Hyperfixed - A Button is a Promise

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

This week, we answer a question we have gotten quite a few times since the show began: Why does every microwave have a "Popcorn" button, but nearly every popcorn manufacturer warns you not to use it? The answers are wilder than you ever imagined.Support Hyperfixed by becoming a premium member. You will get access to bonus episodes, the Hyperfixed discord, discounts on merch and live shows, and you will be supporting completely independent journalism. We don't exist without your help!hyperfixedpod.com/joinLINKS:Alec Watson's YouTube channel, Technology ConnectionsThe Popcorn Board Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Available wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners read with their problems big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, a button is a promise. So, usually we start these episodes by telling you a bit about the person who submitted the question,

because understanding who's asking the question generally helps us understand why they're asking, which helps us understand why the question matters. But this week's question requires none of that stuff. You don't need to know where this listener lives or what she does for a living, because this week's question, it's one of the ultimate questions, at least as far as we're concerned. I thought everyone was kind of having this question, and then I asked a friend, and she looked at me like I had asked her if her toaster had feelings, you know? She was like, I've never thought about it.

This is Suzelle, and the only thing you need to know about her is that she eats a lot of popcorn. By her own estimation, Susel is eating popcorn at least every other day, and most of the time she's eating it at home, out of a microwave popcorn bag. But in the process of preparing these bags of microwave popcorn, some 182 times over the past year, a question has popped into her brain. What is the deal with the popcorn button on the microwave? Because every microwave I've ever seen has the button. And then every bag of popcorn I've ever seen says do not use the popcorn button on the microwave. Now, if you have no idea what she's talking about, it's probably because you live outside of North Carolina.

America. The microwaves where you live probably come equipped with different power settings. They probably have a defroster. They have a timer. And all those things are included in the microwaves we have here, too. But in addition to those things, nearly every microwave in North America has a button that's dedicated exclusively to popcorn. And the weird thing about this button is that nearly every bag of microwave popcorn comes with an explicit warning not to use the button. According to the instructions on the bag, there is only one right way to make your popcorn. You're supposed to stand next to the microwave, listening to the kernels as they pop. And when you get down to about one or two seconds between pops, that is when you know it's done.

So then, what's the deal with this button? When I think about the word button, like a button is a promise, you know, from the person who made the button. That's like the most philosophical thing I've ever heard in my life. You know, I'm going to hit this button, and it's going to, the button is saying, I'll take care of this. And I just don't understand how we got to this point where, like, at the end of the day, it's just me in my kitchen chaperoning this, like, complicated relationship. And how did we get here? Have you ever tried using the button to pop your popcorn? Oh, I use it all the time. Yes. It's like the closest I get to committing a crime. You're like a full-on popcorn button user. Yes, but the thing is, I can't

really trust that it's going to uphold the promise that it's making to me. So I need to stand there and then kind of listen. But I use it all the time. Okay. So essentially, you're using it, but it's like meaningless. Like it's not doing what it's supposed to do. You just press the button because you're putting popcorn in there. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yep. Yeah. It's a vibe thing. What happens if you don't monitor it? Like what, do you just burn it? Sometimes it chars. And the issue with popcorn is that, like, if the steam has enough of the, like, burny smokiness, it gets into all of the popcorn. So even if it's not burnt, then it has a taste of burnt. And not only that, if it does, in fact, burn, your whole house just reeks for the day.

A hundred percent. Then it's over. And then everyone in your house knows that you, like, mess this thing up that should be simple. That's the kind of shame I don't want to have to put up with. When I'm just having a snack, you know? So do you have any theories about why the button exists, why the bags say don't use it, and why it is not calibrated to actually pop popcorn correctly? Like, why would this thing exist?

Well, I wonder if at some point there was some agreement with or like collaboration maybe between like Orville, Red and Bacher and Whirlpool. You know, they sat at a table and said like, this is the size of the bag. This is the typical wadage of a microwave. Like, let's see if we can come to a conclusion. And then, you know. They got out of sync for whatever reason and people's popcorn started to burn when they used the button.

But my question then is like, why is there still a popcorn button? Why haven't we gotten rid of it? If we all know that it doesn't work and we all know that the popcorn people don't want us to use it, why is it still there? Why are we still making microwaves to have this button? Okay, so just summarizing all of the questions here, you want us to figure out what's the deal with the popcorn button, why can't it be trusted to do the thing it was designed to do, how did we get here, and why haven't we gotten rid of it? Yes. Susel, it has been an absolute pleasure.

