#181： The Geography of Genius
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, I speak with the author of the book The Geography of Genius, Eric Weiner, about creativity and genius throughout human history, and what we can learn about creativity from these pockets of creativity throughout time and cultures.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast i want to start
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off the podcast by saying i'm sorry to you all sorry for the bad sound quality on these last
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few episodes i found out what the problem was i've corrected it it shouldn't be a problem but
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it shouldn't have happened in the first place so sorry for that and also give you a heads up i've
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been working on some technology that will hopefully improve the sound quality of my guests
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so being someone who doesn't have a professional studio doesn't have the budget to fly people out
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i have to rely on skype but skype as you all know can be some people can sound like they're talking
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in a tin can but i think i've found something that will solve that and make that part of the audio
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sound a lot better so look for that in the next few months hopefully we have that ready for you
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as always we're trying to improve the show we take your feedback seriously and we're doing all we can
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to give you a good quality product all right so without further ado uh let's talk about today's
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podcast so throughout human history there have been these pockets of genius that have just flourished
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in the world uh there was ancient athens where you had plato socrates aristotle all in a very short
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time period you know come out and along with other greek thinkers uh edinburgh scotland during
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the enlightenment produced a lot of great thinkers that influenced uh the modern world you had you
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have silicon valley today you have uh vienna during the 1900s you have renaissance florence so what was
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it about the the time and the place why do these pockets of genius flourish during this during these
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different periods of time well my guest today wanted to find out the answer to that his name is eric
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weiner he's the author of the book the geography of genius and what he does in the book is he goes
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on this whirlwind tour of the entire world to find out what was it about these places that allowed
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genius to thrive and what we can learn from these places a fascinating read it's entertaining it's
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super funny uh but at the same time enlightening so today on the show eric and i discuss the geography
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of genius and what we can learn about creativity and genius from these different uh pockets of
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creativity throughout time and uh cultures so without further ado eric weiner the geography of
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genius eric weiner welcome to the show thank you happy to be here so you're the author of the book
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the geography of genius where you go on this worldwide tour of genius clusters clusters that
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have popped up throughout human history before we get into the tour and the places you visited let's
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talk about the topic of genius first i thought it was interesting you began the book by saying in
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the modern world we are suffering a genius inflation what do you mean by that well what i mean is that we
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we toss around the word a bit promiscuously you know everybody these days is a genius and we have
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marketing geniuses and football geniuses and political geniuses maybe not so many political geniuses this
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season but uh in the past we've had political geniuses and and we all want our children to work
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to be little einsteins and little mozarts and um that's not the way the word was you know originally
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used um at least for the last few centuries it's really meant you know someone who rises to the
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very top uh of creativity really and that's what i'm talking about i'm not talking about genius as a
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smarty pants or someone with a high iq i'm talking about people who really change the way we see the
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world with their creative innovations you know an einstein or a mozart or a freud uh and so
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yeah we i think the word has been a bit diminished in recent years this is interesting um in the beginning
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of the book you talk about how there's a small group of academics who studied genius the very
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scientific approach can you tell us how this study of genius began or i mean who is the father of
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genius science if you want to call it that uh well i think that would um probably be sir francis
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galton um we're going back to the mid 1800s here and he was a very odd british scientist and
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nobleman and uh and he wrote a book called hereditary genius right and it was the first really scientific
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in quotes approach to the subject before creative genius was just a sort of romantic idea people
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had but no one had thought to really try to measure it and study it and he did he got a lot long though
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uh he really concluded that genius was almost entirely hereditary when in fact now today we know
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it's not uh but he at least started the ball rolling with an attempt to sort of empirically measure
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this thing called creative genius uh you know and to to try to put numbers to it and therefore to
