The BrainFood Show

In the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore’s Bond and Bond girl Melina Havelock - played by Carole Bouquet - dive to the bottom of the Ionian Sea to recover a top-secret code machine from the wreck of a sunken British spy ship. There, they are suddenly attacked by one of the villain’s goons wearing what looks like a nightmarish combination of a medieval suit of armour and a giant insect exoskeleton, with a bulbous helmet, multiple round portholes, segmented limbs, and menacing mechanical claws. A similar suit also shows up in the 1989 underwater monster movie Deepstar Six. But while this contraption may look like it came from the fevered imagination of a Hollywood production designer, it is, in fact, a real piece of deep diving equipment known as an Atmospheric Diving Suit or ADS. Effectively wearable, articulated personal submarines, ADSs alleviate many of the limitations of traditional diving techniques, allowing humans to work at previously unheard-of depths. But achieving this capability has come at the cost of daunting engineering challenges, with the surprisingly long history of atmospheric diving suits being one of ingenuity, dogged trial-and-error, and incremental improvements in technology. This is the fascinating story of mankind’s quest to conquer the deep in a suit of armour.

Author: Gilles Messier

Host: Simon Whistler

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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During WWI, the senior members of the British Royal family kept awfully busy. One of them shattered his pelvis when a near thousand pound horse decided to ride him instead of the other way around, another one enjoyed some time in the trenches and examining early tanks, his brother came under fire from German warships, and their sister distributed nicotine and ‘acid tablets’ to soldiers and sailors in gift boxes.

If you want to learn more about their adventures, and misadventures - including whether or not they should be held responsible for the execution of the Russian royal family, as suggested by a certain Netflix crowning achievement of streaming entertainment- well, take a look at our video here on YouTube What Did the British Royals Get Up to During WWI? if you haven’t already. Among other things that video also includes a great The Road Not Taken tie in and why almost everyone universally gets that poem’s meaning quite incorrect in rather ironic ways, as well as how the man it was written about also initially misinterpreted Frosts’ intent, which was mostly just to tease him, and how that all partially helped lead to that man’s death in WWI as a result.

But that was WWI. What about the story of the world’s most famous royals during WWII?

Well, in what follows we will discover how a sailor Prince saved his entire crew from almost certain death via a rather spur of the moment scheme, which Monarch would be best suited to fix your carburettor, how many secret plans a King can set in motion without his nation finding out, whether the former King of England, as is often stated, really tried to buddy up to Hitler to help get his throne back after being forced to abdicate a few years earlier, and why his other brother is at the centre of a similar major conspiracy theory involving no less than Winston Churchill himself ordering his death…

So, strap on your royal cape, grab your shrubbery and holy hand grenades, and let’s dive into what the British royals got up to during WWII.

Authors: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 Intro

3:20 The King is Killed and the Troublesome Heir

16:18 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

20:57 The King’s Secret Plan

23:48 ‘Lilibet’ and ‘Margot’

25:31 Philip of Mountbatten's Badassery

30:46 The Duke of Windsor's Virtual Exile and the Nazi Plan to Make Him King of England Again

56:14 The Duke of Gloucester

58:18 The Duke of Kent, A Plane Crash, and a Conspiracy

1:14:04 King George’s Secret Missions

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For those of us born relatively deep into the before times of the 20th century, it may come as a rather shocking realization that WWI occurred now over a century ago, playing as the backdrop on the positive side of astonishingly rapid progress in the fields of medicine, science, technology, literature, and the arts, along with on the downside the past, as ever being the worst, such as the Spanish Flu pandemic which while WWI was raging killing about 20 million, that Spanish flu was outdoing the humans in a much shorter span killing between 50-100 million people and infected around a half a billion around the globe between 1918 and 1920.

That’s not even to mention just after the Encephalitis Lethargica which swept across the world killing over a million people while affecting numerous others, before suddenly disappearing, leaving the finest scientific minds of the age absolutely stumped, though today it’s thought to have been caused by a rare type of strep throat, which concerningly enough is still around today, and a subsequent immune response gone awry. That one was particularly horrifying as if it didn’t kill you, this illness could instead potentially trap you inside your body, stopping you from having the will to move or speak, though you’d otherwise seem perfectly healthy. A few decades after the outbreak, a treatment was found that would, for lack of a better phrase, “wake up” the patients, though within weeks they’d slip back into their trance. If that all sounds like a familiar plotline, it’s perhaps because it was the inspiration for the Robin Williams’ fronted film Awakenings.

