Introduction to The Portal

The cover image for The Portal Podcast's first live event at The Icehouse in Los Angeles.

In July 2019, Eric Weinstein launched The Portal Podcast. Drawing on "portal story" motifs in literature, the show aims to bring its audience into contact with the most fundamental and transcendent aspects of reality, to break the intellectual stasis that pervades our institutions, to foster individual sense-making, and to galvanize the search for a more hopeful and transformative future. Since launch, the podcast has released over 40 episodes, spread between interviews and audio essays. Other content, including dozens of Instagram livestreams and several standalone YouTube videos, have been released since the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Eric is also active on Twitter and on Clubhouse (as @ericw).

The content on this page covers The Portal's main ideas to help new listeners see their common threads. Our community is built around understanding and further conveying these ideas; we encourage you to join one of our Discord servers to chat and learn, and to contribute to one of our projects.

For more information about our community, see The Portal Group.

For more information about this wiki, see The Portal Wiki.

Selected Portal Content

The podcast episodes listed below explore central themes of The Portal. They are available as audio and video on major streaming services and as transcripts on The Portal Blog. The Portal Clips YouTube channel also has excerpts from the podcast and community-made videos on recurring themes, such as this video on the Twin Nuclei Problem and this video on the N^2 revolution. Other community members have also made their own videos related to The Portal, such as this video on kayfabe.

For a comprehensive list of Portal content, see All Episodes of The Portal Podcast and All Content by Eric Weinstein.

#	Title	Transcript
1	Interview with Peter Thiel - Institutional Failure and Stagnation	Read transcript
2	Solo Episode - What is the Portal?	Read transcript
18	Solo Episode - Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal & Chapter 2020	Read transcript
19	Interview with Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC	Read transcript
20	Interview with Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy	Read transcript
40	Solo Episode - Introducing The Portal Essay Club - What if everyone is simply insane?	Read transcript

Edge Essays

Some of the earliest discussion of the podcast's core ideas occur in Eric Weinstein's Edge.org essays. These are brief essays in response to an annual themed question posed by Edge.

Question	Answer	Year
What is the Last Question?	The Last Question	2018
What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to Be More Widely Known?	Russell Conjugation	2017
What Do You Consider the Most Interesting Recent (Scientific) News? What Makes It Important?	Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy	2016
What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?	M-theory / String Theory is the Only Game in Town	2014
What *Should* We Be Worried About?	Excellence	2013
What is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?	Einstein's Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum	2012
What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?	Kayfabe	2011
How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?	Go Virtual Young Man	2010