"I joined Randy Cassingham's THIS is TRUE mailing list more years ago than I can remember, and his stuff was of sufficient interest to me that when I took over layout for Brutarian and begin writing a column, an interview with Randy seemed a given. Brutarian was about pop and fringe culture, and nothing seemed to fit better. Randy's list has continued to grow in popularity, so if nothing else, visit www.THISisTRUE.com and sign up. It's free!

"Below is the interview, including my lead-in to the Q&A section, which was the magazine's favored interview format.

"David M. Fitzpatrick"

Going Out to Thousands:

An Interview with Internet Columnist and Mailing List Mogul Randy Cassingham

(from Brutarian Quarterly #32, January 2001)
by David M. Fitzpatrick

BOULDER, Colorado (BQ) We often think of music, books, art, and movies as being the avenues where people challenge what society perceives as the "norm" what we at Brutarian consider to be "brutarian": raw art, as it were. But there are plenty of other corridors for that sort of thing, and as I am fond of pointing out, nothing represents raw art better than the Internet.

Robert L. Ripley once challenged us to "Believe It Or Not," and while many did and many didn't, nearly all were amazed, enthralled, and entertained. What Ripley didn't find while scouring the world over, it found him in the form of mail sent to him from virtually every inhabited corner of the globe.

BQ: Would you classify TRUE as fringe culture? RC: Without trying to sound Clintonesque, I guess it depends on your definition of "fringe."

Robert Ripley is dead, but Ripley's Believe It Or Not rolls onward like an unstoppable juggernaut of the bizarre and the outré. Following it have been other attempts to amaze and bewilder; many successful, some not. Books abound; a museum near the Space Coast in Florida draws hordes of amazement-seekers. Other feel-alikes, like the Baltimore Dime Museum (Brutarian #31), keep attentions grabbed and imaginations sparked.

But in the modern age of information sharing and the Internet, there are boundless ways to stimulate the mind. A man named Randy Cassingham figured out a few years back that one of the most entertaining modes of mind-sparking comes from something we've had around for quite some time, but which is now much more easily accessible: news wires. You see them every day in your local newspapers—stories from the Associated Press, Reuters, and others. News wire services are how local papers get news stories from around the world; it's been like that this entire century (the Associated Press, for example, has been around since 1848). Now, imagine all the stories that go out across the wires that you never see. Chances are, Randy Cassingham sees them.

And he saw them, all right, a few years back, and THIS is TRUE was born. TRUE (as it is affectionately abbreviated by Randy) is a collection of weekly wire stories, completely rewritten by Randy and doled out to his faithful following by way of a mailing list. In case you're new to this email thing, a mailing list is a service regular folks like you and I join by adding our email addresses to the mix. When the list owner sends out email to the list, it is then automatically distributed to the many subscribers. This is a hell of a lot easier than Randy typing out everyone's email addresses every week, since he has something in the neighborhood of 100,000+ addresses to which TRUE gets emailed.

Mailing lists aren't new. In fact, in Internet terms, they're older than dirt. And they're everywhere! If you're online, you've no doubt become familiar with at least a dozen regular "humor" mailing lists like Top 5 or Joke-A-Day, among myriad others. So what makes TRUE so different?

Randy rewrites and summarizes his stories, adding at the end his trademark humorous tagline; trust me, there's no explaining them away. Subscribe to the list and you'll see. Included in each regular mailing of TRUE is also a nice feature called "Honorary Unsubscribe," where Randy honors someone who has recently passed, a name with which you might not be familiar but darn well should be. This, in fact, sparked a secondary list Randy runs called HeroicStories (he figured people could be honored without having to die, and that seems more than reasonable to me).

But I digress; or, rather, there's so much to TRUE that summing it up just makes my fingers dance like crazy trying to get it all in some sort of order. The subject matter of the news stories isn't something easily categorized, but suffice to say, you'll likely have the impression that you should be slapping your face after reading most of them (or at least after one of Randy's clever taglines which often follow them). Whether gut-bustingly funny, merely a chuckle, a "blink-blink, jaw-drop" bit, or simply something making you stop and think, the best thing about the content in TRUE is one simple, basic fact: they're all for real.

And so is Randy. He attended a rich, Silicon Valley junior high school in 1972, where computers first captured his interest. Having been online continuously since 1982 (yes, folks, there was "online" long before the World Wide Web hit in the early 90s) and, as a result, he's intimately familiar with the "online culture and I use that word advisedly," he says. "You must understand the culture to succeed online; there's a word for those who don't understand it and throw money into their online presence anyway: 'bankrupt.'"

A journalism school grad, Randy first learned the ins and outs of networking computers during a ten year stint at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Here he not only honed his publishing skills but also was a software engineer for a network-distributed client-server information system- okay, okay, no more boring you with the tech stuff; we can agree at this point that the man isn't a newbie and not just some guy who bought his first computer last year and decided to put up a mailing list.

I've been a member of THIS is TRUE for a couple of years now, and amongst the blizzard of emails which beleaguer me and my email boxes every week, this is one I look forward to rather excitedly. The list is free—that's the best part!—although you can opt to subscribe to a pay-for list which you get before the rest of us get it. It contains more new stories than the free version, and doesn't have any advertisements (relax, they're barely obtrusive, and usually very interesting, enough so to be worth clicking on). On occasion I've traded emails with Randy, usually poking good-natured fun at something he had said. Not by a long shot have we been best e-buddies, but over those few emails (along with years of TRUE mailings with Randy's personal commentary) I've certainly gotten a handle on what sort of a guy he is.

Randy was more than happy to do this interview, which was conducted in a way the rest of the Brutarian staff found quite alien—conducted via email. For onliners like Randy and me, it seemed like the most logical way to do it; saved on phone calls, nobody had to travel to meet anyone else, and with Randy typing roughly twelve thousand words per minute on his Dvorak keyboard, it was a lot faster. Read on...

BRUTARIAN: Email interviews are nothing new to you, I am sure, but for Brutarian I'm almost certain this is a first; but that's the way its done in the modern world. The boss wanted me to conduct the interview live, so if anyone asks, we did this on ICQ or in a chat room. Now, Brutarian claims to cover all aspects of pop or fringe culture, and it occurs to me that, although these are public news stories you refer to, there is a certain amount of "fringe culture-ness" to this massive following you have herding after you and TRUE. Would you classify TRUE as fringe culture? Or how would you classify the trend that it has made for itself?

RANDY CASSINGHAM: Interesting question. Without trying to sound Clintonesque, I guess it depends on your definition of "fringe." The stories come from "legit mainstream" newspapers, but my selection of what to cover certainly ain't "mainstream". I generally don't do the Big Stories that you hear about as front page news—people are sick of them by the time I could do anything with them. OJ Simpson, Princess Di's or Prince JFK Jr's deaths, or (shudder!) Elian, for instance. So yeah: in a sense, it is fringe, but it's also familiar and comfortable, because they're the stories that when you do see them, you cut them out and put up on your bulletin board at work, like a good cartoon. The classic "They did WHAT?!" kind of stories. We've all seen them; I just figured out how to make a career out of them.

BRUT: We know that TRUE is a collection of true stories you have rewritten from facts garnered off news wires, but TRUE is clearly more than that. If you had to explain to a philosopher or an archeologist a thousand years from now about what TRUE is representative of to today's culture, how would you do it?

RC: First, I think it'd be cool to still be there to explain it to her, but I know what you mean. TRUE's obvious purpose is to entertain, but it indeed goes deeper than that. In essence, I write about the most stupid things people do all over the world, yet they are often things that real people can relate to. Like today, I wrote about a drunk driver that got pulled over by the cops. Who hasn't thought of the scam of quick, let's switch seats with the passenger! But naturally, the passenger was drunk too, and the cop saw them switch, so because he saw both in control of the vehicle on the street, both of them got popped for drunk driving! It isn't just the sweet justice aspect, but people are able to point at that kind of behavior and think to themselves, "I'm not THAT stupid!" It validates that the kinds of stupid things they do are either quite common, or not as bad as what OTHER people do. There's deep satisfaction in that. Then to top it off, they get the laugh, or the expression of irony, or outrage, that I add at the end that sets TRUE apart from the several other weird news columns out there—my commentary on the story.

