If you have ever wondered whether you were crazy when everyone else claims to see things differently than you do, this is the episode for you.
Book clubs are everywhere and we are always asked for book recommendations. But what about the great Essays, Interviews, Conversations, Aphorisms, Shaggy Dog Stories, Lyrics, Courtroom Testimonies, Poems, Movie Scenes, Jokes and the like? Sadly, there is almost never a club in which to discuss them. Yet there are Essays and offerings in other intellectual formats that are just as profound and meaningful as any book while having the advantage of being much more in keeping with modern attention spans. The Portal seeks to fill this obvious lacuna.
We thus finish out the regular first year of the Portal Podcast with an inaugural episode of an experiment: The Portal Essay Club. In this episode Eric reads aloud an astonishing essay from 1944 by Arthur Koestler which changed his world. In the essay, Koestler wrestles with a difficult question that has plagued independent thinkers for ages: what if everyone who is supposedly 'normal' is actually a maniac living in a dream world? What if the only sane ones appear crazy just as the crazy appear sane?
During the episode, Eric first reads aloud the essay "The Nightmare That Is A Reality." and then discusses paragraph by paragraph what makes this one of the most profound yet often forgotten essays to have appeared within the twilight of living memory (1944 as it happens). We hope you will enjoy this experiment and let us know what you would like to see appear next in this series.
Thanks for a great first year.
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42: Cashing Out My Trump & IDW Positions
41: Douglas Murray - Heroism 2020: Defense of Our Own Civilization
39: Admission To Sugar Baby U.
38: Mass Media, Markets, and Human Malware: A Portal Q&A
37: Andrew Marantz - Surfing the Wake of The Woke
36: Dark Matter, Black Matters and All That Jazz
35: Balaji Srinivasan - The Heretic & The Virus
34: Zev Weinstein - On Parenting, Boys & Generation Z
33: Josh Wolfe - The Mind Financing The Future
32: J. D. Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares
31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes
30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the Fall
29: Jamie Metzl - The Bio-Hacker will see you now, Ready or Not
A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look
28: Eric Lewis - The Singular Genius of Elew
27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses
26: James O’Keefe - What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century
25: The Construct - Jeffrey Epstein
24: Kai Lenny - To Play and Flirt with Giants
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