The Portal – Details, episodes & analysis

In this solo episode, Eric shares three related audio essays. In the first essay, Eric admits that he has spent the last four years asserting that Donald Trump represented an Existential Risk, but without the usual contempt for his supporters. Here, Eric finally responds to the frequent requests for clarification of his unusual position, by beginning to explain what is behind his view of the Trump and MAGA phenomena.  

In the second essay, Eric discusses the odd phenomena of Trump's post election strategy of contesting the election, and what to make of all those who refuse to accept Biden's apparent win despite the state of the legal battles and election certifications. 

In the last essay, Eric discusses loyalty in the context of close relationships where there are accusations of impropriety, and uses the framework set out to provide context for Sam Harris' public displeasure with still unnamed members of the Intellectual Dark Web. 

N.B. Eric and Sam have recently discussed the matter privately to make sure they have a generally shared mutual understanding of the events. 

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If you don't know Douglas Murray, in the estimation of the The Portal, this may well be the most important voice you will hear from the United Kingdom for some time. In the tradition of De Tocqueville and Alistair Cook's famous "Letter from America," Douglas Murray is America's true friend. He is not the man who tells you that you look great and laughs at all your jokes, but the one who pulls the big mac out of your mouth, flushes your cigarettes down the toilet, locks your liquor cabinet and personally drives you to rehab until you straighten yourself out. 

I have met many men who train in combat sports, or extoll the virtues of masculinity. However, I know of none braver than Douglas Murray. In our time, this is one voice of relentless reason that everyone needs to hear.

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It is said that there is not one American dream but many, and few have lived more than JD Vance. Growing up in Appalachia on the border between poverty and the lower working class, JD knew economic fear first hand as well as the cultural devastation of the region's post-coal era. Working his way up, he joined the elite US Marine Corps and entered Yale University to attend the countries most exclusive Law School. Not content to stop there, he found his way to Venture Capital in San Francisco while marrying into a multicultural relationship with a wife of Indian descent, herself supercharged with a dynamism informed by the classic immigrant experience.  

So it was something of a surprise when JD became a national best selling author with his book Hillbilly Elegy which poignantly tells the tale of growing up in a family under pressure rocked by one of the most difficult economic experiences to be found anywhere in the United states. 

Eric and JD sit down to discuss the history of coal and politics, the evolving American Left in the era after the demise of organized labor. Through it they discuss the difficulty of finding out footing in the collision and disappointment of so many American dreams which all too frequently remain tantalizingly out of reach for the majority of those who dare to dream them. 

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Ryan Holiday is a master manipulator with a cool head, and keen eye for social observation and a big heart. Eric sits down with the Author of "Conspiracy" and tries to get a self-confessed former manipulator and one of the top emerging millennial social analysts to tell us how he unweaves society's artifices to see what is really driving our current moment across many areas. 

Ryan is a unique voice who uses stoicism to remain intellectually detached but without seemingly succuming to emotional or moral disinterest in the issues of our day. With a background in marketing and media. he has gone beyond mere vice signaling to try to help people see how open they are to having their own media and digital habits weaponized against them. In some ways, one could say that he has migrated from grey-hat mind hacker to a white hat analyst and conversationalist helping us to better understand ourselves using ancient wisdom in a modern moment.  

This interview was recorded slightly before the quarantining and so is interesting to think of in light of what is about to happen. 

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Just before the great indooring due to the Pandemic of 2020, Eric sat down with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss his book "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success." Over champagne flutes filled with bubbly, the two discussed the various ways that the success and excesses of American Capitalism were now distorting the American Dream into a dystopian fever vision, making it far harder to wake up from this stasis in time to avoid the previous fates of fallen empires. 

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Former National Security analyst turned author Jamie Metzel has written a book called Hacking Darwin. The book attempts to use storytelling to explore where we are as the new era of rewriting our cells and ourselves gets into full swing. Here he sits down with Eric to explore the negatives and positives of our seemingly ineluctable future of God-like power to rewrite biology. Together they discuss the role of story telling and fiction in understanding cutting edge science, the limits of bio-hacking regulation and the rise of mainland China as the outlying superpower of state sponsored experimentation. 

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A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look

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Eric Lewis is an open portal, a wonderful friend and one of the most important pianists in the world by our measure. As such, we will not bother with further notes for this episode. If you love the quest of the show as well as authentic soulful music, this is your guy. We simply sat down at a famous Yamaha grand piano at The Village recording studio in Los Angeles and this is the interview that transpired. 

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In this second episode of the Portal to be released during shelter-in-place restrictions during the Corona Virus Pandemic, we release an older discussion with Daniel Shmachtenberger on whether there is any plausible long term scenario for human flourishing confined to a single shared planet. 

Daniel is seen as a leader of the growing Game B subculture of the human potential movement. This group bets that there is a second evolutionary stable strategy for cohabiting not based on conflict or rivalry, even for life raised in Game A (i.e. standard evolutionary and economic environments based on scarcity and rivalrous goods. Eric asks Daniel about where the bright spots and progress might be in this movement which refuses to accept the fate that that Eric has elsewhere put forward as the Twin Nuclei Problem of having unlocked the power of both Cell and Atom in the early 1950s without the wisdom to use it. 

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James O'Keefe is a dangerous man. He records people without their knowledge and publishes the results using the full power of our technological toolkit. He is well versed in the details of the law as to what can and cannot be legally recorded and/or published without the consent or even awareness of his targets. He is willing to risk prison to capture his stories and he has developed a policy of not settling out of court, even when it would be financially advantageous to do so. Clearly, he is willing to risk ruin and hatred for what he is doing, and is therefore not a man to be lightly trifled with. 

In this episode, Eric sits down with James to try to understand the mutant future of journalism as it reckons with the power of new technology, while continuing to move away from traditional newspapers and reporting. Eric tries to discover what is truly motivating O'keefe and why he would want to come on a show that has been so openly critical of his organization. 

James has many who see him as a crusading hero. He has also been accused of unethical deception, trespassing, entrapment, selective editing, and an entire litany of ethics complaints from traditional media. Oddly, however, more standard reporters working for traditional news desks openly discuss among themselves the professional need to deceive their targets in order to get the truth, or at least the story. Such strategies include using disingenuous flattery, pretending to be the source's friend, threats, the lure of fame, and a host of other edgy techniques to get people to say things that the reporter knows will likely be personally disastrous for the person being quoted. 

This raises the question of just what it is that makes James O'Keefe different from a more mainstream reporter. Is it his method, more than his chosen targets? Is it that he really doctors his footage or instead that he has revived older journalistic techniques to hunt new journalists? This interview may not answer all of these questions, but we hope it may prove to be a conversation unlike any you have previously heard on this topic.

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