Noubar Afeyan: belief

Transcript context

…Why has the city of Montreal fallen into underrated status? It was once the financial capital of Canada, right? Now, it feels like a backwater. What happened? Oh, God. Well, first of all, Montreal is where my family escaped to from the civil war in Lebanon at a time when people didn’t think it was going to be a long-lasting war, and thanks to my now-departed father and his vision, we were among the first to get out. So Montreal, for me, is this incredibly special place because that’s where I grew up. Your question is a tricky question because, one, I’d say in some areas it’s certainly fallen a bit behind, but in other areas, it’s thriving. Canada had a period of time where there was a lot of infighting around language, around laws, around some of those concepts of self between a bilingual society. And I think that had some impact on Montreal’s vibrancy because there was a big exodus of companies. There was an influx of other ones. I think a lot of that has largely passed now. I think Canada, in general, is itself, I’d say, underrated because it’s got a lot of potential, and it’s got very progressive values and maybe a little less at the edge the way the US is able to and willing to be, but that’s the choice they make. That’s their culture, so that would be my answer. What do you love most in classical music?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.