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explain it i guess from then on a lot of the genius was genius study was focused on the individual uh
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there was a fellow by the name of um his last name was simonton simonton dean simonton university of
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california davis uh who unlike galton is very much alive and kicking and uh he really got this field
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called historiometrics going uh which is again studying history through statistics
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and he's a numbers guy who's taken that numbers approach and he's he's really looked at these
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genius clusters as i call them certain places in certain times in history that have flourished
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creatively and you know what was in the water back then well dean simonton has spent the better part of
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the last 50 years studying you know what was going on all right so uh you took this idea that you had
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and you actually went to go visit these genius clusters to find out what was going on and the
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idea was that it's not so much the geography of the place but there's a culture in that geography in
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that area that's embedded in these areas that foster genius it is i mean that's what i mean by the
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geography of it's not you know oh whether mountains or not i mean that's part of the equation but really
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it comes down to culture it comes down to you know you get two or three people together and you
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have a culture and you get two or three thousand together you definitely have a culture and in
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these places there was a certain culture that i think really made genius more likely you know we were
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so stuck to this myth of the genius as this solitary individual um fighting against the odds and in
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in persevering and that's yeah that's part of it but that really misses the whole important part of
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the puzzle which is they did this in certain places at certain times their timing was good
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uh the place they were in like mozart in vienna of the 1700s was you know conducive to their
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particular genius and that's important okay let's talk about some of the places you've visited for
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example you start off going to athens and you didn't go there to study modern-day athens but you
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were there to figure out what happened in ancient athens during this very small period um a lot of people
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think that the classical era where there's all this flourishing was very long but it was actually
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really short right and they always are by the way these golden ages never last very long and that was
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true of athens as well yeah so how did this small city state in greece and like you describe athens as
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this dirty inhabitable place it's not that great yet it was able to come up during this time period
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where they produced lots of geniuses like aristotle plato sacred socrates and a bunch of other thinkers
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and scientists well um you're right that it was it was as i say in the book a dump um it was not a
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very nice place uh and so we should just disabuse ourselves with this idea that genius requires
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paradise in fact paradise if it existed would probably be the least creative place in the world
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because you would have nothing to push against you would have no need to be creative um and ancient
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athens was not paradise by any means but they had a few things going for them um uh they drank a lot
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of wine uh which is no small thing but they they watered it down they diluted it five parts water two
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parts wine um and so they were able to sort of maintain a low level buzz throughout the evening when
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they held these symposia which means literally drinking together and they discussed and that's
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sort of on the ground level something that happens in all these creative places there's conversation
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going on slightly but not too inebriated conversation and it's conversation of people
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from different backgrounds and it's energized and it's you know at times can get a bit nasty but
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no hard feelings you know it's it's all everything's allowed that's what happened in athens
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and they also walked a lot uh in fact they did a lot of their philosophizing while walking um
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and they were not sedentary the way we are and i think that's a good thing in fact there have been
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studies that show that we're more creative when we walk even 15 minutes on a treadmill never mind
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in the beautiful outdoors in the greek countryside simply being on a treadmill for 15 minutes will make
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you more creative um i mentioned those two the wine and the walking as important but not the
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most important factor i would say the most important factor was their openness they were open to the
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outside world and in fact they borrowed or stole depending on your perspective a lot of the ideas that
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we now associate with them whether you know it's theater or statue making they they imported these ideas
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and then they perfected them and and so they had they were able to sort of absorb and then all these
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foreign ideas and foreign concepts and then improve upon them and that's what all these places do they
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don't create something out of nothing they borrow from other places and why did the fountain of genius
