Pop Tarts: No Fruit Necessary

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck.
Jerry's here, too, talking about her grandmother and what she did with Pop-Tarts. And it actually sounds kind of good.

Speaker 15 Oh, man. My grandmother wouldn't have, there wouldn't have been a Pop-Tart anywhere near her house.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, she was like that, huh?

Speaker 15 Well, one of them. My one more, I mean, one was sort of the modern grandmother, my mom's mom.
They had like TV and stuff like that and a VCR.

Speaker 15 But Granny Bryant, my dad's mother, was very old school, sort of rural Tennessee. And like, she didn't have a television.
She didn't have anything like a pop-tart.

Speaker 2 Right. She's like, if I didn't can it, you're not going to eat it.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 She's just kind of had the big, uh, big jar of grease on the stove that like she never bought oil in her life. She just kept reusing the same stuff.

Speaker 2 Man, I'll bet that tasted good, though.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Granny Bryant, the best.

Speaker 2 Well, that's funny. You said that one of your other grandmother, your mom's mom, was modern.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because that's actually some theories say that that is what Pop-Tarts grew out of. That there was this huge shift in the 60s,

Speaker 2 usually pointed to a second-wave feminism, where women began to essentially say, like,

Speaker 2 this whole traditional housewife thing is basically domestic servitude, and I'm not down for it anymore. I'm going to work in the workplace.

Speaker 2 And so, convenience food grew up almost immediately to kind of fill that void or whatever, the vacuum that was left as moms started to move out of the house into the workplace, and people still needed to eat.

Speaker 15 That's right.

Speaker 15 And I feel like this is one where we assume everyone knows what a Pop-Tart is.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 15 And we get punished for that in emails. So a Pop-Tart is a maybe a breakfast item, but as we'll see in the old ads, it was, it could be for lunch or a snack or whatever.
But it is a toaster pastry.

Speaker 15 It's a little sort of fruit-filled

Speaker 15 faux pastry that you stick in your toaster or not and toast it up or not.

Speaker 15 And it came about, and we're going to, you know, we need to thank Livia, but we definitely want to thank Diana Stampler

Speaker 15 for the website Promote Michigan, because as Livia found and as I found, when it comes to Pop-Tart origin stories, Diana Stamfler's is the bomb diggity.

Speaker 2 She did her homework.

Speaker 15 Yeah, she had a lot of great detail that other places didn't have. So big thanks to that website.

Speaker 15 But Pop-Tarts came out in the 1960s, and we're going to have to retell a little bit of our live episode about the Kellogg

Speaker 15 Cereal Corporation and the Kellogg brothers, because that's where this story starts. So we'll give you kind of a quick little overview, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was our live episode from Sydney. It was good.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So the Kellogg brothers, William Keith or Will Keith and John Harvey Kellogg, they ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which essentially was a health spa, health resort, dedicated to

Speaker 2 getting you to poop with precise perfectness, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And other things.
And this was in the 19th century. And so as a result of this, one of the things that came out of it was the Kellogg brothers inventing new types of food.

Speaker 2 And one of the foods that they invented were cornflakes. And almost as importantly importantly as them inventing cornflakes was

Speaker 2 one of their guests, one of their patients coming along. And his name was C.W.
Post.

Speaker 15 That's right. He loved those cornflakes and

Speaker 15 spent a little time there and said, you know what? I'm going to start making my own cereal.

Speaker 15 I remember a lot of that. I guess when you do the live show several times, I remember a lot of details from that one, by the way.

Speaker 15 But like individual jokes, even.

Speaker 2 I want to double it. Lay it on me, buddy.

Speaker 15 Oh, just made me think of the Elton John album title. Was that, but I can't remember the name of the machine, the Electric Bath something.

Speaker 15 Oh, yes,

Speaker 15 it sounded like an Elton John.

Speaker 2 Electric Light Bath.

Speaker 15 Electric Light Bath was it?

Speaker 2 Yes, I remember that. It was like one of those one-person

Speaker 2 steam rooms where your head stuck out, but it was light.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So that's what was going on at Battle Creek. But CW Post tries that Kellogg corn flake, says, I love this stuff.
I'm going to form a company to make it. And the Post company was formed in 1895.

Speaker 15 And it was about 10 or 11 years after that that Kellogg got into the cereal business,

Speaker 15 like legit-wise, and established their Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So they're like, we're going to sell these things outside of the sanitarium.

Speaker 2 And now Post and Kellogg's were direct competitors in this new emerging cereal market that those two companies created out of thin air.

Speaker 2 By the time the 60s roll around, a good half a century later, breakfast cereal was a thing. It had been healthy, healthy, healthy.

Speaker 2 And then I think starting in 1948, sugar crisp was the first sugar cereal that came out. And it was like, wow, they went full bore right out of the gate.
Yeah. I mean, with sugar crisp.

Speaker 2 I think they call it golden crisp now because you like a mob with torches and pitchforks would come after you if you called your cereal sugar crisp. Yeah.
But it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 And that came out in in the 40s. So by the time the 60s were around, you had a lot of different sugary cereals.
And Kellogg's and Post were making a lot of them.

Speaker 2 But the upshot of the cereal market being established is there's not a lot of new things you can do. You can come up with a new cereal and it'll be kind of a hit or not.

Speaker 2 And that's about all you can do.

Speaker 2 So they started looking for entirely new products to kind of fill, like I said, this vacuum that was being left by second wave feminism, getting women out of the house and into the workplace.

Speaker 2 So that they were like, we need to come up with convenience foods that are even more convenient than cereal.

Speaker 15 Yeah, than pouring something out of a box and adding milk.

Speaker 2 Mm-hmm. And then reading the back of the box.

Speaker 15 Or water, in the case of, was that Fridays?

Speaker 2 You better put some water in that damn.

Speaker 2 I love that one.

Speaker 15 So classic.

