Alain de Botton - The School Of Life: How To Apply Philosophy To Real Life

Full transcript: Alain de Botton on London Real

3:57 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Alain de Botton, the philosopher, author and founder of the School of Life. Your work has been described as a philosophy of everyday life and explores love, status, meritocracy, religion and self-knowledge. Your school launched in 2008.

4:12 It now has 13 locations globally and a YouTube channel with over 500 million views. Your books Essays in Love, Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness have sold millions of copies, and your latest, The Emotional Education, gives a crash course on emotional maturity. Alain, welcome to London Real. Thank you so much, great to have you here. I really can’t wait to get into a bunch of your ideas and all of that stuff.

4:35 I’m sorry if we could start off and just ask you this question. Um, when you were growing up in Switzerland in the 70s, did you ever imagine that you would be doing what you’re doing now, running the School of Life, you know, giving lectures all over the world and talking about these concepts? Was that in your brain or not? Look, I think that the attitudes that I bring to my work now, I like to feel might have been present in the seven, eight-year-old me as a kid.

5:04 I loved creativity. That meant at the time the tools I had were Lego, some paints, you know, some exercise books, so I would write, I would draw, I would build worlds and I loved, you know, the technology we had then. I liked to take things apart etc., and in many ways work continues to be an extension of play, and the embarrassing thing is that I enjoy my job so much, it’s better than going on holiday, and that’s in a way the definition of the kind of work that you want.

5:37 You want the kind of work that if you didn’t have to do it, you’d want to do it anyway. And I’ve always, I was a dutiful student when I went to school and then university. I wanted to please my parents and tick all the boxes, but I also knew that if you did that your whole life long, that would be equivalent to being dead. That, you know, there’s a time for submitting to authority and for complying, but there is also a time for strategic rebellion, and I knew that in my bones.

6:05 I knew that I didn’t want to lead a life that was inwardly dead. And because I went to school from a very young age, you know, in a pretty tough English boarding school from the age of eight, a kind of military establishment really, school Dragons. So, yeah, Dragon School. Your acting school, it’s never heard of this. I know, you educate us on the Americans.

6:26 Are gonna love this because it feels very Harry Potter. Yeah, well, the British, you know, believe partly because of their days of empire that it’s useful for a child to be separated from its parents around the age of six, seven, eight and to essentially build up a new identity among a group of your peers, play a lot of football, rugby, all weathers, eat thin and under-nourishing food and essentially suffer so that it prepares you to rule over the Congo, parts of Kenya, maybe new universes not yet discovered by Her Majesty’s gunboats. Of course by, you know, 1979 this was hugely outdated ambition, and indeed the whole system is completely crazy and the original of that system deserves to build up those warriors?

7:09 Yes, absolutely. It was, it was, it was absolutely intentional, but but completely outdated. So as an adult I become, well, you know, it’s interesting, one of the things that I’m fascinated by is attachment theory. And attachment theory as a theory was developed by the English psychologist John Bowlby, who had himself been to boarding school and experienced separation from parental love at a very young age and realized that it messed him up, and it probably messed up lots of other people as well.

7:37 And so the whole notion of how much you can trust once your basic trust, the trust that should have been built up in childhood, has been ruptured, you know, is alive at the heart of a lot of our studies of what makes relationships function and what you need to do in order to be somebody who can trust in adult love. Okay, so, and what happened to you? Do you think it is cool, Dragons, or Dragons cool? I mean, were there traumas? Was there also any any upside in that?

8:05 Um, indeed, you, I’m guessing you didn’t send your children? No, my children have been, you know, held very tightly to my bosom, and now they are themselves, as should happen, as teenagers, you know, drifting away, but it’s that way around. You know, I’ve kept them as close as they need to be and let the rebellion come from them as it as it should be. I mean, let’s face it, you know, you know what, your kids spending their whole life at home, at some point children have to grow disenchanted with their parents, but that should come at its own rhythm in this period of time that we call adolescence, and with a full sense that it’s possible to regress.

8:42 And I think what’s, what’s interesting about a good adolescence is that it’s compatible with regressive episodes where actually, you know, you dig out the old toys, you you know, re-explore moments of childhood, but then, you know, you face outwards again and have a more adult life. And I think that sets a pattern for what it means to be an adult. I think what it means to be an adult is to be in touch with the child that you once were, that you can be again at selective moments.

9:11 And, you know, to thread it back to English boarding schools, part of the problem of English boarding schools is that the atmosphere in them, certainly in my day, was a kind of hysteria against the childlike. So, you know, the last thing you wanted to be called was a mommy’s boy, the last thing you wanted to do is to be found, you know, clutching your teddy bear or have any weakness or sentimentality or fragility. These were extremely risky kind of modalities to adopt.

9:42 And this runs counter to what an emotionally balanced life should be, which, as I say, is a kind of negotiated constant encounter with the more childlike aspects of oneself. Right. How did you deal with that, boarding school? So I coped. I learned how to cope.

10:00 I was a good boy. I knew how to play the system and play my peers, but boy oh boy, did I hate it inside, and I knew that this was going to be for a time and for a time only. And even now as an adult, I relish, in a way that perhaps others who haven’t been through that system by not relish, my freedom. I loved the ability to go where I like, when I like. And part of the reason why when I finished my education I didn’t adopt a standard career path is I thought, this feels too much like school.

10:34 I didn’t want to, you know, enter a regimented office culture that might to me have kind of reached a very constrained life. So I knew that if I was going to be alive in the true sense, I needed to follow my passions and interests. And when I graduated, those passions, their interests were predominantly psychological. You know, what fascinated me was how do I function emotionally, psychologically, and how do others function, and I wanted to try and put some flags on that territory, map that territory and read as much as possible, talk to as many people to give me a sense of, looking broadly, the meaning of life.

11:18 I mean, it sounds ridiculous, it does kind of, but you know, I was a kid who at university, I mean, I would say to my friends, you know, I’m looking for the meaning of life, and they were like, oh, this guy, and I got a California for ya. But, you know, I mean, Britain, you know, that you want to pull that off with a smile, and you know, the worst sin in the UK is to take yourself too seriously, particularly as a so-called intellectual. But deep down I was a very earnest questor after big answers to big questions.

11:45 I wanted to know how to love, how to live, how to direct my energies, how society should be organized, and what the place of art was, where philosophy should fit in, what an education system should be like, etc., etc. And I’ve had the great good fortune to build a life where I’ve systematically been able to explore these questions, but it took, I can’t describe to you enough how frightened I was as a 21 year old. My life was ahead of me and I knew that I had to perform.

12:13 I came from a high-performance family. I came from a family where people who were slacking and not doing very much were not tolerated, and I knew that there were pressures on me, but at the same time I knew that adopting a more standard path in industry or commerce was not going to work for me, but I knew I had to tick some of those boxes. So I had a big challenge. I was under pressure as a 21 year old. I wrote my first book when I was 22, publishing, I was 23, and that, looking back, you know, it was great and I enjoyed it and it was, you know, I’m happy with that work, but it came from a lot of pressure, and I wouldn’t want other people to go through that pressure.

12:54 I think that was, you know, that was coming from a pretty dark place. Mm-hmm. So it was Dragons, Harrow, Cambridge, Harvard, where you were writing that book? Very briefly, briefly for the PhD, and then you wrote the book. I mean, 23 years old to write a book that sells millions of copies.

13:10 I mean, yeah, there’s Hollywood actors that are, you know, in the gutter for success like that early on. Is that a good or a bad thing? Um, did it surprise you, and in retrospect how did that happen? Look, I think in a way, you know, people who achieve a lot, you always have to ask why. Isn’t it okay just to be them?

13:29 Why do they have to put on other things in order to make themselves presentable to the world? And some of it is authentic and coming from a place of health and creativity, and some of it is coming from a place of fear, and I think the two, you know, operated for me. So I think I think that I needed to perform to impress those around me who, you know, I felt I had to kind of put on a show for, but at the same time, you know, I loved thinking, writing, creating.

