Prof. Agnes Callard on The Portal, Ep.  

All I can really say is: I feel so much better in myself, just being able to listen in to conversations like these. It's wonderful listening to you talk to your guests. I'm inspired and hopeful that with folks like you around, we might just all be alright... in the end. Thank you. Again.

Holy cow. The last 20 minutes is the most exciting thing in the history of podcasting! This convo started out fun, then got muddled and hard to follow, then suddenly BAM!

Between Eric and Lex Fridman I feel like we're in a golden age of podcasts

The only podcast in years that instead of playing at 1.5x speed I had to reduce to .75x speed. Holy heck.

The kinda podcast where I have to look up a word every 5-10 minutes. Just to fully comprehend this dialouge. My favorite.

At 1:53:00 that was amazing! I've never seen someone unleash their anger in such an elegant way. Perfection! The Portal keeps getting better and better. Keep it going Eric!

Eric conducts a 2 hour interview with a kaliedoscope. Brilliant!

This woman reminds me of the way I used to be. Constant mental rumination over what I now consider to be essentially false "problems". I leave open the possibility that I am wrong of course, and that these are actually really important problems, but I've ruminated so much over these things for so long that I no longer have much of a desire to continue these ruminations. They do not aid my well being at all and I don't think they even aid my understanding very much.

"Orgy of analyses upon analyses" What an eloquent way of saying "circlejerk".

I almost spit my coffee all over the place in laughter because I had just taken sip when Eric said: "You cannot say; "I'm sorry I was late for the meeting, I spent the morning lost in Onanism"

Look at this guy just pumping out these episodes, right on!

Over an hour in, I have no clue what she is ultimately getting at. And I have written my thesis on Aristotle. I hope they manage to get another philosopher to cover..whatever the topic was supposed to be.

22:50 Eric: "did you just say quadripartite?" Agnes: "Yes" Eric: "I've never said that!"

I love how calmly heated that discussion was towards the end.

A key objective of this venture is to maintain a good faith conversation no matter the degree of disagreement. This, was evidenced here by a) the relatively high level of disagreement, and b) the high level of regard verbalised by Eric towards Agnes upon closing the interview. (I trust and hope Agnes holds mutual regard)

"the whole thing kind of descends into an orgy of analysis on analysis on analysis" Haha

One of the best talks so far. I'm really loving how Eric has an open structure of mind, enough so that he's learning and developing before our very eyes.

By far one of my favorite episodes. The contrast between the early vs the later conversation was really something beautiful. That shift at the end caused me almost physical agony. I mean that in a good way. I've never seen these kinds of honest intimate conversations during an interview. I think I learned something about my own shortcomings. I listened on Spotify first then came back to watch the video on RU-vid. Sorry for the crazy rant but I really think this was great. Thanks

Clothes: look at me Body language: don't look at me

I enjoy this interaction very much. The weaving and stitching of contexts together to this very lovely tapestry. There is a respectable friendship evolving on a level that is not shared by many. Great job guys!

Last 10 minutes - yes! Thank you for saying this. It drives me mad that people refer to lecturers as teachers, and universities as "schools". Lecturing and mentoring are important but different mechanisms to teaching, and you go to a university to learn, but not to be schooled. America seems to share the bulk of the blame for the deterioration in this distinction as well.

Refreshingly honest and thoughtful conversations Eric - please keep going!

Was Eric trying to tell her that she has bad breath? I thought the universally accepted solution was to offer someone a mint... but that does still leave some ambiguity. I suppose that's an example of favoring grace over truth.

I love how she constantly switches between the abstract and the concrete seamlessly.

Thank you for this Eric.

I listened to this with great relish. it is not easy to follow but it has intellectual integrity and I am glad a conversation of this kind is a thing in the world of podcasting.

34:20 To be able to simply pull out that Hegel quote in the middle of a conversation is just... mind blowing to me. How obscure is that particular line and to throw it into this situation and have it be contextually relevant is just... I don't know... I'm mystified.

I really enjoy Eric discussing philosophy... about any topic or domain just becoming Meta...is a beautiful thing to listen to.