Speaker 15 So this was also a time a post-war sort of food science boom was happening where they were making all this sort of dehydrated space age astronaut astronaut food and stuff like that.

Speaker 15 So that had a lot to do with it as well. And Post was experimenting with that stuff and experimenting with wrapping things in foil,

Speaker 15 dehydrating or partially dehydrating stuff. And they said, all right, we're making these Gainsburgers,

Speaker 15 this dog crumbly, you know, looks like a meat burger for your dog that's wrapped in foil that you break apart.

Speaker 2 Do you remember those? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 15 They're still around, right?

Speaker 2 Or did they go away? They went away in the 90s, I read.

Speaker 15 Oh, Oh, interesting. Yeah.
I definitely remember Gainsburgers because I always remember thinking, like, those are the luckiest dogs in the world.

Speaker 2 Do you? Yeah. It was.

Speaker 15 Like, my family would never buy that stuff.

Speaker 2 No, same here. That was like luxury dog food at the time.
But now it'd be like, I wouldn't even feed this to

Speaker 2 a rat.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 15 So they were experimenting with like foil wrap things. And as you'll see, that's what Pop-Tarts were wrapped in.
So that's why that's kind of key.

Speaker 15 And they said, all right, we've invented a pastry filled with fruit, like a fruit mixture, and we figured out how to make it shelf-stable so it doesn't need to go in the fridge and how to have it not collect bacteria over time.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And toasters on the counter were a thing now instead of just having to use the oven for everything.
And so they shaped them into a toaster-sized thing.

Speaker 15 wrapped it in foil.

Speaker 15 And in October 1963, the Battle Creek Inquirer newspaper reported that these country squares, which is what they're calling them, is the latest and greatest food that you're going to want on your breakfast table.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it took me a little while, but I wondered if country squares was a play on country squire.

Speaker 15 What's Country Squire?

Speaker 2 It was a landowner, a rural landowner in medieval England. Hmm.

Speaker 15 I doubt it, but you never know.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 they call them country squares. Let's just leave it at that.
Okay, Josh? Fine.

Speaker 2 But this was Post. This wasn't Kellogg's who ended up making the Pop-Tart.
This was Post who was breaking new ground with these little handheld toaster-heated pastries, right?

Speaker 15 That's right.

Speaker 2 Problem was the, I don't know if the Battle Creek Inquirer got in there and had a spy or else if there was a really dumb vice president that was getting exposure in the Battle Creek Inquirer.

Speaker 2 But Post was not ready to go to market with these things. They had a recipe, but they didn't know how they were going to package it, market it, get it out to stores.

Speaker 2 So they had many months of development left ahead of them when news broke.

Speaker 2 Well, it just so happens that the higher-ups at companies like Kellogg read the Battle Creek Inquirer because they're in the same town.

Speaker 2 And this gave them the ability to catch up because they were caught totally off guard by this. Yeah.
But it gave them the ability to catch up, scramble, and create their own versions.

Speaker 2 And I believe Pop-Tarts ended up beating country squares to market. Yeah.

Speaker 15 I think the vice president of Kellogg says, what is this country squares?

Speaker 2 And someone said, it's a rural landowner in England.

Speaker 15 No, there was a vice president, though, named William Lamoth,

Speaker 15 and he had a guy working there in the kitchen named Doc Joe Thompson. And he said, get to work.
We need our own pastry.

Speaker 15 And it would be their first foray into any kind of little bakery product like that. And they wanted a partner because they, you know, again, they were just cereal people.

Speaker 2 So plus everybody likes to have a partner.

Speaker 15 Yeah, exactly. So they went to the Heckman Biscuit Company, which was conveniently also in Michigan.
They had been around selling Dutch cookies since the beginning of the late 19th century,

Speaker 15 door to door. And by the 1960s, when this is happening, they're a division of the United Biscuit Company of America,

Speaker 15 which would eventually become Keebler in 66. Right there in Grand Rapids, they had a great modern

Speaker 15 industrial bakery, and it was a really...

Speaker 16 sort of a great partnership out of the gate.

Speaker 2 Grand Rapids, by the way, just a little personal aside, is where I learned that I actually love frog legs. Oh, really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there was this dinner theater in Grand Rapids that my family used to go to when I was growing up in Toledo.

Speaker 2 The frog leg theater? On their buffet, they had frog legs. And I would, I tried them once and I was like, oh my God, these are amazing.

Speaker 2 I don't think I would eat one now, but when I was like eight, nine, ten, I would eat some frog legs.

Speaker 15 I

Speaker 15 don't know where it was, buddy, but I tried frog legs on a buffet in the 1970s or early 80s as well.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I thought, hey, this tastes like chicken.

Speaker 2 Kind of. It's the weird skin that really throws it off, though.

Speaker 15 These were fried, so I don't remember the skin. And this is a very distant memory.
So, but I'm with you. I couldn't eat a frog now.

Speaker 2 These were not fried. These were like braised.

Speaker 15 No, mine were fried.

Speaker 2 So back to, thanks for indulging me. Sure.
So back to the Heckman Biscuit Company.

Speaker 2 At the time, they were making stuff like macaroons, butter cookies, vanilla wafers, windmills, ginger snaps, all your favorite, like old-timey cookies this company was making.

Speaker 2 And to make all this stuff, they had just a really knockout dynamite production facility. So it was a good idea to go to them.

Speaker 2 Apparently, the Heckman company wasn't fully on board with this, but there was a guy named William Post, no relation to the Post Cereal Company, who was in this,

Speaker 2 did work for Heckman at their Grand Rapids factory. And he's like, I'll do this.
I'll take this project on.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And it wasn't an official thing.
I think it was a handshake agreement at first.

Speaker 15 They started, you know, testing out versions, giving them to their kids to try, of course, which is sort of the usual story when food science is involved.

Speaker 15 And Dan, I think the son of William Post, again, supposedly no relation.

Speaker 15 Quite a coincidence, though, don't you think?

Speaker 2 It is quite a, yeah, almost suspicious. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 15 But little Dan said, they taste like cardboard. And they said, all right, let's go back to the drawing board.
And he said, well, these explode when you put them in the toaster, dad.

Speaker 15 And they said, all right, well, let's poke some holes in it. Like, you know how you score a pie for the same reason that you bake in an oven.
They started scoring the dough for the, you know, and

Speaker 15 kind of solved that problem out of the gate.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that's why there's little holes in Pop-Tarts still today.

Speaker 15 That's right, because they will explode.

Speaker 2 It's true.

Speaker 15 Fruit expands, I guess, or fruit-like stuff.

Speaker 15 And they initially set on, as Daniel Day-Lewis would say, fruit scones.

Speaker 15 The rest of us would say fruit scones.

Speaker 15 And I think there were four flavors out of the gate. Strawberry, blueberry, and apple currant

Speaker 15 that were partnered with Smuckers, another great idea, to provide their fruit filling. And then, oh, baby, the fourth one, the all-time great, brown sugar cinnamon.

Speaker 2 Yep, that's the best one, hands down. Oh, you too, huh? Oh, yes.
Okay, great. What a relief.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Some Lipton blackberry tea and brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts in the evening was just a great way to wind down after a long day in third grade.

Speaker 15 So what is that garbage Jerry said before we recorded?

Speaker 2 She talked about her grandmother

Speaker 2 making blueberry, I believe, blueberry Pop-Tarts that were unfrosted and buttering them.

Speaker 15 Okay, well, I was going to hang on to that for my final tip, but I might as well launch into it now. That is the secret to Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 2 Put it in the toaster, toast it up.

Speaker 15 For me, brown sugar, cinnamon. Then you get a stick of butter.
I think I've said this on another episode, and maybe our breakfast episode. Okay.

Speaker 15 And then you just take that stick of butter. Don't even like cut off a piece.
Just unwrap it a little bit, flip it over to the non-frosted side and just sort of rub it on there.

Speaker 15 And then don't forget about that frosted side, my friend. Flip it back over, butter up that frosted side a little and the edges and get those corners.

Speaker 15 And because the problem with Pop-Tarts to me is they're always a little too dry where there's no filling. And this solves a problem.
It's buttery. It's delicious.
I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 If you mentioned that before, then there's a 100% chance that I followed up with this. That I have, I heard of that from Jessica Simpson.

Speaker 15 oh who mentioned I guess when she was pregnant she was craving buttered Pop-Tarts and I hadn't heard of it until then it's the finishing touch it's the cherry on top it it really uh it really finishes it off nicely so you do that with the brown sugar cinnamon version dude every version but that's the only version i'll eat and i gotta gotta say i don't i don't eat pop-tarts anymore like i can't remember the last pop-tart i had

Speaker 15 But I can't walk down that aisle without looking at them and going, oh man, if you fall into my basket, maybe you'll make it out of the store. Right.

Speaker 2 So I love brown sugar cinnamon since we're talking about personal preferences. But for the fruit ones, I used to be all strawberry as a kid.
And it was just because I never ventured out.

Speaker 2 And once I grew up a little more and my tastes really started to develop, I found that cherry is actually the top fruit. Oh.
Did not know that until.

Speaker 2 I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. Okay.

Speaker 15 I'll have to, I mean, this is, I'm going to buy some Pop-Tarts just just to try some of these again. I'll try cherry.
All right. I'll try cherry.

Speaker 15 They're frosted, I take it.

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, I don't even know why they make them unfrosted.
That's crazy.

Speaker 15 Those are the kind I had to eat growing up here and there. They weren't even called Pop-Tarts.
I think they were called toaster pastries and there was no frosting in sight.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and your grandma canned them.

Speaker 15 But does the cherry have sprinkles? Because I don't love the sprinkles, but it's just sort of part of the frosting, so it doesn't stand out too much.

Speaker 2 Cherry has everything you want. Not only does it have sprinkles, Chuck,

Speaker 2 it has like sugar crystals.

Speaker 2 Yes, dude, you're going to love cherry. Believe me, I expect a text later on with you thanking me for recommending cherry Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Ruby's never had a Pop-Tart, so we're going to

Speaker 2 start on.

Speaker 15 All right. So,

Speaker 15 well, I guess we should probably take a break.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we just, we kind of got off course here.

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah. Okay.
We left off at Fruit Scone and Smuckers and the launching of the original four, and we'll come back and pick it up right after this.

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Speaker 9 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 22 That's right.

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Speaker 2 learning stuff with joshua and charles

Speaker 2 stuff you should know

Speaker 2 okay chuck so those original fruit scones the the prototype the er pop-tart i guess you call it if you're a a weirdo.

Speaker 2 They were not exactly what you'd recognize as Pop-Tarts today. I think if you put them next to a Pop-Tart, it wouldn't be like, you know, night and day.

Speaker 2 But one of the big differences was the fruit scones had a diagonal score going across them. Not quite from corner to corner, but a little more in the middle.
And you could kind of break them in half.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like you would have like a grilled cheese sandwich kind of cut like that.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And none of these first ones were frosted either, we should point out.

Speaker 2 No, it took years, a couple of years, because all of the frostings that they came up with initially essentially either melted or caught fire in the toaster.

Speaker 2 So they did not have the frosting out of the gate yet. But one thing that Pop-Tarts still are,

Speaker 2 that was part of the initial rollout, was they're packaged together, two per package.

Speaker 2 And the reason why was just simply cost-cutting. Like if they had individually packaged each Pop-Tart,

Speaker 2 it would have cost them a lot more. But it also makes me wonder how many people over the last like 60-something years would have only eaten one Pop-Tart if they were individually wrapped.
Fools.

Speaker 2 You open that. You open the package.
You got one. What are you going to do? Like roll up the other one? You can't.
The foil is designed, I'm sure, to tear open in ways that you can't reseal it.

