Hoppy Thoughts

In 1976, three men hijacked a school bus in Chowchilla, California and buried 26 children and their driver in a trailer at a rock quarry. After 16 hours underground, the kids dug themselves out. For Episode 50, on the 50th anniversary, we cover the ransom call that never connected, the rich kidnappers who planned it, decades of parole fights, the heir who ran a gold mine from prison, and how the s...

William's father-in-law, Chris Hall, joins the show to talk about coming up as a musician in the 80s and 90s. He covers landing gigs, getting paid, and building a music career before the internet changed everything. Plus casinos, music debates with William and Chet, and family stories that only come out on mic.

Chet gets 22 CIA gadgets and plots and has to call each one: real or fake. 14 are real. A cat wired with a microphone and an antenna running down its tail. A robotic dragonfly. A pistol that fired frozen shellfish toxin, held up on camera by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A wetsuit dusted with skin fungus meant as a gift for Fidel Castro. Pigeons flying camera missions over Washington. We start wit...

A Boston fruit company owned Guatemala's port, its telegraph lines, and more farmland than it could plant. When President Jacobo Árbenz moved to redistribute the idle acreage in 1952, he offered compensation at the valuation United Fruit had claimed on its own tax filings. The company went to Washington instead. Two years later, Operation PBSUCCESS put Árbenz on a plane and Guatemala on a path...

Biosphere 2: eight people sealed inside a glass dome in Oracle, Arizona for two years starting in 1991. This episode covers the $150 million experiment funded by Ed Bass, the oxygen levels that fell from 20.9% to around 14.5% with no explanation, the constant hunger, and the crew fracturing into two factions that stopped speaking. Also covered: Jane Poynter leaving through the airlock 12 days in f...

April 26, 1986. A routine safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant ends with Reactor 4's core blowing through the roof — and the Soviet Union deciding, for a day and a half, that the safest thing to do was say nothing. This episode covers the disaster start to finish: what the test was supposed to prove, the reactor design flaw the operators were never briefed on, the exact sequence of...

Kalshi is a $22 billion prediction market app that lets you trade on sports in states where sports betting is illegal — and it got there by filing a form the federal government never answered. This episode is the full story. We start with the history of gambling itself: the ancient sheep-bone dice that predate the invention of the die, the first government-sanctioned casino in 1638 Venice, the col...

David Icke says the world is run by shape-shifting reptilians and thatreality is a manipulated signal broadcast from Saturn. This episode is ourattempt to take that seriously enough to actually take it apart. We follow Icke from BBC sports desk to the most prolific conspiracy authoralive, then walk through the core of the worldview: the BabylonianBrotherhood and hybrid bloodlines said to run globa...

Would you pay $100/month to skip every line — locked in for a full year? This week we invent Life Subscriptions: real-life perks with monthly price tags. We guess the cost of each one, then debate whether we'd actually subscribe. Green lights forever, first-class upgrades, a secret extra weekend each month... some of these got surprisingly heated. Play along and tell us your picks!

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Anunnaki walk into a podcast. This week, Will and Chet take on two of history's most mythologized topics — the 1947 discovery in the Qumran caves that rewrote biblical scholarship (and the academic scandal that buried it for decades), and how ancient Sumerian deities got transformed into extraterrestrial overlords through Zecharia Sitchin's Nibiru theory. What...

t's episode 40, so we're doing forty things. Fun facts about the number itself, what happens to your health when you hit 40, what serial killers were up to at age 40, and why the Bible treats "40" as shorthand for "a whole lot" rather than an actual count. We close out with why Flock cameras and license plate readers are a surveillance problem nobody voted for. New epis...

Thin crust, New York, or Detroit — which pizza style actually wins? Chet and William settle it in this week's "What is Best…" debate, then tackle the least-terrible place to go number two, and whether one week of training is enough to land a plane, defuse a bomb, or perform heart surgery. It's the Hoppy Thoughts variety show: true crime, gaming history, and unhinged hypotheticals...

