yeah when things were so much easier when we were all technologically illiterate i swear yeah it like it was especially before the internet your postal mail was so much more exciting. It was all of your communication with the outside world, except for telemarketers. And so when the CD came, it was like a big deal. It was like, oh, they say this disc can connect me to everything. And they also put the discs even more places than that.

Apparently they packaged them with Blockbuster Video initially. They would come with rentals. more places than that apparently they packaged them with blockbuster video initially they would come with rentals and then they also needed to run an experiment at one point to see if you could freeze the cd and still have it work like if you've you know put in a frozen temperature and since that did work they packaged it with omaha steaks which is a mail order meat business so then you would also get an aol cd with your meat aolx omaha that's the collaboration of them waiting on yeah yeah exactly but i mean i remember them just like sitting in coffee shops or record stores or whatever just a pile of them by the you know well yeah by the door or whatever but yeah wow and to be clear with people like either a customer used this disc or did not but

either way a hundred percent of them were in a landfill like it's a demo so once you use it you're done and you just throw it away yeah like this was pure waste yeah going out to the entire country oh my gosh it's actually kind of awful Well, and then people also responded to that. Apparently one of the outcries against AOL was the waste of this campaign. And at one point in 2002, people tried to organize a grassroots campaign to mail 1 million CDs back to AOL. Like, gather them up, package them up. I love it. They didn't put it together, but that's a great idea.

I wish they had. Yeah. I think the three of us could put that together. Yeah. The thing is, the catch 22 is the best place to organize a campaign like that is on the internet. Yeah. So, you know.

Right. We all use our demo time to organize this and it's just not enough time to really to get it the ball rolling yeah yeah what uh and that that demo time element too apparently another reason this campaign ended because they so people know they stopped sending cds in 2006. that was the last year of mailing cds but that was also this was an aOL disc where they were offering you a free amount of hours of internet service. And AOL started struggling because competitors broke in by offering unlimited time. And so then AOL said, okay, well, we'll do unlimited time too.

But once you're doing that, the disc is not like a currency so much anymore. Like it doesn't feel like it's full of hours physically. So that was so that was a change aol already was kind of up front about them having a worse service you know it's like why would i go with them just because they're more convenient when i already have the convenience from these other people i wonder like do you know how much time you were allotted per CD before it was unlimited? Oh, I'm not sure. There's a, we'll link a gallery from ngadget.com because they have a bunch of pictures of these old discs. And I'm seeing some, one of them says 100 hours free.

Another one says 1,175 hours free. Maybe that was later on in the run. That's a good amount. That's not bad. Older disc with 50 free hours. I think they just constantly tinkered with the different pitch of the different discs. Yeah. Well, like I said, I didn't have a computer growing up, so the only way I could play RuneScape

was I had to walk to the library and that was like one hour increments. I wish I would have... If I would have had these, I would have stockpiled them, man. Everyone could have sent their CDs to me and I could have been... Just daisy chain them one after another? Absolutely.

Level 100 in RuneScape in a thousand hours, for sure. I like that if you do that you're essentially a video game character you're just like collecting hit points in an environment i like to live my life like it's a video game like you get bumped into and all the discs fall out like sonic rings like just scattering everywhere desperately trying to pick them all up before they get scratched. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and AOL as a company, it seems like they kind of saw what happened to them coming.

Because in 2001, they purchased the Time Warner Media Company. With that merger, they kind of tried to become an entire entertainment conglomerate, not just an internet company. Because by 2006, they weren't doing discs anymore. Their ISP business is way, way smaller now, even though it used to be the top one. And now they've been bought and sold by a few different companies. They got bought from Verizon by a private equity firm last year. So they're very small now.

But with this one giant junk mail campaign, they kind of put a bunch of the country on the Internet and made that more of our lives. But that merger and then just what's happened to ALL, it really does feel to me like my entire adult life or since basically elementary school. It's like every five years all gets bought or merges and it fails and then it happens again and it's just like over and over and over it just seems to they just keep finding so now and like all of these stories all roads lead i suppose as you were saying to private equity and that's that's where they are now yeah so that's that's surprising yeah they got bought by Verizon in 2015, and then private equity bought AOL and Yahoo from Verizon in 2021. It's just getting passed around.

I think that as a society, we're really overdue for the next viral junk mail campaign. I wonder what it's going to be, but I think that we're overdue for something that, instead of a 2% return, let's have something really cool that gets like 6% of us interested.

You know, let's... Masks. N94s. Yeah, that would be great. That could have been it. Or Yeezys, one of the two. Oh my gosh. Kanye, I know you're listening. Kanye, i know you're listening kanye i know you're listening you're gonna be sending me that aol disc also send yeezys to everyone a pair of slides to

every american yeah and i think you'd get like i've seen those slides maybe three percent would actually wear them yeah that would be one junk mail campaign that i'd be in on right okay kanye with one of those little green visors like reading the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jody Avergan and to Benny Wayne Sully for making me feel validated in my practices with apartment mail. Because you get junk for past tenants, too. It's a real pile. It's a real pile. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode.

obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two stories, because we're talking about two humongous American catalogs with surprising impacts on the entire country. Find out what those are and visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost seven dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring Junk Mail with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, modern Junk Mail comes from the 1970s privatization of the U.S. Post Office Department. Takeaway number two, one successful barrage of junk mail built the internet. Plus tons more in the stats and numbers about the shopping, sweepstakes, and other schemes in the history of this junk mail practice. Those are the takeaways.

Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Jody Avergan is an incredible podcast host and producer and so much more. You can hear him multiple times a week hosting This Day in Esoteric Political History, along with Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson. And I also hope you'll check out many other things he's made for 30 for 30, 538, and so many more places. And then Benny Wayne Sully is the co-star of My First Native American Boyfriend, which is a short film written and directed by Joey Clift. It is doing the festival circuit right now.

We'll link to the trailer. Also going to link to NDND, which is the YouTube channel where you can see Benny Wayne Sully and many other friends of the show, such as Sienna East, performing very, very funny and great tabletop role-playing. That's what you want from the internet, a great hang like that. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. Leaned on two wonderful books this week. One of them is Neither Snow Nor Rain, A History of the United States Postal Service, that is by Devin Leonard. The other is Undelivered from the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service, that's by historian Philip F. Rubio. Also used articles from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and TechCrunch and Vox.

Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly, incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.