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The Sporkful
Are The Jell-O Heirs Cursed? (Reheat)
00:34:31
Allie Rowbottom’s great-great-great uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor in 1899 for $450, then sold it in the 1920s for $67 million — nearly a billion dollars in today’s money. Lately, Allie’s been obsessed with how all that Jell-O money shaped America, and her own family. It’s funded generations of Rowbottom women, including Allie, but it’s also been a shadow they can't escape.
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Siriusxm podcasts.
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Hey everyone, it's Dan here with another Sporkful Reheat for you. And this is one of those episodes we did years ago and I still think about it all the time. Certain episodes just stay with you. Like that. It's a mysterious story. It's a mystery of sorts and unraveling. It touches on themes of American history, sexism, medicine, food, dynasties, wealth passed down from one generation to another. And it all centers on one family's complicated relationship with Jello. This story was originally reported by Dan Bobkoff for Business Insider. I think you're really gonna like it. Now remember, there's a Sporkful episode you want us to pull out of the deep freezer? Drop me a line, send me an email or voice memo to helloporkful.com tell me your first name, location, what episode you want us to reheat, and why. Thanks so much and enjoy. Please note this episode deals with eating disorders.
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C
My sort of odd and tangential claim to fame here is that my great, great great uncle by marriage order Francis Woodward bought the patent to Jell O from its inventor in 1899 for $450 and then sold it for 67 million in 1920s.
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This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Ally Rowbottom is an heir to the JELL O Fortune. That 67 million that her great great great uncle made back in the 1920s. It's worth nearly a billion dollars today. That money has filtered down through Ali's sprawling family over generations. And lately, Ali's become obsessed with Jell O. How Jell O has shaped America with messages like this.
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What's for dessert? When a spouse needs cheer, the men
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in my life swear by it.
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Ask any little girl. When it comes to entertaining, there's nothing quite like Jello. There's always room for Jello.
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Allie's also been thinking about how that Jell O money shaped her family. Jell O funded Ali's grandmother and mother, and now it's funding Allie. But it's also been a shadow that they can't escape. Jello became a twisted metaphor for all the bad things that happen in their lives, to the point that they started to wonder, are we cursed? To tell this story, I'm going to turn the mic over for this episode to reporter Dan Bobkoff.
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In the late 1600s, a guy in France boiled some Animal bones and skin and figured out how to extract the collagen. The jiggly clear substance became known as gelatin. Jump ahead 200 years and a self taught engineer named Peter Cooper turned it into a powder that became a dessert when you added hot water. But it didn't catch on and he started working on glue instead. A half century later, a cough syrup maker in Leroy, New York branched into foods and added flavors like strawberries, strawberry to the instant gelatin. His wife named it Jello, but he couldn't get people to buy it either. So in 1899, he gave up and sold it to someone who finally turned it into a hit. That guy was Ali's great, great, great uncle. You know, the one who bought Jell O for a few hundred and sold it for millions. From that point on, Ali's family was loaded. But they were never again directly involved with Jello's business or manufacturing. For years, they stayed in Jell O's hometown, Leroy, New York. This is where, until the mid-60s, the Jell O factory turned those bits of old bones into a shiny dessert. In that small town upstate, it was a Jello economy. The family's wealth put their name on buildings. Whenever one of their kids got sick, the local gossip pages would write about it. When it got cold out, a limousine would pick them up from school. Allie heard the stories as a child, third hand from her mother.
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And I loved hearing about the light elements of those stories. The feasts and servants and butlers and a limousine.
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Ally's childhood was more station wagon than limousine. But that 1920s fortune still meant her mom didn't need a day job. And as Allie got older, she wanted to understand where she came from, where her money came from. And so she started with the earliest inheritor in her family line, her grandmother, Midge.
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C
So Midge was a young woman growing up in Leroy, New York. My mom did always say that she had a very soft, even tone and that she really rarely raised her voice, which seems in keeping with her character. I've read a lot of her letters and they're very restrained. She had brown hair, which she wore swept into a neat bun at the back of her head, and she wore very neat earrings and very fashionable outfits for the time, a lot of sort of trim waists.