14:00 That’s, you know, my lifeblood, but I wish, I wish I could have been a little more relaxed about the whole thing. Invited in again, then it wouldn’t been published? Maybe not, maybe not, never, you know, his moment for who knows. It was a big moment. I was 23 and suddenly I was able to make my life my living as a writer, which I’d never expected.

14:14 I’d never, you know, I thought it was just like a distant dream, and you know, and suddenly I was, you know, getting paychecks for having put words on a page and describe my inner life. So my first book, Essays in Love, called On Love in the US, was, you know, a very personal dissection of a relationship such as I’d experienced it or partially experienced it and imagined it as well, and it was a kind of work of psychology, and it, you know, rang a bell with people. That book has, you know, is published a long time ago now.

14:52 This was, it came out in 1993 and it’s been in print ever since, and you know, it’s had a weird afterlife. It’s a huge seller and continues to be a huge seller in South Korea. It’s one of the books that every young South Korean reads now. I totally hadn’t expected that, but South Korea, I don’t know, for some reason I have a, I mean, for beautiful reasons, I have a really flourishing career in South Korea. While a similar to yours in some way, it must be.

15:22 I think the South Koreans in some ways have, you know, are searching for the things I’m searching for quite early on. Had a very dynamic publisher. I went out of South Korea with Lana on a speaking tour etc. and built up a connection with that country. So anyway, funny things happen when you publish and you, you know, now we operate in digital channels as well, and you find that certain countries and nations have a feeling for what you do. So Brazil is another country where the stuff that I do is always had a real echo, you know, but then there are countries where it doesn’t work at all, and oddly France is one of them.

15:58 So my books have never sold copies in France, everything I do doesn’t work in France. That’s a price less. The French, you don’t, French, I speak French, I’m very intimate with French culture, I know the French soul very well. So I’m a little surprised. It’s the French don’t believe in self-help, but you don’t do self-help, but you do do cell phone.

16:17 Well, we can talk about that. I mean, okay, my relationship to self-help is, is, is interesting. When you say to most people self-help, they imagine something that’s American, that might have, you read pink covers, that would be selling you something that is promising a massive change, a transformation, a total reorientation of your life, et cetera. Do I believe in that kind of self-help? Mmm, I’m skeptical.

16:38 You know, I’ve read all the stuff that everybody’s read in this area, and a lot of it is very repetitive, slightly one-dimensional, and doesn’t necessarily work. You know, there’s some great gems in the traditional literature as well, but that’s the summarize. Am I interested in literature that changes lives? In some ways that is alive to, you know, our need for understanding and answers and response to our suffering? Absolutely.

17:03 But I suppose I would do it in a slightly different way, and the books that were self-help for me when I was growing up and developing into an adult were quite different books to the books that most people would treat as self-help. So, you know, the works of Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, that was self-help for me in the sense that that was a book that was teaching me how to love and live. You know, I was reading Tolstoy as self-help. I didn’t care about, you know, Russian society in the nineteenth century.

17:29 I wanted to know how to live in the late 20th century and how to forge a life for myself. I’m a very, very selfish consumer of culture. I want to know things that will work. I’m the opposite of a disinterested academic who, you know, looks at the pantheon of culture as a kind of, you know, lofty guardian of this for its own sake. I’m for knowledge for my sake and for our own time’s sake, and I think if people have responded to my work it’s maybe because they too have an urgent need to find stuff that’s going to work for them now.

18:07 It makes me very unpopular among academics, because academics look at what I’m doing and what the School of Life is doing and they’re like, hang on, we thought it was Plato for Plato’s sake, and you’re saying it’s Plato for our sake, and I’m saying yes, and they’re saying no, and it’s a, you know, philosophical difference, but I’m very willing to stand up and, you know, make a case for what I do and the way I do it. You may not agree with everything I say, but I think the essential premise, which is the great books of the past and the great artworks exist now as resources for us to learn how to live and die well, this seems absolutely something we need to hold on to. And a lot of your critics do come from that academia that says, well, what you’re saying is obvious, and that you can feel that because they’re, they don’t understand your take on it.

