The BrainFood Show

4.9 (1.4K)
HISTORY
UPDATED SEMIWEEKLY

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.

1D AGO

Who Invented the Band-Aid?

Finish the following sentence: “I am stuck on Band-Aid…” If you immediately sang: “…cuz Band-Aid’s stuck on me!”, congratulations: you have a 50-year-old ad campaign living rent-free in your head. A staple of every first aid kit, Band-Aids are a quick and convenient solution to all the minor cuts, scrapes, burns and other boo-boos life can dish out. Indeed, so fully have these little sticking-plasters permeated popular culture that the brand lent its name to the 1984 charity supergroup behind the hit song “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” while the term “band-aid solution” has entered the lexicon as a byword for temporary, often slapdash repairs. But while the idea of a gauze pad attached to a strip of adhesive tape might seem so basic that it must have existed forever, as we covered in our previous video Who Invented Duct Tape?, even the simplest inventions have to come from somewhere, and surprisingly the idea of the self-adhesive bandage is only a little over a century old. The story of how this simple idea went from home remedy to household name is one of a klutzy housewife, a devoted husband, tireless innovation, and clever marketing. This is the fascinating story of the Band-Aid. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Caden Nielsen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 min
3D AGO

The Crazy Carnival Ride Soviet Turntable Procedure That Gave Us the First Corrective Eye Surgery

The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. More practically, they are our windows to the world, humans being one of many visually-dependent species on the planet. But they are also fragile windows, susceptible to all sorts of injuries, diseases, and disorders. Worldwide, over 2 billion people - nearly a third of the world’s population - suffer from some sort of visual impairment, ranging from mild glaucoma and cataracts to complete blindness. Of these, 88.4 million suffer from mild, easily correctable refractive errors such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. For much of history, the only solution to such impairments was corrective lenses, but more recent years have seen the rise of advanced surgical corrective technology such as LASIK. Thanks to such safe, quick, and relatively painless and inexpensive procedures, thousands of people are able to enjoy perfect vision without the hassle of glasses or contact lenses. But no technology appears fully-formed overnight, and LASIK and its relatives owe their existence to a bizarre procedure developed in 1970s Soviet Russia which involved an assembly-line team of surgeons, diamond scalpels, and a rotating operating table that looked more like a carnival ride than a piece of medical equipment. This is the story of Radial Keratotomy, the world’s first successful corrective eye surgery. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

22 min
5D AGO

Forgotten Hero- The Other Oskar Schindler

In 1993, legendary director Steven Spielberg released two groundbreaking films, which could not have been more different from one another. The first was Jurassic Park, a thrilling summer blockbuster and special effects landmark about bringing dinosaurs back from extinction. The other…was Schindler’s List. Widely considered one of the most heart wrenching films ever made, Schindler’s List tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who, through his enamelware and ammunition factories in occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, succeeded in saving over a thousand Jewish workers’s lives. Thanks to Spielberg’s film, Schindler is today perhaps the best known of the so-called “Righteous Among the Nations” - individuals recognized by the Yad Vashem memorial institution for assisting Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. But Schindler was far from alone, and his story bears a striking resemblance to that of another, more obscure figure: a fellow German businessman named Otto Weidt. While Weidt only managed to save the lives of around 30 employees, the sheer heroic lengths he went to to ensure their survival and defy the Nazi authorities makes his a story one well worth telling. This is the story of Nazi Germany’s forgotten “other” Oskar Schindler. Author: Gilles Messier Host/Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19 min
NOV 4

Who Were the Real Life "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and What Did they Actually Do?

Among the many box office bombs of the 2024 movie season was The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Starring Superman himself - Henry Cavill - and directed by Guy Ritchie of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels fame, the film tells the story of a ragtag team of saboteurs tasked with raiding a Nazi naval base off the African coast during the Second World War. Though highly fictionalized and over-the-top as only a Guy Ritchie film can be, the story is very loosely based on a real, daring raid that took place on January 14, 1942, which helped establish the reputation of one of the most infamous clandestine organizations in the war. This is the incredible forgotten story of Operation Postmaster. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

41 min
NOV 2

Rebuilding Civilization, America's Most Mysterious Monument, and Blowing It Up

On July 6, 2022 around 4 AM, a loud explosion rocked a remote corner of Elbert County, Georgia. Later that morning, the sun rose to reveal the shattered remains of America’s most mysterious and controversial public monument: the Georgia Guidestones. From the moment they were unveiled in 1980, these six massive granite slabs covered in inscriptions became a magnet for criticism and conspiracy theories, with many detractors accusing the monument of promoting satanism. As a result, the Georgia Guidestones became a target for numerous vandals, culminating in its bombing and demolition 42 years later. But what were the Georgia Guidestones, really? Who designed them, what was their purpose, and why did they attract so much fear and hate? Let’s find out as we dive into the fascinating and controversial history of “America’s Stonehenge.” Author: Gilles Messier Editor / Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