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run dry in athens why did it end in a word arrogance i think i think that's what happens to all these places
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um they they get their success leads to arrogance and once you're arrogant you're no longer ignorant
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and ignorance is actually one of the most important ingredients in creativity never mind creative genius you
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have to know that there's something you don't know right you have to be open to the possibility that
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there's something to learn and the greeks the athenians in particular uh became pretty cocky um which
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annoyed their neighbors and ultimately i think led to their demise as a as a great place they also just sort
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of in a way if you if you stop importing as they did eventually you you you're like a in your
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kitchen cabinet you know you have so many ingredients and you can make various dishes with
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them but if you stop importing new ingredients you're going to run out of new combinations and
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new new dishes to make and that's what happens as well hubris which is a greek word which was a
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which was a crime against the gods too which was a big deal back then it was you know that's sort of
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what kept them in check for a while they they did not it was considered very bad to engage in hubris
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excess pride and arrogance and then all of a sudden it was okay and oh and by the way they became foodies
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at some point you know they were during the golden age they were they were like anti-foodies they
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believed in very simple meals low caloric intake uh kind of bland food uh and then they became foodies
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and started you know shopping at williamson sonoma or whatever the equivalent was back then and
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i'm not saying there's a direct cause and effect there but it's interesting that as they became
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into more into food they lost their creatives interesting so the next place you visit is a
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chinese city and excuse me if i don't pronounce it right is it hongzhou hongzhou hongzhou hongzhou
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all right so it's a chinese town it's from an eastern culture and i like how you put that in there
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because i feel like here in the west we have this idea of creative genius being you know you have to create
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something new novel you create something from nothing but in china and in the east they had a
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very different idea of creative genius they did and to some extent still do have a different idea
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and that is that um all creativity must be based on tradition that and it must be useful you know as
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you say we're in the west we're really focused on on this idea of novelty and newness that you know
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something must be really novel in order to be considered creative um and the chinese see it
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differently you know something must be useful in order to be creative yes it must be new or new enough
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but they don't really live under this illusion that you know that you can create something out of
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nothing um and that's very much a western idea you know the latin ex nihilo means literally from
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nothing that's the way god created the earth and heavens was from nothing in the chinese mythology
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there was always something there was never nothing and so it becomes a job of a creative person to kind
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of rearrange the stuff that's already there and perhaps new combinations but not to create something
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from nothing so it's it's it's a it's it may sound you know esoteric and metaphysical and it is on one
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level but it also has a very practical side that you know that everything you create must be linked to
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what came before right i guess one of the other factors too that you um you see in all these places you
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visited hung joe was going through some there was some political turmoil turmoil going on yep these places
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are never like placid and completely stable there's always a bit of tumult not all-out war actually
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think that's bad for creativity but uh political intrigue um or just just some churning of society uh
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it's you know graham green once said of switzerland maybe this is a bit unfair but he said it anyway 500
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years of peace and stability and what have they brought the world but the cuckoo clock um his point in
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in fact the cuckoo clock was invented in germany so they're not even that but i guess his point is
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that you know you need to live in interesting times and that means a bit of turmoil and even
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chaos at times which is actually good for creativity i think that's interesting because i think there's a
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popular idea about creativity and genius you know you read these blog posts and books and magazines
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articles how to be creative it's it's all about finding your little space and having your routine when
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it makes and everything's peaceful and calm and what i found is but the research shows that it's
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actually that's not going to help you you actually need a little chaos in your life for creativity
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right and you know and and i think that's important and that's why you know all these attempts to sort
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of create the next golden age you know often governments are trying to create the next silicon