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Midge's Jell O money helped make her life more exciting than the average married woman. In the 1940s and 50s, she met and married her husband Bob during a stint as a reporter in Honolulu. Then the two lived in Lima, Peru, for several years. As he flew commercial planes around the world.
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C
She had always wanted to travel and to write. And so the idea of living abroad with her dashing husband was, you know, obviously really fetching.
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But then she had kids and her adventures hit a dead end. She found herself feeling isolated in Lima. She didn't have the support and status she got in Leroy from her place in the Jello royalty. So she and Bob left Lima behind and returned to their hometown, Jello's hometown, leroy. In some ways, it felt sort of like a let town. Leroy was drab, suburban and snowy, but it was the easier choice, the safe choice.
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She was a sort of a social butterfly, so she had a lot of girlfriends and acclimated.
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Midge's family was in Leroy. Her cousins, her aunt. And being close meant they'd make sure to get that inheritance.
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C
So I think, you know, Midge made a sacrifice herself. She had wanted to travel, she had wanted to write. But moving back to Leroy meant that she was in the society there.
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Also, her life in Leroy looked a lot like what Jell O marketing promoted back then.
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It was very wedded to the idea of the housewife and the strong American family where Daddy goes to work at 9am every morning and comes home and has a martini in the evening and the kids all gather around the table and it's. It's happily ever after with the white picket fence.
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Midge's husband was more of a beer drinker than a martini kind of man. Midge would fetch him a bottle from the fridge when he got home every day, playing the role dutifully, if unhappily. Meanwhile, their maid was in the kitchen making dinner, sometimes pouring fruit into Jell O molds. Back then, Jell O's makers wanted Americans to put all sorts of things into Jell O.
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Onions, radishes, carrots, peas.
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There was a Jello salad with mayo and anchovies, beans, lime, earned string, A ham and celery loaf made with lime jello. Mmm.
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Bright, crisp vegetables in cool, shimmering Jello. There's a salad for you.
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What is going on? That's not even the worst of them.
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It was prunes, unflavored gelatin, chili sauce, cottage cheese, mayo and sweet pickles.
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This is Ruth Clark. She runs a blog called Mid Century Menu that tests old recipes from the 50s and 60s.
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Really, it was very soft and the only thing that was hard in it were the, like, chunks of sweet pickles. So otherwise everything is just kind of like glooping around in your mouth. It was very, very strange and very gross. It was like Having a mouthful of like Silly Putty.
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This was definitely not the finest hour in the history of American food or American food marketing. What was Cello saying to women at the same time that Midge was in Leroy?
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Uh, so much about where to stay physically, which is in the home. Too late to make dessert.
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Wait, it's not too late to make dessert.
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And how to make it in particular,
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just add to milk and beat.
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So I think especially. Cause initially jello was this mystery food. It was a scientific experiment in a way.
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This terrific new busy day. Dessert is ready to eat.
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Once we're Talking about the 40s and 50s, we're really talking about time periods that privileged growth and innovation.
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Or let the children make it themselves. It's that easy.
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And cleanliness. So old recipes might be seen as
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dirty, creamy, nourishing, so delicious. J et.
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It's as though the whole marketing campaign for Jello recipes was basically, you can hide whatever you want in a Jello mold. Old chicken, wilted lettuce, put it in some Jell O. How nourishing.
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Jell O really fit well with that identity, in part because it literally is a food that you mold. So it encapsulates and contains what feel like messy ingredients, like shredded vegetables or leftovers or whatever. It can all go into the Jello and become neatly contained. And I think, you know, especially in an era of American history where we were really privileging sameness, a lot of people probably had to do a lot of stuffing and hiding of their own trauma.
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In the mid-50s, Midge and Bob took their kids to Italy. Ally's mom Mary, was 12. And just like Midge had realized in Peru, Mary saw there was life outside their small town of Leroy. She loved being in exciting new places, and she saw a future for herself that didn't look like the rest of the Jell O aristocracy. But while they were abroad, Midge found out she had breast cancer. And again, she reluctantly returned to Le Roy. She had a mastectomy, but she remained ill, eventually bedridden. And for months, no one in the family talked about the cancer. Mary resented her mother for taking them back to Leroy, resented the sickness. It also scared her.