Speaker 2 So you have to eat both of them essentially.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I was a little disappointed to know it was a cost-cutting

Speaker 15 because I was just like, I thought someone, you know, Mr. Post decreed from on high, they shall be eaten two at a time.

Speaker 2 Well, that's actually the serving size if you read the back of the box, which is nuts because you could, if it were just individually wrapped, you could say one Pop-Tart is a serving and people would be used to that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, true. Those first Pop-Tarts, too,

Speaker 15 they were a little more rounded on the corners, not quite as squared off.

Speaker 2 Unrecognizable.

Speaker 15 And honestly they look delicious even unfrosted it looks more like and I know this is an ad I sent you and Jerry like an old ad from the 60s but and ads are made to make the food look beautiful but it looks way more like a pie than what they have out today you know yeah like the edges are way more like a pie crust yeah it looks kind of crimped or whatever

Speaker 15 yeah

Speaker 2 so um i think after this this all happened like you said poor dan post was taking bite after bite and saying like these are disgusting but within four months of kelloggs approaching Henkels, they had like a ready-for-market pop-tart developed.

Speaker 15 Yeah, or Bruitzcone. They changed the name, I think, pretty quickly to Pop-Tarts, which I never knew this.

Speaker 15 This was a play on pop art, which is a big thing at the time with Andy Warhol and his factory.

Speaker 15 And I had no idea that it was just sort of a little clever nod to that. I didn't either.

Speaker 2 I didn't realize pop-tarts were quite so cool.

Speaker 15 Agreed.

Speaker 2 So the trademark for the brand was filed on june 20th 1964 they started shipping out the first cases on september 14th and they chose cleveland as their test market and cleveland went bonkers for these things um i saw in the first two weeks they sold 10 million boxes of pop-tarts oh my god by December 30th, so just a couple months.

Speaker 15 Wait, 10 million boxes?

Speaker 2 Yes, 10 million boxes of pop-tarts. So they started shipping them in September.
By the end of the year, they had to run an ad saying, hey, sorry, we ran out.

Speaker 2 We didn't think you guys were going to be this into it. We're working literally around the clock to get more Pop-Tarts out to you.

Speaker 2 And by the end of the year, they were making, they had made a billion Pop-Tarts and were selling them like

Speaker 2 hot cakes, but more like hotcake-flavored Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And so if you're wondering, like, well, what about Post, who sort of invented this?

Speaker 15 They weren't first to market. They, they finally released their country squares

Speaker 15 and they quickly were like, well, that name stinks. So they rebrand, everyone's getting us confused with rural landowners.

Speaker 15 So they rebranded them to Toast them Fruit Filled Pop-ups, sold that off in 1971 to Schultz and Birch Biscuit Company. They still make those.
I think they're still the same name, even.

Speaker 2 Toast'ems.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and there have been different, you know, sort of, like I said, I grew up with this sort of cheap version. I think they were called toaster pastries.

Speaker 15 Nabisco had one called Toastettes that they finally finally stopped selling in 2002.

Speaker 15 Pillsbury, I will say the toaster strudel, when it came out in 1985, was a pretty big hot item, I remember.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because it was an unfrosted Pop-Tart,

Speaker 2 much more pastry, like flaky pastry than a Pop-Tart is. But the key was, the gimmick was that came with frosting separated.
So you put frosting on it. And I was

Speaker 15 squeeze it into your mouth at the end.

Speaker 2 Exactly, yes. And I was crazy for these things.
And I guess I got a bad batch or something once. And I got sick off of it.
And now just seeing those two words together makes my stomach turn. No way.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 I couldn't be in the same room as a toaster shrudel again.

Speaker 15 That was like me with beef jerky for a solid 10 years.

Speaker 2 You poor bastard.

Speaker 15 I know. All right, so they keep developing these things.

Speaker 15 The very first ones was just the pastry and the filling. They added that frosting in 1967.

Speaker 15 like you said, once they came up with one that wouldn't slide off and kill your house, basically.

Speaker 15 The first frosted ones were Dutch apple, Concord grape.

Speaker 18 Boy, that sounds good.

Speaker 15 Raspberry, that sounds good. And of course, brown sugar cinnamon.
Then they added the sprinkles the year after that.

Speaker 15 And since then, they've just been coming up with kind of new crazy flavors, sometimes obviously special editions, co-branding, and just trying new things.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So just to kind of put this into perspective,

Speaker 2 they out of the gate, remember, Post was supposed to be the first to do this.

Speaker 2 Pop-tarts just destroyed Post and everybody else so much that I think that they have something like 80% of the market share for that kind of product.

Speaker 2 In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported they had growth in sales. So every year they sold more than they had the year before for 32 straight years.
Wow.

Speaker 2 And that in 2022, they sold 3 billion pop-tarts.

Speaker 15 Boxes or individual tarts?

Speaker 2 I don't know. If you put it like that, then it's probably individual pop-tarts.
So I'm going to go back and revise my thing about that first year to 1 billion pop-tarts, which is still impressive.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, once you get into those kind of numbers, you're kind of splitting hairs, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's true, man. Thanks for saying that because I was feeling pretty down about myself for a second.
No, no, no, no.

Speaker 15 You're great. So in 1968, one of the little side products they made was called, and this is Kellogg's, called the Danish Go Round.

Speaker 15 They were trying to make it look more like a Danish, like a real Danish, because at like little ladies' garden parties and stuff, it's like, why make a Danish when you can just buy these?

Speaker 15 They didn't do so great. They crumbled up a lot.
So they replaced them with the Danish rings in 77 and then just got out of the Danish market in the 80s.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is kind of sad because Danishes are great.

Speaker 15 Yeah, the cheese Danish.

Speaker 2 Yes, I think that's probably my favorite too. Yeah.

Speaker 2 In 1971, they're like, okay, we've got this whole Pop-Tart thing down. Let's see what else we can do with this thing.
And they came up with Presto Pizza, which is a bad idea.