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valley or wherever and they tend to fail uh one reason well one reason is you can't really create
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one of these places they grow organically but the other reason is that you know government trying to
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mandate creativity is like trying to schedule spontaneity you know it's kind of a contradiction
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the next place you visit is florence to study the renaissance era and what i thought was
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interesting from this this chapter was that about the art i think a lot of us modern westerns think
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that for art to be pure and truly art it has to be unsullied from money i mean it can't be connected
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to it but it seems like most of the great art that came from florence all these great innovators
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they they were created for commercial they were created as commercial products in a way they were
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created as commercial products and they were backed by uh one family in particular the medici
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um and you're right that's what i try to do in that chapter is to to show that the world of money
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and the world of creativity are connected you know florence like many of these creative places it didn't
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have a lot going for it it was malarial infested it it uh didn't have a port it didn't have a lot of
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natural resources but they used their ingenuity and they developed the cloth trade um by importing
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dyes from around the world and and and becoming really perfectionist and creating the best cloth they
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could and that led to banking which led to this family the medicis and they had this sort of almost
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just really intense love of beauty and they wanted to create it they didn't want to be patrons for the
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reason people tend to do today which is to look good or to feel like you're doing your share they
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they actually uh were into art and beauty for its own sake and they had they were very good at at
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talent scouting and picking out the the artists that were that showed the most most potential
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like a young michelangelo or young leonardo and and backing them there was a whole system of
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apprenticeship in a way for and this is always the case for these places for for talent
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to blossom you know and and that's what happened in florence i think it's interesting because
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there's some parallels to today i mean you hear people talking about you know cities trying to
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create centers of creativity and they often do this by throwing lots of money at it at the problem
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right so they want to create you know programs that attract creative types um they create these
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centers where people can do hackathons and things like that but it often doesn't work so my question
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is does the money come first or does the creative creativity come first and then the money i guess
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yeah that's a good question i mean you need to have some money and some resources right or
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you know if you're you know if you're just uh let me put it this way um if you're starving you're not
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going to create much art so the idea of this truly starving artist is is a myth you know the starving artist
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doesn't create anything um you know uh anything but their own misery really um so you need some but then it's
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what you do with the money um you know do you deploy it in a smart way in a way that's likely to lead to
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genius and and you know you look at some countries in the persian gulf and elsewhere they have lots of
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money but not lots of creativity um because you can't you know you can't just buy a culture and
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import it you've got a it has to be more organic than that also what i thought was interesting from
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from this era was the role of the i guess it's called bottega bottega is that how you pronounce
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it bottega yes it means literally workshop yeah these sounded like they weren't just they sound
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like like sweatshops of art almost art sweatshops yeah i mean they were rough and tumble places where
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there were chickens running around and rabbits which they used for various purposes and and uh it
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was more like a sweatshop than an artist studio as we might have this romantic notion but yeah and they were
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they were essential to the creative ecology of the place really right so they're getting that chaos
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aspect again and i also thought it was interesting that you talk about the master artist would let
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their apprentices work on their art so it was very collaborative um they made art that was very
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collaborative in the bottega it was i mean and you think about it like there was this artist named
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verrocchio who ran a workshop certainly prided himself on being good but you know he let a young
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you know 17 year old uh one apprentice in his shop paint uh one part of his painting called tobias and
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the angel uh and a 17 year old was named leonardo da vinci right who was not yet the renaissance man
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the famous man we know but it shows there was enough trust there they were collaborative they were also
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competitive at the same time it was that that mix that you always see um and you know like leonardo
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davinci and michelangelo they were very competitive michelangelo was younger he was more the upstart
