In this solo episode, Eric shares three related audio essays. In the first essay, Eric admits that he has spent the last four years asserting that Donald Trump represented an Existential Risk, but without the usual contempt for his supporters. Here, Eric finally responds to the frequent requests for clarification of his unusual position, by beginning to explain what is behind his view of the Trump and MAGA phenomena. In the second essay, Eric discusses the odd phenomena of ...
Dec 02, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you don't know Douglas Murray, in the estimation of the The Portal, this may well be the most important voice you will hear from the United Kingdom for some time. In the tradition of De Tocqueville and Alistair Cook's famous "Letter from America," Douglas Murray is America's true friend. He is not the man who tells you that you look great and laughs at all your jokes, but the one who pulls the big mac out of your mouth, flushes your cigarettes down the toilet, locks your liquor cabi...
Oct 24, 2020•5 hr 53 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you have ever wondered whether you were crazy when everyone else claims to see things differently than you do, this is the episode for you. Book clubs are everywhere and we are always asked for book recommendations. But what about the great Essays, Interviews, Conversations, Aphorisms, Shaggy Dog Stories, Lyrics, Courtroom Testimonies, Poems, Movie Scenes, Jokes and the like? Sadly, there is almost never a club in which to discuss them. Yet there are Essays and offerings in other in...
Aug 12, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the pillars of the American Dream has been that of seeing your children go to college. And, for the many families that can't afford the cost of soaring university tuitions, a new controversial institution has arisen to address the problem. That institution is Sugar Baby University, a tuition assistance campaign that attempts to allow attractive young women, and a smaller number of handsome young men, find generous older men to date in the quest to complete a new version of the Americ...
Jul 30, 2020•2 hr 52 min•Transcript available on Metacast With this release, we try something a little different on The Portal. We begin an initiative to search for ways to feature members of the vibrant Portal sub-communities as part of the podcast itself, by requesting that listeners send in their questions around the prompt: “Mass media, markets, and human malware.” The questions that came in were interesting and enlightening, and we hope that you may find the answers similarly useful. We look forward to hearing your feedback on this new forma...
Jul 10, 2020•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast New Yorker writer and book author Andrew Marantz and Eric became friends shortly before the 2016 election when Andrew set off to write the first profile of Eric and Geometric Unity, his theory of Physics. Coming from similar ethnic and politically progressive backgrounds they found plenty of common cause. With the rise of Trump, they then found themselves in subtly different places with Andrew more directly concerned with the rise of the Alt-right and Eric convinced that the Alt-right was likely...
Jul 01, 2020•3 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stephon Alexander is a first class jazz musician as well as a first rate physicist and a professor at Brown University. As the New President of the National Society of Black Physicists, Eric sits down with Stephon over a good deal of wine to discuss particles, politics, blackness and STEM, and other matters as they look back on the last decade of their friendship and their sprawling discussions across music, politics, mathematics, physics and beyond. Thank You to Our Sponsors: Athlet...
Jun 11, 2020•3 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Investor Balaji Srinivasan is a highly original thinker in Silicon Valley on Biotech to Blockchain and everything in between. Most recently, he was quite early in warning us about the Corona virus and was ridiculed for his efforts by many in the world of institutional sense-making. That is before people realized he was not wrong, but simply early. In this episode Eric talks to Balaji on the topic of what it was like to see the future before it arrived and what his crystal ball suggests...
May 22, 2020•3 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the first episode of The Portal which was 100% recorded at home, during quarantine, under social isolation. The guest is none other than my own son Zev Weinstein and the recording was timed to straddle his midnight transition from being 14 into being 15 years old. Zev is currently a 9th grader who occasionally posts to his YouTube Channel GenerationZ ( https://www.youtube.com/c/GenerationZW ) and his Twitter Account @Zev__Weinstein ( https://twitter.com/Zev__Weinstein ). In th...
May 13, 2020•2 hr 55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital is a leading mind in the current wave of venture capitalists making waves. While aware of each other for some time, in this episode Josh sits down with Eric for their first meeting. Together the two explore various topics from comparing notes on their encounters with Jim Watson of DNA fame, to talking about what society gets wrong and how to see that as a source of opportunity. It is frequently asked what makes a great venture capitalist. This conversat...