Speaker 2 It was a pizza version of Pop-Tarts. And they put it in the same box and everything.

Speaker 2 The problem was that there was not enough sauce and too much dough.

Speaker 2 Not anything else is the problem with it. It was just that it was too doughy.
And so it went away pretty quick, but it was a good attempt, I guess.

Speaker 15 yeah when i said it was a bad idea i think it's actually a great idea but you just you can't get enough sauce and cheese and and

Speaker 15 whatever in that form to make it like like you know we make these when we go camping with pie irons you ever heard of pie irons sure

Speaker 2 oh you have yeah

Speaker 15 like a hand pie iron right yeah you like you know you take uh two pieces of bread you butter up the little iron and then it's hinged and you put like we put pizza sauce and pepperoni and cheese and you squeeze them together and then you bake it over a campfire and that's thick enough to where you can actually have enough stuff but a Pop-Tart's just not thick enough.

Speaker 2 Well, plus also now today, if you came out with that, everybody'd say this isn't like a hot pocket. So

Speaker 2 what's the point?

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah, good point.

Speaker 2 You know, but I'll bet it burns your tongue like a hot pocket if you ate it too soon. Or a Geno's pizza roll.
Is there anything that can burn a tongue worse than a Gino's pizza roll?

Speaker 2 Because you just you eat them too soon. You can't wait around for them to cool off enough.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that's a garbage food that I wasn't allowed to have much and we don't have at our house. But at

Speaker 15 Ruby's pool party this year,

Speaker 15 I just needed something easy to put in the oven to make for a bunch of kids. And I got freaking pizza rolls.

Speaker 2 What'd you think?

Speaker 15 They're not great, but the kids loved them.

Speaker 2 I haven't had one in a while. I'll have to go back and revisit it or else maybe I'll just not.

Speaker 15 You have a more sophisticated palate now. I would just lean on nostalgia and what a great memory you have.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Thank you for that.

Speaker 15 I don't think we need to go off through all these other things. I mean, they made Pop-Tart bites, little crisps,

Speaker 15 and all sorts of little side products that kind of came and went, like all products do. They try to spin things off, and it usually doesn't work out.

Speaker 2 No, and don't forget Pop-Tart cereal. That kind of made a splash for a minute.

Speaker 15 I didn't try that. I hadn't heard of that.

Speaker 15 Did you have that?

Speaker 2 What's weird is I remember eating it as a younger person, but apparently it came out in 2018. So either I made up the idea that I ate it or I was way older than I remember when I ate it.
Right.

Speaker 2 It was just like seven years ago. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 15 When you were a child. Right.

Speaker 2 So essentially what Pop Tarts finally did was, it's like what we did. Like we tried a TV show.
We tried Sirius XM. We tried going on other people's shows.

Speaker 2 And everyone was like, we just want to hear you podcast. That's essentially what Pop-Tarts did.
They finally just. put it all in to mostly just making Pop-Tarts in new interesting flavors.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Well, well, it helped that no one called us after a while.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 15 When the opportunities dried up, you know.

Speaker 2 I took it as, you know, we just want to hear you podcast.

Speaker 15 No, I'm with you.

Speaker 15 Marketing-wise, you know, we did an episode recently on Saturday morning cartoons and a lot of it, to some listeners' disappointment, as it turns out,

Speaker 15 was about

Speaker 15 marketing to children like sugar cereals and things like that during Saturday morning cartoons. And Pop-Tarts was,

Speaker 15 I mean, definitely one of the, I was about to say worst offenders or but maybe I should just say one of the best at it

Speaker 15 because they ran tons and tons of commercials saying like put them in the lunchbox eat them for breakfast have them as a snack like really you can serve them warm you can have them in between meals you can eat them right out of the foil

Speaker 2 yeah we'll get to that in a second what right up right out of the foil yeah do you have do you do that I have only done that in a pinch.

Speaker 15 I used to throw these in the backpack for camping trips when I was young before they had a ton of like granola bars and stuff.

Speaker 15 Like now there's so much of that, but back then I would just threw some Pop-Tarts in the backpack and I would eat them out of the package, but it's not great.

Speaker 2 It can be done, but no, it's not great.

Speaker 15 Which what I do then is, is I tear off the edges so I just have the frosted center. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And you leave the edges to nature. That's right.
So the wolf

Speaker 2 checking you.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 They did come up with a mascot for a very short time, which is weird because this is exactly the kind of brand that would have a mascot, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 But they ditched Milton the Toaster pretty quickly when they debuted him in 1971. But they continued on, like you said, advertising.
Like anytime you watch Saturday morning cartoons, they were on.

Speaker 2 After school cartoons they were on. Like if you were a kid watching TV, you probably saw a Pop-Tart commercial.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I looked up Milton the Toaster and I remember Milton the Toaster. So I don't know if it was reruns or what, but I remember seeing Milton firmly in my brain.

Speaker 15 I think these days they adopted a slogan called Crazy Good.

Speaker 15 And they've been running since sort of like 2004, all kinds of ads

Speaker 15 under the Crazy Good banner. And I think they ran one from 2004 to 2008 that

Speaker 15 supposedly increased Pop-Tart eating in 10 to 12 year olds. by 28% in 2005,

Speaker 15 which is a pretty big uptick for kids in Pop-Tart. Sure.

Speaker 2 Speaking of their ads, though, I don't remember Milton at all, but I do remember this one that I cannot find on the internet. But it goes pop, pop, pop, pop, my feet can't stop.

Speaker 2 Pop, pop, pop, pop, Kellogg's Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 2 I don't remember that one. There was also, well, I made that up too when I was eating Pop-Tart cereal in 2018.

Speaker 2 There was also a campaign called So Hot They're Cool, and another one called Snackula. So if you're a millennial or Gen Xer, like that pretty much covers you.