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and this really pissed off leonardo um but it somehow this this competition actually brought
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out the best in both men then you move to scotland to edinburgh and i don't think a lot of people
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understand particularly in america don't really understand the influence that scotland had on america
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and its founding i mean all the founding fathers read these thinkers that came from scotland like adam smith
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and other others like him some of them traveled to scotland like benjamin franklin was a visitor to
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edinburgh yeah yeah so what happened in edinburgh during this enlightenment era that that fostered
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this genius output well i they had they had a chip on their shoulder which is actually interesting
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because they had just sort of lost their independence to england uh they were you know certainly on the
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edge of the world you know way up there north and small city and they wanted to prove they were
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every bit as good as people in london or paris and that motivated them and their particular skill
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i think and i think they still have it to some extent today is combining the theoretical with the
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practical so this manifests itself mostly in in medicine for instance a lot of you know the early
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forms of anesthesia and other medical advances were made there and it kind of makes sense because
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medicine is you need to have a theory you need to know how the body works and understand chemistry and
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other conceptual ideas but you also it needs to be practical there's a practical goal here to make
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people well prevent them from getting sick uh and the scots were very good at this improvement they
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always try to improve things um so adam smith was there at the time he's the founder of modern economics which
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is a social science and theoretical but also practical right economics is about creating the wealth of
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nations to borrow the title from his book you talk about the practice of flighting flighting f-l-y-t-i-n-g
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nasty it sounds like the definition i was given as the ritual humiliation of your opponent through verbal
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violence this sounds brutal but uh and i the historian who told me about it uh i said well he said the ritual
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humiliation of your opponent through verbal violence i said it really sounds nasty and he says oh it is
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with a gleam in his eye you know and and it's this idea again that you can have this conversation
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that is you know gloves off kind of nasty and honest you know nasty in an honest way or honest in a nasty
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way if you will uh so everything is on the table you say what you're thinking but then afterwards you all
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head down to the pub for a pint or five because there are no hard feelings and that's that's kind of
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important to be able to have an open conversation but to not get so personal that you make enemies
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and the scots were particularly good at this that's really interesting i guess we don't really have
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that much today i guess some people would say social media is that but you can duke it out there but you
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don't have the beer afterwards you just no they don't and you don't have the intimacy that you know
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their true intimacy on social media that these places like Edinburgh and Hafton's had where
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you know these geniuses were friends with one another not always there was competition
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but often friendly competition like Adam Smith and the philosopher David Hume best buddies didn't
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always see the eye to eye they disagreed on on religion for instance Hume was an atheist Smith wasn't
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but they were able to live with these differences uh and i wonder if we able to do that as much today
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or we tend to demonize our enemies and then you go to Calcutta and i were i really wasn't aware of the
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genius cluster here um the flourishing of genius that happened in Calcutta India
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on the late 19th and early 20th centuries can you tell us a little about what happened during this
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time well that's why i included in the book because it was so unknown and and outside of
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Indian circles really and therefore surprising we're talking the late 19th early 20th centuries
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uh and it was it's now known as the bengal renaissance named after the bengalis the ethnic group
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that's predominant in calcutta and you saw i mean you saw more books published at that time than any
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city in the world except for london you saw the world's first non-westerner to win the nobel prize
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for literature rabindranath tagore and tagore was kind of a renaissance man he was a poet and essayist
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and educator and activist and there were scientific advances there uh and there was a lot going on and
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um you know it was really this convergence of english culture and indian culture um that
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produced kind of third culture that was remarkably creative uh and not that well known i guess there's
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that chaos aspect again um you got the combination of different cultures even calcutta itself it's a
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very chaotic city with lots of people anyone who's been to any indian city especially calcutta now known