We will see what we can figure out, and we will get back in touch with you. So excited. Thanks, y'all. As I mentioned before, the paradox of the popcorn button is one of the ultimate hyperfixed questions. It's one of those questions that we've received on more. multiple occasions, and it's also one of those questions we found ourselves wondering about from time to time. So when we first started looking into this, we weren't super surprised that there were actually

a lot of people online who put in the time to explain the mechanics behind what's going on with the popcorn button. And many of them have done a pretty good job of it, which is why you're going to hear from one of them in a second. But the thing is that as we continued to report this out, we realized that the mechanics of the popcorn button was really just one piece of the answer to Suzel's question. And as far as we could tell, nobody had actually covered the other major pieces. So in our attempt to answer all of Suzelle's questions about the microwave popcorn button,

we've divided this episode into three chapters, starting with the most immediate and the most literal. Chapter 1. Why we can't trust the popcorn button to do the one thing it was designed to do. So in the case of the popcorn button, there's actually several reasons it could be considered untrustworthy, but the single biggest problem with the popcorn button would be that it's unknown what it actually does. This is Alec Watson. He's the host and creator of a YouTube show called Technology Connections, which is dedicated to helping people understand how technology works

so that we can be smarter about the ways that we use it. And when it comes to the question of the popcorn button, Alex says that the most important thing to understand is just what's happening inside the microwave when we press this thing. So during our intake interview with Suzelle, she mentioned that there seems to be this implicit promise that when you press this button, your microwave is automatically going to cook your popcorn.

It's going to know what to do and how long it needs to do it, and most importantly, it'll know when to turn itself off so your popcorn doesn't burn. But it turns out that's not necessarily what's happening. So when you press the popcorn button, one of two things might be happening. it might be using some kind of sensor that can detect your popcorn as done, or it could be just setting a fixed timer which might work or it might not.

What Alec is saying is that behind your popcorn button, there may be no automation whatsoever. It may just literally be a timer that's been pre-programmed based on some tests that some manufacturer ran at some point in the company's history. And if that's the case, then your popcorn button's no more capable of reliably popping your popcorn than if you were just punching in numbers on the keypad. And obviously, there's nothing wrong with punching in numbers on the keypad.

That's how I've been popping my popcorn for the last 40-some-odd years. But knowing that your popcorn button is actually just a timer should change the way that you engage with the popping experience. And because all these buttons look the same, it can actually be hard to tell what kind of technology is powering your specific popcorn button. If you press the button and then it asks, like, is this a three-ounce bag or a three-and-a-half-ounce bag,

Be skeptical. People have told me that theirs works fine, even though it's asking for a wait, but I would be very skeptical that it doesn't have any true programming to detect how cooked things are. In general, if you press popcorn and it just starts, it's probably got a decent popcorn function. So that's part one of the problem. But remember how Alec said that there are actually several reasons why the popcorn button could be considered untrustworthy? Ironically, the second, third, and fourth reasons have to do with this other better kind of technology that's powering the popcorn button. That is, the sensors that drive the automatic cooking functions inside your microwave. So if you want a microwave to automatically cook something, it needs to have some way to detect that cooking is happening. And usually that's going to be a moisture sensor. All this moisture sensor does is measure the level of humidity in the air inside.

the microwave, and it can use that measurement to determine how much food you're cooking and how long it needs to cook. If it's seen a very, very slow increase, it can tell you're microwaving a lot of food. If it's seen a pretty quick increase, it can tell you're not microwaving a lot of food, and then it will just adjust how much longer it will keep cooking until some measure of doneness. But the case of microwave popcorn presents an interesting twist on the humidity center's approach to cooking, because the thing that's special about microwave popcorn is that it's almost always, cooking inside of a sealed bag. And as it cooks, all the moisture that's being released, that stays inside the bag as well. So unlike pretty much every other food that you cook in the

microwave, a bag of popcorn won't give the humidity sensor the kind of data points it would otherwise use to assess the progress of your popcorn while it's cooking. Instead, the humidity sensor has to wait for the moment that the bag suddenly bursts to open, releasing a sharp spike of humidity, to then calculate, okay, this burst happened about one and a half minutes into the cooking process, ergo this must be a three-ounce bag of popcorn. And then if you watch certain microwave ovens, you'll be able to tell, after the bag bursts open, there's five, ten, maybe 15 seconds of a delay, and then a time shows up on the screen, because it has calculated that's how much longer I have to go, and then it will stop.