Eric "I'm a huge fan of arriving" Weinstein.

Timestaps of interest: 49:33 (parents and cowardice) 58:00 (ethical suit) 1:53:00 (Are you f**king kidding)

I can only speak for myself but I find your podcasts incredibly valuable, much more so than my time...

I get what she's talking about around 7 min mark - I used to work in music business and it would be pretty weird being in the backstage with very famous musicians, as part of the deal to be deemed a suitable player to be in that area is that you don't acknowledge them as having a higher status - it's a strange world. One time in the queue to get food I was in front of Bjork and we both reached for the same serving spoon, but she was sort of getting ahead of her place in the queue - I had to give her a funny look and she said 'sorry'. Just really weird, very Larry David. You almost feel like you have to treat people with less 'normal' manners than usual, just to prove you aren't star struck.

I am also intrigued by common things which it is not socially acceptable to discuss honestly. The primary example that comes to mind is that we have no polite way of saying: "I think you're a perfectly decent person. But I don't want to spend any more time with you, because I already have enough friends."

The one thing I can take away from this conversation is that my English vocabulary is limited 😂

He is such a genius it hurts my head. It is cool to be a fly on the wall with such smart people.

"HIPOCRICY = WHAT A GREAT DEAL" ahhaha holy shit I love this guy

The dynamic between these two is interesting and different from his previous guests. Either way, a great talk between two powerful minds.

Eric talking to someone he introduces as a Professor at a University: "You don't understand what a University is. It's something special" Also Eric: "The problem with the university is its a confusion." It amazes that despite Eric not being in academia or involved with a university, he derives so much self proclaimed authority to comment as if he should be... So interesting to watch him struggle to come to terms with his own perceptions and status. Constantly redefining his posturing and status to maintain a perception of correctness in matters he is obviously less experienced with. Social ingroup speech patterns "my field" and "in mathematics" is exactly what an outsider posturing to assert inclusion and status would say in such a conversation

1:55:48 My new favorite Eric Weinstein quote. I want a soundbite of this ready to play at all times, from now on

This video ramped slowly for me and was edifying primarily from the point of view of watching two intellectuals mate. It's a psychological drama wearing intellectual clothes. In the first 30 minutes, we go through the pseudo-self-effacing "status doesn't matter...but it does" dance. For example: - "Two [name drop] friends of mine found you interesting so I thought that I might" - "I Googled you so that gave me some basis." - Etc. Then, after an interesting historic tour of philosophy, our two players present their personal internal frameworks: - "Courage is what makes life worth living," she says - "The meaning of life is the struggle to impart meaning to me," he counters Act III is a maddening debate centered around how many levels of detachment we can contemplate. How "meta" can we truly be? It depends on how smart and zen we are I guess. This part made me feel that the unexamined life truly is worth living. In the last 30 minutes, we get Agnes committing the mortal (for Eric) sin and saying that it's the science that matters and not the scientists. And in the context of Eric's brother! And possibly not watching that episode of the Portal (for which she only has middling affection) closely enough. For shame. Eric pounces. High drama ensues. This is the Portal at its best IMO - navigating the intersection of science and the establishment.

As much as I enjoyed this talk, um, like, um, well, like fer sher, the silences were more appreciated than the teenaged valley girl tendency she exudes as an adult with a phd. If it weren’t for her authentic personality “shade might be thrown”. That being said I do more so appreciate the rawness of his talks, and her energy an “innocence” of mind coupled with thought and intellect are greatly appreciated. So much to digest from each one of the talks here on the portal I’m thankful I discovered this channel. I want nothing this year for Xmas or Hanukkah, just more Portal. Thank you Eric.

You guys should have started with the last 10 min and done 2 hours on that theme

This is so well discussed I don't even know what to say. Agnes's philosophical outlook on society is quite elegant and beautiful. I wish I could see this sort of thinking in more women. Empiricism is the key 🔑 to this civil society continuing in this way.

This might be my favorite interview you've done. The part where you were like: WTF?!! was epic.

