The BrainFood Show

By Cloud10Education History

The BrainFood Show episodes

July 30, 2025 What's the Deal With Presidential Libraries?
In today's episode of The BrainFood Show, Daven Hiskey dives into the surprisingly cool Presidential Library system, how it came to be and what they are actually for.

This episode is brought to you in part by the City of Quincy. To discover more about Quincy, check out the link - https://discoverquincy.com

Occasionally accused of being “Modern day Pyramids” or “Monuments to someone’s ego”, presidential libraries have long been divisive institutions, especially when first established. However, while some have such perceptions of these libraries, it turns out there is vastly more to them than many people realize, and the more distant we become to the eras these leaders lived in, the more and more valuable the Presidential libraries become to our understanding of history and our own evolution as a society, and as humans because of what they contain in an absolute treasure trove of materials- where it’s not an exaggeration to say that a newly minted college graduate historian could enter a given Presidential Library one day, spend the next five decades of their career inside, and only scratch the surface of what that single library holds that no other institution in the world has. So what exactly are presidential libraries really? What do they contain? And how did this whole Presidential Library thing start in the first place?

Author: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
57 min
July 28, 2025 The Twisting, Turning Road That Gave Us the Microwave Oven
In this episode of The BrainFood Show, Simon Whistler dives into the surprising origins of the microwave oven, from Maxwell's electromagnetic waves to WWII radar tech. Dive into the science and history behind this kitchen staple’s unlikely invention!

Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Simon Whistler

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
53 min
July 23, 2025 A Guide to Building the Pyramids- How Did They Do It?
In today's episode of The BrainFood Show, Daven Hiskey dives into how the pyramids were actually built.

A quick tour on popular online video sharing platforms may convince you that ancient Egyptian builders were either Completely useless, and had to rely on Alien help, or They were incredibly advanced, and used power tools and lasers. Because … Atlantis, Tom Cruise, and Ice Road Truckers…
These theories are a fairly recent trend, borne out of a modern mindset of people who don’t know what they are talking about and because they cannot comprehend how stuff could get built without the aid of sophisticated technology that they tend to also not really understand, and seemingly suffering from a false sense of superiority over our past human selves. Which, to be fair, that one is an almost universal idea despite it being objectively untrue. Our millenia past ancestors were just as smart as we are and in some ways far more capable at getting things done with a whole lot less.
But going back to making the pyramids, if we look at the writings from people who lived closer in time to when the Pyramids were built, we find no such sense of mystery. To them, building huge monuments was impressive, sure, but did not spark wild speculation.
Take Greek historian Herodotus, for example, writing in the 5th Century BC. According to his Egyptian guides, the Great Pyramid at Giza was built by 100,000 men, employed for three months a year, over a period of twenty years.
His colleague Diodorus Siculus, active in the 1st Century BC, recounted that: ‘The construction was undertaken with the help of ramps of earth, since at that time cranes had not yet been invented.’
As we shall see later, further studies by contemporaries Egyptologists have partially corrected the accounts of these titans of ancient historiography.
Nonetheless, they seem to have gotten the basics right.
Building a pyramid was a huge, daunting endeavour, sure, but one that could be achieved by employing resources which the Pharaohs had access to. Not too dissimilar to modern day marvels like humanity going from horse drawn carriages to walking on the moon in only a little over a half century. An immutable fact of humaning- when humans throw practically unlimited funds and large amounts of labor and expertise at a problem, we are extremely good at doing the formerly impossible. And countless examples throughout history prove this fact. Throw enough money and labor at a problem, we humans will figure that crap out right quick. Which kind of makes it a shame we don’t do just that at more problems we humans have today from tuberculosis to cancer to a sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, Galaxy Quest. Let’s make it happen no matter the monetary cost. The most important thing humans could ever create- Galaxy Quest 2- The Search for Grabthar’s Hammer.
But in a similar vein, the Pharaoh’s formula for building the pyramids was: loads of time, plenty of cash, building techniques which were state-of-the-art at the time, and tens of thousands of skilled labourers. Yes, skilled labourers, not slaves.
Time, money and skilled labour were the founding blocks for other ancient construction projects, which Diodorus and Herodotus might have experienced directly, such as great temples, amphitheatres, roads, aqueducts and public baths. Many of which, by the way, were architectural and engineering projects arguably significantly more sophisticated than the Pyramids, and yet no one calls down Aliens from the sky as being behind those projects. Or… at least, not yet. Never underestimate what the History Channel is capable of.
Author: Arnaldo Teodorani
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Caden Nielsen

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
35 min
July 21, 2025 How Did the Wright Brothers Win the Race Into the Air?
In this episode of The BrainFood Show, Simon Whistler dives into the fascinating journey of the Wright Brothers, from failed flight attempts to their groundbreaking success in 1903, reshaping aviation history with persistence, innovation, and a methodical approach.

Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Simon Whistler

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 7 min
July 16, 2025 From 0 to 1000 to 0- What Happened to Howard Johnson's?
In today's episode of The BrainFood Show, Daven Hiskey dives into the incredible rise and fall of Howard Johnson's.

This episode is brought to you by the City of Quincy. To discover more about Quincy, check out the link - https://discoverquincy.com
In the modern world, if you step out your door and travel to neighboring cities or even countries, you’ll generally be greeted by a slew of familiar food related franchises for your respective region, with some of the most popular in the world today including McDonald’s, Subway, Starbucks, KFC, Dunkin, and the like. In all of these, with some small variation, you’ll be able to get the staple food and beverage items from those restaurants you can get anywhere else in the world at the same branded establishment. But it was not always this way. In fact, this has been a relatively recent phenomenon in the era of humans humaning. And before all these better known restaurant chains today, there was one that kicked it all off that, for fascinating reasons, managed to go from 1 restaurant to the second largest supplier of meals outside of the home in America behind only the U.S. military, then even more rapidly disappeared from existence. In fact, despite their dominance through most of the 20th century, because of how rapid their fall was, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone born after around the 1990’s who even remembers them at all, outside of perhaps recognizing the name from a small branch of Wyndham hotels. We are, of course, talking about Howard Johnson’s restaurants which introduced the world to the concept of restaurant franchising, spawning a now staple of the industry world wide. Here now, is the fascinating story of how Howard Johnson’s went from 0 to over 1000 locations and back to 0 in under a century.
Host: Daven Hiskey
Author: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
36 min
July 14, 2025 How Did Christianity Go From a Tiny Jewish Cult to Rule the Western World So Quickly?
In this episode of The BrainFood Show, Simon Whistler dives into the fascinating reasons Christianity was able to so rapidly go from a tiny Jewish Cult to rule the Western World despite a whole lot of persecution in the interim of that insanely fast rise.

Various religions have been popping up randomly seemingly as long as humans have been humaning- interestingly, not just with humans but our Neanderthal cousins, with signs of some form of religious practices with those Neanderthals going back at least 150,000 years. But one religion founded about 2,000 years ago triggered a marked shift in the way many in the world view religion and interact with a deity. Starting out as a sect of Judaism, fast-forward just a handful of generations of humans later and Christianity had evolved into its own distinct religion well on its way to dominating the Western world and beyond. And hasn’t really stopped since, statistically the world’s #1 religion with over 2.3 billion adherents in its various branches. So what made Christianity take off to then unprecedented levels, going from 1 person to millions in such a short span, and then billions beyond, where countless thousands of other religions in history don’t or sometimes only briefly rise and then fizzle out? Well, I’m glad you asked, because this is one of the more fascinating topics on so many levels we’ve ever covered here. So, quiet down your children, have a seat in a pew up front, and let’s dive into it all, shall we?

Author: Daven Hiskey
Host: Simon Whistler

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 40 min
July 11, 2025 The Marxist Mummies- The Weird Practice of Mummiffying Communists
In today's episode of The BrainFood Show, Daven Hiskey dives into the bizarre tradition of pickling and displaying communists.

In the shadow of Moscow’s Kremlin Walls stands one of the most famous structures in all of Russia: a squat, austere-looking stepped pyramid, built of polished red porphyry. For decades, the balcony or tribune on the pyramid’s roof served as a stage of honour for Soviet and later Russian leaders to observe military parades on Red Square below. But what makes this imposing structure truly special is the macabre relic preserved within: the embalmed corpse of Vladimir Lenin. For over a century the great revolutionary and Soviet leader has remained on near-continuous public display, lying in a glass sarcophagus for all to see and tended by an elite team of specialists who keep him looking just as fresh - more or less - as the day he died. And he is not alone; around the world, other famous communist leaders have been similarly pickled for posterity, including Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, China’s Mao Zedong, and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. But why wasn’t Lenin’s body simply entombed in the Kremlin necropolis like other Soviet heroes? How has his corpse been kept so lifelike for over a hundred years? And how did the admittedly bizarre idea of placing these leaders on pickled display spread to other nations?
Well, comrade, line up in front of the firing squad, make sure ample formaldehyde is at hand, and let’s dive into the peculiar and fascinating history, and science, of Communist mummies.
Author: Gilles Messier
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Caden Nielsen