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as kolkata is um yeah i mean just think that the visual that the stimuli that the that your senses
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are bombarded with just walking down an indian street for one minute is remarkable uh it has been for
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some time and i think you know we now know psychologists know that this kind of stimulation varied stimulation
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not being stimulated by the same thing but by different inputs leads to creativity and an element
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of chaos as you say um that uh you know in order to get from an old idea to a new idea you need to
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enter through a chaotic state and that's true literally true of your eeg in your brain you know
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when they hook up they actually hooked up rabbits brains to eeg machines and then introduce them to a
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bunch of odors some they were familiar with others they weren't when they were introduced to a new odor
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their eeg got all chaotic and entered what the one neuroscientist called an i don't know state
00:25:19.680
and i think being in a chaotic setting triggers something in us it triggers that i don't know
00:25:25.840
state and once you say well hmm i don't know maybe it's another way you've really opened the door to
00:25:30.960
creativity right in calcutta you talk about there's that theme of talking face to face they have this
00:25:36.000
thing called the ada i think it's what it's called yep and that the ada was their symposia or their
00:25:42.000
flighting you know it's it's a particularly vengali kind of conversation that i love that they give a
00:25:47.280
name for it uh but it's it's unstructured you know i said to one indian woman you know a friend there
00:25:54.720
uh well is there an agenda at ada and she said oh no an agenda would kill in ada um because the
00:26:01.280
whole idea is it's free-flowing uh it doesn't always lead anywhere i gotta be honest but but it's
00:26:06.640
this idea that they value conversation enough to give it a special name and to set aside some time
00:26:12.400
to just we would say shoot the breeze today but it was more than shooting the breeze because they
00:26:17.280
were against some pretty deep subjects sometimes sometimes they talk about cricket you know but
00:26:22.880
again this idea of open-ended conversation is important then you highlight vienna which
00:26:28.400
interestingly had two golden ages of genius a double dip yeah i call it it sounds like the double
00:26:34.720
dip of genius should be a bed and jerry's flavor maybe they'll pick up on that um uh yeah because
00:26:41.920
all the other places are kind of one shot and that's it and vienna was fascinating because you
00:26:47.280
had the vienna of like say roughly 1780 when you had uh mozart and haydn schubert and beethoven was
00:26:54.960
coming along soon you know this musical explosion really that was taking place and then you know in
00:27:01.680
the 1800s not that much happened there but then in the late 1800s around 1900 all of a sudden you
00:27:07.120
had another explosion of genius but this time in many more directions you had sigmund four he was
00:27:12.000
probably the best known character to emerge for that milieu and you had an artist named gustav
00:27:16.960
clint and you had oh my incredible amount going on so much of our modern world came out of
00:27:22.400
the ideas that were talked about and developed in vienna of 1900 um but it was unusual i mean in that you
00:27:29.920
had this double dip um i i think they were different one was musical and one was more
00:27:34.960
interdisciplinary um but um you know we don't think about vienna and genius that much we might
00:27:41.120
think of paris or london but vienna probably shaped the way we are more than those other cities i would
00:27:46.160
argue and we're seeing a lot of the same factors in play in vienna uh with the political turmoil because
00:27:51.680
i guess they they changed political hands a lot during their their time during their existence
00:27:58.880
it changed hands you're right under the ottomans and then not and it um it also was on kind of the
00:28:05.520
crossroads um of east and west during the cold war you know it was the sort of spy capital of europe
00:28:12.800
um and it again was a city of immigrants especially during freud's time i got i mean
00:28:18.800
ford was an immigrant and probably a huge percentage of the of the city was from elsewhere
00:28:24.320
from the austro-hungarian empire and all kinds of places and that's something else i found these
00:28:29.520
places uh these creative places all had a fairly open immigration policy and they allowed in outsiders
00:28:36.800
and their ideas right then then the outsiders you they that they bring us new ideas but they also
00:28:43.040
the outsiders you kind of allude to this in your book they they have a chip on their shoulder a bit
00:28:48.160
well yeah i think there are two things going on one is the immigrant you know why are immigrants
00:28:52.480
so successful one reason is and this is the more conventional reason i guess is they have something
00:28:57.040
to prove right they they're hungrier they want it badly they're motivated that definitely explains
00:29:03.600
their success but what about their creativity and that i think is that they they see the world
00:29:08.640
differently from everyone else they're coming from a different orientation and yet they're
00:29:14.640
accepted this is sort of the key they have to be accepted into the new place you know african americans
00:29:22.000
in this country during times of slavery were outsiders but you didn't see many geniuses emerge in that
00:29:26.880
community because they weren't accepted enough again they were truly outside the system uh an immigrant
00:29:31.840
like freud who was jewish in vienna was accepted to an apple to a point you know he was he was what i call
00:29:38.320
an insider outsider and uh and that's that sweet spot i think for creative people they they're outside
00:29:45.040
enough to have a fresh perspective but inside enough so that their ideas resonate all right
00:29:49.120
finally you come back home to america to visit silicon valley which has been the hotbed of
00:29:53.200
technological genius what's going on there that's different from some of these other places you've
00:29:57.600
visited well it's a bit of an outlier in some ways first of all the chapter's not over on silicon
00:30:02.800
valley right it's still unlike these other places i visit are historical and you can look back and
00:30:06.800
say ah that was good what's going on it's silicon valley still writing its story right that's
00:30:11.680
number one um it also all every other place i looked at every other golden age i can think of
00:30:16.640
really was an urban phenomenon began in a city and silicon valley began in farmland essentially it was
00:30:25.200
known as the valley of heart's delight in the prune capital of america you know and and that makes it
00:30:31.280
unusual um it's also in to some extent it is like these other places it's like athens and that it
00:30:39.040
borrows a lot from outside not all that much was invented in silicon valley not the cell phone you know
