Eric Weinstein

But Chopin was us, and Tchaikovsky was us, and Putin should be us.

Dostoevsky is certainly us.

I mean, in many ways, my feeling, particularly as a mathematical physics guy,

it was a different mathematical physics culture, a different musical culture.

You know, this is why, for example, Van Cliburn's winning of the competition in Russia was so powerful.

This is that America recognized that in the style of play, the Russians were dominant.

They were the experts.

And I have to say that

know russia is a barbell culture it's the highest of the high and the lowest of the low and we just don't understand it well enough so i've spent a great deal of my life appreciating eastern europe in awe of eastern europe and i'm sad to say that in general i don't think we give eastern europe its due the two the two men

gave America its thermonuclear strength came from Budapest and Lvov, which I'm now told is Lviv.

Stanislav Ulam came from the mathematical school of Banach and Hausdorff in the Scottish Café.

And Edward Teller came from Laszlo Ratz's math classroom at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest.

These fine Americans who signed our death warrant were Eastern Europeans.

Then we're talking about Russia.

No, but I'm saying that we are already over the line.

When Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were absorbed into NATO, we acknowledged that we have the wrong line.

We said, those are us.

If we say Ukraine is us, Ukraine's old name was Little Russia.

The key issue is that Russia is the strongest part of that universe.

And we would have had to make an accommodation that said, we recognize your strength.