Episodes

  • How Government Works, When Does the U.S. Government Debt Become Unsustainable, And Much More

    How Government Works, When Does the U.S. Government Debt Become Unsustainable, And Much More
    Jun 6 2025
    We live in, shall we say, politically divisive times… which, contrary to some’s belief, is no different than really any other point since humans started humaning. From Ancient Rome to relatively more modern times in the likes of Thomas Jefferson secretly bankrolling Scottish scandalmonger James Callender to attack Jefferson’s presidential opponent and former best friend, John Adams. And things haven’t exactly improved since, though also contrary to seemingly popular sentiment, as anyone who studies history in any depth will tell you, while the world today is far from perfect and a lot to fix, the best time to be alive for pretty much everyone is quite literally right now for innumerable reasons all summing up to that the past was the worst. But we’re not here to debate that can of worms with you today, but rather, talk a little bit about how the U.S. government actually functions from a practical, day to day, perspective. Along the way we’ll be looking at the practical side of the election process; who actually runs everything; how the government pays for things and manages debt; what would happen if a city ran out of money, or if the U.S. federal government could no longer pay on its massive debt and at what point the U.S. national debt becomes unsustainable. We’ll also be looking at how government manages to transcend party politics to actually get things done, including covering the Aunt Sally Effect and why it’s so effective at helping at the level government likely affects you most, and we even look at how one gets a Ted Talk and what the process of doing one is like, which I promise makes sense in context. And perhaps in all restore your faith in government a little bit along the way. Because while popular political news will likely have you thinking the world is doomed and leave you seriously considering alcohol as a phenomenal life strategy, it turns out, as shocking as this may come to some, governments the world over are run by people. Not a handful of shadowy individuals controlling everything, but in fact lots of people. Literally millions of them. It’s not just the people at the top in leaders of nations, but the people at a much less talked about level that are the ones generally actually doing the things in a much less heralded way to make sure society doesn’t collapse and otherwise runs as well as it can. While no system is perfect, this is a level which is typically far less polarized and, maybe unsurprisingly, is mostly filled with people trying to do the best job they can for the communities, states, and country they live and raise their families in. Because, hey, they live here too. Now, to dive into all this, we’re going to do something a little different. Instead of me talking at you about it all, we decided to bring in an expert in the field, Eric Mason. Beyond giving a Ted Talk related to this, “If Not Here, Where?” in which he discusses the power of local government to make huge changes at not just the local, but national level. Eric is also the CFO of the City of Presidents- Quincy Massachusetts. When he’s not managing their around a half a billion dollar annual budget, helping to make sure the city he grew up in continues to thrive now and the foreseeable future, Eric also is an occasional keynote speaker on all things finance, government, and world economics, and on the side teaches Microeconomics at West Virginia University. So, let’s look at how government actually works from a practical standpoint, and see if along the way you don’t have your faith in government restored, and maybe shift your focus a titch from the polarized, and generally highly sensationalized, national level, to where things actually typically are getting done, who is doing them, and how it all works. Host: Daven Hiskey Guest: Eric Mason Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 31 mins
  • What's So Special About McDonald's Fries?

    What's So Special About McDonald's Fries?
    Jun 4 2025
    Ah, McDonald’s French Fries. According to a poll we recently ran here, 48% of about 42,000 of you prefer this restaurant’s slender tan starch sticks to all the other restaurant tuber cutting offerings, with this percentage more than double the next runner up which was a blanket choice of “Other”- i.e. nearly all other restaurant french fries combined. While many view McDonald’s as a hamburger joint, the truth is, beyond in the present day McDonald’s making about 1/3 of their revenue from their franchises on real estate (all once causing Ray Kroc to quip he wasn’t in the hamburger business, but rather “My business is real estate”), McDonald’s came to dominate the world of fast food for primarily one reason- their french fries, with an astounding 1 out of every 200 potatoes grown in the world today used to make these salty sticks of potato guts. Which is extra good for the company as french fries are also one of the most profitable non-beverage items on the menu. So just how did these french fries come to be? What exactly is in them and how are they made? Why were they the center of a surprisingly bitter and occasionally riotous and deadly fight? And just who invented french fries at all in the first place? Well, tuck in ladies and gents, and let’s do a deep fried dive into the history of the french fry and its perfected version at McDonald’s, shall we? Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    46 mins
  • What's It Actually Like to Be an Amish Person?

