This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing.
If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. Mm-hmm.
Coca-Cola. For the big. for the small. The short? and the tall.
Peacemakers. Risk takers. For the optimus. Pessimists for long distance love. For introverts.
and extroverts. the thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.
Mm-hmm. So you're telling me that the AI that's meant to make everyone's job easier to manage? Just adds more to manage, on top of the thousands of apps the IT department already manages. Funny how that works. Any business can add AI.
IBM helps you scale and manage AI to change how you do business. Let's create smarter business. IBM.
Okay. This is Rob Gronkowski from Dudes on Dudes with Gronk and Jules. For the second season in a row, I partnered with T-Mobile's Friday Night 5G Lights, powering up hometown football across America. This year, T-Mobile invested over $4 million in prizes to help schools take their Friday nights to the next level.
Now it's time to crown our $1 million grand prize winner. A huge congrats to Derricks High School in Derricks, Arkansas, home of the Outlaws and your 2025 T-Mobile Friday Night 5G Lights Champion. They scored a home field upgrade, Gronk Fitness Weight Room, a 2026 tailgate party, and an all-expense paid trip to the SEC Championship game. to every school that competed, posted and rallied your communities. Thank you.
And a big thanks to T-Mobile for making it all possible and helping communities shine under the Friday night lights. This season may be over, but the story isn't. Stay tuned for season three in 2026. Season two of Unrivaled Basketball is here, and the talent is unreal. The best women's players on the planet are running it back with even bigger moments and bigger stakes.
Don't miss as Paige Beckers, Nafiza Collier, Kelsey Plum, Brianna Stewart, and more take the court and redefine the game. This isn't your regular season. This is Unrivaled, where the pace is faster, the energy is higher, and every athlete shines. Unrivaled Basketball, Season 2, sponsored by Samsung Galaxy, tips off January 5th on TNT, True TV, and HBO Max. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.
Up next, the backstory of America's greatest culinary gift to the world. The hamburger. Here to tell it is George Motz, a burger flipper restaurateur and the creator of the documentary, Hamburger America. Let's get into the story. How did I get into burgers?
It was actually an accident. It's a complete fluke. During my 30s, I was looking for a fun film subject. No one had touched the hamburger, because the hamburger wasn't really taken seriously at all. The hamburger was seen as something that was fast food and probably kind of gross and there for basic sustenance, not really there for anything but that.
But I would like to tell you that It is the only Real food invention. in America in the last 130 years. Think about it. Pasta, pizza, donuts, even the hamburger itself. Most foods have been borrowed from other countries and cultures.
But pretty much everything else out there from somewhere else has been altered in America. But not enough that it still looks like something from the mother country. The hamburger does not. The hamburger is a truly American invention, and hamburgers, have a very long and sordid history. Uh We can actually start with what I like to call the modern-day hamburger.
which is the 19th century in Germany. Because that's actually where the name came from. In the late 1800s, if you were trying to find passage to America from Germany, you had to leave out of the port of Hamburg. That's where the ships left. And sometimes you had to wait for passage on a ship for sometimes upwards of a month or two, and you had to eat cheaply and well.
And one of the very popular dishes at the time. Was something called a fricadellin, or just basically chopped beef that was pattied and cooked and served on a plate with probably some gravy and some onions. The onions were the first condiment, we believe. Mustard was probably next. The pickle came soon after.
So, if you find a hamburger today that has mustard, pickle, onions on it, you're looking at a very, very early primary source hamburger. But by the time Germans had emigrated to the United States, when they got there, they found other Germans who were eating what they called, in English, steak in the style of hamburg in New York City and other parts of the East Coast. Eventually, as the Hamburg stake, or stake in the style of Hamburg, moved to the Midwest, as Germans were looking for more land and looking to go farming, they would have to go to state fairs in search of farm tools and farm knowledge. And of course, there were these, you know. Food courts that would serve what was then obviously ethnic food.
But what happened though at these state fairs was that the hot dog existed Before that, by a good 10 years, and that was a portable food. It was another German ethnic food, the Frankfurter, served on bread. And I would imagine that they probably saw a hot dog and they thought, why can't the hamburger steak be portable? And there goes the rest of the story. That changed everything because it became very American at that point.
Mm-hmm. Sadly for the hamburger, Upton Sinclair wrote a book called The Jungle. which exposed all the wrongdoings of the meatpacking industry in Chicago. It was a huge hit and did a lot of damage to eating habits for Americans, especially when it came to ground beef. That's really what the book was all about.
Yeah. It wasn't until 1920 that the hamburger's image was reversed. One guy, a visionary, a guy named Billy Ingram, met this hamburger operator in Wichita. Named Walt Anderson. And at Walt Anderson's hamburger stand, serving.