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There was a time, and it really shaped my mother's life as sort of the last time that she saw her mother, which was in the winter and her mom had been worsening. But I think people weren't really talking about it and the family wasn't talking about it, certainly, but it was. It was happening.
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What was unsaid is that the cancer had come Back. Midge was dying, and Mary wasn't prepared for it. No one was. Apparently, perhaps most of all, her husband.
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Her mother came out of a bathroom on the first floor of the house and was very concerned. In the other room, Bob, Midge's husband, was calling the ambulance. And Midge was saying to my mother, please hide me. Don't let them come for me. The subtext being, if they come and take me, I'm never coming back. And my mother was completely bewildered by this and frightened, I'm sure, and didn't know what to do. And so she said to her mother, like, okay, I'll take care of you. But then ultimately couldn't figure out what to do and just had her sit down. And then my mom ran and hid behind the tool shed in the backyard while the ambulance came and took her mother away. And that was always told as sort of the last time that she saw her mother. And her mother's last words to her being like, hide me.
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A couple weeks later, Mary received a phone call from her cousin telling her Midge had died.
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Everything fell apart. It was like somebody turned off the lights and things just fell apart.
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Mary left Leroy as soon as she could. She wanted to escape the small town life of Jell O fame, to carve out her own path on her own terms. She went to boarding school, then Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts college just north of New York. But she kept having nightmares about Midge's death. She turned to drugs and alcohol to cope. By 19, Mary ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Someone there asked her, what's your deal, Jell O? She said,
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I think that loss and the turmoil that ensued felt like a curse to my mom.
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In Allie's family, there's been an idea for generations that all the family's problems came from Jell O. A Jell O curse. Allie's been hearing about it since she was 5. The men in the family had their idea of what it meant.
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Alcoholism, addiction, existential boredom. The family had a history of all of those problems and also suicide and early deaths, sort of from mysterious causes.
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Mary heard about the curse when she was little, and at first it was like a scary bedtime story.
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She had learned as a child that that the curse was specific to her family, specific to the men in her family and how it haunted them because of the connection to Jell O and the great wealth that Jello had brought the family.
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But then after Midge died, Mary struggled with grief. A number of men took advantage of her vulnerability, abused her, and she eventually became addicted to drugs and alcohol. The curse started to feel very real to Mary, a curse that affected women. And over her life, she began to see Jell O and everything it represented as a kind of parable. She could see it when she turned on the TV or opened a magazine and got a blunt reminder of where her money came from. The Jello ads made her cringe, so
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it seems like she's looking up at someone who's taller than her.
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And Ali showed me some old Jello ads from this time around, 1970. In one, a woman with coiffed auburn hair grimaces up at the camera, her hand over her mouth.
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And the quote at the top of the image is, this is the guess what happened when I backed the car out, dear? Pudding. So the idea being that this woman messed up and now has to atone for it by offering her husband a slice of pie.
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Jell O isn't alone here. It didn't invent sexism, and it was far from the only mainstream company with ads like this. But even so, something about these ads feels especially biting. It's always a woman serving Jello to what we presume to be her husband. In one, she says, congratulations, dear. But what exactly does a vice president do? In another, she's holding a Jello cream pie, clearly to atone for the new $950 fur coat she bought. You can even see the price tag on it.
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It's pretty egregious in terms of its sexism.
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When these ads were published, Mary, her mother, was in her 30s. Ally hadn't even been born. Then later in the 70s, Jell O found a new face for the product. The always cheerful, friendly, and seemingly unthreatening Bill Cosby.
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Why not make new sugar free Jell O instant pudding?
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Bill Cosby hawked Jell o in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, it's one of the longest celebrity endorsements in history.
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How long has it been since your mom's fixed Jell O pudding plate? How long?
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For a lot of that time, especially in the 70s and 80s, the ADs were still about mom in the kitchen making Jell O for her family.
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Moms, you know how the kids love Jell O pudding. And you know it's made with fresh milk, so it's wholesome.
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Bill Cosby is at the kids table. He's never the one making the jello.
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And you haven't made jello pudding for them since last night. Last what?
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But seeing him perched at the kitchen table in a woolen sweater was enough to reinforce those all American Family values. Those Jell O family values.
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Coming up, after battling her addictions, Mary turns to art. Plus, her daughter Allie opens up about the role that Jello played in her own struggles with disordered eating. That's coming up after the break.