But, we’re not here to talk about all the ways the past was the worst, else this video would end up being the longest ever posted on YouTube, even if we restricted ourselves to just the first 25 years of the 20th century. But rather, we’re going to zero in on a specific piece of that era, which will always be remembered as the century in which many of the most prominent nations on this planet decided to plunge our species into the most lethal, devastating, traumatic conflict since our ancestors had first pierced someone’s guts with the sharpened end of a stick. Not happy with just one such conflict, we went and did it twice, in the first place in The Great War, also known as ‘the war to end all of war’, and later simply as World War I when everyone realized that humans will seemingly never end warring until we have one so devastating that there are no humans left to war with. ...

Author: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 The Past was the Worst

7:45 The Truth About What Really Started WWI

14:05 King George V and Queen Mary

19:01 The Romanovs and The Windsors

22:40 Princess Mary

25:21 ‘David’, the Prince of Wales

29:01 Prince Albert

32:43 From WWI to WWII

35:38 How Everyone Gets "The Road Not Taken" Wrong and How It Helped End the Life it was Written About

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Discover the untold story of Hitler’s Jewish poster children, Hessy Levinsons and Werner Goldberg—icons of Nazi propaganda hiding shocking secrets. A compelling tale of irony, danger, and defiance.

Author: Gilles Messier

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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On July 20, 1969, the whole world gathered around their flickering television sets and watched in awe as astronaut Neil Armstrong who, if not for someone secretly slipping his very late application to the astronaut program into the pile wouldn’t have even been there (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), climbed down the leg of a strange, spidery vehicle, stepped onto the surface of the moon, and spoke the immortal words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” …Followed by the much less memorable second words, “I can – I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”

But for the first time in history, a human being had set foot on another world. The historic flight of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a massive eight-year effort to realize President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. But the road from the earth to the moon was far from a smooth one, beset by numerous hurdles and setbacks. For example, the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew in a launch pad fire on January 27, 1967 prompted a complete redesign of the Apollo spacecraft, while ongoing problems with the Saturn V rocket’s massive F-1 rocket engines nearly resulted in the cancellation of the entire Apollo programme. But perhaps the greatest challenge of all was deciding how to land on the moon in the first place. Solving this seemingly trivial question proved far more difficult than expected, requiring years of careful study and the heroic persistence of an obscure but determined engineer. This is the story of how we learned to land on the moon only a little over a half century after humans were still hitching up covered wagons to go places.

Host: Simon Whistler

Author: Gilles Messier

Editor: Daven Hiskey

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If your parents ever took you to a science museum or planetarium as a child, you likely spent much of your visit in the gift shop, begging them to buy you one of the hundreds of shiny – and purportedly “educational” – items on offer. And most irresistible of all was undoubtedly “astronaut food”: shiny foil packets of freeze-dried strawberries or ice cream sandwiches. Sure, they had the texture of florist’s foam, crumbled into sticky dust, and tasted like sugary chalk, but that didn’t matter: you were eating the same food as actual astronauts!

…well, sorry to ruin your cherished childhood memories, but sadly no, you weren’t. For while the freeze-drying process used to make these novel treats was originally developed for the space program, no astronaut has ever eaten gift shop “astronaut” strawberries or ice cream during a mission – for the simple reason that the crumbs would float away and wreak havoc in the spacecraft. So what do astronauts actually eat in orbit? Well, put on your spacesuit and pack your Tang as we blast off into the long, complicated, and fascinating story of space food.

Author: Gilles Messier

Host: Simon Whistler

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The shadows go in different directions! The flag is waving in a vacuum! The lander didn’t dig a crater! You can’t see any stars! It was all filmed on a soundstage by Stanley Kubrick! If any of these statements sound familiar, then odds are you’ve spent way too much time online and need to touch some grass. Ever since Bill Kaysing published his “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976, a small but growing number of dissenters have vehemently argued that neither Neil Armstrong, nor anyone else ever stepped foot on the moon. Rather, they argue, the whole Apollo programme was nothing more than an elaborate Cold War hoax, meant to demonstrate America’s technological superiority over the Soviet Union.