Speaker 2 And then it seems like Gen Z was getting the crazy good

Speaker 2 campaign, which is so okay. But it's like these crudely drawn Pop-Tarts and they like kill each other to eat one another kind of thing.
It's just weird and bizarre and off the wall.

Speaker 15 Interesting. Well, they took over the Citrus Bowl, the college football game played in Orlando a couple of years ago.
It's now the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

Speaker 15 And I think it'll be in its third year on the next one.

Speaker 15 And they have, you know, these interesting tie-ins where they have three different mascots, and the MVP of the game picks the mascot.

Speaker 15 So, you know, they're tying in stuff like that. They say it's kind of fun.
I think

Speaker 15 they like to tout their

Speaker 15 just sort of out-of-the-box thinking as far as marketing goes.

Speaker 15 And we should also say they spun that Pop-Tarts off from Calog into its own company. A lot of times food brands will do that.

Speaker 2 So Pop-Tarts, along with a few other things was spun out into a company that sounds straight out of the movie gattaca it's called kelanova yes it is kind of unsettling for some reason but that that pop-tarts bowl the mvp doesn't just pick the mascot he picks the mascot to kill and eat and they have like a giant pop-tart that's i think 73 times the size of a regular pop-tart

Speaker 2 and for a little while they sold it uh for 60 they called it the party pastry just a giant looks a really good price. I thought so too.
It seems like a real value.

Speaker 15 I mean, I saw this picture of this thing on a kitchen table and it that's cheaper than a decent birthday cake.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, let's say you have eight, eight pack of Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 15 Well, they're sold in sixes, though, right?

Speaker 2 I think they're sold six, eight, $14, a million. There's like a bunch of different ones.
24, I'm pretty sure. But I can tell you, 73 times the size of a regular pop-tart does not translate to $60

Speaker 2 or more. So it is a really great value.
You can't find it anymore, though, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 Sorry. If you're a thrifty type and you buy one big party pastry and cut them into individual Pop-Tart size shapes and then pack them away in the freezer, you can't do that anymore.

Speaker 15 Ooh, I bet that centerpiece is so good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'll bet it is too.

Speaker 2 Have we taken a second break? I don't think so, man. I think we should now.

Speaker 15 All right, we'll take a second break and talk about everybody's favorite topic, health and safety, right after this.

Speaker 15 Support for the show today comes from Public.com.

Speaker 16 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

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Speaker 15 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com/slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 20 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 21 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.
Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 21 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 21 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 9 Living with a rare autoimmune condition condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 22 That's right.

Speaker 22 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 8 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 5 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 23 So, if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 20 Listen to Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 2 Learning stuff with Joshua Charles.

Speaker 2 Stuff you should know.

Speaker 15 All right, so we kind of made a joke earlier about the frosting sliding off and burning your kitchen down.

Speaker 15 I don't, I didn't find where it had ever burnt a house down, but over the decades, there have been a lot of reports about Pop-Tart fires.

Speaker 15 In 1993, it came a little more to the forefront of pop culture when syndicated humor columnist Dave Berry wrote about a report from Dover, Ohio, where there was a Pop-Tart fire in the toaster.

Speaker 15 And, you know, it was legit. I think they found the fire department did tests and they found that if you just leave that thing in there, your toaster can shoot flames three feet high.

Speaker 15 And supposedly Dave Berry recreated this outdoors as part of his humor column.

Speaker 2 I saw a website called flamingtoasters.com. They did this experiment too.
They put two in a toaster and you need a malfunctioning toaster that never pops up. Right.

Speaker 2 So that they continue to heat up because they're designed to make it through like a good long toaster cycle without catching fire. But if the toaster cycle never ends, the pop start's in big trouble.

Speaker 2 They got 18 inch high flames in four minutes, 42 seconds of toasting. But roundly, around the internet, I've seen these flames.
These aren't like campfire flames.

Speaker 2 I've seen them described as like blowtorch-like. So there's like flames going

Speaker 2 out of your toaster. And apparently the reason why is because of all of the high-fructose corn syrup inside the filling.
If it heats up too much, kaboom, and it catches fire.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I think those,

Speaker 15 I mean, mean, it's unique. It's not like toast will do that because that filling, A, with the high fructose corn syrup, but B, that filling packed in that pastry just retains a lot of heat.
Right.

Speaker 15 And it just, yeah, it's a pretty volatile, can be a pretty volatile situation. I think the Philly Inquirer in 2001 reported that the U.S.

Speaker 15 Customer Product Safety Commission had 17 reports of Pop-Tart fires. And eventually, of course, there would be a lawsuit.
In 1995,

Speaker 15 Pop-Tart settled. The plaintiff's attorney attorney apparently threatened, I don't know if it was in jest or not, to call in Dave Berry to go to trial.
And Pop-Tart said,

Speaker 15 we'll give you two grand. And they said, $2,500.

Speaker 15 And Pop-Tart said, $2,400. And they said, deal.
Deal.

Speaker 2 $2,400. Right.

Speaker 2 I guess. And then the attorney took like $2,000 of that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, probably.

Speaker 2 So one of the things that Pop-Tarts also gets,

Speaker 2 I guess, bounced around for is because they're just not healthy in any way, shape, or form. Yeah.
So unhealthy that there was

Speaker 2 another,

Speaker 2 it wasn't a lawsuit, but they got pressure from this children's advertising review unit to remove the phrase made with real fruit from its packaging. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because the amount of fruit in it is so paltry that they don't even have the right to say that on their box anymore.

Speaker 2 And the reason why is because, so a serving sizes two of say frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts, 370 calories, 31 grams of sugar, 8 grams of fat, but here's the healthy part, 1 gram of fiber and 4 grams of protein, which can only be explained as accidental.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 A byproduct. I wonder if on the nutritional thing, it also accounts for added butter.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 With butter, a million calories.

Speaker 15 Yeah, you mentioned the fruit content.