It’s so nice to see two ordinary people having an interesting conversation. Everything in my life always seems so fake

If someone comes on the show with an outfit like that... ima need them to stand up so I can understand what's going on.

I know the podcast is gonna be good when Eric can go "go on" or "say more" and the guest immediately gets it.

This is the first Portal episode I'm having trouble finishing.

One of the best things I've ever viewed on RU-vid. Love this podcast!

39:00 maybe this is why her circular logic of analyzing the analysis never comes to an end? Because we're trying to use linear temporal cause and effect to explain our thoughts.. When in reality, perhaps thoughts are not linear, nor linear through cause and effect. Sometimes hearing her talk, i feel like she's trying to find the "end" of a closed circle. And i'm just sitting here with popcorn in my hand like.... "Don't you understand? The whole thing IS the beginning AND the end, you cant analyze your way down to find the root of it. It's all emergent at once."

Anges uses what she opposes and mixes her categories. "You can't just divide up the world" and then goes on saying "there are just 2 things", "1 exception"... I think she is a thinker but lacks the ability solidify concepts (not creating absolutes but forming sufficient categories). She's feeling a truth in an unstructured format. It's like streaming a movie over slow bandwidth and it's broken. Eric on the other hand is masterfully crisp and perceptive and encapsulates sufficient topics. For me this was more of an interview on Eric

2:02:00 I'm also disturbed by her indifference to the human element. Eric makes the pragmatic objection, but I think it's the lesser objection. I would have made the ethical objection that it's never excusable to rob people of the rewards, material or otherwise, of their contributions. Because unethical behavior is unsustainable by definition. So the ethical objection makes the pragmatic objection for itself. Actually Eric tied those together too. The prestige rewards aren't a want, they're a need. The system falls apart without them. It's strange if she doesn't see the ways in which indifference to this kind of thing happening to other people foreshadows it happening to her. Maybe it speaks to her degree of devotion to the ideas, her field or human progress in abstract, and I sympathize with that, but the moral ungrounding is worrying and dangerous.

Although this was much better on video than audio, making Eric's points about watching vs. listening particularly fitting, I still came away a little uneasy (if less than after my first listen). And to qualify everything that follows, I'm a big fan of the project, and I truly feel drawn to Eric's background and outlook on most issues. Anyway, Agnes came across as a great guest and great conversationalist, her points and examples were actually really interesting to me, and yet I felt like Eric was unduly animose throughout, and that hurt the experience for me (personally). Whatever the mentioned article was, I had no access to that, nor to their previous discussions. Letting these things pervade the conversation so much, along with interrupting her, in my opinion, much more than necessary, instead of focusing on the conversation at hand, was at the very least confusing. And I really wish I didn't have to mention it but, in my mind, it was quite uncivil and uncalled for to defensively use profanity, etc. towards the end. And I didn't understand the quick cut-off and no time for Agnes to make any final statement - if it was because of time constraints mentioned behind the scenes, I feel that it should have been mentioned during the podcast. All that aside, don't get me wrong, the guests really have been great and the conversations rich and stimulating, so keep up the good work.

You're going to talk about EVERYTHING? I'm in.

This is what you wanted this podcast to be

9:35 analyzing my previous level of analysis infinitely is just the last time i took mushrooms

I think this is the conversation that convinced me of your commitment to the goals and spirit of this project.

The end was where this conversation really happened. Until then, it all felt like a large set up. Thanks for the talk, was very insightful.

Fascinating. These broadcasts are blissful.

Say, "I felt hurt" rather than, "that hurt me" - as if someone else DID something TO ME creates a victim mentality. "What's your response now?" (After this intellectual war I say Let's get into feelings where I can blame you for my hurt) this is a perfect example of our collective struggle with blaming each other for our own negative emotions 💔

To formulate an argument against all of Philosophy is its self a philosophical enterprise which means the argument is fatal to itself or to put it in your preferred lingo, self-extinguishing.

