18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal and Chapter 2020: Difference between revisions

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And I want to give a huge shout out to [https://kastmedia.com/ Kast Media], who has been the original studio and effectively a co-producer of the show, along with Jesse Michaels, and the advertisers and the sponsors who have been paying for the equipment, for the people who work on the show, so that nobody had to shell out anything in order to get this. The show would never have happened if it wasn't taking place as a commercial enterprise.

Studying this work led to the idea of talking about EGOs, that is, embedded growth obligations. Now, [[Embedded Growth Obligation|embedded growth obligations]] are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance, technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s. And yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished.

What some of you don't know is that I believe that, inside of that group of four, one of us wrote a book immediately after getting a PhD, which is Heather Heying's book, [https://www.amazon.com/Antipode-Seasons-Extraordinary-Wildlife-Madagascar/dp/0312281528 Antipode], about her solo travels to the jungles of Madagascar. So if you have a young woman in your life who is looking for a pretty impressive female role model, I would say Heather's toughness, intelligence, and grit makes for pretty terrific reading, and I'd recommend buying the book Antipode for that young lady.

Now, I don't know whether I'm nuts, but I do know that at previous points, I've suggested things into both the mathematical and physics communities that have later been shown, by other people, to be correct. And while I was waiting for a some kind of confirmation, I was being told, "Eric, you're completely off base. You're not getting it." One of these situations involved something called the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiberg%E2%80%93Witten_invariants Seiberg-Witten equations], which I put forward in the 1980s, around probably 87, and I was told that these couldn't possibly be right, that they weren't sufficiently nonlinear. I'll tell the whole story about how if spinors were involved, then obviously [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Hitchin Nigel Hitchin] would have told us so, blah, blah, blah.  

So the next thing has to do with who we are, what is this place, and what I've called Geometric Unity. It is the aim of making The Portal a place where I can have a channel that cannot be controlled by the academic complex, and I'll come back to that in a second. The third area that I want to talk about has to do with markets. Now markets are really the sponsor of our freedom. By having non-centrally directed, locally organized human activity, free agents are able to contract freely with each other, exchange with each other, build prosperity, lift each other up, and if you are a progressive, you almost certainly really have to appreciate the power of markets. But our markets are in great danger at the moment, in my opinion, because they're being meddled with, and they are returning results that indicate that only a tiny fraction of us are worthy of reaping the true rewards of the markets, while many of us feel that we're being left behind.

However, last year I made an interesting calculation. I decided to look at the presidencies of all of our leading research institutions, and to try to figure out how many of them belonged to people who came after the Baby Boom.

The purpose of The Portal, if you will, is to create a channel that has never existed. Now, I could try to submit everything to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Review_Letters Phys Review Letters]. I could try to submit to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrica Econometrica]. I could try to go through all of the normal channels, and I think what I've started to realize is, part of the problem of having screwed up all of this early stuff in our lives, of having tried to do this the formal and "right" way, so to speak–the privilege of having been screwed over so directly and so beautifully by the system, is the right to raise the middle finger to the institutions. Like, how dare you expect that I'm going to use your quiet procedures.

If you look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky Noam Chomsky] sitting at MIT, you will realize that it was once the case that such people were much more common. You can look up a fellow, an old friend of mine named Serge Lang, and you could scarcely believe that such a person could have existed at Yale, but that person very much did exist. You can look at an old controversy about David Baltimore and a woman named Margo O'Toole, and the courage of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ptashne Mark Ptashne] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gilbert Walter Gilbert] in fighting a Nobel Laureate when Margo O'Toole accused a colleague of the Nobel Laureate of misconduct, or at least, irreproducibility of results.  

If you look at our [[1: Peter Thiel|episode]] with [https://twitter.com/timurkuran Timur Kuran], we introduced you to a concept of preference falsification. Right now, the danger of the Andrew Yang and the Jeffrey Epstein situations is that they have conveniently communicated to many people, "Of course, we're going to mess with your sense-making. What is it that you're prepared to do about it?"