Speaker 15 I think in 2021, there were four plaintiffs that filed a five million dollar class action suit that said hey this is false advertising you got pictures of strawberries on this thing on the box and uh you mentioned there wasn't much actual fruit in there there is a a quantification of that the whole grain frosted strawberry pop-tart contains less than two percent each of dried pear, apple, and strawberry.

Speaker 15 And the strawberry Pop-Tart is, the strawberry is the third of those fruits, which, you know, they're listed in order of how much they have.

Speaker 15 So there's more pear and apple in a strawberry Pop-Tart than strawberry.

Speaker 2 Right. So they're not healthy.
No.

Speaker 2 Which, so you can imagine my surprise when I was looking for articles about the health or the health impact or how unhealthy Pop-tarts are, that I found an article titled, Can Pop-Tarts Really Help With Weight Loss?

Speaker 2 I was like, are you kidding me? And if you read the article, six paragraphs in, they're like, no, absolutely not. It can't help with weight loss at all.

Speaker 2 But it

Speaker 2 kind of underscores this trend that I've noticed just in the last couple of months, Chuck, of just a slew of long tail,

Speaker 2 which means like really, really specific articles, clearly written by AI.

Speaker 2 And they're all the same. There'll be like a short introduction, then there'll be the table of contents, and then they'll go section, section, section.

Speaker 2 And all the sections are like basically one paragraph. They're totally convoluted.
The sections will repeat themselves. They're often giving contradictory information.
It's just crap.

Speaker 2 And it's essentially the dead internet theory finally come to pass where it's just AI writing articles for other AI to be trained on.

Speaker 2 And we humans have just been pushed to the side and given articles with the clickbaity titles, Can Pop-Tarts Really Help with Weight Loss?

Speaker 15 Demly bought an AI book by accident off Amazon. It was a pottery book and she got it and she was like, wait a minute.

Speaker 2 She's like, this isn't a real person.

Speaker 15 And she tried to look up the author. It didn't exist.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Obviously returned it and was, you know, not too happy.

Speaker 2 And the AI was like, man, I thought that was a sale.

Speaker 15 I do want to circle back, though, to that lawsuit, the class action lawsuit.

Speaker 15 The judge eventually, a federal judge dismissed it.

Speaker 15 and said no reasonable consumer would see the entire product label reading the words frosted strawberry pop-tarts next to a picture of a toaster pastry coated in frosting and reasonably expect that fresh strawberries would be the sole ingredient in the product.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 15 In other words, everyone knows what a Pop-Tart is, dummy. Go home.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 15 You don't eat it because it's healthy.

Speaker 2 I had forgotten that you hadn't wrapped that story up.

Speaker 2 That's right. Quite a boondoggle in the middle there.

Speaker 15 So because of the, you know, food dyes and things like that, you're not going to get like a regular American Pop-Tart in other countries.

Speaker 15 A lot of countries in Europe don't even have Pop-Tarts at all, but they do have different versions that are a little better, probably.

Speaker 15 And I know the UK doesn't have high-fructose corn syrup in their frosted strawberry sensation Pop-tart

Speaker 15 or red 40, yellow six, and blue one dyes. They instead use paprika, beetroot, and extract from the annoto tree to color their Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is an orange-reddy color I've read.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I wonder how that affects the flavor, paprika?

Speaker 2 But it's also, I mean, like, when you hear about this, like the EU or the UK having these standards that are just, that makes American standards substandard as far as health goes it's just so frustrating that nobody's looking out for American consumers like they do in the EU and UK you know yeah like use beetroot jerk

Speaker 15 agree uh

Speaker 15 should we go through a couple of these cultural uh touchstones yeah

Speaker 15 uh i'll mention the the movie um the netflix movie last year unfrosted which was at least directed and starred. I don't know if Jerry Seinfeld helped write it.
Yes, he did.

Speaker 2 And And conceived of it, too.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it was a bad.

Speaker 2 So bad. It was a bad movie.
It was so boring.

Speaker 15 I didn't watch it. I watched a little bit of it and realized that it was

Speaker 2 flaming garbage. Exactly the same for me.
I think I made it 10 minutes in.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's really bad. It got a couple of Razzies.

Speaker 15 Amy Schumer was in it. Like really quality people.
It's just a bad movie. Sometimes it happens.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it did happen with that one. What else? You can make your own Pop-Tarts at home.
I've actually done this. I made an apple cinnamon giant Pop-Tart.

Speaker 2 It turned out okay. I think the trick is the crust always seems too high-falutin.
So you're not really recreating the Pop-Tart very well. No.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but that's kind of the, like I had one in a fancy restaurant once. They had it on the dessert.
They called it their Pop-Tart. And it was astounding, but it wasn't a Pop-Tart.

Speaker 2 Exactly. It has to have a certain

Speaker 2 trashy quality. Exactly.
It does. And it's missing that when you make it at home.

Speaker 15 In 2021, when we were bombing Afghanistan, we started dropping food, including Pop-Tarts that the military, the U.S. military, said was supposed to be an icebreaker for those people,

Speaker 15 for the Afghan people.

Speaker 15 And then they also got criticized because they were like, hey, we're dropping food for these people to subsist on. Let's not drop.
garbage food as an icebreaker.

Speaker 2 Right. They're like, can't Pop-Tarts really help with weight loss?

Speaker 2 They've also made several appearances on The Simpsons, most famously when Homer's trying to gain weight so he can get on disability and not have to work. I remember that.

Speaker 2 He consults with Dr. Nick, who tells him how to gain weight.
And one of the things he says is, instead of using bread, make a sandwich with two Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 2 I bet that's so good.

Speaker 16 Like a PB and J between two Pop-Tarts?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I can see that.
Well, there's PB and J Pop-Tarts or there used used to be, and those were pretty good.

Speaker 15 Yeah. I mean, they've had lots of wacky flavors.
I know you looked up a bunch of those. Any of them stand out?

