Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be

TWiT 1092: You Brought a Knife to a Wolf Fight - Apple Accu… · Jul 13, 2026 History

Marion Stokes ran nine properties and three storage units of VCRs, recording 24-hour news continuously from 1977 to 2012 — 71,000 tapes. She was right: that footage would have been lost otherwise. As Sony kills discs, TikTok ages, and source code rots, the question of who saves digital culture grows more urgent. Expand

What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East G… · Jul 13, 2026 History

The GDR lasted longer than Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the German Empire — and yet it feels like a historical glitch. Fin and Horatio set up why East Germany is simultaneously the most improbable and fascinating state in modern European history. Expand

What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East G… · Jul 13, 2026 History

At Yalta in February 1945, the Big Three carved up post-war Germany into zones of influence while the war was still ongoing. Stalin charmed everyone by bringing in an entire lemon tree for Roosevelt's martinis — the high watermark of American-Russian relations. Expand

What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East G… · Jul 13, 2026 History

Walter Ulbricht didn't rise to lead East Germany through merit — he survived everything else. Nazi persecution, Stalin's purges of German communists in Moscow, the Spanish Civil War. By 1945, he was simply the only one left. Expand

What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East G… · Jul 13, 2026 History

German efficiency is ideologically neutral — it's the ultimate wind-up toy. The GDR became the most successful communist state ever attempted, and West Germany became an economic miracle. The problem was never the German spirit; it was the direction it was pointed. Expand

What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East G… · Jul 13, 2026 History

The Stasi's founders were the cockroach survivors of the twentieth century's worst decades — purged by Hitler, nearly purged by Stalin, battle-hardened by civil war. Their paranoia wasn't personal; it was institutional DNA. That's why the Stasi became something the KGB never was. Expand

What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East G… · Jul 13, 2026 History

From 1979, the Stasi built a vast archive of citizens' odour samples stored in airtight glass jars — a library of smells used to train sniffer dogs for tracking dissidents. The German federal prosecutor was still dipping into this archive in 2007. Expand