Join us for an in-person Live Talks Los Angeles event:

Thursday, June 13, 2024, 8pm
(virtual event airs.on June 1 8 at 6pm PT/9pm ET)

Eric Weiner in conversation with Rainn WIlson
discussing his books:
Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
& Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life

• $20 General Admission ticket
• Signed copies of Geography of Bliss and Ben & Me (Eric Weiner); and Soul Boom (Rain Wilson) will be available for purchase at the event.
• Free parking at the venue
• Virtual event airs.on June 1 8 at 6pm PT/9pm ET, and is avilable on video-on-demand for five days after it first airs.
• Virtual event tickets can be purchased here.
• ASL interpreter arrangements made upon request (48 hrs advance notice)
• Facemasks recommended

  Now a new series on Peacock with Rainn Wilson, The Geography of Bliss is part travel memoir, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide that takes the viewer across the globe to investigate not what happiness is, but WHERE it is.

  Eric Weiner is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss (now a docu-series featuring Rainn Wilson) and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God and The Socrates Express. A former international correspondent for NPR, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the anthology Best American Travel Writing. He lives with his family and a menagerie of animals in the Washington, D.C. area. For more information, visit his website.

  Rainn Wilson is an Emmy nominated and SAG award-winning actor best known for playing the inimitable “Dwight Schrute” for nine seasons on NBC’s, The Office. His robust and diverse career includes television, movies, Broadway, unscripted series, animation, and podcasts. He has an MFA from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts and spent 10 years doing theatre in NYC before moving to LA. In addition, he is also a NYT Bestselling author, having written The Bassoon King, SoulPancake: Chew on Life’s Big Questions and his latest book Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. Rainn founded a digital media company SoulPancake and co-founded Lide Haiti, an education non-profit that empowers women and girls through the arts and scholarships in rural Haiti.

The Geography of Bliss
Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? In a unique mix of travel, psychology, science and humor, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life
Not a conventional biography, Ben & Me is a guide to living and thinking well, as Ben Franklin did. It is also about curiosity, diligence, and, most of all, the elusive goal of self-improvement. As Weiner follows Franklin from Philadelphia to Paris, Boston to London, he attempts to uncover Ben’s life lessons, large and small. We learn how to improve a relationship with someone by inducing them to do a favor for you—a psychological phenomenon now known as The Ben Franklin Effect. We learn about the printing press (the Internet of its day), early medicine, diplomatic intrigue and, of course, electricity. And we learn about ethics, persuasion, humor, regret, appetite, and so much more.

At a time when history is either neglected or contested, Weiner argues we have much to learn from the past and that we’d all be better off if we acted and thought a bit more like Ben did, even if he didn’t always live up to his own high ideals. Engaging, smart, moving, quirky, Ben & Me distills the essence of Franklin’s ideas into grounded, practical wisdom for all of us.