18:56 Yes, I mean, it’s interesting, the notion of the obvious. I’m very much somebody who believes in popularization. Now what does that mean? We live in mass democratic societies where we’re going to sink or swim because the answers that we find appeal not to the tens of thousands but to the millions. So if you’re in the business of ideas, if you’re in the business of looking at mentalities and ways of thinking, and there is something about what you do which means it’s never gonna clear the thousand-person mark or the five thousand person mark, I think you need to ask yourself what you’re doing and whether you’re doing it in the most effective way, because I think our responsibility as thinking people is to society at large rather than a narrow coterie.

19:42 So from the first I was always trying to write works and produce work that would have nothing within it that would mean that an intelligent, completely ordinary but entirely unschooled person could immediately pick it up and go, yeah, I am, and what’s going on. There was nothing in it that said you need a special key, and that special key is bought at Harvard or Yale or Oxford or Cambridge, and that’s the only way you can get into this. So I am in this way an intellectual Democrat, completely.

20:10 I believe that the work that I do needs to clear the boundary of ordinary understanding by everybody. And so the fact that my books have sold and my work has, you know, gone beyond the boundaries that one might have expected given the nature of the material I’m talking about is, you know, I feel lucky and I’m incredibly glad and incredibly grateful. Am I totally surprised and is this totally counter to everything I’m doing? No, it is in line with at least a big part of my ambition.

20:42 If you’re talking about love and you’re talking about dying and you’re talking about meaning, and you tailor your message to, you know, one or two people, why is that? You know, I was brought up, interestingly, by people who were by different groups of people. Some of my family were very educated and very sophisticated and very complicated, and others were had good hearts and clever minds but had not been through any education, and in a way some of what I’m trying to do in my work is to build a bridge between these two sides and to make sure that every side is understanding every other.

21:18 And so every time I write a sentence, I’m rewriting it three times. I’m writing it for sense and logic, I’m writing it for intellectual persuasion, and I’m writing it for ease of comprehension, and if it doesn’t tick all those boxes, it goes back to the workshop. And most of your colleagues in those schools you mentioned that you went to are not necessarily writing that way? No. And that makes you very different and then sometimes subject of criticism.

21:43 Totally. You mentioned pressure to deliver a performance to people. I’m guessing you talking about your family, mom, your dad, which shapes who you are and shapes a lot of your production. I’m sure everyone’s trying to analyze you and your parents, but can you speak on that briefly? Because, you know, we’re influenced by our parents.

22:00 I know I am. And I, I know what you mean. Part of what I do is because it comes from me and I love it, and part of what I do, I’m sure I’m still trying to get the approval in it of my parents, who divorced when I was seven, and that’s just something I’m gonna live with. Look, I, I think it’s one of those things, you don’t need to be a fully paid-up Freudian or psychoanalyst or defender of psychotherapy to accept a basic fact: the way that we are as adults, it’s on an emotional base that was formed in childhood, and a lot of the behaviors that we manifest as adults can be traced back, sometimes arduously and nebulously, but clearly, back to things that happen to us as children.

22:39 And this is very boring, it’s like, hang on a minute, you know, I’m 50 years old and you’re telling me that, you know, what I’m doing now today you know dates back to something that went on with my father or mother? This is an insult. It could seem like an unlikely humiliation. It isn’t really. And I think the best thing we can do is to own up to it, to recognize it, share it with others.

22:58 We’re all the products of our childhoods, and I Ryder allotted adult identities, you know, sitting on a very thin crust of adulthood, and then comes the childhood. So my own life, sure, I experienced the parents who didn’t from the first think I was terrific, you know, they had problems, and that’s made me a little harder than most on myself, and it’s meant that my own decencies of human being is not immediately apparent to me. I feel that there are things I need to prove to those who might want to love me or like me, to those around me.

23:38 Historically I haven’t liked myself very much. It’s been a really big journey to say, you know, I might be okay. I might not be brilliant, but I might be good enough. You know, one of the, the School of Life, we were very keen on this wonderful British psychoanalyst who was writing in the 60s, broadcasting a lot as well, and this man, Donald Winnicott, was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, and he came up with a wonderful phrase. He said that, you know, no parent and indeed no child and no adults to be perfect.

24:11 The only thing we all need to be isn’t good enough. And this notion of being good enough, depending on where you’re coming from in life, could sound either like the most obvious thing, like, of course I know how to be good enough, that’s fine, or it could sound almost miraculous, really, I have permission to be good enough. And you know, for those of our viewers for whom they’ll go, wow, can I really be good enough? Is that, is that enough? Is that okay?

24:35 You know, if you come from a certain sort of background, that’s going to be a surprise to you and probably a journey of real self-acceptance, but a wonderful thing to be able to get to a stage of thinking, yeah, you know, my, the most brilliant person that ever lived? No. But no one needs to be, and indeed it’s a kind of psychotic feeling that structure to imagine that the only way in which you can live is at the pinnacle of human achievement. I mean, let’s get statistics right here.

25:01 You know, we’re living on a planet of seven billion people, most of us are incredibly flawed, we don’t really know what’s going on, we’re, you know, maneuvering in the darkness, but that’s okay. Once in a while we make a good call, we behave with generosity and charity towards others, maybe even to ourselves, and that’s enough. You, dad was a workaholic man, there’s a lot of money in Switzerland, taught you maybe you didn’t want to do that stuff, maybe you saw that as an, maybe that wasn’t the end-all goal for you, and Mom nurturing?

25:33 I’ve been banned from talking about my, my specific parents. I’ve caused so many upsets. So without wishing to be cagey, and they did a brilliant job given who they were and what they lived through, and they did the best they could. I think, you know, passed around, I think the kind of date is probably around 43, you, you need to stop griping about your parents and simply have a blanket thing of, like, they did what they could. And I think that’s not to whitewash the question, it’s gee, it is actually a very deep point, and literally as parents, most parents do what they can, and you always need to look at their parents and where they’ve come from, and you know, I’m in the business at this stage of, you know, charity and love to, to all who try, and so yeah, believe it, once you want, you become a parent, you realize how hard it is and how you’ve got your own life going on and you’re just doing the best you can, and it’s always going to be flawed, and you’re gonna pass on things whether you like it or not.

26:34 And then also once you see that, you can even in perspective look back and say, wow, if my father wasn’t this way, there might not be a School of Life. And you know, it’s so weird, wait, created of the beautiful things about you as well. That’s right. We’re all billiard balls that are kind of hittin in random directions by the accidents and forces of life around us, and we end up in, sometimes good, sometimes, you know, bad places, but, you know, I’m grateful to too many things in my past and to the age in which I live.

27:03 You know, before we were recording we were talking about, you know, how fortunate it is that we now live in an age where people like you and I can record stuff without asking the powers that be, the big powers that be, whether we got permission to do it. We can make our stuff, we can get books out, we can get material out that, you know, for hundreds of years we wouldn’t have been able to do that. So we’ve been blessed by many things, and so even if sometimes historical forces take us in directions we were less happy with, let’s be grateful that, you know, we can have this conversation and benefit from the technologies that underlie it.

27:36 Yeah, and what I found with broadcasting all these conversations over the last eight years is that maybe like you are taking Plato and showing the masses, or even yourself and learning something from that, or Tolstoy, is it? I find that a lot of our viewers will listen to someone’s story and take one little bit. My dad told me, he said, Brian, a thousand people can watch that show and everyone’s gonna take something different. I’m one for a minute forty, one for a minute 53, based on wherever they’re at in their life at that random moment, and it’ll be like, wow, that just helped me get over that thing.

28:04 And he said, you’re never gonna know what it is. All I can do is try to set up a story that’s didactic, that shows vulnerability, that shows a character arc, that shows failure, that shows some type of learning, and then see what happens. And everybody needs to learn from the person that they need to learn from. So funny enough, you know, a bodybuilder might give someone a lesson that an academic can, I don’t. So, you know, what’s fascinating is it’s about the time in your life that a lesson hits you.

28:30 So you have this, you know, a good book is only ever a book that you’re reading at the right moment, and the right moment is going to be a, you know, a bizarre confluence of needs and also a readiness to grow in a certain direction. I mean, there are moments in our life where someone who will tell you something and you’re, in inverted commas, not ready to hear it. In other words, the idea, though correct, may be so threatening and so potentially destructive to the way in which you’ve ordered your life at that time that you are not ready to take it on board, even though maybe 10 years later you’ve grown more solid in areas and you can take it on board.

