The Portal
Kast Media
The Portal is an exploration into discovery, including conversations with thought leaders. Host Eric Weinstein, Managing Director of Thiel Capital, brings his unique expertise and diverse roster of guests for a wide range of discussions, including science, culture, business, and capitalism. The show will feature people whose lives demonstrate that portals into what we would normally consider…
Episodes HN recommended
39: Admission To Sugar Baby U.
Jul 30, 2020 • 1 h 52 min30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the Fall
Apr 16, 2020 • 2 h 38 min25: The Construct - Jeffrey Epstein
Mar 7, 2020 • 1 h 10 min21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart
Feb 1, 2020 • 1 h 53 min19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC
Jan 18, 2020 • 2 h 18 min18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal & Chapter 2020
Jan 15, 2020 • 1 h 09 min15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself.
Dec 6, 2019 • 1 h 47 min4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception
Aug 20, 2019 • 2 h 47 min2: What Is The Portal?
Jul 19, 2019 • 30 min1: Peter Thiel
Jul 17, 2019 • 2 h 53 min
Recent episodes
42: Cashing Out My Trump & IDW Positions
Dec 2, 2020 • 54 min41: Douglas Murray - Heroism 2020: Defense of Our Own Civilization
Oct 24, 2020 • 4 h 53 min40: Introducing The Portal Essay Club - What if everyone is simply insane?
Aug 12, 2020 • 1 h 12 min38: Mass Media, Markets, and Human Malware: A Portal Q&A
Jul 10, 2020 • 58 min37: Andrew Marantz - Surfing the Wake of The Woke
Jul 1, 2020 • 3 h 14 min36: Dark Matter, Black Matters and All That Jazz
Jun 11, 2020 • 3 h 12 min35: Balaji Srinivasan - The Heretic & The Virus
May 22, 2020 • 3 h 21 min34: Zev Weinstein - On Parenting, Boys & Generation Z
May 13, 2020 • 1 h 55 min33: Josh Wolfe - The Mind Financing The Future
May 3, 2020 • 1 h 43 min32: J. D. Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares
Apr 30, 2020 • 2 h 19 min31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes
Apr 23, 2020 • 2 h 28 min29: Jamie Metzl - The Bio-Hacker will see you now, Ready or Not
Apr 12, 2020 • 2 h 04 minA Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look
Apr 2, 2020 • 2 h 50 min28: Eric Lewis - The Singular Genius of Elew
Mar 28, 2020 • 2 h 07 min27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses
Mar 27, 2020 • 3 h 39 min26: James O’Keefe - What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century
Mar 19, 2020 • 2 h 30 min24: Kai Lenny - To Play and Flirt with Giants
Feb 29, 2020 • 1 h 56 min23: Agnes Callard - Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits
Feb 24, 2020 • 2 h 12 min22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness
Feb 16, 2020 • 1 h 12 min20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy
Jan 25, 2020 • 2 h 24 min17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”
Dec 21, 2019 • 2 h 21 min16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized
Dec 17, 2019 • 2 h 19 min14: London Tsai - The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians
Dec 1, 2019 • 1 h 04 min13: Garry Kasparov - Avoiding Zugzwang in AI and Politics
Nov 23, 2019 • 1 h 36 min12: Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine
Nov 21, 2019 • 1 h 31 min11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends
Nov 15, 2019 • 2 h 35 min10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree
Oct 31, 2019 • 1 h 42 min9: Bryan Callen - Cracking Wise
Oct 31, 2019 • 2 h 15 min8: Andrew Yang - The Dangerously Different Candidate The Media Wants You To Ignore
Oct 2, 2019 • 1 h 05 min7: Bret Easton Ellis - The Dark Laureate of Generation X
Sep 30, 2019 • 1 h 57 min
What HN said
- lukiferJan 2020I don't disagree; but propaganda is in the eye of the beholder. Eric Weinstein's podcast [0][1] has recently been discussing similar phenomena in left-leaning media and academia, under the label "Distributed Idea-Suppression Complex" (including alleged media blackouts of Bernie + Yang).
At first order of approximation, a lot can be explained by simple incentives, and who pays the bills (ie, advertisers, which at that scale necessarily include megacorporations who are hyper-sensitive to any PR impacts across their hundreds of subsidiary brands).
But there's something bigger than that: a sort of credibility table-stakes, demanding alignment with a particular narrative ecosystem to be let into the party. What's insidious about this sort of self-selecting self-censorship is that it requires little-to-no to centralized orchestration; just swarms of conforming individuals who know where they're bread is buttered. As soon as one is rewarded by punishing a heretic, thus setting an example to others to not stray too far afield, a particular complex can ossify quickly.
While it's false equivalence to claim that MSNBC/etc actively propagandizes to the same extent as Fox (especially aggregated over the last twenty years), the phenomenon seems to occur independently of political preferences or ideology; even rationalist, free-speech-absolutist communities can develop sacred cows, talking points, and taboos.
In essence, I think there's an argument that the media has always had a propagandistic element (as discussed vociferously by Chomsky), allowing some range of open debate, while simultaneously marking some views as a priori off limits. What's changed is that the media landscape has fractionated: left-vs-right in traditional broadcast, and a long tail of communities and media bubbles and cults of personality online. What's more, I'd suggest that within each media sub-landscape, the range of acceptable debate has significantly narrowed; debate is now something that happens between tribes, rather than something that is permissible internally.
What's your reasoning as to the (non-Fox) media "actively trying to cover up Trump crimes"? It seems to me that circa 2017, they were on top of Trump's shenanigans (the demand was there, and it was good for ratings and profits); I still see no shortage of anti-Trump content, but I think everyone's burned out by the horrific normalcy of it all. Do you see something being actively orchestrated, beyond just advertisers/ratings/etc, and if so, why and by whom?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/18-slipping-the-disc-s...
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/19-bret-weinstein-the-...
- adolphJan 2022Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently conveys, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. The idea of preference falsification was put forth by the social scientist Timur Kuran in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies as part of his theory of how people's stated preferences are responsive to social influences. It laid the foundation for his theory of why unanticipated revolutions can occur. The concept is related to ideas of social proof as well as choice blindness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
More about Kuran:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/11/wh...
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-timur-kuran-economic...
- josephgNov 2019Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on The Portal (Eric Weinstein's podcast) a few months back:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...
I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and Weinstein.
- fareeshSep 2022Eric Weinstein sat down with Ashley Mathews (Riley Reid) and discussed this a few years ago on his Portal podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/21-ashley-mathews-aka-...
- lowdoseApr 2020I also thought the ending was subpar compared to the genius narrative twists in the first two seasons of Mr Robot. I agree with your take on the system, Eric Weinstein's latest podcast has some pretty interesting remarks about it. The youtube video is not up yet so link to the specific portal episode
https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-portal/id146999956...
- scopJul 2020I recommend that people listen to that episode even if it's not interesting to you. Very good food for thought.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s Audio: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...