Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Addiction is often dismissed as weakness, moral failure, or poor decision-making - but the truth is far more complex, unsettling, and human. In this deeply informative episode of Timesuck, we explore the history of addiction, how different cultures have tried to understand and control it, and what modern science reveals about how it rewires the brain, hijacks choice, and reshapes identity. From ancient remedies and religious interpretations to modern medicine and neuroscience, we break down how desire becomes dependency — and why recovery is so much more than just willpower.

Transcribed - Published: 1 December 2025

We sail back to 1789 and find out why the real Mutiny on the Bounty was way less “noble sailors vs brutal tyrant” and way more “horny, possibly rapey young officer snaps on his short, cheese-hoarding, coconut-obsessed captain.” In today's Short Suck, we dig into the petty ego clashes, disastrous decisions, and deeply messed up sexual dynamics that led to one of history’s most infamous mutinies.

Transcribed - Published: 28 November 2025

Linda Hazzard - self-proclaimed “fasting specialist” and actual sadistic fraud - ran one of the most disturbing medical scams in American history. At her Washington State sanitarium, later nicknamed “Starvation Heights,” she starved countless patients under the guise of curing everything from aches and pains to cancer. Her brutal regimen of near-total fasting, daily enemas, and bizarre “massage” beatings left a trail of emaciated victims...

Transcribed - Published: 24 November 2025

In 1971, Go Ask Alice shocked parents across America - marketed as the real diary of a teenage girl swallowed alive by drugs, addiction, and death. Terrified moms and dads bought the book by the millions, used it to police their kids, and fueled a cultural panic that helped justify the War on Drugs. But there was just one problem: the entire book was a lie presented as truth...

Transcribed - Published: 17 November 2025

On January 15th, 1919, a massive molasses tank in Boston’s North End burst, unleashing a 25-foot wall of sticky destruction that toppled buildings, derailed trains, and killed 21 people while injuring scores more. Today, we follow the harrowing rescues, the landmark class-action showdown, and the reforms that changed U.S. engineering standards. A strange, darkly ironic tragedy—equal parts true-crime, industrial history... and sugary nightmare.

Transcribed - Published: 14 November 2025

Happy Veteran's Day! George S. Patton was a war-winning, poetry-writing, reincarnation-believing chaos machine. The Allies needed him. The Nazis feared him. His bosses… tolerated him. From heroic battlefield leadership to slapping hospitalized soldiers and creating international incidents with his mouth, Patton lived louder than almost anyone in uniform. This is the story of Old Blood-and-Guts: genius, troublemaker, and one of the toughest sons of bitches in U.S. military history.

Transcribed - Published: 10 November 2025

He was brash, beautiful, bold, flawed, and unapologetically himself. From Olympic gold to global fame, Muhammad Ali’s story is one of rebellion, redemption, and relentless courage. This week, we dive into the life of “The Greatest” - a man who fought not just opponents in the ring, but racism, war, and even his own failing body. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee… and rumble, young meatsack, rumble.

Transcribed - Published: 3 November 2025

Happy Halloween, Meatsacks! The conclusion of our Halloween week fictional horror! In this conclusion to yesterday's release, Duncan Briggs just wants his life to return to what it was before he'd ever heard of AR Innovations. But we all know that's not going to happen, right? Instead, the new ride he's on keeps getting wilder.

Transcribed - Published: 31 October 2025

Hello again Meatsacks! The beginning of our last bit of Halloween week fictional horror! This one was originally released back in July. In this first of two parts, we meet a man, Duncan Briggs, who agrees to participate in a paid scientific study to make a little cash to get his wife something nice for her birthday while he's in-between jobs. And then things get.... weird. Enjoy!

Transcribed - Published: 30 October 2025

Hello Meatsacks! Time for more Halloween week horror! This one was, as you can guess, released the week before yesterday's story, from this past May. And in it, we head to the tropical jungle of Vietnam's Annamese mountains. When on a dark, rainy night in January of 1968, PsyWar Detachment Six was conducting black ops meant to terrify and break the spirits of the Viet Cong. Enjoy!

