Eric Weinstein

I love these stories.

And my feeling about it is you also have a bit of a barbell culture, which we love.

The guys who brawl at the football games and the pubs.

are connected to the people who have, without question, the world's finest sensibilities about art, the greatest historians and masters of language.

One of the things that I think is terrible is that you don't know your own culture often enough.

I grew up as a Jewish kid from a Ukrainian Jewish family in LA fetishizing Chaucer.

And when I taught my kids drinking songs,

went back to ravenscroft in 1609 you know and and looking at this canon my daughter fell in love with henry purcell you know we played gilbert and sullivan in the house and flanders and swan and all the or you know the great british american projects t.s elliott is this marriage of the uk and missouri where i had jim watson in my office um who discovered

three-dimensional structure of DNA.

And I got a chance to play Francis Crick, a little video of him on my screen in my office.

And I watched Jim tear up.

It was clear that there was no person on Earth that was ever going to be for him what Francis was.

And I got a chance to ask him.

I said, I read your book very carefully.

You shared an office with Jerry Donahue from Linus Pauling's lab at Caltech, and he told you

that all of the textbooks were wrong, that the hydrogen atom was in the wrong place in the nucleotides.

In the next page, you'd figured out the base pairing arrangement through hydrogen bonds.

Didn't you really do the double helix and not you and Francis?

And he looks at me and he says, oh, no.

He says, absolutely, you're right.