>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm pleased to
welcome Eric Weiner to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series.
He's here to discuss his latest book, The Geography of Genius, in which we learn how certain
urban settings are conducive to ingenuity. Eric is the author of two other books including the
New York Times bestseller The Geography of Bliss. He has reported in more than three dozen
countries, and his work has appeared on NPR and in many publications including Slate and the
New York Times Magazine.
Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> Eric Weiner: Thank you, Amy. Can everyone hear me okay? Great. So let's clear the air
right off the bat. When you write a book with the word genius in the title, the first question
everyone wants to know is am I a genius. And I am here to tell you no, I am not. And I've got
plenty of friends and others who will vouch for the fact that I am not a genius.
But that kind of puts me in a minority these days because the word is bandied about rather
promiscuously. We have marketing geniuses and we have football geniuses and political
geniuses -- maybe not so much this season, but in the past we've probably had political geniuses.
And we use it a lot. But have we deflated its meaning? I think we have a bit. And what does it
mean anyway? Let's define our terms. It comes to us, as so many words do, from the Latin, but
back in Roman times you were not a genius, you had a genius. It's the same root that we get the
word genie from. It was like this supernatural being, this spirit that animated you and followed
you around everywhere. And then along came the Renaissance and Michelangelo and then the
Romantics, and then genius is something that you could become, almost like this godlike figure.
I want to tell you what I do not mean by genius, to clarify matters. I don't just mean someone
who's smart with a high IQ, because there are plenty of people with very high IQs, like Marilyn
vos Savant, not to pick on her, but she has an IQ of 220, possibly the highest ever recorded, and
she hasn't done all that much. She has a nice column in Parade Magazine. Then there's William
Shockley, had an IQ of only 140, who went on to invent the transistor and win the Nobel Prize.
So I'm not talking about genius as raw intelligence measured on an IQ test. I'm talking about
creative genius, creating something, creating something that might earn you a patent. And it
turns out that the Patent Office has a nice little definition for genius, or at least to get the patent,
you have to invent something that is new, surprising, and useful.
So let's imagine a coffee mug. Does anyone have a coffee mug on them? Okay. No. So picture
a coffee mug. If I were to invent a coffee mug that is fluorescent orange, in a fluorescent orange
shade no one has used before like that, that would be new, vaguely surprising, not particularly
useful. If I were to have had a coffee mug -- picture this -- with no bottom, new, definitely
surprising, oh, yes, not so useful. But now say I invented a folding coffee mug that doubles as a
flash drive and a Wi-Fi hot spot. Now we're talking patent and we're talking genius.
One of my favorite quotes that sort of says it all about genius is from the German philosopher
Schopenhauer. He said talent hits a target no one can hit -- talent hits a target no one can hit -genius hits a target no one can see. And I would add to that that once the genius hits the target
that no one else saw, everyone else has to see it, otherwise you're just some guy hitting invisible
targets. And we have a word for that, it's called crazy.
So I'm very serious here. I do think that genius is largely a social verdict. A genius is someone
who we declare a genius, otherwise you're delusional and crazy until society decides that you
have created something worthy of the title of genius. Now, hopefully we get that right, we get
that social verdict right and we choose people like Mozart and Beethoven and Einstein and
people whose creations do less through the ages.
I realize that's a little bit controversial, and I wrestled with that definition for a while myself, but
I really have come to believe it. I call it the fashionista theory of genius because in a way it's
looking at genius as fashion, is there good fashion and bad fashion. You know, in the 1970s
people thought wide ties and leisure suits were good fashion. We outgrew that.
So, okay, that's our working definition of creative genius. But what my book is really about is
not what is genius but where does it come from. And we've got two major myths, I think, when
it comes to genius. And I use the term myth to mean not something that's completely untrue or
certainly not something that's useless, because myths can serve a very useful function, right, as
Joseph Campbell taught us, but I'm talking about theories and ideas about genius that are not
completely accurate yet and we've bought into them.
One is that geniuses are born. This is a very popular one; that the genius just pops out of the
womb completely formed and brilliant. And probably the poster child for the genius is born
myth is Mozart who was playing the piano at age three, composing at age seven or eight.
And we think my God, it must be genetic, ignoring the fact that he was born into an extremely
musical family; that his father, Leopold, was one of the great violin instructors in all of Europe at
the time and he was living in a time and a place in Austria that was one of the musical ever.
You know, and psychologists now estimate that genetics make up somewhere between 10 and 20
percent of the genius puzzle, the genius pie. That's not insignificant. It does matter. Just like the
seed matters. You can't grow an apple tree without the seed to start off with.
But let's move on to the second myth, and that is that geniuses are made through hard work.
Edison famously said genius is 99 percent perspiration, 1 percent inspiration. And more recently
you've probably heard of the 10,000 hour theory, you've go to put in 10,000 hours at least to
achieve mastery, if not genius. And that's true. You need to water that seed to grow the apple
tree.
I don't deny the importance of hard work. But there are plenty of hardworking people with good
genes in North Korea but very few geniuses emerging from there. Why? That's because I
believe geniuses are not born or made. They are grown in the soil, and the soil that the seed is
planted in matters a lot.
And we tend not to look at that as much. Partly because we have this very romantic notion of the
genius as someone who works in isolation and is somehow free floating, not tethered to their
time and place at all. And that is utterly untrue. Geniuses are grown in the soil, and the soil
matters.
I mean, just look at a map historically of -- let's imagine a world map there and you were to plot
where geniuses have appeared over time. You wouldn't just find one in Bolivia, one in Siberia,
and one in Bellingham, Washington. Just I don't know why Bellingham, Washington, popped
into my mind, but it did. And, you know, you would find these groupings, these genius clusters,
certain places at certain times that produce a mother lode of brilliant minds and good ideas.