Transcribed - Published: 29 October 2025

Time for another Halloween week Nightmare Fuel! This one is from this past May. And in it, we head to Upstate New York's Woodhull Mountain, where Gabe and Hassan see a very strangely placed house on the side of the hill while out on a hike. When Gabe enters the house, he leaves behind our world, and enters a space outside of it - a dark and mysterious space dedicated mostly... to pain. Hope you like it!

Transcribed - Published: 28 October 2025

This isn't a mistake, meatsacks! I've been wanting to show you some of the new fictional content I've been working on for awhile now. And the week of Halloween seemed like a great time to do it. This week, I'll be sharing five of my favorite Nightmare Fuels with you here on the Timesuck feed, staring with this story I wrote back in March. It's 1989 and a pawn shop owner has found some chilling home video footage of two film students investigating an urban legend set inside a local abandoned insane asylum. Hope you like it!

Transcribed - Published: 27 October 2025

In the mid-1990s, the quiet backwoods of southwest Florida became the hunting grounds of a sadistic killer the media would dub “The Hog Trail Killer.” What began as a routine hog hunt quickly spiraled into one of the most gruesome investigations in Florida history - a string of bodies found in the woods, all bound, mutilated, and left to rot. This week, we look at Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., the man accused of turning Charlotte County’s wilderness into his personal killing field, and explore the chilling possibility that he’s connected to even more victims — the mysterious Fort Myers Eight.

Transcribed - Published: 27 October 2025

From ghostly prankster to urban legend, Spring-Heeled Jack terrorized Victorian London with blue flames, metallic claws, and impossible rooftop leaps—so much so that a Ripper-era letter in 1888 claimed his name. This Short Suck traces the 1838 panic through hoaxes, aristocratic “bets,” and mass hysteria to ask what Jack revealed about a rapidly modernizing empire’s fears.

Transcribed - Published: 24 October 2025

In Victorian England, “baby farming” turned unwanted infants into a deadly business. Amelia Dyer, known as The Ogress of Reading, used it to hide an unimaginable number of murders - hundreds of them. This week, we expose the grim world of baby farming, the cruelty of Victorian morality, and how one of the most prolific killers in British history was only a small part of a much bigger problem.

Transcribed - Published: 20 October 2025

When seven backpackers vanished in the early 1990s, the vast Australian bush became the hunting ground of a sadistic killer. For years, hikers stumbled upon shallow graves in Belanglo State Forest—each revealing new horrors and the same gruesome pattern of torture and execution. The man responsible, truck driver Ivan Milat, would become known as the “Backpacker Murderer,” one of Australia’s most infamous serial killers. This week, we dive into his brutal crimes, the survivor who helped catch him, and the darkness hiding along the open road.

Transcribed - Published: 13 October 2025

Once hailed as a luxurious spa retreat in the Ozarks, the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs would earn a far darker reputation - one of fraud, tragedy... and restless spirits. From its days as a supposed healing haven to a hospital of horrors run by a quack doctor, the Crescent has been called America’s most haunted hotel. Step inside its haunted halls, if you DARE....on this historical and paranormal October episode.

Transcribed - Published: 10 October 2025

From AI breakthroughs and supply chains to TikTok and military might, China’s rise has reshaped global power over the past few decades. Can the U.S. hold onto its superpower status, or is the “American Century” nearing its end? What will the world look like, if reshaped in China's image? All this and more on a VERY informative (and ultimately hopeful) edition of Timesuck.

Transcribed - Published: 6 October 2025

This week, we deep dive into Pastor Robert Shinn, his Shekinah Church, and his management company 7M Films - and examine how a modern cult has (allegedly) exploited TikTok dancers, financially abusing them, sexually abusing members, while also possibly being connected to the very popular and scary Seven Mountains Mandate that has current Whitehouse connections.

Transcribed - Published: 29 September 2025

In 1980, a camping trip at Australia’s magical Uluru sandstone monolith turned into an international media storm when nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from her family’s tent. Her mother, Lindy, cried out that a dingo had taken her baby. What followed was a decades-long battle of flawed science, media hysteria, wrongful conviction, and one of the most infamous trials in Australian history.

