Fitness Product Fails with Angela Giarratana, Jeremy Culhane and Kylie Brakeman | 94
The Big Flop
Audible
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What do you get when you combine Yale graduates, Orange County bros, and Skechers' sketchy ""research""? Three of the most memorable fitness product fails of all time. From David Beckham's magic balance bracelet to Kim Kardashian's Super Bowl shoe commercial, these celebrity-endorsed flops showed that even star power can't overcome basic physics.
Artists on Artists on Artisits on Artists co-hosts Angela Giarratana, Jeremy Culhane and Kylie Brakeman join Misha to get to the core of three 2000 fitness fads: The Shake Weight; Skechers Shape Ups; and Power Balance Wristbands
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Picture this. You're lounging on your couch, ready to indulge in another hilariously disastrous |
| 0:05.8 | episode of The Big Flop, but then, bam, an ad. Don't let that be you. With Wondery Plus, |
| 0:14.6 | you can enjoy The Big Flop a whole week early and completely ad-free. It's like having a fast pass to the front row of the VIP section. |
| 0:24.4 | Upgrade your listening experience and join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or in Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:30.7 | Your uninterrupted flop fix awaits. Hey, besties. Some of you might be too young to remember this, but back in the day, there was a pair of |
| 0:49.1 | biceps that took the world by storm, a set of guns that had the people yelling for more. A couple of arms that |
| 0:57.0 | inspired an intrepid entrepreneur to invent the shakeweight. Get pumped, Bestie, because today |
| 1:05.2 | we're lacing up our sketcher shape-ups, slapping on our power balance bracelets, and double-fisting our shake |
| 1:13.0 | weights to see which fitness fails were the floppiest of them all. |
| 1:17.9 | You've probably seen the infomercial. Maybe you've seen it parodied. They're called shake |
| 1:22.2 | weights. Parodies never. Demonstrating. It's nothing more than a simple bracelet, rubber, |
| 1:26.7 | lightweight, and comes in multiple colors. |
| 1:29.2 | The Power Balance Bracelets website does say that they are not guaranteed to work on everyone. |
| 1:34.1 | The popular shape-up shoe from Skechers. |
| 1:36.2 | Taglines like get in shape without setting foot in the gym are kind of sketchy. |
| 1:40.7 | We are on a sinking ship. |
| 1:49.3 | My name is T.J. Raphael. |
| 1:51.8 | I'm the host of Liberty Lost, a new podcast about who gets to be a mother and the control |
| 1:57.5 | of young women hidden behind the veil of faith. |
| 2:01.3 | Binge all episodes of Liberty Lost, ad-free, right now on Wondery Plus. |
| 2:06.9 | In the 90s, my friend and fellow journalist Dom Phillips was at the center of the UK's dance music explosion. |
| 2:15.4 | By 2022, he had mysteriously disappeared in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon |
... |
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