40: Introducing The Portal Essay Club - What if everyone is simply insane?
The Portal
Kast Media
4.7 • 7.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2020
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, with a new experiment for |
| 0:09.8 | this episode. The idea for this episode grows out of a familiar question. What are your |
| 0:14.6 | top ten book recommendations? Now this is a question that I am asked so frequently that |
| 0:18.5 | I have sadly become somewhat numb to it by now. In contrast, I do not believe that I have |
| 0:23.8 | ever been asked for my top recommendations for essays or speeches, lectures, conversations, |
| 0:28.8 | short stories, lyrics, or interviews. And perhaps once in a blue moon, I'm still asked |
| 0:33.2 | for my poetry recommendations, although even that seems to have trailed off in recent years. |
| 0:37.9 | So I'd like to close out the regular programming for this, the inaugural year of the portal, |
| 0:42.2 | by trying to entice you all into daring to think about books somewhat less in relation |
| 0:45.9 | to all of the other marvelous forms in which rich and meaningful thinking are communicated. |
| 0:50.5 | So let's set all the great book clubs both online and in real life, keep doing the great |
| 0:54.2 | job that they've been doing of talking about books. But for the portal, let's pick up |
| 0:58.1 | essays, speeches, and the like, since they are trading at a deep and inexplicable discount |
| 1:02.9 | given the modern attention span and the amount of top material available. Thus I thought |
| 1:07.5 | I would start with perhaps the most meaningful essay I have ever discovered on my own before |
| 1:11.4 | exploring other non-book formats on future episodes. The essay I'm going to read to you |
| 1:16.1 | is from January 9th of 1944. Now after the war, we would learn that in just three months |
| 1:21.4 | of Operation Reinhardt, that is September, October, November of 1942, over one and a |
| 1:26.2 | quarter million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the heart of Europe. This essay comes |
| 1:30.8 | from more than one year later after this most terrible and organized of all murder sprees. |
| 1:35.3 | Only I don't see this essay as being particularly tied to its time. Instead, it is an eternal |
| 1:40.6 | lesson to me. For the author, Arthur Kustler, is trying to tell the reader something that |
... |
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