Dude, u kinda steam rolled her. And ur brother too. Ur starting to sound like network anchors pushing personal agendas onto their guests. Your interviewees are interestingly eclectic and it is inspiring to hear diverse perspectives find common ground. But I subscribed to The Portal to hear you and find your solo podcasts most insightful. I understand there's multi benefits to having guests. But personally, I'd love to see you unleash the beast on this audience and those who try to suppress varied ideas. #IDW

I loved this conversation! The discussion on Rawl's veil of ignorance was very interesting.

Groove is in the heart

the spaces that Agnes creates in this dialogue is the portal .....they are exquisite

I am struggling with the "ums". Think I will go eat a cookie. The Girl Scouts appreciate my altruism.

Wonderful! One of my take-aways relates to argument: We think to understand or to do some good. You are thinking because you want to do some good. You get frustrated when you run into opposition to doing some good. I am thinking because I want to understand. I get frustrated when I run into impediments to understanding. We are on different paths…but we may not be aware of it.

Prof. Agnes: "Suppose you're gonna reproduce yourself in me, how are you gonna do that without teaching me?" You know, like in the porno.

These conversations create a connection to wholeness, possibility and clarity that allows one to transcend the manufactured depressive pathology that has subsumed American consciousness. Stay connected. "...please Sir, may I have some more..."

1:51:00 This cloud looks like a dark version of Taleb's concept of skin in the game. When the only way to survive in an environment is to cheat, then everyone is complicit in the lie of their own accomplishments and, ultimately, narrative. And so everyone has skin in the game of protecting the lie. If the next generation wants to rise they'll have to become complicit in protecting the lie that their predecessors aren't protecting a lie.

the 1 hour 30 min + build up is worth the payoff in the last 40 minutes, what a very interesting conversation and meta conversation going on. as the listener with no context (had to look up the articles agnes wrote midway through to figure out what the hell was going on) it first appeared that the debate was not about anything but just weird broad arguments about thought processes, then in the last 40 minutes it all comes into focus.

You're killing it, Eric!!

Wait pause... She said, hold on to your question tightly and make sure the answer you get is the true answer not just a truth.😎👍

When I listened to the episode I couldn't have ever imagined Agnes would be dressed so wonderfully!

Eric alone: audio is fine. Eric interviewing: body language often required!

59:07 The Virtues of innocence is a bad legacy of Christianity Original Sin: "Am I a joke to you?"

I’m re listening to this. It’s kinda painful but I need it.

Genius and originality cannot necessarily be taught but it can inspire. In my opinion there are now far too many "paint by numbers" PhD's who live in a smug little bubble that they've created for themselves, pal reviewing each others work and playing the academic/corporate game. If you're in your in, if you're out you're out. Eric is exposing this for what it is, a proliferation of the mediocre.

I never knew what a blessing it was to not worry about what people thought of me. The silver lining of my severe TBI, relatively few emotions. Maybe it was the result of being suicidal, you've said every conceivable negative thing to yourself in the hopes of the eternal reward of silence only find the consolation prize of interconnectedness.

ok but where can we read this article about meeting people? regardless, i feel like the best episodes are when the guests challenge Eric and really make him flex his mental muscles.

Love Agnes! Love this podcast.

She was intellectually intimidated, she wrote an article as therapy, Eric invited her on.

this is a fantastic discussion. Thank you so much for doing this Eric! huge appreciation!

What I find fascinating about hyper intellectual people is how they will go into a bubble and over analyze everything with in that bubble... and everything they know from then on comes from the perspective of being in that bubble. I think because of that they tend to go in circles and get stuck. I think what happens to a lot of modern philosophers is they are building a castle on things they assume are true with out questioning the nature of truth in the first place. My point is that she seemed to obfuscate the conversation a lot on purpose because Eric is basically an intellectual giant. I still enjoyed this. Eric should have more philosophers on from every perspective though to tackle this subject.

She made a decent point about the journey versus the destination. Ultimately, every destination IS journey. Which, in a sense, gets at the deconstructionist quandary of receding definitions. On the other hand, I think her expressed definition of "altruism" is skewed. Altruism is not forgoing happiness in order to defer it onto another. It is OBTAINING happiness by helping others.

There are as many ways to be brave as there are fears.

You guys should just do this every week

Nice pants suit. Best I've seen in 50 years.