But as we’ve already covered in exhaustive detail in our previous video How Do We Actually Know We Landed on the Moon? every single one of the popular arguments put forward by Kaysing and individuals in the aftermath has been thoroughly debunked. For example, looking at the examples we’ve just listed extremely briefly: the shadows are deflected by terrain; the flag had a metal rod along its top edge to keep it deployed; due to the moon’s low gravity the Lunar Module descent engine did not need to be powerful enough to dig a crater; and the exposure on the astronauts' cameras was set to photograph the bright lunar surface, meaning the faint stars didn’t register on the film, something you can try out for yourself with your own camera here on Earth if you like.

And while yes, Stanley Kubrick did direct the moon landings, as everyone knows he was such a perfectionist that he insisted on filming on location(!). Yet among all the arguments against the feasibility of manned lunar landings, one stands out among the rest - even among regular, non-terminally-online people- the van Allen Radiation Belts. These regions, located between 640 and 58,000 kilometres or 400 and 36,000 miles above the earth’s surface, are filled with high-energy electrons, protons, and other subatomic particles emitted by the sun and trapped by the earth’s magnetic field. According to conspiracy theorists, the radiation in these belts is too intense for humans to survive, making space travel outside of Low Earth Orbit impossible. But is this true? Have the Moon Landing Conspiracy people finally scored a fatal blow against NASA and the 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo Missions? Does this one, single data point, negate the literally hundreds of thousands of other confirmations we have during the Apollo Missions and countless more since? Well, no. But this wouldn’t be a very convincing or interesting video if we stopped there. And, in truth, it’s a great question. And has a super interesting answer with a lot of interesting things to learn along the way.

So how did the Apollo astronauts survive crossing such a dangerous region of outer space?

Well, slip into your space suit- pull on your lead-lined underwear -... maybe not in that order unless you want to look like Superman… as we blast off in search of answer to how the brilliant engineers and scientists working on all this solved this problem.

Author: Gilles Messier

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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While just about everyone is abundantly familiar with Adolf Hitler’s exploits in the latter half of his life, an often missed part of the once proclaimed “German Messiah’s” history is that of his childhood. So just how did this “boy like any other” grow into arguably one of the most reviled individuals in the history of humanity? Well, put on your lederhosen and grab your machete and time machine, because we are going to be talking about baby hitler, who his parents were, whether he was actually Jewish, the exploits of his youth, what he was like as a child, his creepy high school crush, and much. much more. Let’s dive into it all shall we?

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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When the sun scorches the earth, when incandescent air burns your lungs, and especially when that glucose curve dips at 10, 2 and 4 in the afternoon … well, there is nothing better than grabbing an ice cold bottle of a very special soft drink- its purple-ish label covered in beads of cooling moisture. I am, of course, talking about the first major soft drink to be invented in America: Dr Pepper, beating Coca Cola by one year and Pepsi by eight, all the way back in 1885! Coincidence that this was the same year Doctor Emmet Brown and Marty McFly were having their little adventure? We’ll leave it to you to decide.

Non-Americans may have only a very vague idea of what Dr Pepper is, considering that it is not as ubiquitous as Coke or Pepsi. And we can even exclusively say that our glorious and unheralded third partner in our endeavors here on TodayIFoundOut in a phenomenal human by the name of Dhruv Sapra only recently tried Dr. Pepper for the first time on August 3 of 2023. But our viewers in the US are surely very familiar with its distinctive packaging and taste. Our friends in Texas in particular share a special bond with Dr Pepper, as they can revel in pride knowing that the drink was invented in their very own Waco.

Or can they? The fact is that the origin story of Dr Pepper is steeped in lore and legend, marked by contradicting versions and no conclusively confirmed facts, and may not have been invented in Texas at all. What follows is going to be us attempting to sort out that mess, while also in the process, for reasons that will soon make sense, diving into the fascinating reasons why 18 is considered the age we become adults, whether two people really are the only individuals who know the full recipe for Coca-Cola, and much, much more! So let’s dive into it, shall we?

Author: Arnaldo Teodorani

Host: Simon Whistler

Editor: Daven Hiskey

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Winning a big ticket lottery very often isn’t all that it cracked up to be and despite a windfall of cash, a surprising number of winners have gone on record as saying winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to them. And some could never end up saying it because of the surprising amount of murder that occasionally happens after, as we’ll get into. But as to the more normal non-murderous awful, this is something that might have a lot to do with the fact that lottery winners (at least in the US) often receive little to no advice on how to adjust to their newfound wealth, which may sound obvious and easy to some, but there are a number of pitfalls we’re guessing most have not considered that have nothing to do with having well managed investment accounts.

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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