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

===Housekeeping===

'''Eric:''' Hello, you've found The Portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and this is sort of an unusual edition of The Portal because it's coming at the beginning of a new decade and I wanted to set some intentions, and also to reserve recap where we've been for the last half a year that the show has been on the on the air and on the internet. There are no notes. There's nothing planned. What I'd like to do is to just try to speak directly about some of the things that's been on my mind and give you all my thoughts on your feedback on the show, and where I think we're going to be going to next. So, with your permission, let's begin.  

It's been a pretty interesting half of the year. The show has built up a fairly sizable audience. And what's more, there are a lot of influential and important voices within our audience, so I know that when I'm speaking I'm reaching a lot of the people who would be on my dream list of people to interview, to talk to, and in fact to plot next steps with.

So I think we've had a pretty successful run of it. We can still grow the show bigger, but the show is now large enough that I actually don't mind losing some of our listeners and some of our viewers by going into more challenging topics. And so I don't think that our primary goal is going to be building the audience quite as much as it was during the first 6 months.

One of those efforts, that's particularly special is that we're trying to enlist artists that can be visual artists. That could be digital artists. It could also be musicians.

And the idea we have is that that legion of artists will be able to help push out many of the higher-level ideas that we would find challenging to do just in speech, by using, sort of, the the brain's full abilities to take in new information and also to use the sort of the transcendent modality to kind of open hearts and minds to truly different and unfamiliar ways of thinking. So I think we may try to get that going. We need to obviously to build a website. We need to have some ways in which people who wish to avoid advertising can can subscribe to the podcast, and other people who want to contribute to be part of this as a movement. We just held her first live show at the Ice House in Pasadena, and thanks everybody who came out. The show sold out extremely quickly, even though we sort of didn't exactly advertise where and when it was, except for cryptically at first. And one of the things that allowed us to do is to meet the listenership en masse, and you know was a truly interesting, and, in many different ways, diverse group of people that were pretty even split between the anti- and pro-Trump voices. People got along great. So we don't seem to be as affected as I was concerned we might be by the election cycle. And what I sensed was that people really want to use the show to coalesce and come together and there's a lot of fear at the moment about anything tribal or anything cult-like and therefore, anything that might be tribal trades at a discount. So I think we might actually take a contrarian position and decide that the show in fact deserves more community, based on the way in which we see our listenership and our viewership going.