15:50 challenge accepted. You tell them that you think their breath stinks, then you gauge reaction to tell if they took it as an insult or a self conscious secret, ect. Then based on that you dift towards saying 'I didn't mean to be rude (or some variant), or its not a bother I just thought it would be something you would care about and didn't notice (or some variant of that), tailoring the first initial response. Then try to gauge your own internal responses for bias to check to see if your affecting your perspective with any subconscious desires of how you want to play out (we know we want the situation to play out in a way thats truthful and without irreparable conflict). After that you have to know if they trusted your 2nd response or if they took it as a further misdirected insult, and treat it appropriately or back off. This can ofc go on many layers and its difficult but it is doable. If I had a back and fourth to his question I could keep answering, I confidently think. This is not much different than when I tell someone that something they do irritates the fking shit out of me, but I then try to explain I don't hate them for it. Its important to understand the context that none of us exist alone and sometimes the best way to be truthful to one person in whom you can not tell the truth in a way they can comprehend, understand, or simply digest and accept, you tell the truth to others and let them live that experience which in turn gets passed onto others directly or through subconscious suggestion by behavior mimicking. Just as the words that leave my lips takes time to travel to the ears of a listener, truth can not always be spoken in a single moment. This also depends on the understanding the fact that not everyone is going to understand, and you have to know when some people are just not going to take your suggestion the right way and to avoid that. Some people just don't have common ground, we think different and we learned how symbology from different circumstances and stimulus growing up. I might have identified fire truck with the literal thing, or someone else might think of it every time they see Clifford the big red dog because it was always around in the show to show the dogs size, and it made an imprint with the word associating it to that show at the same time. Little things like this can make the same language said to different people mean entirely foreign things if you were to compare the two. However this might be a distinction of semantics, for when ERIC says *TRUTH*. It is in fact, impossible to never tell a lie. But there is a difference, a drastic one, between being truth of doing a truthful act, or doing an act in good faith, versus always telling the truth. Sometimes the most truthful act is to lie to protect a value that you truly believe in. I would not tell the truth to people who I know would do harm to those I care about unnecessarily, versus telling a lie to spare suffering that serves no obvious benefit. If a murderer broke into where I live and was looking for someone I knew about, being truthful would not be a truthful act if I believe in moral values that said it was important to do no harm to those I care about. Where as sacrificing others to serve yourself is contradictory if you really believe in (publicly or personally) that sacrifice for others is a virtue.

I'm angry in the same way about what's happened to ESR as I posted on the subreddit. No it's not about credit, it's about having the best person doing the best work for the very important things.

RE:Telling someone they have bad breath I know someone who does a "So and So does this and it annoys me" to tell me that he doesn't like it when I do it. It works because I can verify if I do that thing. "So and so has bad breath and I don't know how to tell him" isn't direct enough because I don't have the knowledge that the statement applies to me either before or after I hear the statement. The trick is faux plausible deniability. I don't know how to get it with the bad breath example.

4:41 Eric describes his weekend

I thoroughly appreciate this woman!

I actually enjoyed how often she said “um”. You could really see the cogs turning. She always pivots in a whole new direction after them. People need to lay off lol

Eric!! Love this conversation. We are out here and you are appreciated. Thank you and your beautiful brain.

What happened to "the Pornal"?!

I find myself agreeing with Eric more, but Agnes is a very great compliment to navigate deep ideas and to have alternative positions against which to test and more fully frame ideas. I interested to where this conversation my pick up and go if continued.

