Modern entertainment such as movies, fictional books, and TV shows aren’t exactly known for accurately depicting how things may or may not go or have gone in the real life scenarios that they depict. From injecting substances directly into your heart a-la Pulp Fiction or The Rock, to Yarr’ing pirates, let’s just say there’s a lot they get wrong. On the former, ya, don’t poke a hole in your heart. That’s not helpful to, you know, not dying. See our video on the subject before you start arguing in the comments. And on the latter, one actor set the standard there for pirate speak in the 1950s and everyone has just sort of run with it as if it had a basis in reality for how pirates talked instead of just something he came up with for various reasons. Moving on to Medieval times, don’t even get us started on things like medieval chastity belts or the supposed ideal of the Chivalrous Knight protecting damsels in distress… Far more likely the knights were the ones causing the damsels to be in distress in reality and said damsels would have traded their left butt cheeks for a device like a chastity belt for some level of protection, as we have covered in excruciatingly facepalming detail before. But we’re not here to talk about the fact that real life knights were mostly- and we cannot stress this enough- just massive dicks to women and like, honestly, almost everyone, even each other. No, we’re here today to talk about what they and their cohorts actually got up to on the battlefield when deciding to siege a castle as a means to conquer, rape, and pillage for fun and profit. Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Countless films produced in the United States feature use of rather expensive military equipment, and often also real world military personnel. Given the extreme expense of all of this using things paid for by the U.S. taxpayer to benefit for profit companies, how is this allowed? Further, how are projects that the military will support selected? Can just any U.S. citizen apply for use of such equipment and personnel for their particular project to make it fair to all? Just how much does this cost the U.S. taxpayer in cases like, for example, the recent wildly profitable Top Gun: Maverick? And why and how did all of this get started? Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While something like the holocaust isn’t exactly unprecedented in history, with mass genocide popping up an unnerving number of times the world over throughout our time humaning, perhaps no other instance of this has shocked the modern world more than the Nazis systematically murdering somewhere in the ballpark of 5 or 6 million Jewish people along with another 5 or 6 million people of other backgrounds, such as the lesser talked about Romani genocide. In this one, the Nazis murdered upwards of a million Romani, which was about half the entire Romani population of Europe at the time. That any civilized people could allow something like this to go on seems unthinkable to our modern selves, but the question becomes from this- how much did the general public actually know about what was going on at the time it was happening? It turns out, contrary to what is often stated, quite a lot actually both on the global scale, and even within Germany itself evidence pointing to at least the idea that it was happening being relatively common knowledge, as we’ll get into shortly. But also, paradoxically, by accounts from many people directly after the war, they didn’t really know at all… So which is true? To really get to the bottom of this, we must discuss events leading up to the holocaust and how much of these the German people and wider world knew about. Sponsor note: Go to ⁠HelloFresh.com/BRAINFOOD10FM⁠ now to Get 10 Free Meals + a Free breakfast for Life! Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the episode today, Simon discusses who invented the potato chip, nachos, whether the green part of a potato is poisonous, and much, much more in this ode to potato chip episode. Sponsor note: Go to ⁠HelloFresh.com/BRAINFOOD10FM⁠ now to Get 10 Free Meals + a Free breakfast for Life! Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is a scene out of countless romance novels and prestige period pieces: an elegantly-dressed Victorian lady, laced too tightly into her corset, is suddenly overcome by a case of “the vapours” and swoons - collapsing into a convenient “fainting couch” designed for just this purpose. Immediately a servant or dashing doctor rushes to her side, uncorks a small bottle of smelling salts, and holds it under her nose. She gasps, springs back to consciousness, and all is well. Of course, most of this scenario is pure fiction. Contrary to popular depictions, the corsets was not some diabolical, patriarchal torture device that caused women to faint constantly - indeed, working women regularly wore them in the fields and factories - while so-called “fainting couches” were nothing of the sort - merely ordinary day beds for lounging. But smelling salts were a real thing, used for centuries to rouse both men and women from fainting spells; indeed, they remain popular today among many professional athletes. But just what are smelling salts? Who invented them, how do they work, and are they safe to use? Well, lace up your corset, position your couch accordingly, and prepare to be shocked into unconsciousness as we dive into what exactly are smelling salts and how exactly they work. Sponsor note: Go to HelloFresh.com/BRAINFOOD10FM now to Get 10 Free Meals + a Free breakfast for Life! Author: Gilles Messier Editor/Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s age of relatively stable international relations, it is hard to imagine the impact of something like the Mongol invasions. Starting in 1206, It was a trying time for those who initially witnessed them: mountains of skulls, burning cities, murder and pillaging on a wide scale. Even if Genghis Khan’ descendants became more urbane and grew closer to their conquered peoples, the initial shock of it all was massive. The conquered people struggled to make sense of the carnage and their new reality. New religious movements that promised a bright future rose to meet the new age. Some of these movements were as apocalyptic as the events recently witnessed. Out of the ashes of the old political order, new states were formed that looked to the Mongols for legitimacy, just as new religious reactions to the carnage looked to instill hope and resistance in the conquered people. A chain of events that could only arise from these conditions led to a very bizarre story of how a Persian king let a leader of a cult take the throne so apocalyptic prophecies could be fulfilled. Author: Yehia Amen Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Picture, if you will, a desert. Chances are, the picture you now have in your head probably looks a lot like Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia, southwest Africa. Among the oldest deserts in the world, this park features a spectacular erg or sand sea of towering, golden-red sand dunes rolling off as far as the eye can see, one of which, known as Dune 7, is the largest in the world at a whopping 380 metres or 245.25 Ariana Grandes tall. Standing amid this desolate, sunbaked landscape, you would expect to be confronted by a profound silence, broken only by the soft whistling of the wind. But this is no ordinary desert, for every so often, the silence will be shattered by a deep, powerful roaring sound, variously likened to thunder, distant drums, or the drone of a low-flying propeller aircraft. But alas for all you Dune fans out there, this ominous sound does not herald the approach of the giant sandworm Shai-Hulud (shy-huh-lood) bless the Maker and his water), but is instead produced by the sand itself. Such “singing” sands are surprisingly common, appearing in deserts and on beaches around the world from Morocco to Kazakhstan, Scotland, Canada, and Hawaii, and have been the subject of myth and folklore for centuries. Yet despite decades of scientific investigation, to this day no-one is quite sure what causes these sands to sing. This is the story of one of the last great mysteries of the natural world. Author: Gilles Messier Editor/Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover the origins and sinister evolution of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the infamous paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party, and how it grew to become one of the most powerful forces in Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices