The BrainFood Show

The BrainFood Show

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.

  1. 4 DAYS AGO

    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

    38 min
  2. 6 DAYS AGO

    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

    1h 46m
  3. 11 JUL

    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

    1h 3m
  4. 4 JUL

    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

    2h 41m
  5. 30 JUN

    How Do We Actually Know We Landed on the Moon?

    On July 20, 1969, the world looked on in awe as 39-year-old astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off a ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and onto the surface of the moon, becoming the first human to set foot on a natural celestial object. This moment, watched on television by over 650 million people worldwide, has gone down in history as one of mankind’s greatest triumphs, redefining what humanity is capable of achieving. Over the next three years a total of six Apollo missions and twelve astronauts would visit the moon, leaving behind scientific instruments and returning mineral samples that helped expand our understanding of the moon, the earth, and the solar system. …or so most of us have been led to believe. Despite the Apollo program being one of the largest, most expensive, and most public undertakings in human history, for nearly 60 years a once small but ever growing dedicated group of conspiracy theorists have maintained that the whole endeavour was in fact an elaborate hoax, a piece of Hollywood flimflammery aimed at pumping up America’s self-image and winning a propaganda victory against the Soviet Union. According to this theory, no humans have ever set foot on the moon, and the famous images beamed into millions of households were instead filmed on a soundstage on earth. While anyone with a passing knowledge of history and conspiracies should be able to recognize these claims as total nonsense, they have gained a surprising amount of traction, with a 2005 poll revealing that nearly 25% of Americans aged 18-25 doubt that humans had ever walked on the moon, Yes, 1 in 4, despite living in an era when humans have access to more information than ever showing we did, in fact, land on the moon... But how did this conspiracy theory come about in the first place, and what hard, observable evidence is there that the Apollo moon landings actually took place? Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    41 min
4.9
out of 5
239 Ratings

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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.

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