World’s first podcast network✦ Established February 2005✦ Brisbane · Australia✦ Now hosting the shows Cameron co-hosts✦ Books · A film · 21 years of audio✦ World’s first podcast network✦ Established February 2005✦ Brisbane · Australia✦ Now hosting the shows Cameron co-hosts✦ Books · A film · 21 years of audio✦

Weekly Roundup · by Cameron Reilly

TPN Weekly Roundup — 2026-10-03

From Cameron

I hope you’re having an awesome week.

What can I share with you?

Ray and I didn’t record this week because it’s school holidays here and, as we didn’t get a chance to go up to Bundaberg to visit my mum like we normally do, I decided to take the day off on Thursday and take the family to Stradbroke Island with some friends from Kung Fu. Stradbroke is an island off the coast of Brisbane. You catch a ferry over, which takes about half an hour, and then there’s a number of beaches you can catch a bus to. It’s pretty spectacular.

Stradbroke

We saw humpback whales breaching from the coastline. My mate Aleksei had a drone in his backpack, which he sent out over the pods that were breaching, which was pretty incredible.

We also got some drone footage of Chrissy and I being kung fu dorks, doing some kung fu forms on the beach (and Fox is behind us in the orange top playing in the water).

This week, I’ve been listening to Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, the one he composed after Stalin died in 1953, which has a pretty famous second movement known as the Stalin movement, and then the third and fourth movements are heavily encoded with Shostakovich’s own initials and the name of one of his former students, who he was in love with at the time.

This week, I’m going to be obsessively listening to his fourth symphony, the one he benched for 25 years because he was worried he would end up in a gulag if it was performed during the Stalin years.

I also read Robert Heinlein’s first short story, Life Line, written in 1939 and it kind of blew my mind because it’s basically about a scientist who figures out a way to build a machine that can accurately predict the time and date of someone’s death. But the way he explains it is essentially talking about block universe theory, something that fell out of “Minkowski spacetime”, which itself fell out of Einstein’s theories of relativity, which were only a few decades old when Heinlein wrote his short story and not very well appreciated by the public (then or now, quite frankly).

But that led me to re-read Sir Arthur Eddington’s book, The Nature of the Physical World, from a series of lectures he gave in 1927, where he talks about relativity and quantum mechanics. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in such things.

Today, Chrissy and I finished the season finale of The Bear, which I enjoyed, but thought it was a little bit of a soft landing for a show that was possibly the most traumatic television I think I’ve ever seen.

Oh, my other news is that today I hit my lowest weight on record. I’ve been recording my weight since 2003, so I’m now down to 87.3 kilograms (192 pounds). When I started Kung Fu five years ago, I was up around about 110 kg (242 pounds). So it’s been a pretty incredible journey.

All right, enough of me (or too little of me, depending on what you’re weighing, I guess).

Let’s get some podcast updates.

Talk to you next week.

Cameron

My Thought For The Day

The atom is as porous as the solar system. If we eliminated all the unfilled space in a man’s body and collected his protons and electrons into one mass, the man would be reduced to a speck just visible with a magnifying glass.

Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

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Which country is biggest? France or China? france macron coldwar #historytime

♬ original sound – Cam & Ray TPN History – Cam & Ray TPN History

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