May 03, 2020•2 hr 43 min•Transcript available on Metacast It is said that there is not one American dream but many, and few have lived more than JD Vance. Growing up in Appalachia on the border between poverty and the lower working class, JD knew economic fear first hand as well as the cultural devastation of the region's post-coal era. Working his way up, he joined the elite US Marine Corps and entered Yale University to attend the countries most exclusive Law School. Not content to stop there, he found his way to Venture Capital in San Fran...
Apr 30, 2020•2 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ryan Holiday is a master manipulator with a cool head, and keen eye for social observation and a big heart. Eric sits down with the Author of "Conspiracy" and tries to get a self-confessed former manipulator and one of the top emerging millennial social analysts to tell us how he unweaves society's artifices to see what is really driving our current moment across many areas. Ryan is a unique voice who uses stoicism to remain intellectually detached but without seemingly succuming to emotio...
Apr 23, 2020•2 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just before the great indooring due to the Pandemic of 2020, Eric sat down with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss his book "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success." Over champagne flutes filled with bubbly, the two discussed the various ways that the success and excesses of American Capitalism were now distorting the American Dream into a dystopian fever vision, making it far harder to wake up from this stasis in time to avoid the previous ...
Apr 16, 2020•3 hr 38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Former National Security analyst turned author Jamie Metzel has written a book called Hacking Darwin. The book attempts to use storytelling to explore where we are as the new era of rewriting our cells and ourselves gets into full swing. Here he sits down with Eric to explore the negatives and positives of our seemingly ineluctable future of God-like power to rewrite biology. Together they discuss the role of story telling and fiction in understanding cutting edge science, the limits o...
Apr 12, 2020•2 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 02, 2020•3 hr 50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Eric Lewis is an open portal, a wonderful friend and one of the most important pianists in the world by our measure. As such, we will not bother with further notes for this episode. If you love the quest of the show as well as authentic soulful music, this is your guy. We simply sat down at a famous Yamaha grand piano at The Village recording studio in Los Angeles and this is the interview that transpired. Thank You to Our Sponsors: Theragun: Theragun.com/PORTAL Wine Access: WineAccess.com...
Mar 28, 2020•2 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this second episode of the Portal to be released during shelter-in-place restrictions during the Corona Virus Pandemic, we release an older discussion with Daniel Shmachtenberger on whether there is any plausible long term scenario for human flourishing confined to a single shared planet. Daniel is seen as a leader of the growing Game B subculture of the human potential movement. This group bets that there is a second evolutionary stable strategy for cohabiting not based ...
Mar 27, 2020•4 hr 39 min•Transcript available on Metacast James O'Keefe is a dangerous man. He records people without their knowledge and publishes the results using the full power of our technological toolkit. He is well versed in the details of the law as to what can and cannot be legally recorded and/or published without the consent or even awareness of his targets. He is willing to risk prison to capture his stories and he has developed a policy of not settling out of court, even when it would be financially advantageous to do so. Clearly, he is wi...
Mar 19, 2020•3 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over half a year ago, immediately following the reported death of Jeffrey Epstein, Eric recorded a solo episode that he never released in hopes that its subject matter would be overtaken by investigative journalism. As this has not happened, it is being released with some trepidation in March of 2020 due to the issue of state involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Eric discusses his memories of his single bizarre meeting (circa 2004?) with Jeffrey Epstein in Epstein's 71st St townhouse in...
Mar 07, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast In a world which is often slow-moving and even stagnant, there are always sectors and individuals who buck the trends. In this episode of The Portal, Eric sits down with his favorite surfing hero Kai Lenny who is pioneering a new approach to big wave surfing. By availing himself of the latest technology and dedicating his life to innovation and discipline, all-around waterman Kai Lenny is redefining what is possible with boards and waves. Whether it is kite surfing, hydrofoils, paddle boards or ...
Feb 29, 2020•2 hr 56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Philosopher and University of Chicago Professor Agnes Callard sits down with Eric on this episode of the portal. Agnes is a champion of the philosophical tradition of attempting to detach the capacity for inquiry and reason from the fog of feelings and societal taboos that often keep us from delving deeper into the questions that animate our lives. Agnes began this unusual back and forth by writing an article about status negotiation in first meetings shortly after the pair first met....