Now, when this humidity sensor works, it works great. But the truth is, it doesn't always work great, because the quality of the back-end technology on a microwave varies with the quality of the microwave itself. And even if you have a high-quality machine, over time, the sensors can drift. They can get blocked by grease that builds up in your microwave. And sometimes you just get a lemon, and the sensors fail for no reason at all. And this is the core of most of the problems with the popcorn button. Because while these failures may not be a big deal for most of the things you're putting in your microwave, when it comes to popcorn, even small All issues with these sensors can become a real problem.

With popcorn, it really is that tiny threshold between it's cooked properly and it's burning. That makes it such a difficult thing to try and automate. Because if you use the sensor reheat function and, you know, you're heating a big plate of leftovers from yesterday's Chinese food, well, if it goes a minute too long, it doesn't really matter. It just might make the noodles a little bit too crispy in one spot. But if you go a minute too long on popcorn, you've ruined it. Right. So all of those variables are basically the root reason why the popcorn manufacturers tell you don't use that button.

Because for being advertised as a one-touch solution for cooking popcorn, there's no guarantee that it's actually any good. So am I correct in assuming this means you don't use the popcorn button on your microwave? I mean, I use the popcorn button all the time. But that's because I did the testing to figure out, can I trust this thing? And, you know, I'm a weird nerd. So that's the sort of thing that I'm going to do. But the popcorn button, depending on the different features your microwave was equipped with, can work really well. You basically just have to test it for yourself to figure that out.

And there is kind of a new technology, which I had read about first and then discovered my microwave actually implements it, which is sometimes they use microphones to actually live. listen to the popcorn. Oh my God. That's amazing. What a brilliant idea. Yeah, so the instructions on the bag that will tell you, like, wait until you hear two seconds between pops. That is exactly what my microwave does. And I've just been watching it. And I'm assuming it's using the steam sensor as well, but it really is you hear the popping slowdown. And then once you see that two second gap, it throws 19 seconds on the screen, but actually it stopped cooking. It's just cooling down. Chapter 2.

A Cultural History of the Popcorn Button. So I'm going to keep it a buck. When we started reporting this part of the story, it was honestly kind of a joke. Alec had answered pretty much all of Susal's most pressing questions, and in light of what we learned from him, the rest of her questions felt almost self-evident. But Suzelle had asked us to look into the question of how we got here. And she had raised a theory about a collaborative meeting between the people who make popcorn and the people who make microwaves. And since we had started to feel like maybe microwave popcorn shouldn't have been automated in the first place, we decided to contact the people who created the first popcorn button and asked them about its origins.

We actually use popcorn as a lab test to make sure our microwaves cook well. And the result of that, we actually have a very good popcorn key. This is Harry Heson. He's the Associate Vice President of Design and Product Planning for Sharp Manufacturing, the company that created the first popcorn button in 1988. Now, Harry wasn't at the company when the button was created. He joined just one year later, but when we reached out to Sharp for an interview about the origins of this thing,

they said Harry would be the best person to talk to. So he asked him, tell us the story of the popcorn button. And as expected, the answer wasn't very interesting. There was no roundtable meeting with the producers of popcorn, no lightning bolt moment of inspiration. In Harry's version of the story, the microwave popcorn button was created because the microwave popcorn bag was created.

And when you're in the manufacturing business, that's just the kind of call that makes sense. The microwave bags came out in the early 80s, and, you know, two and two kind of clicked together. Well, if we had a popcorn key, we could really automatically do it. That would be, you know, a big feature. So Sharp repurposed the humidity sensors

that were already built into its microwaves, and in June of 1988, the first popcorn button made its public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. It spurred big headlines for Sharp and a slew of imitators across the industry. And if that was the whole story, we probably wouldn't have bothered telling it to you.

So what changed? Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. One, two, three. Alex, how are my levels? This is hyperfix producer Emma Cortland. And the reason she's on the mic right now is because while she was in the process of editing this episode, She heard something in our tape that changed our understanding of how the popcorn button came to be and why it came to be.

So one of the things that happens when I'm editing these stories, like especially the ones about how something happens, is that I try to build a map of all the little events that led to the big event just to make sure we aren't missing some critical piece. So I wasn't in this interview, but as I'm going through your hairy tape trying to get a better understanding of how the button came to be, I hear him say this thing about the moment Sharp decided to repurpose the humidity sensor for their popcorn button. And I hear something that makes my ears perk up. They were trying to figure out how to get around the, I don't know if there was a patent at the time or what, but the other previous company, they came up with the idea of a decimal mic in the microwave that would count the decimals of the popcorn popping like you do manually.