A very, very straightforward proletarian version of the hamburger, what we call now a slider. He noticed that there were little boys buying hamburgers and then running around the corner and jumping into limousines and going back to the wealthy side of town. People knew they probably shouldn't be eating it because, still, Americans didn't trust ground beef, and he knew that he could actually exploit that. the two of them got together and decided they were going to clean up the hamburger's image. and decide to open up a restaurant called White Castle.
White which referred to cleanliness. Castle referred to strength. They actually built a small structure. It looked like a tiny little castle. And it was modeled after the famous water tower in Chicago, the water tower that saved Chicago.
It was strength. It was strong. And whenever they presented the burger, it was presented clean. The entire place was clean. People wore white paper caps.
Their uniforms were always spotless. In the early days, they actually ground the beef right in the restaurant so you could see what was going on and see how fresh it was. And that changed everything. People realized that the hamburgers actually were a good thing. At that point in America, if you did not call your hamburger white something or castle something, You were not gonna sell many hamburgers because you were not related to the vision of White Castle.
Really, if it wasn't for White Castle, we would not be eating hamburgers today. That's for sure. And White Castle spent a lot of time suing everybody to try to control their own brand, which was smart. They lost that battle for the most part because there's still places in the U.S. that are called We have White Hut in Massachusetts, we have White Mana in New Jersey, White Rose in New Jersey.
There's so many places actually out there today that all sell pretty much the same burger that White Castle sold in the beginning. But as Americans, we love to put our spin on things. Which was perfect for the hamburger because the hamburger was literally just a canvas waiting to be painted. But in the 1920s, at a place in California, we see the introduction of cheese for the first time. Which was an accident.
It's not supposed to be on there. And before that, there were a few things happening with the hamburger. There was chili on a burger. The chili burger was invented before that, also in Los Angeles. It was not really common to even put cheese on a burger until the 1960s.
I mean, you're talking, you go all the way to the 1960s, and we were still enjoying burgers with nothing more than a few condiments on there. And there are parts of the hamburger story that do reek of some sort of marketing. To make it more popular, one of them is ketchup. Ketchup on a burger, we believe, came from some of the fast food chains. in the 1940s and 50s.
Pushing their hamburger to a younger generation because ketchup was sweet. I think kids like ketchup, so let's put ketchup on a burger. Ketchup did not exist on a burger before the chains got involved. And by the way, it's the same thing that's happening right now with sauce. A sauce on a burger has been around for a long time.
One of the earliest sauces in America goes back to Bob's Big Boy in LA. I believe it was the 1920s. But that was it. Big Mac didn't have a sauce on it until... 1960s, I believe.
And now I feel like everybody puts sauce on their burger. When people think of the American hamburger, they think of something that is old. Which is true. It's been around for a long time. They think of something that is.
maybe aging or fading. And people have a hard time, generations later, imagining that this started out as an ethnic food from Germany. but I would like to tell you that the hamburger is still alive and well. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to George Motts, a burger flipper restaurateur.
and the creator of the documentary, Hamburger America. And it's so true. I mean, why take this food seriously? Because it's America's favorite food. Hands down, nothing touches it.
Hot dogs are not even close to second. And it's the only real food invention, as George pointed out, in the last 20 years. And it was indeed a distinctly American invention. Starting in Germany in the 19th century, but those hamburger steaks, well, a very different item than what we've come to know. And of course, what changes everything are those state fairs that Germans go to, and there they see that hot dog on a bun, that portability, it changes everything.
And well, why can't we make a hamburger steak portable? And of course one of the wrenches in the development of the hamburger was up in Sinclair's The Jungle, which sort of ruined hamburger for a while, or at least the idea of eating hamburger meat. But then came White Castle, still one of my favorites. And then of course the ketchup, which was brought on by the chains. And now, well, the most ubiquitous food in America.
The most distinguished meal in America by far. The story of the hamburger, a history here on Our American Stories. Season 2 of Unrivaled Basketball is here and the talent is unreal. The best women's players on the planet are running it back with even bigger moments and bigger stakes. Don't miss as Paige Beckers, Nafiza Collier, Kelsey Plum, Brianna Stewart, and more take the court and redefine the game.
This isn't your regular season. This is Unrivaled, where the pace is faster, the energy is higher, and every athlete shines. Unrivaled Basketball, Season 2, sponsored by Samsung Galaxy, tips off January 5th on TNT, True TV, and HBO Max. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like EFTs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.
Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing, Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member F-I-N-R-A-S-IPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool.
Output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing.
If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on OSA dot com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. Okay.
Only ten more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first There. The last one. Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that Are you freshes?
Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible.
That's healthy optimism. That's optimum. Visit optum.com to learn more. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
Mm-hmm.
