The odd Adam Smith

My sister sent me a link to a podcast from Planet Money discussing Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism:

On today's Planet Money, we talk with Nicholas Phillipson, the author of Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life.
Besides learning about the intellectual and political world Smith inhabited, we hear a bit about the man himself:

He's a strange man. I mean, he had a reputation for being rather awkward ... He wasn't a good conversationalist. You know, he would sit down and actually switch off ... then suddenly he would wake up and go into a great monologue. ... He's an uneasy person. ...
His mother was formidable. ... This was a woman you didn't mess with. She is a dragon. People learned that the way you got on with Smith was to chat his mother up. And if you couldn't chat his mother up, then your relations with Smith were not going to be as close as you would like. He is a mama's boy. ...

I'll say that it seems that a lot of geniuses seem to be socially awkward.  I've got the socially awkward part down, just not the genius part. Damn.  The podcast is pretty long, but wide-ranging about Smith's life and philosophy.  The beginning of the podcast addresses Egyptian wheat imports and the misunderstanding over whether the democracy uprising was fueled by increased wheat prices or not.  They say, no, this was a separate uprising.