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Time to cook up some advertisements.
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat. I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, check out my Instagram when you get a chance. I share what I'm up to, what I'm eating, all of my hot takes that don't always make the cut here on the Sporkful. Although I don't know why anybody would want to cut out my rants about the best way to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But the point is that that stuff is on my Instagram and we have a lot of fun there. Also, sometimes I'm like debating, what should we do for this episode? And I'll put up a poll so it gives you a chance to actually have input into the show. So you can do it right now while you're listening. Follow me on Instagram. Hesporkful. Again, that's Hesporkful. Now let's return to Dan Bobkoff and the story of the so called Jello Curse.
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In her 30s, Mary had controlled her addictions and found some comfort and expression in art. She painted nude women with bold gestures and brushstrokes, but she never promoted herself or the work. She'd give away her paintings for free. After all, she had Jell O money. Then she married, and at 40 years old, she got a surprise. She named her Allie. What was your mom like as a mother?
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She was very present and very childlike with me, which, you know, seems almost kind of strange looking back on it. I think, like when I look at old movies or whatever, I'm a little like, I'm like, oh, I don't think I would be that kind of mom. Should we sing Clementine? Yeah. Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, oh, my darling Clementine.
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You can never really know a family from the outside, but when I see some of her childhood videos, I see a happy kid and a loving mom singing to her child in the bathtub with a puppet on her hand.
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Whoops. I got wet. Whoa. I got wet again. Ouch.
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But Allie sees something different.
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Oh, she's good at it. I noticed this in a lot of my childhood videos. Like, she's acting when she's talking to me, like she's created a Persona. And that's where we meet. Do you want me to take that little dead Mouse and bury him and we'll have a little service.
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Yeah. All right.
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In another video, it's Allie's first birthday party. Mary sitting next to a plastic white picnic table. Allie's perched on her lap. They blow bubbles together. Allie giggles. And just to their left on a platter, a lime green Jello mold glistens in the sun.
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And I was blowing.
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I missed that.
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What's your first memory of Jell O?
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My first memory of Jell O, it was at. I don't know if people are familiar with the grocery store chain Stop and Shop, but they had a salad bar that had Jell O in it and cottage cheese and whipped cream and cantaloupe melon and other things, I'm sure. But those were the things that my mom and I were selecting at the time, which I realize now she must have been on some kind of diet.
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Jello followed Mary and Allie throughout their lives. And weirdly, Mary and Allie seemed to follow Jello.
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During my adolescence, my parents divorced, and my mom was again struggling to find her footing, and we started Weight Watchers together. I'd already had some struggles, like in my very early adolescence with restricting what I was eating, but I think, I don't know, like, I had sort of yo yoed, and she was, like, worried for some reason, and she was gonna do Weight Watchers, so she was just like, why don't we do it together?
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Oh, so it was her idea for
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you to do it? It was her idea. So, as in a lot of things at that time, I was like, fine. I feel betrayed by the fact that you've told me to start Weight Watchers, so I'm gonna start Weight Watchers, but then I'm gonna get better at it than you are. And so it felt like I've got to get my number smaller than hers.
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Weight Watchers assigns points to food, except there are a few foods that are zero points. You can eat as much of those as you want. And one of those was sugar free
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Jello fruit and sugar free Jello gelatin.
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We would just put it in the bowl on the table in between us and eat it together with spoons. It was kind of an interesting time with us making Jell O together because it was at once this sort of bonding experience, but it was also, like, bonding over this ultimately destructive act, like we were both trying to change our bodies as a way of feeling better about ourselves. And Jello also, it doesn't really fill you up. It's not nutritious, and it tastes horrible.
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Jello, Jello Tea.
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This started when Allie was a teenager. By the time she got to college, the mini fridge in her dorm room was stocked full of sugar free Jell O cups. She refused to eat almost anything else. And before long, it turned into a full on eating disorder.
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And that was a horrible, horrible time. It was a time that was really fraught for my mom and I. And then ultimately she gave me an ultimatum and I went into treatment when I was in my early 20s.
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What did she say to you?
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She said, no more money if you don't go to treatment.
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And that worked?
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It did, yeah. Because I didn't know what I was going to do otherwise.