29:07 A lot of good ideas are both good but also anxiety-provoking. In other words, if we were really to listen to them and take them in deep, we’d have to change things about our lives. Maybe we need to get out of a relationship or into a relationship, change jobs, change our, our likes and dislikes, and sometimes we’re not ready to make those intellectual kind of transitions, and so we need to block our ears, you know, and I’m sympathetic to that. We’re all sometimes, maybe at all times, in denial about certain ideas that we are not strong enough for, even if those ideas are very good, and so, you know, I see it, you know, I see it in people around me, people I love, who I’ll be telling them something one year and they’re like, wow, what is this, you know, and then three years later come back and go, you know, can we go back to that?

29:55 And I do the same, you know. So it’s it’s all about, you know, maturation is, you know, becoming a mature adult is an intermittent, peculiar process, and a lot of it is getting to a place where the difficult truths can land in safety. And you know, in our culture we speak so highly of thinking. We’re always saying like, thinking is good, reading is good, taking on ideas is good. Yes, but sometimes we’re not ready for it because we’re scared.

30:26 You know, intellectual laziness is fear. There’s no such thing as laziness, it’s just fear. You’re afraid that some things you might hit upon might open doors through which you are not keen to walk at that time. And so when people, you know, sometimes they’re in a mood when all they can do is check Twitter and look out of the window and not focus in on themselves in any way, and they need to be distracted, it’s it’s frequently because there’s an insight that they are resisting, and I think we can be generous towards that need to resist it.

30:59 Like maybe that insight is too big, they can’t think about it, but we need to create, I think, in our lives areas of safety where we can look at dangerous material. And it, you know, I’m very keen on psychotherapy. I think psychotherapy, done well, it’s often thought quite badly, but done well with the right sort of person can be a wonderful safe place in which to let dangerous ideas out and kind of entertain thoughts that maybe just felt really risky the rest of the time, and we can just give ourselves that time.

31:30 But you know, people can do it at other moments. You can have a long hot bath without technology and you’re just left with your thoughts, and during that time the important thoughts can bubble up. And the middle of the night is good. I mean, often what we call insomnia is really a kind of the mind’s revenge for all the thoughts that you, in inverted commas, forgot to have during the day but there needs to emerge, and if you don’t let them emerge, you know, a little part of you is going to wake you up, and it’s 3:00 in the morning, it’s very inconvenient, you’ve got lots to do the next day, but even more important is that you’d be able to think about certain things.

32:07 What are the modalities, do you think, are good? And will you say psychotherapy, you mean in the classic sense? I sit down, I talk about my problems. Sure, I sit down with another human, another, I plugged my brain into another brain and I basically take the spirit level, I, I check out whether the way I look at things is really fair and good and the right way of looking at things. And I think very often when people go into psychotherapy they start questioning stuff, because, you know, people will say, I’m in a relationship and, you know, I don’t know, we never hug and that’s normal, and maybe the psycho therapist goes, do you like that?

32:42 Is that it said good in person doesn’t know. I hate that. And they go, well, is that normal? Sure, it’s been normal for 20 years, it doesn’t go as well, but you want it to be normal, you know. And suddenly you start to ask a question, you know, and so patterns of being unhappy that we’ve locked ourselves in to get questioned, and psychotherapy done well should be a journey of liberation, that we should have a lot more options.

33:04 You know, one way of looking at unhappiness is people who are in one way or another in a tunnel. They say, the only way to live is this way. They’re not happy with it, but it seems the only way. I’ve got to love this person, though is not making me, but I’ve got to do this job, though it’s a prison, I’ve got to live in this place, though I don’t like it. And you know, we can unpick some of those things and say, really, does that, is that absolute, absolutely necessary?

