
Eric Weinstein holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D in Mathematics from Harvard. He received a fellowship at the Racah Institute of Physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a National Science Foundation fellowship at MIT.
In 2019, he began hosting a podcast called The Portal. The fifth episode, earlier this month, is a fascinating, nearly two-hour discussion with Rabbi David Wolpe, in which Weinstein explored his own views as a Jewish atheist with the rabbi. Worth listening to in its entirety.
The following is an excerpt from the July 3, 2019 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, viewed by more than 3 million, in which the subject of Shabbat came up (beginning at 7:12):
WEINSTEIN: In terms of this weird thing about islands of time, one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner every Friday. No matter how atheist and militant people are against any kind of organized religion, they will leave us alone if we say we're going into Shabbat. … like people will pester me in all sorts of situations, but if I invoke something that is vaguely religious, even Sam Harris probably wouldn't call me during that period of time. I find that very interesting – like, could you create a religion that was simply there to make sure that you had some time offline.
ROGAN: Yeah, I know if I text Ben Shapiro, I'm not getting a text back on Saturday until it’s dark. But when it's dark, he texts you back.
WEINSTEIN: As soon as there are 3 stars in the sky! There's Ben on Twitter -- “What’d I miss?”
ROGAN: ... I think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic shit and just connect with humans in a very old school type of way. I think it's probably very good for it to connect with yourself.
WEINSTEIN: I had this experience: I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years, and we landed in this Orthodox-run hotel. And on Friday night everything shut down, you know, like the textbook. And I then moved into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood right on the boundary of the place where the secular and the Orthodox met. And what was really fascinating to me was I started telling people “you would never think that it's great not to be able to find a restaurant or a nightclub, but it's amazing that this is enforced downtime.” And about a month in, somebody said “Oh you're in the wrong place -- of course you can go out on Friday night, you just go to the Russian compound and everything is hopping, and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things.” After I knew that, I went dancing and drinking, and I was much less happy than believing that somehow Israel actually shut down on Friday night. And so very weirdly, I appreciated the constraint. As soon as I knew you could break the constraint, I was less happy, and I would never actually obey it anymore.
ROGAN: Yeah, I think having a rigid rule, even though it seems like counter-intuitive, in that it would provide you some freedom by having restrictions, but it does. It gives you some freedom, like OK like now we don't have to think about all these other things. So now we have the freedom to just be alone. Now we have the freedom to be relaxed. Now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings. You know I think, constraints … discipline equals freedom.
WEINSTEIN: Discipline equals freedom.