    What's It Actually Like to Be an Amish Person?
    Jun 3 2025
    As humans continue to rapidly accelerate to replacing ourselves with robot overlords or otherwise see if we can’t make Wall-E into a prophetic mocumentary, one group of homosapiens refuses to go quietly into the night. And, while it may come as a surprise to you, this group is seemingly set to inherit the Earth, given their population is exploding, whilst birth rates for the rest of us are declining to an extent that most developed nations are already well past the point where their coming generations will be significantly smaller than the current. But not so for our butter churning brethren. We are, of course, speaking of the Amish, who provide for us a stark contrast to our fast-paced, egocentric lives, with their staunch and deliberate refusal to get swept up in any of it. But is Amish life really as idyllic as it appears from the outside? And just what is the reality of life as an Amish person really like? Well, hitch up your buggy, and let’s walk through the valley where they harvest their grain, shall we? Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Who was the Most Prolific Serial Killer of All Time?

    Who was the Most Prolific Serial Killer of All Time?
    May 17 2025
    In the pantheon of worst humans to ever human you will find no shortage of bastions of awful. Hitler probably has the most collective conscious panache, but at least he had the decency to bravely, and with no regard for his personal safety, infiltrate the Hitler bunker and then put a bullet through the cranium of Hitler. But individuals like Hitler did their killing via proxy. As for those who were a little more hands on, the Hitler of these was arguably a man by the name of Vasili Blokhin who, as we’ve covered previously in our video Who Has Directly Murdered the Most People By Their Own Hand?, personally killed, one at a time, over 7,000 people in under one month alone, let alone countless others he offed at other points in his career. Vasili and many others like him, however, killed for their respective states. In contrast, within this subset of individuals who killed by their own hand, we have a special class that in recent decades has been given the moniker “serial killer”, which brings us to the macabre topic of today- who was the most prolific serial killer of all time? Host: Simon Whistler Author: Daven Hiskey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    38 mins
  • That Time the Postal Service Tried Sending Mail Via Missile

    That Time the Postal Service Tried Sending Mail Via Missile
    May 16 2025
    In this episode of The BrainFood Show, we're looking at that time the British tried to replace parachutes with rockets, that time the United States tried sending U.S. Postal Service mail via missiles, and the origins and interesting stories surrounding NASA's Steely Eyed Missile Man expression, and why the rocket launch countdown is stupid. Corrections- Star Spangled Banner was written during the War of 1812. I knew this. I do not know what I was thinking at the time. :-) Hosts: Karl Smallwood and Daven Hiskey Authors: Gilles Messier, Karl Smallwood, and Daven Hiskey Producer: Daven Hiskey Subscribe to the BrainFood Show: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-brainfood-show/id1350586459 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36xpXQMPVXhWJzMoCHPJKd YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR0XuDegDqP2MW1ZtxnfAIaM1Ax_q1WKm RSS Feed: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/brainfood Tangential Things Discussed in This Episode: The German Rocket Fighter that Dissolved its Pilots Alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfAw4YvI_u0 How to Survive Falling from a Plane Without a Parachute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x64DFUo7R The First Man to Walk in Space Almost Got Stuck Out There https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmXdWLWMTkg How Much Did Top Gun: Maverick Cost the U.S. Taxpayer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w42bQrcu3aY The Tale of the Man Who Nearly Drowned While Falling from the Sky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfUCb4ERxt8 The Mysterious Death of Yuri Gagarin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP_QEmIsnKk Pigeon Guided Missiles and Literal Bat Bombs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbPG8jSud14 The Chicken Heated Nuclear Land Mine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJuxpf-RE7k A Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon https://youtu.be/rb6Xa1acNDE The US Military’s Obsessive World War II Ice Cream Crusade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOi_--kS4CE Did NASA Spend Millions Developing a Pen When the Russians Used Pencils? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAJpzWUhuqM 0:00 Intro 2:37 That Time the British Navy Tried to Replace Parachutes with Rockets 26:19 Missile Mail 56:06 Steely Eyed Missile Man 1:15:55 Launch Countdown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 41 mins
  • Lies! The Truth About the Tesla vs Edison Feud