@9:35 building an infinite tower. I believe what Eric's trying to get at is something rather mathematical and an interesting way to abstract these different "levels of cognition" (?not sure what to term it). Does this "tower" converge? Specifically, is the height of this tower finite, or infinite? Note that it can can still be considered an infinite tower even if it has finite height... A physics analogy might be the electron shells, or orbitals, in an atom ("eigenstates"; they form a discrete set. The distance between eigenstates is finite). There are infinitely many bound states for an electron (bound to an atom), each one being slightly further away from the nucleus/center. Despite there being infinitely many of them, an electron that is bound to an atom will remain a finite distance from its center; we use terms like "outer shell", right? It's just that, after a certain point, the distance between these energy levels becomes arbitrarily small. In some sense, this part is just mathematics, but it's important to note that the discreteness (of the bound state spectrum) is a huge aspect of quantum mechanics. What if, however, as we continued to travel up these levels of cognition, they never became alike one another, they never became indistinguishable. This is interesting, but does it make sense? Would going up 1000 levels really provide remarkably different insight than, say, the 100th level, or 500th, etc.? I tend to think this is not the case, and it appears so do Eric and Agnes. In any case, personally I find this way of approaching meta cognition or w/e as rather stimulating (those typical questions like "how have I not thought of this in this way before?" etc. "is this sort of perspective or model or w/e commonplace amongst experts in the field of philosophy (or psychology)? / does anyone think like this in these other fields?" etc. etc.) In the case of a bound electron, moving up 100 (bound-state) energy levels would not be terribly different than moving up, say, roughly 7-10. An electron in the 100th energy level isn't going to be much further away from the atom than it would if it were in the 7th. Hopefully the following adds some clarity for the physics analogy. When we say 'bound state of an electron' in physics, we are referring to an eigenstate / eigenvalue of a Hamiltonian (energy) operator (possible notation/symbols you may come across: H \psi = E_n \psi) and so if we were to take a measurement of the energy (difference), then we would of course use units of energy, such as electronvolts, eV, or mega-electronvolts, MeV. So, we could speak of the distance between energy levels in terms of energy, eV. But we might more naturally think of the distance between energy levels as an actual distance, say, in terms of femtometers, 10^-15 meters, fm, or Angstroms, 10^-10 meters, Å. It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that we can associate these two different distances as one in the same (at least in some sense). Said differently, the higher the energy of the electron, the further away from the nucleus of the atom we expect the electron to be. Lastly, of course if the electron has enough energy, it will escape from the atom and become a free electron, in which case the energy spectrum is continuous rather than discrete. Sry for wordiness. I am a graduate student and have studied this stuff (math & phys) a fair amount, so I feel confident leaving this answer here. I interpreted Eric's question building the infinite tower as some infinite sequence of layers: do the layers ever sorta merge together (converge), or do they remain separated and distinguished (diverge)? Pls lmk if I made any mistakes. That analogy, or model, really struck me, if you couldn't tell...

This 'stepping back' concept - reminds me of the action where we tilt our head in order to get a different perspective on an idea and it's probably physical origin of the actual 3 dimensional alteration of the perspective of the studied object- stepping back from one perspective and shifting the cognitive 'perception' of the idea at hand...

I love Weinstein and the Portal, but it’s clear he has met his match in this interview. Below is an analysis. I ultimately wish Eric spend less time trying to get his guest to think the way he does about the question, and more time trying to internalize the guest’s response. This is how to be intellectually playful, which is why I watch the podcast. So it is disappointing when the play is stunted. Here are a few instances: 10:21 - Callard shows that the illusion of the tower is false, because the tower implies each rung as independent of the others. She argues there is a collapse of the tower, that layer 0 is not static but through learning at layer N, layer 0 changes, and can be descended back to to make progress. Weinstein does not internalize and cannot play. 17:19 - Callard collapses the infinite regress and makes it finite by making the regress common knowledge. Weinstein doesn’t pick up on it and cannot play. Later, at 36:50 Weinstein says that finding the eigenvector, or the un-altered, input to this puzzle would be philosophically interesting, yet he was not able to see that this eigenvector was already provided. The eigenvector of infinite recursion is the fixed-point combinator. 34:09 - Callard discusses the arbitrariness of a categorization that Weinstein has created for himself that is just words if it cannot express contradictions. Again Weinstein does not internalize this and cannot play. There are more examples but in general Callard is consistently playing, even when faced with intense dismissiveness, and Weinstein is consistently stunting the play. Acts like 1:01:28 and 1:15:48 is playfulness on full display by Callard where she absorbs, enhances and reflects. Ultimately I am highlighting these points because I think the interviewing can be improved for the betterment of the series if this argument is internalized.