The BrainFood Show

Following December 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which finally drew the United States into the Second World War, the attack’s architect, Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, infamously lamented that: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” While in reality Yamamoto likely never said this, the sentiment proved shockingly prophetic, for almost overnight the outraged nation shifted its entire economy towards a singular goal: crush the Axis Powers. Factories which had once produced household goods like sewing machines, typewriters, and automobiles were converted over to churning out rifles, helmets, tanks, jeeps, aircraft, and other vital war weapons by the hundreds of thousands, while a huge force of non-combatant civilians - including record numbers of women - were hired to staff them. The result was a nigh-unstoppable “Arsenal of Democracy” that ultimately swamped the wartime economies of Germany, Italy, and Japan and guaranteed Allied victory. But one American wartime factory stood out among the rest: Air Force Plant 31 in Ypsilanti (ip-si-lan-tee) Township, Michigan - better known as Willow Run. At peak capacity in April 1944, a complete B-24 Liberator heavy bomber was rolling out this facility’s doors every single hour - a staggering feat of industrial production that has yet to be matched. This is the story of the greatest factory ever built.

Author: Gilles Messier
Host/Editor/Pilot: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila
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According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office in Geneva, between 1940 and 2008 there were 157 people who fell out of planes without a parachute during a crash and lived to tell about it. A full 42 of those falls occurred at heights over 10,000 feet (above 3,000 meters), such as the tale of 17 year old Juliane Koepcke who not only survived an approximately 10,000 foot free fall, but also a subsequent 10 day trek alone through the Peruvian rain forest with no real supplies other than a little bag of candy.

Now, while you might think surely nothing like that could ever happen to you, it turns out whether falling from 30,000 feet or a much more common 30, the same basic strategies apply. And for reference here, approximately 30 feet or about 9 meters is around the height at which you begin to be more likely to die from your injuries than survive. At heights as little as about 80 feet, only about 1 in 10 people survive and it pretty much all goes to hell from there.

So what can you do to increase your chances of survival if you ever find yourself doing your best impression of Icarus?

Authors: Karl Smallwood and Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila
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It is one of the most iconic cinematic weapons in history, on par with James Bond’s Walther PPK, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, and Indiana Jones’s bullwhip. Strap it to your back, and you instantly become an unstoppable one-man army, a bullet hose spitting hot lead at 6,000 rounds per minute and turning dense jungle into leaf mulch, cars into twisted scrap metal, and your enemies into piles of hamburger meat. It is, of course, the M134 Minigun AKA “Old Painless”, the blisteringly fast rotary-barrel machine gun wielded by the likes of Jesse “The Body” Ventura in Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Unlike many other movie weapons, “Ol’ Painless” seems remarkably plausible, but does such a weapon really exist, and could you wield it the way it’s almost always shown in movies?

Well, strap on your bullet proof vest, as we dive into how humanity went from the Gatling Gun, to the incredible M61 Vulcan which, in turn, birthed one of cinema’s most badass, and misunderstood, weapons.

Author: Gilles Messier
Host/Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 Intro
1:06 Inventing the Gatling Gun
5:31 How Automatic Firearms Work and Aviation
15:49 Project Vulcan
19:10 The Incredible M134 "Minigun"
25:25 So, Is the “Ol’ Painless” Version of the Minigun From Movies Real?
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In today's compilation episode, we're looking at the greatest naval espionage mission in history, that time the moon nearly started World War 3, WTF is up with embalming communists and many other fascinating cold war stories.

0:00 Silent Seas: The Top Secret, Greatest Cold War Naval Espionage Mission
9:54 That Time the Moon Nearly Started World War 3 (and Other Silly Cold War Shenanigans)
19:09 Death by Blue Peacock: Britain’s Bizarre and Deadly Cold War “Rainbow Codes”
29:17 The Incredible Real Life Cold War Bond Villain Ice Lair
52:50 The Cold War's Most Pathetically Hilarious Air Battle
1:00:01 WTF is Up with Embalming and Displaying Communists?
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Apologies for my audio quality in this one. Adobe kept crashing on me, so we had to use the audio Simon was receiving which isn’t ideal. Also a bit under the weather and lost my voice before recording, so maybe for the best that I wasn’t coming through in pristine quality. Next episode will sound much, much better!

In any event, in this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at the real story behind the song In the Air Tonight.

Moving on to the meat of today’s episode, we jump into the fascinating story of one Willie Francis, a young man convicted for murder, executed, then executed again about a year later, despite the fact that it would very much seem as if he was innocent the whole time.
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