Transcribed - Published: 26 September 2025

Selena Quintanilla rose from an impoverished Texas childhood to become the Queen of Tejano music, breaking barriers and inspiring millions before her life was cut short at just 23 years old. This week, we’ll dive into her meteoric rise, her shocking murder, and also look at the dark dangers of obsessive fandom. From Selena to John Lennon to Dimebag Darrell and beyond, this is the story of when adoration turns deadly.

Transcribed - Published: 22 September 2025

On May 19th, 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking from her home in Eugene, Oregon, to a friend's birthday party in the little Northern California town of Westwood. She was picked up in Red Bluff, California by a young couple, Cameron and Janice Hooker, who were out for a drive with their infant daughter. What followed was one of the most outrageous and lengthy periods of captivity I've ever heard of.

Transcribed - Published: 15 September 2025

In 1933, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had his secret police goons round up hundreds of thousands of former farmers and he sent them into Siberia to create labor camps where they would be forced to work. Many would die along the way, including the over 6,000 unfortunate enough to end up on Nazino Island, where innocent people were dumped with no food other than raw flour, no clean water, no shelter, no medicine, and no protection from each other. Starvation and desperation quickly led to cannibalism, mutilation, and death.

Transcribed - Published: 12 September 2025

In the mid-1990's, convicted rapist Moses Sithole went on a murderous rampage in South Africa. He would blame his sadistic crimes on being falsely imprisoned for a rape conviction in 1989 for which he would serve four years. But he wasn't, of course, falsely convicted. He had been raping woman after woman after luring them out into a secluded area with the promise of a new job. The same con he would later use to lure nearly 40 women to their deaths in 1994 and 1995.

Transcribed - Published: 5 September 2025

In many ways, America's modern obsession with true crime began on March 1st, 1932, when the 20-month-old-son of the most famous man in America, aviator Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his fortress of a home. The press would cover the subsequent investigation and trial of the man responsible like the press had never covered a crime before. There was so much public interest in this case, that Charles and his wife would literally leave the country to avoid the public's intense and overwhelming interest in their loss and lives.

Transcribed - Published: 1 September 2025

If you were lucky enough to have gone to New Jersey's Action Park before it closed in the '90s, you probably have the scars to prove it. This place was WILD. And while I understand why there are no longer parks around like it today, I also really, really wish I could've been there. This is a fun one!

Transcribed - Published: 25 August 2025

I have long dismissed whisperings of secret Satanic pedophile networks. But, it turns out there truly is an international group associated with a kind of Satanism reminiscent of 1980's Satanic Panic. It's called 764. It exists online. It's growing larger, seemingly, by the day. It's very real. And it's extremely terrifying.

Transcribed - Published: 22 August 2025

The Times Square Killer didn't just kill in Times Square. Richard Francis Cottingham committed at least six murders in New York State between 1972 and 1980, plus an additional thirteen murders in New Jersey between 1967 and 1978. While he primarily targeted sex workers, he also kidnapped women and girls as young as thirteen off of the street. Today we both look at his crimes and also, explore the interesting and seedy history of Times Square, site of his most gruesome killings.

Transcribed - Published: 18 August 2025

Did you know that roughly a million people in Russia today make their living as some kind of wizard, witch, or folk healer? And that some of the most popular TV programs in Russia in the '90s were presentations of psychic healers and self-proclaimed sorcerers? Russians have a long history of believing in magic, with old Slavic spiritual beliefs surviving Russia's past Christian takeover thanks to Russia's system of dual beliefs.

Transcribed - Published: 11 August 2025

You'll be hard pressed to find a man who stood for his convictions more firmly than John Brown. John was an white abolitionist willing to do more to end slavery than any other man - of any color - in America in the 1850s. It wasn't enough for John to speak out against slavery, or to help freed slaves find freedom through the Underground Railroad. John felt that if slaveowners weren't willing to immediately free their slaves and renounce their ways, they deserved death. And he felt called by God to send them directly to their graves.

Transcribed - Published: 8 August 2025

Welcome the Terrordome. Philadelphia's Holmesburg prison, before it was officially shut down in 1995, had been a house of horrors for much of its history. In addition to being grossly overcrowded and its prisoners being subjected to sometimes lethal abuse by prison officials... for over two decades - from 1951 to 1974, Dr. Albert Kligman performed wildly unethical medical experiments on its prisoners.

Transcribed - Published: 4 August 2025

Did you know that women's clitoral orgasms have the power to completely transform the world and turn it into a blissful nirvana free from pain and suffering? They don't, but, that's essentially what OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone preached at one point before she went to jail. For years, she put on clinics based around male attendees stroking female attendees clitorises in a very specific way designed to completely transform them...and the world around them. Does that make sense? It shouldn't. This is another weird one.

Transcribed - Published: 28 July 2025

Patricia Douglas was a young dancer and an extra working in Hollywood during its so-called Golden Era when she was tricked into attending a party Tinseltown's most powerful studio, MGM, was throwing for the salesmen who were making it rich on May 5th, 1937. At this party, she was dragged into the parking lot and brutally raped by one on of those salesmen. The studio would bury her assault... but decades later her truth would finally come to light and help lead to much needed change in the movie industry.

Transcribed - Published: 25 July 2025

Eric Edgar Cooke, nicknamed the Night Caller and the Nedlands Monster, was a serial killer who terrorized Perth, Australia from 1958 to 1963. He was incredibly hard to catch, because his MO was to not have an MO. Sometimes he ran over women in a stolen car. Sometimes he shot women. Sometimes he shot men. Sometimes his crimes were sexually motivated, other times purely opportunistic. He attacked one victim with an axe, another with a knife. He strangled one victim, punched others, and once even knocked on someone's door and when they answered he shot them in the forehead. He was mayhem personified, and the last man to be hanged in Western Australia.

Transcribed - Published: 21 July 2025

From 1932 to 1972, six hundred poor, black sharecroppers in Alabama were told they were being treated for "bad blood," when in reality, the US government was conducting an experiment on how untreated syphilis affected their bodies, a study that was supposed to keep going until every participant was dead. A study that would've kept going, had a whistleblower not exposed it.

Transcribed - Published: 14 July 2025

On June 18th, 2023, a deep-sea submersible called The Titan operated by the private company OceanGate mysteriously vanished while its CEO piloted four passengers who had paid $250,000 each to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. When it was revealed that all aboard had died when the submersible imploded, the accident was reported as an unfortunate tragedy. And it was. But later, it would be revealed that it was tragedy a lot of people saw coming and had tried to stop.

Transcribed - Published: 11 July 2025

In the 1930s, an association of primarily Italian mafiosos and Jewish organized crime gangsters, based in Brooklyn, was formed for the purpose of putting distance between the underworld figures ordering hits, and the people carrying out those executions. This organization would come to be known as, Murder Incorporated. And this is their insanely violent story, loaded with crazy characters and their colorful nicknames.

Transcribed - Published: 7 July 2025

Did you know that US government is engaged in efforts to close stargates to other dimensions? Did you know that they engage in weather modification? Or that Arizona is part of Africa? Or that NBA players are synthetic robots and that we've all been inserted with nanobots at birth that keep us from being perfect? You would if you went to the right UNIVERSITY!! This is a fun one. Let's get weird.

Transcribed - Published: 30 June 2025

In the summer of 1968, two young children, both under the age of five, turned up dead in Scotswood, a run down neighborhood of primarily government housing in the industrial English city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Initially, the first boy's death had been ruled an accident. But when the second died... they knew he had been strangled. And the coroner felt another child had been the one to do it. Sadly, he was right. Who would've thought a young girl, just ten years old when she killed her first victim, was capable of this?

Transcribed - Published: 27 June 2025

Ever heard the name Mike DeBardeleben? I hadn't either until very recently. This guy was something else. A prolific counterfeiter the Secret Service spent many years chasing. Also someone who kidnapped bank exec's wives and successfully held them for ransom. He also kidnapped and sexually assaulted numerous young women. And pulled off armed robberies. And randomly murdered some realtors. If it hurt people, Mike was into it.