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 1 min
July 09, 2025 What's the Difference Between Hardwood and Softwood? (I swear this is more interesting than it sounds :-))
In this episode of The Brain Food Show, Simon Whistler and Daven Hiskey are looking at the difference between a number of things, kicking it off with the difference between hardwood and softwood.... which you'd think you already know, but we're guessing for most, you don't actually know the difference. :-)
Up next we dive into a bunch of "difference betweens" such as the difference between fruits and vegetables, green and black tea, various types of olive oils, brown and white eggs, etc. as well as a slew of interesting tips on optimizing ripeness schedules on bananas, including a way to keep your bananas at the perfectly ripe stage for approximately a week, instead of the two seconds or so that happens naturally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 9 min
July 07, 2025 WTF is Vegemite?
In this episode of The BrainFood Show, Simon Whistler dives into what the Aussie staple of Vegemite actually is, and how it came to be, and become a national treasure in the nation.

Author: Gilles Messier
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Simon Whistler

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
33 min
July 04, 2025 Hancock's Revolution- Birthing the United States
In today's episode of the BrainFood Show, Daven Hiskey does a deep dive into the oft' forgotten founding father, without whom there may have been no revolution and whose life was who Paul Revere was trying to save on his famous ride.

“The troops of George the third have crossed the Atlantic, not to engage an enemy, but to assist a band of traitors in trampling on the rights and liberties of his most loyal subjects… Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.”
These are the words of John Hancock spoken during the 1774 Boston Massacre commemoration at Faneuil Hall. While most today only know John Hancock for his name coming to be an expression when referring to one’s signature, it turns out there was good reason his signature was the most prominent on the Declaration of Independence.
Having risen from relatively humble origins to one of the wealthiest men in all of America, with a large part of his fortune depending on trade with Britain, when it was time to take sides, unlike so many of his elite contemporaries in his same boat, he curiously chose to sink his business and side with the rebels. Soon after, he was involved in a massive number of the early efforts against the British, from the Liberty Affair, to the Boston Tea Party, to being the principle reason for Paul Revere’s famous ride. Soon after this he was made President of the Continental Congress with his business and management acumen in that role being a huge reason the rebellion was able to function in the early going. In that role he was also the chief signer of the Declaration of Independence, later nine time governor of Massachusetts, and overall one of the most well known, and popular men in all of America during his lifetime, with at one point his popularity with the masses combined with his extreme wealth seeing the British mockingly nickname him “King Hancock.” Later, this moniker was taken up by the colonists as a term of endearment for the man, and even allegedly a rally cry during the famous battle of Lexington and Concord that kicked off the war. And yet, a funny thing happened after he died. Despite John Hancock being arguably one of the most critical of the revolutionaries in the first half of the affair, and his popularity with the masses of America being almost unparalleled in his lifetime as noted, for a variety of reasons, popular history would very quickly mostly forget the man other than his famous signature. In fact, the first full biography on John Hancock wasn’t even written until the 20th century, and it’s only been in recent decades historians have started to completely re-evaluate his story given the significance of so much that he was involved in, and the rather silly reasons, from a modern perspective, that contributed to him being so quickly dismissed after his death.
As one of the greatest Founding Fathers of them all in John Adams would write a few decades after Hancock passed away, “James Otis, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock were the three most essential characters [in the revolution]; and Great Britain knew it, though America does not. Great and important and excellent characters, aroused and excited by these, arose in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, South Carolina, and in all the other States, but these three were the first movers, the most constant, steady, persevering springs, agents, and most disinterested sufferers and firmest pillars of the whole Revolution.”
With such high praise from a man who himself was arguably in the top 3 of shapers of the budding United States, I think it’s time to get to know the individual he heaped such similar praise on. So without further ado, here now is the largely forgotten story of John Hancock.
Author: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2 hr 36 min

About The BrainFood Show

From the publisher's feed

In this show, the team behind the wildly popular TodayIFoundOut YouTube channel do deep dives into a variety of fascinating topics to help you feed your brain with interesting knowledge.