The BrainFood Show

The BrainFood Show

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The BrainFood Show episodes

  • Nikola Tesla's Rather Peculiar Childhood and Oddities (Daven & Gilles)

    In today's episode, Gilles Messier and Daven Hiskey do a deep dive into Nikola Tesla's childhood and many of his rather peculiar oddities.

    In the mid-19th century, the Austrian Empire, which stretched for over a thousand miles (1600 km) from Italy to Ukraine, was a place of contradictions. The ruling patriarch, Minister of the Interior Baron Alexander von Bach, was on the one hand something of a despot, abolishing public trials, reducing the freedom of the press and imprisoning political opponents. Conversely, his rule also saw the relaxing of economic laws, the demise of internal custom duties and peasants freed from their feudal obligations.
    It was during this time, in the small village of Smiljan, situated within the Empire’s military frontier (now modern-day Croatia) that Nikola Tesla was born on July 9th or 10th (with the confusion owing to the time at around midnight), 1856, the fourth of five children. Tesla’s father, Milutin, was a priest, and the family soon moved to nearby Gospić, where his parish was located.
    From the beginning, Tesla was seemingly a rather brilliant child, though Tesla claims his father discouraged scientific academic pursuit, hoping Tesla would become a priest himself someday and doggedly stuck to this point. Even, according to Tesla, restricting his study, with Tesla partially attributing this to the death of his apparently brilliant older brother Dane, back when Tesla was 5 years old....
    Author: Daven Hiskey
    Hosts: Gilles Messier and Daven Hiskey
    Producer: Caden Nielsen

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    1 hr 15 min
  • The Incredible Tale of Inventing Walmart

    With their endless aisles, their bountiful racks chock full of discounted merchandise, Walmart stores have firmly wedged themselves into the hearts and minds of most Americans, especially within those neural circuits in charge of household budgeting. At this point, Walmart may as well be considered one of the great, all-American institutions, an essential fiber within the fabric of Star-Spangled capitalism. Or, on the other side, some might say Walmart is everything wrong with the business world today, ruthlessly dominating anyone who even hints at competing with them, and otherwise strong arming everyone from government officials to manufacturers to get their way. But whether you love to hate it, or hate to love it … you certainly can’t ignore Walmart. But how did the world’s largest retailer, with gross annual sales double that of the next up in amazon, start and grow to the behemoth we have today, let alone so insanely rapidly?


    Well, put on some Lynyrd Skynyrd, grab your guns, flannel, and a Budweiser, and let’s dive into the fascinating story of how one man changed how the world shops.


    Authors: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey

    Editor: Daven Hiskey

    Host: Daven Hiskey

    Producer: Caden Nielsen


    0:00 Intro

    2:51 An Incredible Humble Beginning and Sickening Overachiever

    6:07 Continuing to Sickeningly Overachieve in College

    8:43 After College Scatterbrained Hard Worker

    10:24 WWII and a Dream Girl

    12:33 A Beginning and Some Key Choices

    18:40 A Huge Mistake, Overcoming, and Expansion

    22:18 A New Breed of Store to Change the Game

    25:40 Going it Alone and Risking It All

    28:06 Go Big or Go Home

    30:52 The Methods to the Madness

    44:12 The Passing of a Titan

    45:56 Good or Bad- The Walmart Controversy


    Sponsor note:  Give online therapy a try at ⁠betterhelp.com/BrainFoodShow⁠ and get on your way to being your best and happier self.

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    55 min
  • Why Did Japan Join the Nazis? (Given, You Know, the Nazis Explicitly Hated Non-Aryans)

    Discover the complex relationship between Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II. Learn about the Tripartite Pact, their conflicting ideologies, and the consequences of their loose alliance.


    Author: Daven Hiskey

    Host: Simon Whistler


    Sponsor note:  Give online therapy a try at ⁠betterhelp.com/BrainFoodShow⁠ and get on your way to being your best and happier self.

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    46 min
  • Why Wasn't There an Italian "Nuremberg / Tokyo War Crimes" Trial After WWII?

    Discover the untold story of Italian war crimes during WWII and why there was never an "Italian Nuremberg" to hold fascist officials accountable for their brutal actions.


    Author: Arnaldo Teodorani

    Host: Simon Whistler

    Editor: Daven Hiskey


    Sponsor note:  Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BrainFoodShow and get on your way to being your best and happier self.

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    38 min
  • How Did the SR-71 Blackbird Get Made and How was It So Fast?

    Explore the legendary Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the world's fastest military aircraft. Discover its groundbreaking design, thrilling history, and the incredible feats that made it an aviation icon.


    Author: Gilles Messier

    Host: Simon Whistler

    Editor: Daven Hiskey


    Sponsor note:  Give online therapy a try at ⁠betterhelp.com/BrainFoodShow⁠ and get on your way to being your best and happier self.

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    49 min
  • WTF is Up with Embalming 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.


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    Author: Gilles Messier

    Editor: Daven Hiskey

    Host: Daven Hiskey

    Producer: Caden Nielsen


    0:00 Intro

    3:38 The Death (or Murder) of Lenin

    7:05 The First Communist Mummy

    15:29 Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!

    22:30 Stalin’s Mummy

    26:11 Dimitrov’s Mummy

    32:39 Gottwald's Mummy

    34:57 Choibalsan’s Mummy

    37:42 Uncle Ho’s Mummy

    41:50 Mao’s Mummy

    44:49 Neto and Burnham's Mummies

    46:57 Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s Still Ruling Mummies

    48:01 Evita's Mummy and What in the Actual F-

    49:34 Marco's Mummy

    50:41 Chavez’s Mummy

    51:06 Full Circle to Lenin

    53:51 Putin

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    1 hr 2 min
  • 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

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    57 min
  • 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

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    53 min
  • 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

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    35 min
  • 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

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    1 hr 7 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.