And the question I've set out to answer in this book is why, what was in the water and can we
bottle it, and what can we learn from it. This book is partly selfish, as all books are, right? As I
said, I'm not a genius, it's too late for me, but it's not too late for the city I live in, Washington,
D.C. -- maybe it is too late for Washington.
[laughter]
>> Eric Weiner: But it's not too late for my daughter, my 11-year-old daughter who's brimming
with potential. And, you know, I may not be Pericles, Ruler of Athens, but I -- and I'm not even
ruler of my house, but I have a lot of influence over the culture of my home and of my
neighborhood, and I maybe have the ability to cultivate a place of genius for her.
So I identified seven genius clusters, sort of seven genius wonders of the world, you might say.
And I realize I could have come up with many more. This could be a 3,000-page book very
easily. But I had to make decisions, and I chose a sort of cross-section of places.
I chose some familiar to most readers, which Classical Athens, Renaissance Florence; some
moderately familiar, Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, or, as it's
sometimes known, the Scotch Enlightenment because they drank a lot; Vienna, musical Vienna
and Freudian Vienna. That city experienced a rare double dip of genius.
And then I chose some places that are I think off the map for many if not all readers such as
Hangzhou, China, in the 13th century, which was the capital of the Song Dynasty, which was an
amazing place and definitely a golden age, and Calcutta, which I think would surprise most
non-Indian readers and maybe even some Indian readers that this city that is today so associated
with poverty and despair was, in fact, very much a genius cluster in the late 19th, early 20th
centuries.
And then what did I do? Well, you know, my style is a bit unusual. This book is -- doesn't fit
into a category. It's a little bit travel log, it's a little bit history, it's a little bit social science, it's a
little bit of a meditation. But I did travel to these places, and the question is why bother because
the Athens of today is not the Athens of 450 BC. And that's true, but I do believe there is great
value in going someplace.
I mean, why would any of us travel anywhere? It's all available online, we can Skype -- is Skype
Microsoft? Am I safe with that? Okay, good. Whew. Got to be careful what you say about
products. Why go anywhere? But, in fact, walking literally in the footsteps of a Socrates or a
Leonardo da Vinci and literally touching the ground and the stone that they touched does provide
portholes to the past.
And I'll be honest. I was told the "F" word was okay at Microsoft, but this word is fun. That's
the word I'm talking about. It is fun. Okay? There's no reason why we can't treat a serious topic
like creative genius in a fun way.
So I want to take you on a quick just little sampling of some of the places I went to and some of
the observations and then open it up into questions. Because if there's anything I learned about
creative genius, it is that it is a conversation. And I want to turn this into a conversation.
So first stop was Athens. And I land there. And what strikes me right away is the light. There's
something about Greek light, in particular Athenian light, that's stark, that is stunning actually.
So I'm jet lagged and a bit out of it, and I think, well, maybe it was the light, maybe sunshine
explains genius.
But, no, that would not explain Shakespeare's Elizabethan London. Nor would it explain Seattle.
Plug for local rainy city. It's true. It's not weather systems. In fact, if anything, the first thing I
learned about Athens is that it was not an easy place. If you were to time travel back to 500 BC,
look at the hundreds of Greek city-states and try to pick which one would rise above all the
others, you would not pick Athens. Other city-states were bigger or wealthier or stronger
militarily. Right? Athens, the land was barren, not much grew.
This is a theme of all these places, is that they're not easy. There's always something to push
against. So this is one of the facts of creative genius, is that it thrives where there is a challenge.
The creativity is a response to a challenge; that we actually need constraints in order to be
creative. Robert Frost once said that writing free verse poetry would be like playing tennis
without a net. We need those boundaries. We need those constraints.
A musician, I believe it was Brian Eno, said that the electric guitar is a very dumb instrument, it
just does a few things well. So the good electric guitarist channels all their creative energy into
those few things.
What else might explain why Athens, of all those Greek city-states, flourished the way it did?
Well, there was the wine. Seriously. They drank. They didn't have coffee, which, I know, as
Seattleites, you must be shocked that they produced democracy and theater and so much with no
coffee. But it's true. But they had wine.
And they -- first of all, they watered it down, five parts water to two parts wine, knowing perhaps
instinctually what we know today through research, which is a little bit of alcohol does increase
divergent thinking skills -- that is, creative thinking skills -- and a lot of alcohol makes you fall
down. It's not good.
But more important than the wine that they drank in these large shallow cups called kraters,
which encouraged sipping and not gulping, was that they did it together in what was called a
symposia. Symposia is a Greek word that means literally drinking together. Next time you're
attending a professional symposium, keep that in mind. But it was the conversation. Another
thread that I see in all these places is a place to come together where you can converse where
there are no boundaries, where no topics are off limits and that sort of thing.
They also walked a lot. And that might seem insignificant, but it's not. Aristotle founded the
pair peripatetic school of walking, which means -- philosophy, rather, walking and talking.
Walking and thinking. And this is, again, a common thread among many, many geniuses.
Charles Dickens would walk through the streets of London in the middle of the night turning
over the plot of A Christmas Carol or whatever novel or story he was working on at the time.
Mark Twain was a pacer, pacing back and forth until suddenly, as his daughter recounted once, it
was as if a new spirit entered the room and he was unstuck.
And, in fact, recent research out of Stanford University shows that you put people on the
treadmill for 15 or 20 minutes -- a treadmill, not even outside -- staring at a blank wall, after as
little as 15 or 20 minutes, they will come up with more creative ideas than someone who had
spent that 15 or 20 minutes sitting in a chair. There's something about the act of putting one step
in front of the other that encourages creative thinking.
Ultimately, though, the dirty little secret about Athens, in addition to the fact that it was kind of a
dump even for its time, the living conditions were poor for its time, again, constraints, something
to push against, the dirty little secret is not that much was actually invented there. They
borrowed statue making from the Egyptians, mathematics from elsewhere.
But as Plato said, what the Greeks borrow from foreigners they perfect. What the Greeks borrow
from foreigners they perfect. And so if you're looking for the secret of Athenian genius, I would
point to the sailing ships. They reached out to other lands. They had an open immigration
policy. They were called metics, these resident aliens as we call them today. And Pericles, the
leader of Athens, even said at the time -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- we know this is kind of
crazy, there might be enemies amongst these people, but it's worth the risk.
I mean, the overtones for our current debate over immigration are pretty obvious, but I looked at
some depth about why it is that so many of these genius clusters have what I would call openness
to experience. That, in fact, is the trait that psychologists have identified as the single most
important trait for any person, for any creative person, this openness to experience.
And that's true individually and I believe it's also true on the societal level for these places. But
why? What is it about immigration that makes -- makes someone like an Einstein or a Freud or
Marie Curie on one level more likely to become a genius?
You know, the traditional narrative about the immigrant success story is that they come to this
country or any country and they're motivated, they're hungry, so they work harder and they often
earn the support of their family. That would explain -- well, it'd certainly explain their success,
but it wouldn't explain these creative leaps that are required of any genius. And they make these
leaps.
So I think I found an answer in something called a schema violation. A schema violation is a
psychological term that means when your world is turned upside down, either spatially or
temporally. So having pancakes for dinner would be a kind of schema violation or preparing the
pancakes in a backwards order. Or watching, even watching someone you can identify with -that's key -- watching them do something backwards.
Again, in the lab, and they find that these people who have been exposed to schema violations
have more creative ideas. Well, think about it. An immigrant, their life is one giant schema
violation. And there's something else going on. It's not just that the immigrant might -- is likely
to be more creative than a nonimmigrant, there's a kind of contagion effect; that creativity is
contagious.
Because what happens when you, say, look at a country like Japan that's traditionally been closed
for most of its history but with occasional openings? And there's been a very rigorous empirical
study by a professor named Dean Simonton at UC Davis who looked at this. And he looked at
Japan from about 800 AD to 1950, and he found a direct correlation between their openness and
their achievement in the arts and science, et cetera. They didn't have enough immigrants to
explain it.
I think what's going on is that when you open -- you're used to doing -- drinking water, whatever
it is, in a certain way, or say using a fork and knife, you think there's no other way to eat your
food, then along comes someone using chopsticks or someone from South India using their
hands. And you're like wow, you know, I never thought there was any other way to eat except
with a fork and a knife.
Now, you're probably not going to switch to chopsticks or your hands, but your mind has been
opened to what I call the possibility of possibility. And I think that's the real value of
immigration, is it opens our mind to the possibility of possibility.
So what they borrowed from foreigners they perfected. And that reminded me an awful lot of
Silicon Valley where not a lot has been invented but a lot has been perfected. Goethe said
essentially we're all plagiarists and we might as well admit it. Newton said it another way, he
could see so far by standing on the shoulders of giants. There's nothing wrong with borrowing
with a little bit of credit, perhaps. I'm not sure if the Athenians gave people credit.
But let's move on because I want to make sure I have time for questions. We're just going to
touch upon some other places. Let's jump to Florence, Italy, another well-known place. Now, I
subtitled that chapter Genius is Expensive. Intentionally provocative, because we don't normally
think of genius as money as having much to do with one another. We think of the starving
artists, the genius being beyond money.
And the genius may be beyond money in a way, but not these genius clusters. In fact, they do
need money, a certain amount, anyway, to drive. But the money must be leveraged in a wise
way. And nobody leveraged that money better than the Medicis, the patrons of Florence.
And I just want to tell you a brief story about one of the Medicis named Lorenzo de' Medici,
AKA Lorenzo the magnificent. I'm not sure if others called him that or it was self-declared, but
it was on his business card, so it's got to be true. And he was the chief dude at the time, to use a
technical term. He was like many of the Medicis, though. He was not just a patron of the art, he
was a poet, and a pretty good one, and he was a diplomat, but most of all he was a talent scout.
He was good at spotting talent.
And one day he's walking outside the palace grounds and he notices in the garden there a young
stonecutter not more than 14 years old hammering away at a statue of a faun, a Roman god.
They did lots of replicas of Roman and Greek gods. And it was pretty good. Pretty good. And
Lorenzo says to the kid, that's pretty good, but, you know, you got the teeth all wrong there. It's
an older faun, but the teeth are perfect, and that's not really what happens in the real world.
Lorenzo walks a way, comes back the next day and notices that the kid has fixed the teeth and
now they're incredibly decayed and realistic. And Lorenzo says in some words, hey, kid you got
talent. Come live with me, literally come live with me, almost as a family member. Lorenzo
gives him the best teachers, the best material in the land. And it was an investment, and it turned
out to be a very wise investment because today that kid is best known by his first name,
Michelangelo.
Now, who was the genius? We think Michelangelo was the genius. But I would argue that it
was Lorenzo and, more than that, it was the Medicis and, more than that, it was the city of
Florence that was actually the co-genius, in a way, because there was an audience for the art in
Florence.
And genius requires an audience. You cannot separate the creative act from the recognition of
the creative act. I really do believe that. You saw that in Florence. You saw that in Vienna, in
musical Vienna where Mozart was prodded, encouraged -- I'm not sure what the right verb is, but
he had a demanding audience.
Everyone was musical from Emperor Franz Joseph down to the street sweeper. So in a way you
can argue that those musical people of Vienna or the artistic-minded people of Florence were
co-geniuses along with the geniuses themselves. It's not just a one-way street the genius creates
and we passively receive it.
Let me talk a bit about a couple of other places. Let's talk about Edinburgh for a second, and
then I'll go to one least expected one, and then we'll take questions.
So Edinburgh was a surprise because in 18 -- I'm sorry, in about 1740, were you to visit
Edinburgh for some reason, you would find it -- and I quote from one historian -- inconvenient,
dirty, old-fashioned, alcoholic, quarrelsome and poor. Ouch. On the edge of the world, small
population of 45,000. Just got swallowed up by England, didn't have a lot going for them.
But over the next 50 years, Edinburgh would go on to become one of the seats of the
Enlightenment, a place that, as Jefferson said, no place -- Thomas Jefferson, that is -- no place in
the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh. Benjamin Franklin visited often and was
impressed by the city, loved the city.
In fact, if you were to point to one city that explains the way we Americans are today, it would
be Edinburgh of the 18th century. Look, you had Adam Smith, the founder of economics; Adam
Ferguson, the founder of sociology; James Watt with his steam engine; David Hume, the
philosopher; and there were poets like Robert Fergusson, and it goes on and on.
And it was a very practical form of genius in Edinburgh. They were improvers. They were very
much interested in making something better. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine, he
perfected the steam engine. Very Athenian, I guess, in a way.
And, again, it was very social. Not only social. David Hume is a good example. He's a
philosopher. He would lock himself up in the room for days on end and engage in these thought
experiments, just literally inside his own head. And then after three or four days of this, he wrote
in his diary, I had to get out and get to the pub and be with other people, this fierce need for
socializing.
So there's always this toggling back and forth with the genius, I think, between going off into
nature, having insights, but then returning to a social setting, almost always a city, in order to
consolidate those insights. That's what Hume did.
And they consolidated those insights in these clubs. The clubs were weird places. Like the 1717
Club, they only met at 1717 p.m. I don't know why. There was the Six Foot Club, where, as you
guessed it, you had to be at least six feet tall, which was kind of not that easy back then, right?
People were shorter. My favorite was the Oyster Club, founded by Adam Smith and David
Hume. They would go to a cellar every Friday afternoon, eat oysters, which was actually
considered peasant food at the time, drink claret, red wine, and discuss.
David Hume would declare something conversable, and once it was, the discussion happened.
And they engaged in something called flyting, a word that I had never heard of until I went to
Edinburgh. Flyting, f-l-y-t-i-n-g, is -- and I'm quoting here from historian Tom Devine, it's
defined as ritual humiliation of your opponent by verbal violence.
[laughter]
>> Eric Weiner: Ouch. And I say to Tom it sounds brutal. He's like, oh, yes, it is, with a
Scottish glean in his eye. But the key to flyting, and it's after you've committed this ritual
humiliation of your opponent by verbal violence, is that you go to the pub and you have a pint or
ten because it's no hard feelings. Everything is -- everything is allowed to be said but no one is
wounded afterwards. And it's that kind of free flow of conversation that I do believe is essential
to creative genius.
I also talk about something in Edinburgh that I notice, but it's true everywhere, called
compensatory genius, which is just the idea that these geniuses almost always have a buddy, a
buddy who compensates for their shortcomings or who just might be a comrade in arms so they
don't feel like they're quite as crazy as they might be otherwise.
You know, Freud had a friend named Wilhelm Fliess, who was also a physician. They had a
long friendship and correspondence. Both had strange ideas. Freud had these crazy ideas about
dreams and the unconscious, which were dismissed as fairly tales by his colleagues at the time;
Wilhelm Fliess had strange ideas about the nose. He believed it was the most important organ in
the body and that it was actually a sexual organ -- I'm not making this up -- and he performed
surgery on people to improved their psyche by operating on their nose.
Now, Fliess was, as Freud eventually concluded, nuts. But Freud wasn't. At least not as crazy.
But he needed that fellow conquistador, he said. Someone to bounce his ideas off of.
And in 18th century Scotland there was an incredible geologist, the world's first geologist named
James Hutton who posited this crazy idea that maybe the Earth is a bit older than 6,000 years as
the Bible says. Up until then that's what everyone believed or was told, because that's what the
Bible said. So he did a lot of field research, wrote it up in a paper.
The problem was that Hutton was a terrible, terrible writer. It was turgid. It was unreadable.
But he had a friend named John Playfair, who was a good writer, who took that turgid prose and
turned it into something readable, something that Hutton presented to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, something that eventually landed in the hands of one young botanist named Charles
Darwin who used that research to form his Theories of Natural Selection and Evolution.
Compensatory genius.
I want to end before we go to discussion in -- I did say there were some places that were off the
map, at least for Western readers, and so let's go to Hangzhou. So Hangzhou in the 13th century
was a city of more than a million people. Think about that. In the 13th century a city of more
than a million people. The biggest city in Europe at the time was maybe 50,000.
So the Europeans are living in tiny hamlets, picking lice out of their hair and wondering when
the Middle Ages are ever going to end. God, just going on forever. The Chinese under the Song
Dynasty are inventing the compass, are sailing huge 400-men ships, are writing sublime poetry,
painting beautifully, are ruled by poet-emperors.
I loved when I stumbled across this hyphenation. I thought it was one of the greatest
hyphenations of all times, the poet-emperor. They were better at poetry than emporing, as it
turns out, and ultimately the Mongols invaded. Still, for a while, though, it was amazing. And
Marco Polo traveled there and was hugely impressed.
Now, I use the Chinese, and I travel there, of course, in the present day, and I use it as a way to
do a couple things: To explore this incredible flowering that was 13th century Hangzhou, but
also to look at the differences between the Chinese approach to creativity and the Western
approach.
And there is a different approach because I believe our creative instincts, for lack of a better
term, are really rooted in our creation methodologies. We live in a Judeo-Christian culture.
Whether or not you're religious, that's a fact. So we tend to believe in creation ex nihilo, literally
"from nothing"; that the Creator creates everything from art to software sort of just poof out of
nothing. That you can create something out of nothing. Right? We believe that.
But in China, in their creation mythology, there's always been something. Always. And so what
the Creator is doing is in a way rearranging or illuminating what is already there. And that's not
less important. As the historian Will Durant said, nothing is new but the arranging. Which is
nothing to get depressed about because there can be great importance and beauty in arranging
things.
And the Chinese approach is more -- you know, we talked about the coffee mug and the new,
useful, surprising. We really focused on new and surprising, that novelty shock effect for
something to be declared creative. It's got to really smack us in the head.
In China and in Confucian cultures like China, it is more a matter of usefulness. If something is
not useful, they will not consider it really creative. And they seek creativity as standing on the
firm ground of tradition. And, in fact, I really do believe all creativity is based on tradition; that,
you know, if you're going to be creative, you need not only an accelerator, you need a rear view
mirror. You need to know where you've been to know where you're going.
And if I were to invent -- again, I'll stay with the coffee mug analogy for now -- a coffee mug
that was so unlike any coffee mug anyone had ever seen before, you wouldn't know what to do
with it. It would be incomprehensible. Right? And we live in a bit of the myth of new and
improved. Cars come out every year that are new and improved, and they're neither and we
know it, but we sort of play a long with that. Chinese less so.
And I want to end with talking about -- I might even read a very short bit. I don't know if that's
against the rules. It won't take very long at all. And then we'll go to questions. I want to talk
about one of the reasons I think that Hangzhou was so special and why I don't think we're living
in a golden age of creative genius today. So this is just a very short bit, and then I'll go to
questions.
I want to tell you about a painter, governor, amazing person named Su Dongpo. He was an
engineer and a governor and an artist, and he did all these things that today you would find in ten
different people. So I step out of this small museum that shows some of his work in the
Hangzhou, right on this beautiful lake called Xi Hu, or West Lake, to a brightening sky, and I
find myself wondering why there aren't more people like that, like Su Dongpo today. Why must
we sequester our ambitions?
I answer my own question by imagining what would happen if a polymath like Su walked onto a
modern college campus. Is it literature you're interested in, Mr. Sue? Then please see the
School of Humanities. Oh, what's that? You're a painter? Well, please drop by the Department
of Fine Arts. What's that? It's engineering that piques your interest? I see. Well, we have an
excellent school for that too. But I want to do it all, said Su. I'm sorry, Mr. Su. We can't help
you there. Please return when you've clarified your career objectives. Meanwhile, if you like, I
can direct you to mental health services.
We don't often question the rationale of specialization. Of course there was less specialization
back then, a friend said at a dinner party. The world was less complicated. Yes, it was. But I
would argue that the world was less complicated because there was less specialization. The
specialist is encouraged, rewarded for parsing his or her chosen field into smaller and smaller
morsels, then building high walls around those tiny bits. A narrow outlook naturally follows.
We mourn the death of the Renaissance man, oblivious to blindingly obvious fact that we killed
him and continue to do so every day on college campuses and, sorry, in corporate offices across
the land.
Gee, on that bummer of a note, but I -- I do believe that specialization is one of the enemies of
creative genius; that all these geniuses I look at and all these places of genius, what they excelled
at was making connections and seeing not only targets that others don't see but seeing
connections that others don't see.
You know, Einstein was not a know-it-all. There were physicists during his day who knew more
physics than Einstein did. What Einstein was was a see-it-all. And what I'd like to see is more -fewer know-it-alls and more see-it-alls, and I think the world would be a better place. And with
that, I'd be happy to take any questions you might have. Thank you.
[applause]
>> Eric Weiner: Yes.
>>: Can you talk to us about your process? What sparked the ideas for this book, and how did
you go about building it? Had you visited all these places already?
>> Eric Weiner: Okay. Good question. I'm interested in big ideas and places and how they
intersect. And I'll be honest, I had written about happiness and God, and those were two big
ideas, and it struck me that what else do you need to lead a fulfilled self-actualized life? And
creativity is a huge part of it.
And I felt like someone needed to sort of correct what I saw as a myth about -- or these two
myths about where creativity and genius come from. So that was my interest in addition to
selfishly wanting my daughter to be the next Marie Curie.
How I went about it, I begin all my projects from a place of ignorance, which I think is a good
place to start. I didn't talk about the importance of ignorance and creative genius, but I think it's
hugely important. Sure, I knew something about these places and I had been to couple of them,
not many, though. Actually, I don't know if I'd been to any of them. Well traveled, but I haven't
been to these places.
And I dove into the research. But I researched not the products. We tend to just look at -- you
know, you go to the Uffizi museum in Florence, you can see the products of the Renaissance.
Tells you absolutely nothing about the process, about the bottegas, the workshops where
Leonardo did an apprenticeship and these things.
So I really looked into the historical process and I read a lot of social science papers so you don't
have to. And there is a whole field of creatology, the science of genius, which is emerging.
There's also something called historiometrics, of which Dean Simonton at UC Davis is the Grand
Poobah.
And I weaved that all together, and then I got on an airplane and went to these places and tried to
find translators, not literal translators, but cultural translators. And I tried to connect what I -what the lab was telling us, the social science research, with the place and the historical. Boy, it
sounds hard the way -- now that -- no wonder I'm tired. But that's what I did. Other questions?
Yes.
>>: So I notice that some places were omitted, and I know you had to kind of make decisions,
but think about, for example, more than half of the places were in Europe, and places like in
Africa or like Central South America were omitted. So would love to know more about the
process and just given that there's some negative connotations places like Africa and South
America in terms of genius, so how you think that this book might contribute to that dialogue.
>> Eric Weiner: Well, I mean, I could have easily not left Western Europe because so many
people who we equate with genius -- again, we equate with genius were born and raised there. I
made an effort -- not just an effort, but I wanted to expand the idea of what genius was, thus the
trips to China and India.
There is one place I wanted to go to, a chapter I wanted to include in the book but were not able
to, and that was on the Muslim or Arab -- or there was really a Muslim and an Arab Golden Age
that began really within a century after the birth of Islam -- I guess we're talking 7th century -and lasted a long time. But really the apex of that was Baghdad and the House of Wisdom
around 800 to 1000 AD.
And the fact is it's not safe to go to Baghdad today. I've been there before for NPR as a foreign
correspondent. I'll be blunt here. I didn't want my obituary to say author dies while researching
book on genius. And that was a disappointment to me that I wasn't able to go there.
As far as Africa and Latin America, I mean, I could have, I suppose, found some places. Part of
the problem is that genius is really this Western concept that, you know, if genius are places we
declare to be places of genius, we have undiscovered, unknown genius in Africa or in South
America, maybe to a lesser extent, but the record, historical record isn't there.
And I'm not just trying to check off boxes and go everywhere in the world. I realize it's been
said about writing, no writing is ever finished, it's only abandoned. Where do you think I should
have gone to or could have gone to in Africa?
>>: I actually don't know, which is I why I'm excited to read this book. But I do think it's an
important part of the discussion when I think of kind of a Western discussion about genius and
race and ethnicity and culture, and I was wondering how that would contribute to the dialogue of
thinking that ->> Eric Weiner: Well, I think if people get anything out of my book, it's that creativity is not
what we think it is and there's not only one way to think about it. And that whether it's the way
the Athenians saw it or the way the Chinese or the Indians saw it or the Scots or the people of
Silicon Valley, that there are a lot of different ways of thinking about creativity, and that's what I
tried to contribute to the dialogue. Yes.
>>: Did you find competition playing a role in these creative clusters?
>> Eric Weiner: Yes and no. And this is one of the places where the lab research sort of butted
up against the real world. So in the psychology lab there's this theory known as the intrinsic
theory of motivation. There's a Harvard psychologist named Teresa Amabile who's the main
proponent of it. And basically in study after study she would get two groups of people, have
them build a collage out of material.
One group is told you'll be graded, you'll receive money for the best collage, you'll be -- your
collages will be made public. In other words, they're given a lot of what's known as extrinsic
motivation. And the other group was told just to build the collage and have fun and give an
intrinsic motivation. And it's this second group that are told just to have fun that produced the
more creative collages.
Yet in the places I look at, you know, like let's take Florence, there was a lot of rivalry in
Florence. And Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci hated each other. Hated each other. But it
did bring out the best in them. You know, and the ancient Greeks believed there were two types
of envy, good envy and bad envy. Bad envy ate you up inside. Good envy propelled you to do
better. Better than your old self.
I did come across one fascinating study that isn't in the book that looked at more experienced
artists. Those collage makers tended to be not very experienced, new to the task. But when
these psychologists looked at musicians who had at least five or ten years' experience, quite
accomplished, told them to improvise, it was actually the group that was given sort of financial
incentive and a publicity incentive that did better.
So I think that when you're first attempting a task, competition is probably not helpful. But once
you do attain a degree of mastery, competition can help you up your game. Yes.
>>: So increasingly what we find is that there is social grooming; where we're born in a place
and our environment shapes us to be who we are. And often in corporations we have a culture
which is as a result of that. How do you break out of that to get creativity? From the different
places you've seen, how do these people break out from their social grooming or social clubs in
order to come up with the new stuff?
>> Eric Weiner: Okay. Well, that's interesting question, but, first of all, I would argue that the
job is not for the -- not always for the individual to break out of the culture but for the culture to
be creative enough to recognize the creativity.
Like, in other words, we put the onus -- your question, and it's a common way of thinking that,
that it's up to the person to be creative, which means going against the culture, and that always is
true, but in these creative places, there's more receptivity to the other, right? The person has to
be, in that sense, in the right place at the right time where there's a receptivity to their idea.
And I think, you know, I want to be clear that the people like Socrates and Freud who thrived in
their respective city of Athens and Vienna did not necessarily have a happy, always happy
relationship with them. Socrates loved Athens to death. Literally. They ended up putting him to
death.
And Freud had very mixed feelings about Vienna. He moved there when he was four or five
years old as an immigrant. And as an immigrant and as a Jew he was always a bit of an outsider.
But not that far outside. He actually had -- some professions were closed to him as a Jew, so he
couldn't go into -- sorry, couldn't go into the military or government, but he could go into
medicine. So he channeled his energy in there. And then he was kind of an insider outsider.
So I think that, to answer your question, I think the genius has to be far enough outside of the
mainstream to see something different but to be close enough inside and to be living in a culture
and a time that is receptive enough to it so that their ideas resonate. It's sort of the sweet spot
being between an insider and an outsider. Yes. Yes.
>>: So in your research, what are the common reasons that you found of -- or did you find for -behind the decline of these genius clusters?
>> Eric Weiner: One word. Arrogance. I think. You know, a historian talked about ancient
Athens and why it eventually declined, and he spoke of a creeping vanity. Which I think is a
good term because vanity isn't -- doesn't hit you over the head, it sneaks up. You don't wake up
one day you're an arrogant jerk. Takes years to get there. You know? But people do it.
And I think that, you know, once you're arrogant, you've lost your ignorance, right? You know it
all. So you're not -- you've lost that openness, you know? You do need to be self-confident, but
you need that combination of self-confidence and ignorance.
And I find that these places, they become arrogant. And there's an interesting theory by an
anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber in the 1940s. And he talked about what he called
configurations of culture growth, which is a terrible term, but what he meant was essentially that
cultures are like kitchen cupboards, you have so many ingredients to combine them in different
ways. And if at a certain point you don't import more ingredients, you're going to run out of
combinations. And that's when cultures just start to plagiarize themselves. That combined with
arrogance I think leads to the decline. Yes.
>>: Hi. I'm looking forward to reading your book.
>> Eric Weiner: Looks like you're reading it already. This is great.
>>: I'm curious to know like just your comment on why you called Silicon Valley weak in its
genius. And then, secondly, is that the only genius cluster you see in North America, or have
any hope for any other genius clusters in North America?
>> Eric Weiner: Aren't I standing in one right now? Let me answer the second question first. I
wanted to have one chapter on North America. I like the way you say North America. Are you
Canadian?
>>: No.
>> Eric Weiner: Okay. But up here, we're close. We're close enough to Canada we can say
North America. Good. Not just America.
And I thought about New York and the art scenes in the '50s and '60s and I thought about New
Orleans and jazz, thought about Detroit and the automobile, thought about Hollywood and film.
But I thought that Silicon Valley epitomizes the American flavor of genius.
And why did I call it genius is weak? Because there's a -- there's a paper -- or a sociological
paper written in the 1970s by a young -- at the time young -- sociologist named Mark
Granovetter, and it has gone on to become the most cited paper in all of sociology, and it's called
simply "The Strength of Weak Ties." "The Strength of Weak Ties." And he argues, very in
plain English, that having weak ties, a lot of people -- knowing a lot of people but not knowing
them that well can actually be helpful in social settings and when it comes to creativity.
And I realized how that that theory sort of explains Silicon Valley. People, to be honest, don't
have such deep relationships. But they know a lot of people. They have lots of context. I
suppose we call it networking. And Facebook, one of the products of Silicon Valley sort of, sort
of mirrors that. Right? He didn't -- Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent weak ties, but he made them
cheaper and easier to have. So this is -- you know, that's sort of the theory behind Silicon
Valley, is that it's actually these weak ties that explain its greatness. Yes.
>>: So speaking of Silicon Valley, you said that some of these places they had sort of a
challenge or they were difficult, whether it was the weather, whatever. There's nothing easier
than the Bay Area. So how ->> Eric Weiner: Yeah, that's a good question. I hate when people point out potential
contradictions. But, I'm not going to give up. I think the challenge was simply being in
California in -- you know, I trace it back to 1912. I trace Silicon Valley back to the sinking of
the Titanic. Bear with me. So 1912 the Titanic sinks, and after that, few months later, Congress
passes a law requiring radios aboard all ships.
Well, there was a nascent -- radio was a brand-new technology. It was the digital technology of
its day. There was a nascent radio industry in Palo Alto and in Silicon Valley, and it took off
after that. And along with it a lot of amateur radio operators, hams, and that whole culture of
tinkering and that sort of thing.
And back then, of course, California, the whole West Coast, what do historians say about it? It
was created modern or some term like that. It was tabula rasa and they had a chip on their
shoulder. So when Leland Stanford, the senator, founded Stanford University, an East Coast, a
New York paper snipped, and I'm quoting almost exactly here, California needs an elite
University the way Switzerland needs a retirement home for sea captains. You know? Ouch.
So I think the difficulty was we're out here, we're a long way from the centers of power and
knowledge and money, and we have a chip on our shoulder. Not the micro chip, wasn't invented
yet, but that chip to prove ourselves. So I think that's what they had to push against, was their
otherness and being out there and their irrelevance in a way. Yes.
>>: I read your first book, The Geography of Bliss, and really enjoyed it. I'm wondering if in
your research if you found any parallels or a confluence between these countries or cities ->> Eric Weiner: Happy places and genius places?
>>: Yes. Or exact opposite?
>> Eric Weiner: What would the Venn diagram look like? Would there be overlap? To be
honest, not to pick on Switzerland in this case, not -- Switzerland did appear in The Geography
of Bliss but not in The Geography of Genius. First of all, are there any Swiss people here?
Okay, good.
So Graham Greene famously or infamously said of the Swiss: 500 years of peace and stability
and what have they brought the world but the cuckoo clock. Now, first of all, the cuckoo clock
was actually invented by a German, a Bavarian. But there is chocolate.
But the point there being that, you know, Switzerland is a very content place but not a
particularly creative one. I don't think that you need to be a miserable person living in a
miserable place to be creative.
One of my favorite responses to this very question was actually in my first book, The Geography
of Bliss, when I'm in Iceland and I'm sitting down with Hilmar. Hilmar -- Hilmar is a Heathen,
but that's not -- that's his religion, that's fine, the Nordic religion. He's also a composer of
classical music. He was one of Björk's mentors. He's a very successful musician, very creative.
His music is haunting and beautiful.
And I said, Hilmar, you seem like a pretty happy guy, yet you've created, you know, so much art,
and usually I think that artists like, you know, need to be unhappy and miserable. And he said,
well, I am basically happy, but I cherish my melancholy.
And that stuck with me as explaining a lot about the relationship between people, sad people in
places, and there are. You can be happy, but you need to have this side of you that is
melancholic and that you don't reject; that you cherish in the right way. So yes.
>>: Since we were talking about Venn diagrams and The Geography of Bliss, actually there is
one, India, which is featured in The Geography of Bliss and ->> Eric Weiner: You're right. You're right. Yay India.
>>: Chaotic, yeah.
>> Eric Weiner: Yeah. And India has such a wide spectrum of everything, the best and worth of
humanity. And I did subtitle the chapter on Calcutta "Genius is Chaotic." But the thing is about
the chaos of India as a Westerner when you go there the first time, it looks like total chaos. But
Indian friends will say no, there's a hidden order; that chai wallah is always there on top of that
elephant or whatever. It looks crazy, but there's a reason to it. And I think India could probably
feature in every book I write because there's a lot to say. Yes.
>>: So I'm curious about your opinion on hiring diversity to offset specialization. Like does
that -- so having a diversity of background, of ethnicity, of experience, even if people are still
specializing in computer science or specializing -- like if you have a bunch of doctors, if they all
come from different places, don't they bring -- doesn't that -- does that offset or ->> Eric Weiner: Well, when I talk about diversity, I really mean diversity of ideas. And of
course you can have ethnic diversity but everyone thinking exactly the same. But you're right. If
you have someone from China and someone from India, they're probably going to bring different
thinking along with their different ethnicity.
And I realize that specialization is to some degree necessary in our world. But the issue I have is
people not talking to one another; that in all these other places I looked at, these Golden Ages,
there were conversations between economists and sociologists and physicists because these
fields were so young that the fortresses that they built around their little quadrants of knowledge
had not yet been solidified and fortified.
So I think you can have the degree of specialization necessary, but it sort of should be the
minimum required and then you should be talking to one another.
And in 19th century and early 20th century Vienna, you know, I sat down with a physicist there
today, and he said back then he was reading some paper from physicists back then and they were
entirely readable and understandable to a layperson, which is not really the case today. I'm a
real -- I disdain jargon. I think that it stands in the way of creativity and progress. Yes.
>>: We have time for one more.
>> Eric Weiner: Okay. And that goes to you. Congratulations.
>>: So I'm kind of sad-facing on the statement you said about the chance of genius in today's
world. And I've been thinking about the things that you think fosters genius, like difficulty,
strife, or constraints, different audiences or receptivity to certain things, and I think about like the
accessibility of knowledge today with the Internet and the masses of everybody, and there
definitely is strife everywhere in the world. And so to me that seems like a perfect foster, like a
perfect breeding ground for genius.
>> Eric Weiner: Right. I didn't mean to sound -- to make you sad-faced so much. Is that a verb,
by the way, to sad-face?
>>: I made it up.
>> Eric Weiner: I like that. Sad-facing. Okay. Well, I really -- I believe that the availability -if the availability of knowledge were a prerequisite for genius, then everybody would be a genius
because we have more -- you're right, we have more access to knowledge today at our fingertips
literally than anyone has, any people have ever in the history of humanity.
But, again, I don't think that creativity and creative genius is about knowing more, it's about
seeing more. And if our minds and our field of vision is cluttered with an excess of data -- data
not being information, information not being knowledge, knowledge not being wisdom -- then
we're less likely to make connections because we're not able to see through the fog of data.
I think that's one potential problem. You're right. There is strife in the world. One
counterintuitive finding is that war is bad for creativity. Some people would say what about
radar and other innovations? And it's true, some have come out of war, but how many geniuses
are coming out of Syria right now? Not that many because all-out war is actually bad for
creativity.
But you're right. There is strife in the world, so maybe there's hope for creative genius. I don't
know. I do know that where are the Darwins and the Einsteins of today? I think -- I conclude in
the book that we get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve. And I think a good example
is take a look at a Mozart or a Beethoven. People look around today and say where the Mozart
or Beethoven of today?
And there is none because, A, if you're young and ambitious, you're probably going to head out
here to Silicon Valley or to Wall Street because that's where the recognition is. That's what
society says is important. And if even if you buck that trend and go on to become a classical
composer, a Thomas Adès, a name that most people here won't know, who is the greatest
probably composer of our day, you don't get that recognition. Right?
So you don't, you know -- we get the geniuses we want and that we deserve and you can't
separate the creative act and the recognition. And what do we care about today? We care about
technology. So we get -- can I say Steve Jobs in this audience? We get like a Steve Jobs or
Mr. Gates.
Because, you know, I'll end just where I began, which is the epigraph in my book, that little
quote in the beginning, and I chose just a very short one that really just says it all and says what
my book is all about, my ideas are all about: What is honored in a country will be cultivated
there.
It's from Plato. What is honored in a country will be cultivated there. So if you want to see what
kind of geniuses we're getting, you just have to ask what do we honor, what do we really honor.
And that's what we'll cultivate and ultimately that's what we'll harvest. So thank you very much,
everyone. Appreciate it.
[applause]