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.

Furthermore, I think what's been somewhat confusing is that we've had—if I recall correctly—16 different interview episodes and one solo episode so far, and I don't think that is exactly what The Portal was intended to be. In fact, you could argue that The Portal has not even begun. What we've done is to build up an audience and to habituate the audience to a different style of interaction. I think we had to figure out what we were going to do if we wanted to bring you certain high-level concepts that often get lost because the admonition to make sure that you don't lose your audience along the way means that you never get very far because you're always doing the sort of preliminary groundwork, and you never actually getting to the meat of the issue. And I think one of the things that we are very proud of is that we have a very motivated audience who's willing to sometimes even listen to the show more than once, or do it with a notepad, so that if there are unfamiliar concepts, they can be looked up, and in fact, we've noted that there have been several communities spring up around the show so that people can trade their questions and we've been watching you guys answer each other's questions in a way that's really been gratifying. So having a lot of experts in the audience has been a huge boon to the show, and we hope to try to figure out how to make community in a meaningful sense a larger part of the show on a going-forward basis.  

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.  

And so, rather than fear that anything would emerge with leadership, because, of course, anything with leadership looks like Hitler to many people, anything that looks at all ritualistic looks like a cult. I think we're not going to worry about those things quite so much. So I think, if I can, I'm going to try to realize that, in fact, the audience is leading, and that I need to do a better job of just accepting that there's a lot of interest in new ways of thinking, and this is one way of kind of getting unstuck to try to find The Portal out of the stasis, and so if the show is to be true to its original mission, I think we're going to have to take some risks, which might mean drinking songs. It might mean ritualistic behavior, and hopefully it'll mean a lot more opportunities to interact through live dates. The show is going to remain unabashedly a commercial enterprise, because otherwise it would never happen.

And I want to give a huge shout out to Cast Media, who has been the original studio and effectively a co-producer of the show along with Jesse Michaels and the advertisers and sponsors who 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 on enterprise. And so, even though some of you find the ads annoying although others of you find them actually entertaining or interesting, what we need to do is to come up with a better model, a model in which sponsors get access to the kind of heart and passion for sticking with the show. So I think I'm going to try to figure out how the riskvertizer model works in earnest this year, but it's also important to me that those of you who wish to avoid having a brain sullied with any kind of commercial intrusion have an option to do that. We've been doing that through the YouTube videos, and in that respect, I feel like in general if you're willing to sit through maybe an initial ad that rolls before the video goes, you usually have an uninterrupted viewing or listening experience thereafter. We'll try to get the videos a little bit in better sync with the audio, but most importantly what I want to get to is what the show is really about. And the last thing I will say on the sort of initial housekeeping is we probably needed to recognize earlier that we need your help. A lot of you guys are audio engineers, or you're graphic designers, or you're website builders. I don't quite know how to source the talent we need from the pool, but I've been bombarded by wonderful offers from any of you some of you at the absolute top of your field who want to help this podcast because you want to see us grow as a movement. And maybe I was slow to recognize how genuine the interest was in and just to say thank you. I mean, I think it's sort of hard to recognize that it's working for various internal psychological reasons. I've been incredibly touched and I really want to incorporate some of the offers of help because Lord knows we need it, just haven't figured out how to do it yet. So stay tuned. I think we'll be organizing that shortly. We've now got a Facebook group for the Portal podcast. We've got an Instagram account that's growing. Twitter's still our largest following, but the actual subscriptions to the podcast but on both YouTube through Apple and other places now quite large, and I think it'll be increasingly hard to shut down these channels to you so that even if we lose one or two of them because of something we say, hopefully we'll remain engaged to and will try to make sure that we were not the vulnerable to having the oxygen cut off.

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