So I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, I don't know who this other company is, but this technology he's describing with the decibels, that's the microphone sensor that Alec told us about. What? But when Alec mentioned this, he said that this was a new thing. And now Harry is telling us that this sonic approach to automation

was there at the birth of the popcorn button. And it actually preceded the popcorn button, right? Because if Sharp designs this button, using a humidity sensor, as a way of getting around this sonic sensor patent, then the sonic sensor had to have come first. Exactly. And look, obviously I want to know where the sonic sensor's been hiding all of these years.

But the bigger thing is that if the sonic sensor came first and we're trying to figure out why the microwave industry decided to automate this food that probably shouldn't have been automated, then we shouldn't be talking to Harry about it. We should be talking to the person who created the sonic sensor. Right. I got to admit that when Emma first came to me with this, I had moved on from the popcorn story. I felt like we already had our answer.

And it didn't actually matter to me, which was the first to automate microwave popcorn, because surely everyone that was trying to do this was motivated by the same thing. But it turns out I was wrong. Hello, this is Mike. Hi, Mike. This is Alex Goldman. How you doing? Oh, well, I'm almost 80, so I'm old.

This is Mike Hodgitz. We found his name on the patent registration for this microphone sensor technology. And when I asked him why he and his colleagues created it, the story he told wasn't about putting two and two together. It was about desperation. You see, back in the 80s, Mike was an engineer at a company called Lytton. Lytton was one of a number of American manufacturers that got its start in defense and aeronautics

before expanding into home consumer products in the 60s. And at one point Litton's microwaves had been at the top, of the manufacturing heap. But around 1984, their business began to falter. The company had been losing more and more market share to companies in Japan. Companies like Sharp, which, by the way, is headquartered in Osaka. And the reason they were losing came down to a question of cost. The overseas companies were able to sell their microwaves for what it cost Lytton to make them.

And since they couldn't lower the cost of making them without sacrificing their quality, the only way that Lytton could stay in the game was through innovation. And after shelf-stable microwave popcorn hit store shelves in 1984, one of the company's salesmen got an idea. Since consumers had to sit there, listening to the popcorn pop to know if it's ready, what if we made a microwave that could hear? One of our salesmen said, why can't we make the microwave oven, hear the popping, and do electronically what the instructions say?

He said, is this possible? And I said, we'll find out. And the question was, how are you going to give the microwave oven hearing and be able to interpret the hearing? Nobody knew how to do this, let alone if this could actually be done. But Mike could see the writing on the wall. The company's CEO is giving interviews to newspapers about how Lytton couldn't afford to be second. It was Innovator die. And Mike had to work quickly.

While you were making this thing, did you sort of realize you were in an arms race with other microwave manufacturers to try and make a, a sort of popcorn microwave. I wasn't really thinking about them. I was in a race against time. I mean, I knew we were going down the drain, and I was hoping this would save us. There were countless problems to solve, and no time to solve them.

But Mike and his colleagues put their heads down and spent hours toiling away in the lab until they finally came up with a working prototype, a microwave that could automatically and reliably cook popcorn by listening to the popping process. But by the time, they filed their application at the U.S. Patent Office. It was already too late to save Lytton. By the time the patent got approved, Litton's microwave division had been sold off. The company that

purchased it filed for bankruptcy just three months later. Eventually, Litton's microwave factory shut down and Mike got laid off, and the sonic sensor technology he created seemed to disappear completely. Until about 2007, when the patent expired, and companies like Whirlpool and KitchenAid started to incorporate sonic sensors into their popcorn box. technology. We reached back out to our contacts at Sharp and tried to confirm that the development of their automatic popcorn button was triggered by the development of Lytton's sonic sensor technology. But Sharp wouldn't commit to that unfolding. At one point, they suggested that the opposite was true. That Litton's sonic sensor approach to popcorn was developed as a way around Sharp's humidity

sensor approach, even though Sharp doesn't hold a patent on the humidity-powered popcorn button, and Lytton's sonic sensor was created first. But based on the dates and what Harry told us in our interview, it does seem like the idea for automating popcorn, which is the promise of the popcorn button, was triggered by Litton's sonic sensor technology, which was itself triggered by Litton's desperate fight for survival. We did get the product out to market.

The only time I ever saw one on the media, I was watching a movie, and the movie was set in England, I believe, and there was a bar in England, and somebody put a bag of popcorn in this bright orange oven. I looked at that, and I said, that looks like a micropopper, and I looked, and it was. It was exactly what it was.