Most Likely To… Survive a Waffle House Ban | Hoppy Thoughts Podcast The superlatives are back and somehow more unhinged. This week on Hoppy Thoughts, William and Chet hand out the awards nobody asked for: Most Likely to win a hot dog eating contest, Most Likely to get kicked out of a Waffle House, and the all-time champion — Most Likely to try to politely end a phone call, get sucked into a new to...

This week we ran the show through three "would you rathers" that got way more heated than they had any right to. First up: do 3 flat years in prison, or stay locked up until your mom beats a Dark Souls game you get to pick — a sentence that could end in a month or outlive you. Then we settle the timeless question of unarmed combat: deaf alligator in a kiddie pool, or blind gorilla in a f...

He built a career out of a video game. He became a star before graduating high school. And two days after prosecutors believe he killed a 14-year-old girl, he released his debut album. This week, we're covering one of the most disturbing cases in recent true crime memory — the story of David Burke, known to millions as D4vd, the homeschooled Houston teenager who went viral on TikTok, signed to...

"The Fighting Game Community (FGC) didn't start in a stadium — it started with 40 people, a Street Fighter cabinet, and a dream. In this episode of the Hoppy Thoughts Podcast we tell the full story: how Street Fighter II accidentally invented the combo mechanic in 1991, how EVO grew from a California basement tournament to the world's largest fighting game event, and how a 26-second c...

What does a Japanese word for "your house" have to do with a global entertainment empire? Why does a community of people who draw animal characters raise more money for charity than most Fortune 500 companies donate? And how did a 13-year-old break a video game that had gone unbeaten for 40 years? This week we're going deep on three gaming subcultures that the mainstream has spent de...

It's Memorial Day weekend, and we're doing what we do best: asking the questions nobody asked us to ask. This week, your hosts crack open something cold and wade into the murky waters of war — who starts them, why they start them, and whether the reasons we're given ever hold up to scrutiny. No sacred cows, no easy answers, just two guys trying to make sense of history one sip at a tim...

"What do a tomb raider, a princess, a bounty hunter, an AI, an android, and a sworn housecarl all have in common? They're iconic, they're unforgettable, and this week on the Hoppy Thoughts Podcast — we're talking about every single one of them. This episode is all about honoring the female video game characters who shaped the culture and stole our hearts along the way. We're s...

In this episode, we're taking a deep dive into one of the most legendary illegal races in American history — the Cannonball Run. From Brock Yates' rebellious vision to the wild cast of drivers who actually lined up and floored it from New York to California, we're breaking down how this cross-country sprint went from a middle finger to the establishment to a full-blown cultural phenome...

Hoppy Thoughts Podcast is back, and this week we are fired up. We're sitting down for another unfiltered, no-holds-barred conversation about the current state of American politics — and what we're seeing from the right isn't pretty. From broken promises to culture war distractions, the playbook isn't working, and we're calling it out. We dig into the headlines, share our honest...

This week, we put our taste buds to the ultimate test with a full blind liquor taste test challenge. Mystery shooters, zero hints, and way too much confidence from people who probably should've done more research before agreeing to this. The rules are simple: take a sip, figure out what spirit you're drinking, and — if you're feeling bold — try to name the brand. Whiskey or tequila? To...

Who is the King of Fast Food? 👑🍔We finally settled it. In this episode, we put ALL the heavy hitters — fast food, casual dining, and everything in between — through the ultimate tier list and ranked them from best to absolute trash. No mercy. No sugarcoating. Just real, unfiltered opinions and plenty of arguments along the way. Taco Bell, Skyline Chili, Whataburger, and a whole lot more all got...

This week, we're diving into the weird, wonderful, and occasionally unhinged world of Steam reviews. We're talking about the games you know and love — Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Elder Scrolls Online, Battlefront 2, Destiny 2, Doom Eternal, and Dark Souls 1 — but not in the way you're used to. We've trawled the depths of Steam so you don't have to, and pul...

Billions of people know Pokémon. Almost nobody knows the man who created it. This week we're pulling back the curtain on Satoshi Tajiri — the reclusive genius, retro gaming obsessive, and unlikely visionary who gifted the world one of the most beloved franchises in history. And trust us, his story is every bit as compelling as the universe he built. We dive deep into Tajiri's early life gr...