00:30:45.520
not the venture capital i even think the mp3 player was invented elsewhere have to check on that um so what
00:30:52.800
does it do it it picks the good ideas the venture capitalists hopefully back they don't always do it of
00:30:59.120
course but hopefully they're trying to back the projects with the most potential uh and then
00:31:04.160
there's a sort of system to move to perfect the ideas sort of like the greeks um and and so to
00:31:11.520
some extent it's like those other places but it's different in that they're they're not really creating
00:31:15.360
something for all time and steve jobs pointed this out actually in an interview he was asked to
00:31:20.880
compare you know silicon valley with renaissance florist and he said well in renaissance florist
00:31:24.720
we're trying to create art for eternity that will be for all time and we're creating something that's
00:31:29.760
only good until the next upgrade you know so there is that difference there i guess also in these other
00:31:35.040
places it seems like there's some intimacy going on the face-to-face contact um it seems like in
00:31:39.600
silicon valley from my perspective it's a little weaker than that there's connections and lots of
00:31:44.640
them but not really strong connections i'm not so sure about that it's i mean on the one hand you would
00:31:49.520
think like have you ever asked you i wondered why silicon valley continues to exist i mean it
00:31:54.000
really it technically it should not exist because they're they're making products there and selling
00:31:58.640
products there that essentially come with this message you can be anywhere you don't have to be
00:32:04.480
in the major city you can be anywhere be with our digital technology skype whatever it is yet all
00:32:09.840
these people who are telling us this tend to live in one place silicon valley so i actually do think
00:32:14.480
face-to-face contact does matter even in the valley um you're right that that may be changing
00:32:19.920
i'm not sure um but it's kind of a miracle that it in and it shows something about the persistence
00:32:25.600
of geography and the importance of place in our culture that that it still exists at all so what's
00:32:30.960
the future of genius could a town take this or a nation state take this your what your research
00:32:35.440
you've highlighted and said here's the blueprint for well if if i have the blueprint i wouldn't be
00:32:40.000
talking to you now because i'd be on my yacht in the mediterranean sipping a drink with an
00:32:43.840
umbrella in it um that that's the fact you know and so i'm not going to tell you that i've got the
00:32:49.680
formula and you know for 9.99 it can be yours um but i think there are things there's just some
00:32:56.720
things you can do to like make it more likely you know have an open society where a new idea people
00:33:04.480
with foreign ideas are not automatically rejected i mean north korea is not going to be the next place
00:33:10.240
of genius it's not because they're not hard-working or have good genes it's because it's not an open
00:33:14.400
system um you know you can have places of conversation encourage the kind of scottish
00:33:21.520
flighting or the greek symposia or the bengali ada have places where people from different walks of life
00:33:28.320
that can come together um be good at discernment you know uh don't just come up with lots of ideas
00:33:35.120
be willing to separate the good ones from the bad ones um that's one of the keys of creativity i
00:33:39.840
think so i'm i sort of even though i'm hesitant to tie things up in a bow i like to present the
00:33:46.720
small bow at the end of the book and i call it the three d's diversity discernment and disorder
00:33:52.320
and we've sort of covered those here i think you know diversity of ideas not just ethnic diversity
00:33:57.280
discernment again you don't want to just be a magnet for talent you have to be a colander that
00:34:02.240
separates things out and that disorder that sort of chaos that we talked about and um all
00:34:09.920
these places i investigate in the future all these places i think creative places will have those three
00:34:15.440
d's but there's i have to be honest there's always that element of mystery there's like
00:34:20.800
why here and not there what's that extra spark um you know it's like my publisher said i'm like i
00:34:28.640
asked him what the secret to a best-selling book is he's like if we knew that we'd make every book a
00:34:32.400
bestseller um if we could create these places of genius we would and hundreds of places have tried
00:34:39.840
to replicate silicon valley and they've all failed yeah it has a little bit more of that roman genius
00:34:44.480
right yeah yeah and um and there is there's just kind of a boldness too in these places it takes cuts
00:34:53.600
you know ultimately ultimately ultimately it's it is a courageous act it can i even say there's a
00:34:59.760
little bit of manliness involved i want to throw that in yeah for sure yeah yeah in the best i assume
00:35:04.720
you're using the word in the best possible exactly yes yeah the greek way the roman yeah that it just
00:35:09.440
occurred to me now because i'm the art i'm on the art of manliness that and women can have this trait
00:35:14.800
too but it's a sort of it's a sort of boldness to say you know what i'm going to put my chips down
00:35:19.200
here and and i think we've we've lost that a lot of ways because like say you're hiring someone to
00:35:25.280
do job x you tend to just come to just look for someone who's already jumped done exactly job x
00:35:30.640
somewhere else where's the risk in that you know in the renaissance they would place bets on
00:35:35.760
like you know the pope at the time wanted to have the sistine chapel painted he chose michelangelo
00:35:40.800
unlikely choice because he was a sculptor mainly then very little painting but he said i think you
00:35:47.040
got talent kid come you know do some ceiling work for me and now it's the sistine chapel so
00:35:52.560
if that's not manliness i don't know what is i like that i like that a lot eric it's been a great
00:35:56.960
conversation where can people learn more about you and your book uh well i've got a great website eric
00:36:02.000
weiner w-e-i-n-e-r books.com all one word eric weiner books.com i encourage people to tell me about
00:36:08.880
which places sparked their creativity um to write to me there and uh and support your local bookseller go to
00:36:16.400
your local bookstore and pick up my book um and uh i can't guarantee you'll walk away as a genius but
00:36:22.640
you'll have fun i think well i love the book thank you i appreciate that eric weiner thanks so much for
00:36:27.280
your time it's been a pleasure thank you so much my guest today was eric weiner he's the author of
00:36:31.520
the book the geography of genius uh you can find that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere uh you
00:36:36.320
can also find out more information about his work at eric weiner books.com
00:36:39.680
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:36:47.040
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you have
00:36:50.560
enjoyed the show got something out of it i'd really appreciate if you give us a review on itunes or
00:36:54.560
stitcher as always appreciate your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to