And I actually saw one in the movie popping corn, and that doesn't sound like any big deal, but it was a big deal to me. We'll be right back after the break. Chapter 3. One disclaimer to rule them all. So before the break, we dug into the history of microwave manufacturing, and we learned about how the popcorn button came to be. We also learned how it came to be unreliable, and why, despite its reputation, it might still be worthwhile to give your own popcorn button a try. But we still had one more question to answer, and there was only one place we could go to get it. Our address is one fun place, because it's popcorn. You've got to have fun.

One Fun Place! One Fun Place is our address, yes. This is Tracy Beaver. Most of the time she runs marketing for Jolly Time Popcorn, a fifth-generation family-owned popcorn company headquartered in Iowa at the delightful address, One Fun Place. But Tracy also has another gig, and this other gig is the reason we wanted to talk to her.

You see, even though we understood why popcorn manufacturers wouldn't want you using the popcorn button, we still wanted to know why every major player in the space decided to add an explicit warning about it on their bags. Online rumors suggested there may have been a lawsuit of some kind, but we hadn't found any evidence of that in our research. So short of calling every major popcorn manufacturer and asking individually,

we were going to have to speak to someone with industry-wide insight, which is why we called Tracy, who serves as a chairperson for something called the popcorn board. The popcorn board is that industries, research, and promotion, organization, popcorn processors funded, the USDA oversees it. It's basically a checkoff program, and our job is just to promote popcorn

as much in wherever we can. Even if you've never heard of a checkoff program, you're probably familiar with their work. Remember the Got Milk campaign? In the United States, this was a series of ads in which celebrities donned milk mustaches to promote the consumption of milk. In general, not a specific brand of milk,

just milk. The campaign ran for over a decade, decade, and it is widely considered to be one of the most iconic campaigns of all time. But the funding for it came from a check-off program for the California dairy industry. Commodities like beef, soybeans, eggs, potatoes, they all have their own check-off programs. And essentially what they do is pool money from producers to fund collective promotion and research and help solve the kinds of problems that affect the industry as a whole. So, we figured that if there'd ever been a meeting where a bunch of popcorn execs decided

to fend off burnt popcorn by slapping a warning label on their products, Tracy would know about it. But when I asked her if this happened, she said no. As far as she was aware, there had never been any anti-button item on their agenda. No collective decision to use this disclaimer. And there had definitely never been a lawsuit over the use of the popcorn button. Instead, Tracy told us that each of the major popcorn producers decided to add the label on their own. And the reason they did it was actually pretty simple. I mean, we'll be honest, we'll get calls from consumers that they burn their popcorn.

Normally they say, you know, your popcorn burned in my microwave. And we're always like, well, did you use the popcorn button? But I don't think consumers want to admit fault. It's easier to blame somebody else. And you're more likely to get through to somebody at your popcorn manufacturer versus, I don't know, Samsung or General Electric. It turns out the reason all of these manufacturers chose to ask. this label is because they kept seeing this trend where consumers would press the button and then walk away from their microwaves, surrendering their one responsibility in the popcorn

cooking process to stand by their microwave and listen to the pops. And when their bags of popcorn would get burnt, the people in the popcorn industry were the ones getting blamed for it. But Tracy was quick to clarify that the issues with microwave popcorn popping were not all one-sided. Certainly there are a ton of variables on the microwave side of the equation, and we spent the last 20-odd minutes telling you about how things like back-end technology, wattage, and the quality of the programming on a microwave all impact the popcorn popping process. But Tracy wanted us to know that the popcorn itself also presents a ton of other variables. It all basically comes down to the moisture level.

You want anywhere between 12 to 14% moisture in your kernels in order to have optimal popping. Now, the way that she just phrased this sounds like she's talking about how to get the perfect pot. But the question of moisture is much more critical than that, because moisture is the thing that actually makes popcorn pop. Unlike every other kind of corn that has a soft permeable skin, the tough exterior of a popcorn kernel will hold in this little bit of water until it's heated to the point that it turns to steam, which builds and builds in pressure until the kernel explodes itself inside out,

leaving you with a puffy, delicious piece of popcorn. Unless the kernel is too dried out to create that explosion. which does tend to happen over time. Microwave popcorn has a shelf life of about nine. It's usually a year, but we don't know how long that's going to be sitting on shelf. So to keep that moisture in there, that's why microwave popcorn bags are wrapped with that cellophane. So if your microwave popcorn is expired, which, let's be real, it often is, it might be too dried out to pop, or too dried out to pop to the point that the bag bursts open.

and if the bag never bursts open, there won't be a sudden burst of steam. And if there's no burst of steam, then even with a humidity sensor, your microwave may just keep on running, blasting your popcorn with electromagnetic radiation until you start to smell smoke, which again, probably won't take very long.

So that's why every manufacturer says, listen to when the popping slows. The popcorn will tell you, you don't need the popcorn button, and I probably shouldn't admit it, but I've used the popcorn button just to see, and it's worked for me, personally, but I'm also sitting there listening.

And if people would just stay by their microwave for those two minutes or three minutes and listen to when it slows, there's no issues. At the end of the day, I think this is the answer to everything. Because, yeah, your popcorn mutton may actually just be a timer, or it may be a sensor that's drifted over time, or maybe the sensor's just dirty, or maybe your popcorn is simply too old to trigger it. But the truth is that no matter what the circumstances are,

If you would just stand next to your microwave while it's cooking your popcorn, everything would be okay. For as long as people have been making popcorn, listening to it has been the best and most reliable way to tell when the popcorn is finished cooking. And if there's one real problem with the popcorn button, it's not that it can't uphold its promise to us. It's that it's led us to believe that we're absolved our promise to popcorn. So when we followed up with Suzelle, we of course told her everything we'd learned about the history of the popcorn button and all of the variables. involved with using it, and how we started to wonder if maybe we should be getting this thing serviced from time to time. But the thing that we stressed most of all was that we had come to believe that even if you are using the popcorn button, you should probably just hang out

and listen to it cooking, especially because it only lasts about two and a half minutes. I always walk away from the microwave, but there's like so many moments, like our house has a lot of stairs and I'll be going up and down the stairs and looking at my phone. And I'm like, I'm not even present in the act of like walking up and down my own staircase. And so I think that'll be a good practice of like, okay, now I'm going to sit here and I'm going to honor this experience that I'm having with this microwave, keep an eye out or keep an ear out on my popcorn. There's one more thing we wanted to add before we put the story to rest. So as we got closer to the end of our reporting and came to a consensus on how we wanted to end the episode, we realized that advising people to listen to the cooking process was not actually a viable answer for everyone who enjoys fresh popcorn. within the deaf community, the popcorn button is actually an accessibility tool.

But because it's not always reliable, for all the reasons we spent this episode discussing, they often have to deal with some seriously subpar popcorn. So to the hearing impaired members of our audience who experienced this show via auto-generated transcripts of these episodes, I say this. We've recently discovered that there are dedicated smartphone apps for both Apple and Android devices that will listen to your popcorn for you and tell you. you when it's done. And if you don't want to download any more stuff on your smartphone, no problem. Even if you just stand next to your microwave with your phone's built-in recording

device in hand, you should be able to see how your popcorn is progressing just by watching the decibel levels of the popcorn as it pops. Wow, I didn't think I was going to send you guys on such an excursion to get all this information, but this is so fun. I mean, we didn't either, but I'm very glad we did. So thank you for submitting this one, Susielle. It's been a lot of fun. I'm so excited to listen. I can't wait. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amoryeates, and Kat Schuchmect.

Our engineer is Noah Smith. The music is by the mysterious Braggmaster Cylinder and me. Hyperfix could not exist without your support, so if you like what we do, please consider signing up to become a premium member at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. You get bonus episodes,

discounts on merch, access to our Discord, a whole bunch of fun stuff. Again, that's Hyperfixedpod. com slash join. Speaking of merch, we've got t-shirts and sweatshirts and coffee mugs and socks with my face on them, if that's the kind of person you are. And you can get all that stuff at merch. com.

And remember, premium members get 15% off their order. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Thanks for listening. See you soon. Uh, this is for a story that we're working on for our show. All right.

So I'm recording this. I hope you don't mind being recorded. I'm on time with it. All right, so you use the popcorn button and it works. Yes. Watch. Okay. Show me.

I've just pressed it twice and then press stuff. But it only goes for a minute and 45 seconds. Doesn't that leave a bunch of unpopped kernels? It goes for a minute and 50 seconds and no, it's not. Your brother's downstairs, going on. Right in front of the couch that you're supposed to. sitting on. Come up here. Let me dump out the candy.

Why are you doing this for a story? We're doing a story about the popcorn button. A lot of the bags, the popcorn bags, say on them. Let me see if I can find it on here. They say to not use the button. I don't see that. I always use the button. I always get a good amount of popcorn. Huh.

Good bike for me. Maybe. Maybe.