From Cameron
My neck is messed up! Not sure how I did it exactly, but it’s been causing me pain and stiffness (stop giggling, Ray) for a week. But then, my upper body generally hurts from kung fu this week too. We did an INSANE amount of pushups.
Aside from that… what cool things can I tell you?
We recorded some fun episodes yesterday about witches and the black death… that’s always an exciting topic. Imagine 30-60% of your city dying over a four year period. When the plague started in 1347, many towns in Europe immediately blamed the poor and the Jews for spreading poisons in the water. Just goes to show you that some people have always loved to throw those on the margins of society under the bus. Simplistic scapegoats for complicated problems. But it’s easy to point fingers at the marginalised and say “burn them!”. Which they did. Today it’s easy to blame immigrants and transgender kids and anti-Semitism for deeply complicated social problems. But nobody look at the billionaires or the corporations who aren’t paying a reasonable amount of tax or profited from moving jobs offshore….
It’s been a week of cool interactions with members.
We had a great two hour call with Jose in Boston (originally from Panama, great story about his great-Grandfather) who has been a Cold War member for ten years! Great guy, has a cool job which we can’t talk about. But he’s been a supporter for a decade and so we jumped on a call to thank him. Time flew.
I also had this email from Andrew Lynn, one of our Renaissance members, with something very cool:
“I’m a long time listener, and there was a Renaissance Times episode a few years ago when you mentioned that Petrarch’s De Viris Illustribus had never been translated to English. This bugged me, but at the time there was nothing I could do about it. But more recently I started learning some of the intricacies of Gemini AI, and I did a bit of work and got it to produce a full translation in what I have to say is shockingly good English. I’ve attached an epub version, and as far as I know you and I are now the only two people with an English copy of this book.”
And yet another cool email from Leon who said we’ve inspired him to write his bachelor’s thesis on the Marshall Plan, which I’m sure will be very useful for future students of the Cold War.
Anyway… I hope you’re all happy and healthy and enjoying life. And I encourage you to have a philosophy that helps you get through life. Make sure you have your own version of what a successful life looks like, something like my Ten Things, so you don’t fall into the trap of living up to someone else’s expectations for you.
SSDD (stay safe don’t die, Fox’s favourite version of goodnight / goodbye)
Cam
My Thought For The Day
“Before the war just about everyone in Germany knew one Jew. The fact is, before Hitler started, nobody hated the Jews in Germany. We had the best record of treatment of our Jewish minority of any country in Europe. Better than France, better than Spain, infinitely better than Poland and Russia where the pogroms were fiendish.
‘Then Hitler started. Telling people the Jews were to blame for the first war, the unemployment, the poverty and everything else that was wrong. People didn’t know what to believe. Almost everyone knew one Jew who was a nice guy. Or just harmless. People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws, they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything.
‘So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. “”
Excerpt from
The Odessa File
Frederick Forsyth
Our TikTok of the Week
@tpnhistory What are the signs that someone you know is a psychopath? 1. High appetite for risk 2. Feeling of inherent superiority 3. Low empathy for others #psychopaths trump #thepsychopathepidemic
♬ original sound – Cam & Ray TPN History – Cam & Ray TPN History
This Week’s Episodes
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Life of Caesar · Published 29 June 2026 The God in the Dog Mask – Vespasian #23This episode we’re deep in the Temple of Isis – which turns out to be exactly where Vespasian and Titus had to spend the night before their joint triumph, for reasons both boring and genuinely weird. We also cover Decius Mundus, a man so obsessed with a married woman that he bribed priests to let him dress up as Anubis and have sex with her…. which Josephus drops right after his suspiciously glowing account of Jesus, purely by coincidence. And… |
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Cold War · Published 25 June 2026 Cold War 311: ColetillasMikoyan, Soviet deputy premier and ice cream king, rolls into Havana in February 1960 with a 40-person delegation, a science exhibit, and advice for Castro to just take all the American-owned land without compensation. Meanwhile, Cuba’s newspaper workers start inserting little clarification notes next to stories they disagree with…. which escalates until the clarifications are longer than the articles, and publishers start fleeing to Miami to write for the Herald. The oldest paper on the island holds an actual funeral… |
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Renaissance · Published 3 July 2026 The Silence of Marguerite – The Renaissance #242The Beguines were a movement of independent women who lived like nuns, owned property, preached in the vernacular, and answered to no man or church…. which, predictably, the church absolutely could not stand. We work through three of the great Beguine mystics, including Marguerite Porete, who spent 18 months on trial giving the Inquisition the silent finger before being burned alive in Paris in 1310. Her book survived, was read seriously by theologians for centuries, and wasn’t definitively credited to… |
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The Bullshit Filter · Published 29 June 2026 The Precariat Trap: Why America Can’t Rise Up – BS Filter #147Today we have guest Scotty B to pick apart America’s slow-motion slide into fascism – the Precariat Trap – and why the 99% can’t afford to pick up a pitchfork even when they probably should. If you would like to listen to the full episode, sign up and become a supporter of the show! It’s less than the cost of a single coffee a week. The post The Precariat Trap: Why America Can’t Rise Up – BS Filter #147 appeared… |
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QAV Australia · Published 1 July 2026 Boring Stocks, Bonkers Returns: QAV AU #926On this week’s show we wrap up the financial year and the numbers are, frankly, bonkers: the AU model portfolio is up nearly 29% for the year, the Light portfolios are up nearly 36% as a group, and the US model is up 44% against a 20% S&P. Tony then does a Pulled Pork on EVZ Limited, a small engineering fabricator that has gone from 16 cents to 65 cents in 12 months and just landed on the buy list.… |
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QAV America · Published 2 July 2026 KSS Me, Darling – QAV America #59This week we dig into Kohl’s (KSS), the mid-range American department store chain that fired its CEO after just 15 weeks on the job for running a secret sweetheart deal with a former romantic partner. Tony and Cam work through the QAV scorecard, weigh up the enormous real estate portfolio sitting beneath the struggling retail business, and debate whether a Gordon Gekko moment is coming. Plus: Fed chair Kevin Warsh goes dark, the Strait of Hormuz tracker, and Willis Lease… |