BQ: What hoops does Murphy's Law make you jump through to make it all come together? RC: It happens because I work every day. Every day, at least eight hours, and often fourteen. It translates to 70-80 hours per week to get everything done.

BRUT: When did you launch TRUE?

RC: The summer of 1994. The concept hit me like a bolt of lightning—I literally leapt out of bed with the idea fully formed in my mind.

BRUT: Describe that moment.

RC: Back in 1983 or so, when the IBM PC was really starting to take off, a friend said to me, "Isn't it amazing how much computer power is going onto people's desktops?" I replied "No: the power will come when they're all linked together." So when I saw it all really starting to happen in the early 1990s, I wanted to be a true part of it.

TRUE itself was born out of several desires. I wanted a creative outlet and to write more. I wanted to create intellectual property—something with a long shelf life that would give me "residual" income over many years. TRUE was designed to be timeless, so book collections could sell for years and years (five have been published, and the sixth is about to go to press). I wanted to create something popular because I wanted just a little bit of fame (I had previously written an esoteric technical book that drew a very limited audience). I wanted to be my own boss. I wanted a portable job—one that I could do anywhere. On the road? On vacation? Perhaps on a cruise ship? How about in Europe? I believe this will be easier and easier to do with the Internet as time goes on.

So one night in June, 1994, I couldn't sleep because L.A. was in the middle of a nasty heat wave, and I didn't have air conditioning. Very suddenly, I saw how to put all my wants together and become a part of the Internet explosion. I leapt out of bed, booted my computer, and started taking notes. My mind reeled, and the next day I sketched it all out for a friend. "You're going to make money giving it away for free?" He couldn't see it, even though it's exactly the same thing that the TV networks do: they give away entertainment for free, yet make huge amounts of money. I told him I thought I'd be able to quit my job in two years and do just that full time. He kind of went "Uh huh," but two years almost to the day later, I did quit my job and moved out of L.A.

BRUT: TRUE is currently distributed to over 100,000 readers in 183 countries, very impressive numbers. When you set out to do TRUE, did have hopes or dreams of that many subscribers?

RC: I knew it would be big from the start, but I didn't realize just how fast it would grow. I had 10,000 subscribers within four months, and remember that was in 1994, the Dark Ages of the Internet. I didn't stop to think quite so much about the international aspect, though—I didn't know there were 183 countries, let alone think that in a few years people in that many countries would be reading my work every week!

BRUT: Now this wasn't your initial area of expertise, or at least not your career path. You used to work for NASA. What can you tell us about that?

RC: I have a degree in journalism, and my specialty was science—explaining complex topics to a lay audience. After college, I started at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena as a technical writer, and ended up publishing a technical journal for them. When that project ran out of money, I ended up doing software engineering. I was doing pretty well after ten years there, but I really hated Los Angeles and wanted out. I did have the habit of posting the "weird news" items I saw on my bulletin board, and it was a hit, so that became the "content" when my online publishing brainstorm hit.

BRUT: You've said that you're making a more comfortable living now working full-time online, but when you first started the list I'm sure you didn't expect it to explode like this. What makes a guy give up a job with NASA to send out emails all the time? Not that that isn't my dream job, because it is! But what made you say, "Hey, I think I'll do this?"

BQ: Are you normally outgoing and opinionated, or are you quiet and reserved? RC: I'm an introvert playing the part of an extrovert.

RC: I like to look at the Big Picture. Yeah, I took a major pay cut when I quit my Day Job, but I had two years of growth under my belt, and I could see where the trend was going. Also, since I was working 50 hours per week at the Day Job, and then going home and working nights and weekends on the new gig, I didn't exactly have much of a social life, so every penny I made went into the bank. I had a nice cushion by the time I left JPL, and I moved to a cheaper place to live, so I figured I had a good two years to make it work "or else." It worked.

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