Eric Weinstein

You know, just as a side note, I'm very worried about my family losing its familiarity with its Eastern European heritage.

I make a point of my son and I go on Kvass runs and we try to figure out who's got the best Kvass from all of the Armenian stores that carry it.

Just talking a lot about the Soviet schools of mathematics under Gelfand and under physics under Landau and what these cultures were about and what they meant.

I care tremendously about Russia and I feel connected to it.

I don't feel that way with China.

I mean, a Chinese-American can say, I feel that.

But I do feel a continuity from Austria to Hungary to Moscow.

It's hard to be persuaded.

I said, I really think that we should have separated two things.

We should have separated out the communist overlay and the Russian substrate.

And we should have been celebrating not only Russia, to be blunt, but there's Ukrainian opera, there's...

the incredible savoir faire and joie de vivre of the Georgians, the proud histories of the Armenians.

There's so much over there that we don't even know exists as Americans.

And I really feel like I wish we treated these places with the respect that I have for them and all of their accomplishments, their literature, their music, their science.

I just think it's a crime.

Even in mathematics, we make up

two different names for the same theorem, depending upon whether we want to claim that it was done in the West or it was done in Eastern Europe.

But look, we don't need to labor it.

I think we have a difference of opinion.

I think that it's not an easy sell, but it's not impossible.