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Eating all that sugar free jello, sometimes only sugar free Jello was a habit that helped enable Allie's disorder. But it was the threat of losing the Jell O money that compelled her to seek treatment. And it paid for that treatment. That Jell O money her mom was threatening to cut off was paying her rent and other big costs. Then once she was better, Jell O money would allow her to become a full time writer. She didn't need a day job to pay the bills, so it's no wonder she didn't want to give up the cash, even if it was a little cursed. The idea of weight was such a big thing in your life. Where do you think that came from?
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There's this idea, at least for me in my life of what happens when you are not, for whatever reason, allowed to speak of your trauma and how it becomes important in situations like that to shut off the body, but then also give yourself something else to focus on. Like, I think at that point in my life, like my parents were getting divorced and it was pretty messy. And I think I was also on the verge of adolescence and womanhood and it felt like I wasn't ready for that. I had no protector.
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Allie got better, but what her family saw as the curse was reappearing in other ways. Now Mary was sick. Cancer, just like her mother, Midge. Then, as Mary began treatment in Connecticut, she and Allie became obsessed with a new story from their Jello hometown, leroy, New York. It was about a group of young women known as the Leroy girls.
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For months, doctors in Leroy, New York have been trying to figure out what caused 12 girls to have severe tics, almost like Tourette syndrome.
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Stay with us. Time to cook up some advertisements.
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Now back to the Jello curse and reporter Dan Bobkoff. Welcome back. What's been going on in Leroy, New York in the past months?
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So in 2011 and 2012, and this is the Story that my mom became really obsessed with a strange illness has
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made at least a dozen teenage girls
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sick at the same high school.
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A group of girls who are living in Leroy, New York. Well, I used to cheer every day. Came down with a mysterious set of ailments. I would go to art class. I used to. I used to go to two art classes every day. Ticciing, twitching, Tourette's like symptoms. I was always so. I was always so active, and nobody knew what was causing them. Everybody was always happy to be around me. And these ailments seemed to spread like wildfire among this group of girls. So the town freaked out, as they should, Looked for all sorts of contaminants and environmental factors.
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And it's important to reiterate, the state health department says its confidence students there are not at risk because if anything, in or at Le Rye High school.
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But ultimately, after every physical test was run and every possible physical problem was ruled out, the girls were issued a diagnosis of conversion disorder.
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What is a conversion disorder?
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Conversion disorder is sort of what it sounds like. It's the conversion of emotional stress or trauma into physical symptoms that the person experiencing those symptoms experiences as real and involuntary.
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Seeing these girls, it suddenly struck Allie that something like this had been her experience, too. After recovering from anorexia, one of her hands occasionally became paralyzed, Stuck in a claw shape, she couldn't uncurl. But she'd never known what was going on. Doctors had called her experiences stress related. She got heart palpitations and migraines, Panic attacks so bad she had to go to an emergency room. She and Mary had both come to understand their ailments partly through conversion disorder, or as Mary might have said, as symptoms of the curse. So the case of the leroy girls captivated Allie and her mother.
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C
But I also really related to what felt like to me at their age, like an inability to understand the scope of my own trauma or to own it and certainly to speak it. So it made total sense to me that they couldn't say, like, what it was that they maybe needed to say. And so their symptoms were coming out sideways because that certainly had happened to me.
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What did your mom think?
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My mom really thought that this was not only a response to the individual traumas in each girl's life like, but the sort of larger patriarchal character of the town in which they lived. One that she oftentimes described as sort of Brigadoon, like nothing ever changed, and that as being a problem specifically for women. She also saw it as sort of an intergenerational Phenomenon wherein, like, women and young girls in this case, are responding to the pain and the trauma that's passed down genetically from one generation to the next.
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Eventually, the Leroy girls started to get better. One of them was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome, and the rest were treated for conversion disorder. By the time high school graduation rolled around, everything was back to normal in Jello. The food obviously didn't cause any of this. Years later, the neurologist who treated them stands by his diagnosis of conversion disorder. As to Mary's belief that it was caused by some kind of inherited trauma, we can't say for sure. An increasing number of studies are showing that traumatic experiences in your youth can alter your DNA. Then those changes can be passed to your kids, especially through women. But the research is pretty new. Still, it sounds like a more scientific version of what Mary would call the curse. The curse is something that you've been thinking about since you were five, right?
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Yeah.
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And. And so what does it mean to you?
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It means not something that's at all specific to where I come from or my family, but rather something that's specific to American culture. I mean, I think it's a particular brand of patriarchy that's wedded to American capitalism and epitomized by the Jell O brand. But I think you could look at other products and see it, too. But Jell O, because it was so invested in women's lives and freedom, or lack thereof, I think is a particularly apt emblem of the curse. And so, like, although my mom had grown up learning about this Jello curse that people said was specific to her family, really, she discovered that the curse was collective.
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Jello left leroy in the 60s and moved its manufacturing to Delaware. But much of the family stayed. And just before her mom died, Allie headed back to Leroy.
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C
It was summertime, and it was green and beautiful and a little bit suffocating, which is something that I've oftentimes felt about upstate New York. It feels like landlocked, and there's trees closing in and mountains closing in, and there's this myth of Rip Van Winkle, and. And I feel it. Like, I just have always felt sort of a palpable difference. I, like, couldn't wait to get out of there.
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How do you feel about your own inheritance and money? It comes from Leroy. It comes from cello.
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Honestly, I see it, and I have to say, I'm, like, fairly early into my life as, like, an heir, but my mom died three years ago, and she left me her slice of Jello.
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Her slice is worth a couple million dollars. That, plus some other money, means she never has to work.
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I really feel like it comes from her. Like, I don't really think about that. I know she did, and obviously she grew up with Jello as much more of a presence than I did, but it feels to me like her. Maybe I am breaking the curse in some ways, as I really don't see the money as a curse at all.
- [30:43]
A
In 2015, Jello made its final appearance in Allie's relationship with her mother. It was a few months before Mary died from the cancer she'd had for more than a decade.
- [30:54]
C
So at this point, it was spring March of 2015. My mom had gone in for surgery in January and had seemed to be improving, but then was no longer improving. So my husband and I flew to New York for her birthday and to see her through another hospital stay, sort of in an emergency capacity, and decided to have a little birthday party for her. It was gonna be her 70th birthday and the only thing that she could eat was Jello and she preferred black cherry. So we bought a bunch of that and since we didn't have a mold, we just put it in a Tupperware bowl, which we then flipped into this sort of odd cylinder shape and topped with whipped cream and a couple candles.
- [31:39]
A
There's a video of this. She and her husband seem excited they got it to work at all.
- [31:48]
C
I went upstairs and got my mom and led her to the table and we all sang Happy Birthday. And she was sort of shuffling to the table in a white bathrobe with her hair a total mess. But she was trying to be delighted by the whole production. I think she was ultimately really fatigued. I have pictures of it and she looks just tired, but that was. That was pretty much the last meal she ever ate.
- [32:29]
B
Ali Rowbottom's book is called Jell O Girls A Family History. Our thanks to Dan Bobkoff and his whole team. This story originally aired on the Business Insider podcast Household Name, which later became the podcast brought to you by. The show's not around anymore, but they got a lot of other great food stories in their archive. This episode was originally produced by Claire Rowlandson, Sarah Wyman, Dan Bobkoff and Anna Mazarakis, with help from Ann Sanney of Eva de Cor Kornfeld and me. We had editing help from Peter Clowning and Gianna Palmer, sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore, with additional engineering by Dan Dezulla and additional music from Black Label Music. This update was produced by Johanna Mayer and mixed by Jared o'. Connell. Our team also includes Emma Morgenstern, Andres o' Hara and Tracy Samuelson. The Sport Crew is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Peter Clowney and Daisy Rosario. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
- [33:18]
A
I'm Shelita from Wallkill, New York, reminding
- [33:21]
F
you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
- [33:39]
B
This reheat was produced by Gianna Palmer. The team that produces the Sporkful today includes me, along with Managing producer Emma Morgenstern and Senior producer Andres o'.
- [33:48]
D
Hara.
- [33:49]
B
Our engineer is Jared o'.
- [33:50]
D
Connell.
- [33:50]
B
Music help from Black Label Music the Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to the Sporkful on the Sirius XM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app. It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? Then there's interviews with a list, stars, and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. Right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com sporkful until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.