27 min
OCT 30

The Horrifying World of Mind-Control Creatures

In the 2013 video game The Last of Us and its 2023 TV adaptation, humanity is overrun by a mutant parasitic fungus called Cordyceps, which disfigures its victims and takes over their minds, turning them into violent, unthinking walking mushrooms called clickers. But this horrifying premise is hardly unique; indeed, the motif of infection and assimilation by an alien parasite crops up time and time again in popular fiction, from the 1950s novels The Puppet Masters and The Body Snatchers by Robert Heinlein and Jack Finney and their numerous screen adaptations to the 1998 film The Faculty and classic episodes of The X-Files, Star Trek: the Next Generation, The Outer Limits, and Futurama. And no wonder: horror fiction often reflects universal anxieties, and parasites have been an unwelcome part of the human experience since the dawn of time. From the tapeworms and hookworms that infect our guts to the filarial worms that cause elephantiasis to the single-celled protozoa that cause malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness and other horrible diseases, these biological infiltrators have been - and still are - responsible for a great deal of human suffering the world over. And while the mind-hijacking parasites of popular fiction may seem like gross exaggerations created for the sake of chills and thrills, this is not the case, for such creatures are horrifyingly real. For example, Cordyceps from The Last of Us is based on an actual parasitic fungus of the same name that infects ants and other small insects, hijacking their minds and bodies and turning them into mindless slaves with one single purpose: to spread their new master’s spores far and wide. Indeed, such devious puppet masters are remarkably common in the natural world, being found in nearly every habitat and family of life - including our very own bodies. This is the story of the real-life zombie makers, the most horrifying - and fascinating - creatures on earth. Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

42 min
OCT 28

Hollywood vs Reality: What Actually Happened During Apollo 13?

“Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B Bus undervolt.” These words, spoken by astronaut Jim Lovell on April 13, 1970, signalled the start of one of NASA’s greatest crises. Apollo 13, the third American lunar landing mission, had suffered an onboard explosion, knocking out vital systems and placing the lives of the three astronauts aboard - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert - in grave danger. Over the next four and a half days, thousands of engineers and technicians back on earth battled one crisis after another to keep the crippled spacecraft running and bring the astronauts safely back home. Their heroic efforts paid off when, on April 17, the Command Module Aquarius splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean and astronauts Lovell, Haise, and Swigert were brought aboard the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima - safe and sound. The saga of Apollo 13 has been described as a “successful failure” and “NASA’s finest hour”, and was famously dramatized in the acclaimed 1995 film starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon. But while the film is praised for its historic and technical accuracy, it by necessity takes certain liberties for the sake of drama - for example, shortening Lovell’s rather passive real-life declaration to the far more urgent “Houston, we have a problem.” But what else did the film get right and wrong, and what actually caused the Apollo 13 disaster? Let’s find out as we take a deep dive into one of the greatest dramas in the history of manned spaceflight. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1h 51m
OCT 26

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire: The Extraordinary Saga of the Unsinkable Nevada

At 9:00 in the morning on July 1, 1946, Major Harold Wood, bombardier of the B-29 Superfortress Dave’s Dream, peered through his bombsight at a massive fleet of warships gathered below. As the crosshairs fell over his target, he released his weapon, and the pilot, Major Woodrow Swancutt, pulled the aircraft into a sharp turn. Seconds later a blinding flash filled the air as history’s fourth atomic bomb detonated over the turquoise waters of the Pacific. But this was not some alternate timeline where the nascent Cold War suddenly went hot, but rather an elaborate test dubbed Able, part of a larger series of nuclear experiments called Operation Crossroads carried out at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. And while the target fleet included several former Axis ships including the Japanese battleship Nagato and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the vast majority were American, a motley array of obsolete battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, landing craft, and various auxiliary vessels. And at the very centre of the assembly, painted bright orange to serve as an aiming point, was a truly remarkable vessel: the battleship USS Nevada. A revolutionary design when she entered service in 1916, Nevada was present at Pearl Harbour on the morning of December 7, 1941 when the surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy marked the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier over the battleship. And now, at the end of her career, she bore witness to another technological revolution: the dawning of the atomic age. This is the remarkable story of the USS Nevada, a ship that served through one of the most eventful periods in the history of naval warfare. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

40 min

See All (141)

4.9

out of 5

1,371 Ratings

Pretty good

Nov 1

fukmook

Entertaining whether you focus on one subject or the broader scope. The banter can be quite endearing. I don’t know if Simon really deserves that 5 star, but like I said, pretty good.
New favorite!

Jul 21

Mnmliepold

It’s back!
It’s back!

May 18

UnclePorkChop

Awesome…this show is pretty good.
Used to love, disappointed now

Jul 7

SomniCat

I loved the original run of this podcast and a huge part of that was Daven and Simon’s banter and conversation. I was elated to see the show return and the first episode back was great… Since then, every episode has been a recorded script from one person or Daven with someone else. It’s very disappointing and I hope the original format returns

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.