The BrainFood Show

Latest Episodes:

Who Were the Real Life "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and What Did they Actually Do? Nov 04, 2025

Show notes

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

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Rebuilding Civilization, America's Most Mysterious Monument, and Blowing It Up Nov 02, 2025

Show notes

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

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The Horrifying World of Mind-Control Creatures Oct 30, 2025

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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

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Hollywood vs Reality: What Actually Happened During Apollo 13? Oct 28, 2025

Show notes

“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

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Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire: The Extraordinary Saga of the Unsinkable Nevada Oct 26, 2025

Show notes

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

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The Great Vibrator Myth Oct 24, 2025

Show notes

Selfie stick. Electrical banana. Pocket pleaser. Magic wand. Divorce maker. Buzz Nightgear. Battery Operated Boyfriend. These are but a few colourful euphemisms for womankind’s best friend, found in millions of nightstand drawers across the globe: the vibrator. If you are a connoisseur of strange product origins then you’ve likely heard the quirky and unlikely story of the vibrator’s creation, which goes something like this: during the Victorian era, women were regularly diagnosed with female hysteria, a catch-all condition covering everything from fainting, insomnia, irritability, nervousness, or excessive sexual desire - really, any inconvenient symptom a woman could exhibit. The most popular treatment for female hysteria was the pelvic or clitoral massage, performed by a doctor in a clinical setting. Being completely ignorant of the female orgasm, doctors dismissed the resulting shudders and moans of ecstasy as mere “paroxysms”, maintaining that as no vaginal penetration was involved, pelvic massage had nothing to do with sex.

As the popularity of this treatment exploded, doctors devised various mechanical vibrating machines to relieve their aching fingers and wrists, speed up the massage process, and allow them to service many more patients per day. And thus, an iconic sex toy was accidentally born.

It’s an entertaining story, one which has been told and retold in countless books, documentaries, and even scientific papers, and inspired several works of popular entertainment including Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning 2009 stage play In the Next Room and the 2011 film Hysteria starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jonathan Pryce.

It is also completely false without a shred of evidence backing any of it. Something only extremely recently revealed.

That’s right: despite being widely reported as historical truth, the popular account of the vibrator’s creation is, in fact, a fantasy, concocted by a single historian based on dubious interpretations of historical records. Yet this narrative has remained largely unchallenged for more than two decades since, exposing worrying truths about how falsehoods can spread through popular culture and how academic research is fact-checked and published.

This is the scandalous story of the great vibrator myth.

Author: Gilles Messier

Host: Simon Whistler

Editor: Daven Hiskey

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WTF is Up with the Swastika? Oct 22, 2025

Show notes

It is among the most feared and reviled symbols in the world, the very sight of which instantly evokes thoughts of hatred, mass murder, and the worst traits of humanity. It is so repugnant as to be outright banned in many parts of the world. It is, of course, the swastika, a symmetric cross with short lines protruding at right angles from the end of its arms. Infamously adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to represent their dream of a Thousand-Year Third Reich, 80 years after the end of the Second World War the symbol continues to be used by Neo-Nazis and other far-right groups to symbolize antisemitism, white supremacy, and other hateful ideologies. Yet the Nazis did not invent the swastika; the symbol had existed for thousands of years before Adolf Hitler was even born, representing nothing more nefarious than good luck or fortune. Indeed, up until the 1930s it was ubiquitous in western culture, appearing on jewelry, buildings, sports jerseys, and even in the names of towns. And even today in many eastern countries it continues to be widely used, carrying none of the stigma it has acquired elsewhere in the world. So what happened? Where did the swastika come from, and how did it go from a beloved good luck charm to a loathed symbol of hate and oppression in less than two decades? Let’s find out as we dive into the fascinating and controversial history of the swastika.

Author: Gilles Messier

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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The Insane Engineering of Atmospheric Diving Suits Oct 20, 2025

Show notes

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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What Did the British Royals Get Up to During WWII? Oct 18, 2025

Show notes

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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What Did the British Royals Get Up to During WWI? Oct 16, 2025

Show notes

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