Feb 24, 2020•2 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Eric sits down with leading fitness geek, guru, thinker and human guinea-pig Ben Greenfield to learn how one of the world's most highly regarded trainers and fitness experts cuts through the nightmare that is our medical literature. The academic and medical literature in health and medicine is a disaster. Studies are performed and reported in non-standard and idiosyncratic ways which are then further distorted by a press often looking more for headlines and scoops than facts and ...
Feb 16, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Historically, fighting obscenity and indecency charges has always been a central part of the free speech movement. Jim Morrison, Mae West, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin have all been arrested for exciting the public in ways that authorities have found threatening. Recently, however, the erotic and comedic arts have undergone more cryptic attacks via Operation Chokepoint, "cancellation", "no platforming", and inadequate press coverage given to cases of legal intimidation (e.g. the federal case un...
Feb 01, 2020•2 hr 53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Roger Penrose is arguably the most important living descendent of Albert Einstein’s school of geometric physics. In this episode of The Portal, we avoid the usual questions put to roger about quantum foundations and quantum consciousness. Instead we go back to ask about the current status of his thinking on what would have been called “Unified Field Theory” before it fell out of fashion a couple of generations ago. In particular, Roger is the dean of one of the only rival schools of thought to h...
Jan 25, 2020•2 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast All of our Mice are Broken. On this episode of The Portal, Bret and Eric sit down alone with each other for the first time in public. There was no plan. There was however, a remarkable story of science at its both best and worst that had not been told in years. After an initial tussle, we dusted off the cobwebs and decided to reconstruct it raw and share it with you, our Portal audience, for the first time. I don't think it will be the last as we are now again looking for our old notes to t...
Jan 18, 2020•2 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast This "housekeeping" (cough cough) episode of The Portal is only for the hard core listeners who launched this experiment with us. This year we begin to take on the idea of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex or "DISC". From "Terms of Service" changes, to selective enforcement of rules, peer review, "Strategic Silence", 'authoritative sources only', deboosting, shadow banning, down ranking, "unbiasing", "Good Censorship", 'diversity and inclusion' oaths, 'cancel culture', no-platformin...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Somewhere on the road between Stalingrad and Forever21, something essential got misplaced amidst the bathos. Eric works through a bottle of Red wine on air with social, literary and artistic theorist Anna Khachiyan (co-host of the explosive and popular Red Scare podcast) to find out what is brewing on the anti-woke Left among the intellectual daughters of Camille Paglia. Anna takes us through her project of the reconstructed feminine combining irreverent intellectual dominance with a return to v...
Dec 21, 2019•2 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Eric sits down with Tyler Cowen to discuss how/why a Harvard educated chess prodigy would choose a commuter school to launch a stealth attack on the self-satisfied economic establishment, various forms of existential risk, tech/social stagnation and more. On first glance, Tyler Cowen is an unlikely candidate for America's most influential economist. Since 2003, Cowen has grown his widely read and revered economics blog Marginal Revolution with lively thought, insight and prose r...
Dec 17, 2019•2 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Garrett Lisi, the so called "Surf Bum with a Theory of Everything (or T.O.E.)", is a PhD theoretical physicist who has refused to be captured by the theoretical physics community. By making shrewd investments, he has avoided holding meaningful employment for his entire adult life. Instead, he lives in Maui and travels the world chasing the perfect wave. In this episode Garrett and Eric sit down to discuss the current status of Garrett's ideas for a final theory based on a mysterious object ...
Dec 06, 2019•2 hr 47 min•Transcript available on Metacast What happened to the Mathematical and Scientific art movement after MC Escher? It went underground. In this episode of the Portal, Eric begins tracking down the leaders of this hidden movement; one that is smuggling higher level science into transcendent art forms. Eric had to coax one the movement’s foremost members, London Tsai, to come out of obscurity where he had been preserving his mathematical art in sarcophagi of unopened bubble wrap sitting for decades in various New York Cit...
Dec 01, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