    Lies! The Truth About the Tesla vs Edison Feud
    May 9 2025
    If there’s two things the internet knows about Nikola Tesla, it’s that he was a genius scientist vastly ahead of his time, and that thanks to a many decades long feud with Thomas Edison which included Edison stealing some of his work and otherwise keeping his former employee on the black balled list, Tesla died in poverty and was largely forgotten by history until relatively recently… The thing is, other than the part about Tesla being a genius, literally none of the rest of what I just said is true. In fact, most of what popular history remembers about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison both individually and with regards to their relationship is pure myth. Ringing in on this, historian Keith Nier very aptly stated of Thomas Edison, "He is actually one of the least well known of all famous people, and much of what everybody thinks they know about him is no more reliable than a fairy tale." And as for Tesla? That’s even more of the case for him than Edison. To a pretty shocking degree actually. In fact, in the couple decades we’ve been researching and writing to the tune of several thousand videos, we’ve never come across two individuals that popular history gets so incredibly wrong. Unfortunately for us, who were once major Tesla fanboys, this meant facing some rather harsh truths about the man and his work and ideas… which were… ya… we’ll get into it all. But as for Edison, turns out kind of an incredible human when you throw out all the myths that largely came about thanks to becoming the devil to god Tesla in the popular narrative of Tesla’s life. So, without further ado, let’s welcome in my co-host Gilles with his vast engineering knowledge to get to the bottom of it all so that you, too, can now smugly walk around knowing the true story of Tesla and Edison, while fanboys and haters on the interwebs continue to sling their myths and misconceptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 55 mins
  • Is There Any Hard Evidence That Jesus Actually Existed?

    Is There Any Hard Evidence That Jesus Actually Existed?
    May 7 2025
    In this episode, Simon delves into the historical and archaeological records, exploring theories and debates surrounding one of history's most significant religious figures. Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    34 mins
  • That Time the U.S. Tried to Build a Massive Military Base on the Moon

    That Time the U.S. Tried to Build a Massive Military Base on the Moon
    May 5 2025
    During the Cold War, the U.S. government was hell-bent on one upping the commies in any way possible. In the process, they came up with a number of outlandish plans, such as that time they proposed literally nuking the moon, interestingly enough a project a young Carl Sagan worked on and broke some laws with. More on this later. While it’s probably for the best that that project didn’t ultimately get carried out, there is another that went into history's dustbin that would have been amazing if implemented- the U.S. Army's plan to build a massive military and research installation on the moon. This is the story of Project Horizon, along with a lot of other interesting related tidbits along the way, from what a nuclear explosion would look like on the moon and whether a nuke would actually be a terribly effective weapon in space, to the guns designed for astronauts, to the rather humorous first thing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did on the surface of the moon, to the dick pic that exists in the so-called first museum on the moon and the famous artist who drew it, to the fascinating story of the man who successfully sold the moon and apparently made a fortune in the process. This is going to be a good one. And to talk about all of this today, we’re trying something different by welcoming in our resident genius, engineer, author of the scripts for over 500 videos on TodayIFoundOut, and the owner of the phenomenal channel Our Own Devices, the Professor- Gilles Messier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    2 hrs and 9 mins
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup