A friend recently asked why I go to Tokyo annually and to Israel semi-annually. My answer was simple: that is where I find the most interesting people.
Which led me to think about where such people are in the United States.
There are two places where such people are not to be found. One is in politics and the other is in the movies and theater. I spent years in both domains.
It is rude to say a group of people are generally boring. Obviously there are intelligent and interesting people in politics, such as Paul Ryan and in entertainment such as David Mamet. But in general these are vast wastelands of people who are deeply engrossed in trite but necessary professions.
I went looking for interesting and intelligent people in the United States several times. To find them I created a public radio program called Social Thought. Here is a list of the people I interviewed. They were nearly all in urban areas, a disproportionately large number were in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the Boston, New York and the DC corridor.