Episode 18: Click It or Ticket

What do a Sunday school mason jar and a billion-dollar federal highway program have in common? More than you'd think. In this episode, we trace how "Click It or Ticket" went from a 1993 North Carolina experiment to a massive, federally funded compliance machine and why the slogan had nothing to do with convincing you and everything to do with threatening your wallet.

We cover the invention of the modern seatbelt, Ralph Nader's 1965 bombshell, the 1974 interlock disaster that made Americans angrier than Watergate, and the marketing psychology that eventually cracked the code on behavioral compliance.

Plus: what the commercials never told you about seatbelt syndrome, the secondary arrests those checkpoints quietly generated, and why primary enforcement laws did more work than any $10 million ad campaign ever could. The safety case for seatbelts is real and airtight. The story behind the campaign is a lot more complicated.