Speaker 2 Oh, God, I don't have it in front of me. No.

Speaker 2 There were a few that

Speaker 2 the ones that stand out to me, I wouldn't like. Like, they have a whole ice cream shop, like sub-brand.
Where it's like chocolate vanilla milkshake or something like that. It doesn't sound very good.

Speaker 2 There's like a co-branded orange crush one, A ⁇ W Root Beer. There are a couple that I've tried that sounded good that I didn't really like, like sugar cookie, which is a seasonal one in the winter.

Speaker 2 It wasn't as good as you'd think.

Speaker 2 What was the feeling? It was like

Speaker 2 a chemically sugar cookie pasty dough.

Speaker 2 Okay. It just should have been better than it was.
But there's a gingerbread one I haven't tried, and I would like to try that one.

Speaker 2 But I think ultimately for me, you just go back to like some of the originals.

Speaker 2 They're just time-tested and they're so, so good. Like cherry or blueberry or strawberry or, of course, brown sugar cinnamon.

Speaker 15 Agreed. It just hit me, they should partner up with Biscoff because they make that Biscoff butter.

Speaker 15 I bet that would be pretty good.

Speaker 2 I'm really surprised they haven't.

Speaker 15 And a couple of these, we have some stats at the end, and a couple of these stood out to me.

Speaker 15 I think that was a 2024 household panel survey.

Speaker 15 The ones that stand out to me are the reasons for people buying Pop-Tarts here these days.

Speaker 15 56% said convenience and 30% said it brings back childhood memories.

Speaker 2 Ostensibly good memories.

Speaker 15 Yeah, of course. And then the other one that stood out was

Speaker 15 72%

Speaker 15 of Pop-Tart buyers said they ate them themselves. And

Speaker 15 these were adults. And 54% said other adults in the house would eat them.
And only 25%

Speaker 2 said they were for their kids so it seems like Gen X is buying and eating these pop-tarts yeah themselves they're keeping them for themselves yeah one that stood out to me is 44% of Americans surveyed said they eat them at least once a week and 9% eat them every day that's a lot that is a lot uh the other thing that was really surprising is 12% of people put them in the refrigerator or freezer and then eat them cold

Speaker 2 I've never even heard of that that sounds like madness and then one of the other things, Chuck, did you see the thing about the Mystery Pop-Tart? No. So they came up with Mr.
T? Close.

Speaker 2 Replace the T with an E, get rid of all the gold in the Mohawk. Replace it with a Pop-Tart that has a mustache and sunglasses and a hat, like a mystery person.
And you've got the Mystery Pop-Tarts.

Speaker 2 It was a campaign they ran in 2021, and it was like the full shebang. Like there's a QR code, and you can go online and guess what the mystery flavor was.

Speaker 2 It was roundly hated. It like found disgusting.
Someone guessed it was Cheez-Its. Someone guessed it was a Swiss cheese Pop-Tart.
Someone guessed garlic and onion.

Speaker 2 It turned out it was an everything bagel Pop-Tart. And everyone said, we hate that.
Get it off of our shelves.

Speaker 15 I do love everything bagel, almost everything, but I could see where that might not, because I even like that

Speaker 15 Ginny's Everything Bagel ice cream I thought was so good.

Speaker 2 Oh, I didn't try that.

Speaker 15 A lot of people hated it. I loved it.

Speaker 2 To me, I'd be like, no, I'm not going to waste my time with anything but gooey butter cake or the almond crisp one.

Speaker 15 Oh, as far as the Ginnies goes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so good. Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 2 You got anything else?

Speaker 15 No, I think I gained a few pounds just doing this episode.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I can't decide if I'm going to run out and buy some more or just, you know, leave it be.

Speaker 15 I'm going to buy some. Well, let me know.

Speaker 2 I'll live vicariously through you, okay?

Speaker 15 You know what I'll do, bud?

Speaker 15 I'll have to get the cinnamon brown sugar just because I can't not.

Speaker 15 And I'll only get one other box and I'll get that frosted cherry.

Speaker 2 Great.

Speaker 15 I'll let you know. Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, while you're doing that, Chuck, how about some listener mail action?

Speaker 15 Yeah, this is about

Speaker 15 another MTV follow-up about their game show Remote Control. Hey, guys.
When I was a sophomore in high school in 1990, we had to do a project in world history about Mesopotamia.

Speaker 15 So my friends and I made our own remote control game show with quiz questions about the subject.

Speaker 15 We had a little brother be our videographer and had bowls of cereal fall on our head as if we missed the question.

Speaker 15 We had so much fun creating it. We're so proud of it.
All the kids knew what it was, but I think Mr. Hall was a bit confused as to what was happening.
But we got an A.

Speaker 2 Woohoo.

Speaker 15 Thanks for the great episode and for the amazingness that you put out into the world. I adore the show and your friendship.
That is a big fan from O-H-I-O. Go Buckeyes, Michelle.

Speaker 2 Nice, Michelle. Thank you for that one.

Speaker 2 That was a Sohio story, if I've ever heard one.

Speaker 15 Agreed.

Speaker 2 If you want to be like Michelle and tell us about something sweet from your childhood that we made you think of again, we love that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom with a Pop-Tart, and send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Speaker 16 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 15 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 2 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 15 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 20 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 21 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 21 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC.

Speaker 21 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 4 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG.

Speaker 10 and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 5 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 9 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Here, with one last reminder to keep you off the naughty list this holiday season, stuff your stockings, your pantry, your gift closet, anywhere you can, with Duracell batteries.

Speaker 2 Because there's nothing worse than opening a gift on Christmas morning and realizing you don't have batteries for it.

Speaker 2 Duracell batteries are the only battery brand with power boost ingredients, which are a unique blend of nickel and lithium designed for long-lasting power.

Speaker 2 So, stock up on your double A's and your triple A's so you'll be A-O-K for the holidays. Choose the only battery brand with power boost ingredients.
Choose Duracell.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.