Deep Cuts

Napster came out of nowhere, was the biggest thing in the world, and then disappeared just as quickly. What really happened? In the late 90s, the music industry was on the verge of change. Many were concerned about the growing popularity of the Internet, and how digital files could be easily shared from home to home. Could this have some kind of lasting effect on sales of albums somewhere down the...

Join Dave, Andrew, and Hillsmer on a very special Holiday episode of Deep Cuts. 00110000 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He was a masked vigilante who stormed a private club for the wealthy elite in hopes of uncovering a deep state trafficking ring. In the early 2000s, Richard McCaslin had become obsessed with the idea of the Deep State and the New World Order, and the fact that Reptilian overlords were controlling humanity from behind the scenes. Specifically, he had hear from Alex Jones that there was a private cl...

In 2006, the worst fan fiction ever written was released. We still haven't figured out who actually wrote it. My Immortal is a bizarre, intensely terrible fan fiction published on the internet from 2006 to 2007. It features a Hot Topic-clad, suicidal, goth, My Chemical Romance-loving female vampire protagonist who goes to Hogwarts and has romances as well as conflicts with the cast of Harry Potter...

The strange story about the time we accidentally went viral for a hoax about Adam Sandler singing the entire Hamilton musical. In 2017, we recorded a weird inside joke bit where an impressionist, Matt Harbert, meticulously re-recorded the entire smash Broadway musical, Hamilton, in his Adam Sandler impression. We posted it online and nobody listened for years. Then, in 2020, out of nowhere, after...

Mortal Kombat caused a chain reaction of parental fear in the 90s, so congress tried to ban video games. Video games fought back. In the early 90s, home video game consoles exploded in popularity. But with the newfound success came attention from concerned parents who didn't like seeing their kids exploding each others' heads in the violent fighting game, Mortal Kombat. This lead to a massively im...

She is the most well-known Saint of the modern era, but her true legacy is full of cruelty, torture, and death. Throughout the 1950s - 1990s, Mother Teresa rose to prominence as one of the most well-known and celebrated humanitarians in history. She ran hundreds of hospitals and clinics to help rehabilitate the poverty and disease-stricken poor out of the kindness of her heart, was awarded the Nob...

Supposed footage of Bigfoot ruined these two men's lives, ended their friendship, and ushered in a new era of misinformation. In 1967, Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson captured the legendary footage of Bigfoot walking through the woods in Northern California. You've seen the video, but did you know the full story behind it? The fact that Roger Patterson used the video to transform himself into a tra...

"Illuminati" is a trading card game from 1994...that predicted the September 11th terror attacks? In the early 80s, Steve Jackson Games released a game called Illuminati. And then in the early 90s they came out with an expanded trading card game version of it to capitalize off of the popularity of Magic: The Gathering. It was a fun game about conspiracy theories that developed a cult following. Bu...

Utopia. Dystopia. These are the two options we thought we had. But there's a third, and we're living in it. Andrew and Dave, your intrepid hosts, have been chipping away at a theory for basically the entire existence of Deep Cuts. It's all about how the year 2020 has revealed that we are living in neither a utopian or dystopian society, but rather a third and more surreal option. A concept that we...

Join Dave, Andrew, and Hillsmer on a very special Halloween episode of Deep Cuts. Additional incidental music credits: The Deadboy Detectives 01001000 01100001 01101001 01101100 00100000 01010011 01110000 01100001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01010011 01100001 01110100 01100001 01101110  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One day his penis just fell off. But doctors had an experimental new way to grow it back... 4 years ago, Malcolm MacDonald developed a rare blood infection. His outer extremities turned black - including his penis. However, unlike the rest of his limbs, one day Malcolm got out of bed and his penis fell off on the floor. He went through a period of shame, depression, and low confidence. That was un...

A weird, somewhat disturbing interview with the leader of the Flat Earth Movement, Mark Sargent. A few years ago, an idea started catching on that was exclusively perpetuated by social media algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The idea was not a new one - in fact it was 100s of years old. It was the idea that our world is, in fact, not round but flat. More specifically, it's a flat...

They think the Earth is flat. Their looney beliefs are more dangerous to society than they seem. A few years ago, an idea started catching on that was exclusively perpetuated by social media algorithms on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The idea was not a new one - in fact it was 100s of years old. It was the idea that our world is, in fact, not round but flat. More specifically, it's a flat...

One filmmaker got men who committed a genocide to play themselves in a movie about the genocide. In the mid-60s, a fascist regime in Indonesia enlisted several paramilitary militias and two-bit gangsters to murder millions of innocent people labeled as communists. The event was re-written in their history books as heroic, and all the men responsible for the genocide are still in charge and walking...

Lisa Frank and her husband used all that money to throw cocaine parties and abuse their employees. All throughout the 90s, Lisa Frank products were the huge back to school craze of the decade. Girls everywhere wore their brightly-colored backpacks, stored paper in their vibrantly-rendered folders, and wrote their homework onto kitty-and-puppy-adorned notebooks with dolphin-and-tiger-emblazoned pen...

He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legiti...

He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legiti...

He used to be a hero, but now he exploits the abuse of children for views and money. In the 80s and 90s, he was a hard-hitting journalist, tackling some incredibly important stories that shed light on issues like slave labor, the crack cocaine epidemic, and child trafficking. In the early 2000s he was host of the insanely popular TV show, To Catch a Predator. For a while, Chris Hansen was a legiti...

A single photo this former Disney Star posted on porn app, OnlyFans, might have destroyed an industry. When former Disney Channel star, Bella Thorne, decided to break the Internet with a bold new experiment in which she would join the massively popular paid content service OnlyFans - largely used by online adult stars and sex workers - and then make a movie about it, what eventually was supposed t...

For years he's been profiting off of the trauma of a teenage boy's murder. In 2012, George Zimmerman saw 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walking through his semi-gated community and became suspicious. The teenager had decided to walk to a nearby convenience store for a snack, but Zimmerman felt like something was just not right. He pursued the boy, and eventually got into an altercation with him that e...

It was a financial and critical flop, but it secretly changed the way movies are made. In 2008, the Wachowskis released a weird, experimental live action adaptation of the 1960s anime classic, Speed Racer. The movie starred Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, and Susan Sarandon, and was not well-received by critics, audiences, and totally flopped at the box office. It has a small continen...

Did Stan Lee & Steve Ditko create Spider-Man? Or was the idea stolen from a Halloween costume? In the Silver Age of comics in the 1960s and 70s, things were an existential mess from a creator perspective - especially at Marvel comics. There were no artist or writer unions, characters were often created in bull pen-type situations where authorship was given to the company at large instead of the ac...

He made a 4 hour movie where he played over 100 characters by himself, but he ended up homeless. In 1994, Laz Rojas desperately wanted to break into the entertainment industry as an actor, writer, and director. He had written literally hundreds of scripts, but couldn't get anybody to pay attention to them. So he shot a 4 hour film that was a collection of random scenes from all of the various scri...

Two Scottish guys fooled the world into thinking they were American rappers for almost a decade. In the early 2000s, Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain were college students and best friends. They also loved hip hop and wanted to do something more with their lives than live a small-town Scottish existence. They formed a rap group and got good. However, after various auditions they quickly learned that, no...