Transcribed - Published: 23 June 2025

Do you recognize the name, Owsley Stanley? If you're not a devoted Dead Head, probably not. But he's the guy who met the Dead when they had just formed, supplied them with LSD, and helped them form their psychedelic, jam band sound. He also supplied LSD to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of others hippies. It was his LSD that would truly fuel the counterculture movement of the late 1960s.

Transcribed - Published: 16 June 2025

Issei Sagawa aka the Kobe Cannibal, made a living for most of his life off of the infamy he attained... for murdering and then eating a young Dutch woman in 1981, when Issei was thirty-two years-old. Why didn't he spend the rest of his life in prison? And why did he want to eat her in the first place?

Transcribed - Published: 13 June 2025

Do you believe that all non-vegans should die? In part for their needless murder of senseless people like.... cows? And in part because their predatory, cruel, EVIL behavior is providing a model for a future AI program to treat humans like a mindless food source once it inevitably takes over the world? If so... you'd make a good Zizian! This is a weird one.

Transcribed - Published: 9 June 2025

This week we cover the life and crimes of the most prolific serial killer in US history, Samuel Little. A monster the LAPD once dubbed "The Choke and Stroke Killer." Before he died in 2020 at the age of 80, he confessed to 93 murders. And the FBI have confirmed 62 of those murders and counting. Who was this guy? And how did he keep getting away with murders across America for over three decades?

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2025

Did you ever watch the Staircase docu-series on Netflix? Or the 2022 HBO MAX adaptation? I watched both, and still wanted to learn more about the divisive trial over the murder of Kathleen Peterson. Did her husband Michael kill her? Or was he railroaded by a justice system that held a grudge against him? Or, did Michael kill not only Kathleen, but also a woman in Germany years earlier? And did he have anything to do with the recent death of his first wife?

Transcribed - Published: 26 May 2025

In the 1960s, Natalie Wood was one of the world's leading actress, her star shining as bright as Elizabeth Taylor's. She'd been acting since she was a small child, appearing in movies like Miracle on 34th Street. She'd starred opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and she'd been linked romantically to Warren Beatty, Michael Caine, Elvis Presley, and Dennis Hopper. And her husband, actor Robert Wagner, may have gotten with killing her off of Catalina Island in 1981, during a weekend getaway the couple shared with Christoper Walken.

Transcribed - Published: 23 May 2025

The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, is what a period of intense fossil hunting in the late 19th century came to be called, thanks primarily to the intense and bitter rivalry between two of America's most prominent early paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. These two men, who started out as friends, would end up destroying each other's and their own lives in their intense quest to become America's most heralded fossil hunter.

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2025

Have you ever heard of La Luz Del Mundo? a.k.a., LLDM? a.k.a., The Church of the Living God, Pillar and Support of Truth The Light of the World? Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of this church based in Guadalajara, Mexico (that some estimates claim has up to seven million members worldwide) is currently in prison after being found guilty of three counts of the sexual abuse of minors. And he is awaiting trial on charges of producing and possessing child pornography. What do members of this church described by many as a cult believe? And how far back does the abuse go?

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2025

Remember when a bunch of dogs saved hundreds of human’s lives in Alaska a century ago? In January of 1925, diphtheria, a deadly disease, swept through the village Nome, Alaska… killing multiple children. The town was frozen in for the winter. No roads in or out. No ships able to break through the ice in the sea around it. No planes able to fly through a winter so cold, temperatures on the ground would plummet to nearly -90 degrees Fahrenheit. The only hope to deliver life-saving anti-toxins to the area? Alaska's wildly hearty, determined, and heroic sled dogs.

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2025

Ever heard of Gary Heidnik? Pop culture wise, he's made a much bigger impact than most murderers, but few seem to know his story. This literal genius, who was also schizophrenic, joined the army, became a nurse, made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the stock market, crushed whatever college courses he took, formed his own successful church, and dug out a pit in his basement to store women he'd kidnapped. Women he raped in an attempt to impregnate them, so that their mixed-race babies would help end racism and bring peace to the world! We gotta another wild one this week.

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2025