33:28 We’re human beings are brilliant at building themselves cages and throwing away the key. And those cages, you know, this is the great insight of existentialism. You know, existentialism in its essence is an attempt to say human beings are born free and managed to enslave themselves, and that process of enslavement is what existentialists study, all the different ways in which we say that X or Y is necessary when in fact it isn’t. And some say there’s no key, we’re just in the cage, the door’s open and we just sit there.

34:02 Absolutely, absolutely, largely because, you know, think of our upbringing. We would grow up very slowly. You know, we’re not really adults though with 20 or more, and we grow up in all of us in some very constrained environments. We are taught to be good boys and girls. We are taught that, you know, there are procedures to jump through.

34:24 It takes a long while and a lot of courage to imagine that doing the slightly unexpected thing might be viable for you. You know, to be a mature human being requires such a fine balance between compliance and liberation. You know, too much liberation and you end up, you know, the kid who leaves school at 16 without the right skills, without the right experience, without the right basis, who has to rebel all the time against everybody, and who can’t achieve because they’re in a permanent fight against authority.

34:59 On the other hand, to swallow everything that authority tells you, that’s not gonna be recipe for disaster as well. You know, if you do everything that the powers-that-be expect you to be and do, you will end up in trouble, oddly a particular kind of trouble, the trouble that ends up when you’re in wordly dead even though outwardly, in inverted commas, successful. Is this super pleaser, the super police? Okay, you know, we hear so much about rebels, we don’t hear enough about the people pleasers who are in a way in a far more dangerous spot.

35:30 There of far more numerous people who haven’t found a sensible way to say a gentle no to certain of the things that society and life proposes to us that will actually kill us slowly but definitely if we accept it. Other modalities to examine your own psyche, do you think about things like meditation, breath work, cold therapy, exercise, psychedelics, cuz all of these can give you a different view on your brain, usually without another human involved? How do you feel about those?

36:00 Because I’ve experienced with all of those last three years and I’ve gotten a lot of insight from them. Sometimes it takes me years to process that insight. Look, I think that we can say that lots and lots of things enable us to gain insight into ourselves superior to that which we would gain if we simply went about our ordinary life. Some of those things are called art. Reading a certain kind of book opens your mind in ways that you would just never known.

36:29 You know, a certain kind of book that will blow your mind, and I’m using the word often used around drugs for good measure, because literally the experiences that people on psychedelics might report around, you know, a magic mushroom could be available around the paintings of Rubens or Titian or Picasso or others. So it could be, it could be. So I think that the word drugs deserves to be expanded to encompass magic Russian mushrooms for sure, a certain kind of breath work for sure, that is also a drug, but it should or could also include, you know, a certain kind of Swiss Alpine cheese or pomegranate juice or the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.

37:07 All of these things function as tools to open up areas of perception and self-awareness that might not be available in, you know, so-called normal life. Is your for all of that? So for anything that gives you that new perspective, yes. And I’m for imaginative relationships to it. So, you know, I remember as a student reading about the Dionysian festivals of ancient Athens, the notion that the ancient Athenians around the beginning of March would regularly open the doors of the city, get extremely and go dancing and enter kind of ecstatic state of dance in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine, drinking, debauchery, chaos, but also a sanity understood in its broader sense.

37:55 We need to go a little crazy in order to remain sane. In the medieval times there was the famous Feast of Fools, where for one day of the year society would be turned upside down and the fool would become the wise person and a wise person would become the fool. That is the correct order, the kind of reversal of order is in itself a correct order. And I think that in a modern society, unfortunately, too often people who want to open our minds to different ways of thinking and feeling have been put in a box called spirituality, called hippies, called drug takers, and those labels have alienated the rest of respectable society from taking a look, because people go like, I’m not a druggie or I’m not a hippie or I don’t do that weird Eastern stuff.

38:45 Right. And I understand that those kind of labels, in that they’re sometimes a fear and apprehension that lies behind it, and sometimes the advocates of these different ways of thinking about life don’t make friends for themselves. They don’t make it easy for the rest of us, because they present their wares in ways that are designed to really frighten an alien, alienate, you know, a busy doctor or a sensible geography teacher facing middle-age or, you know, many of the kind of people who belong to ordinary society are unjustifiably put off by these different ways of thinking and feeling.

39:24 So look, there’s no doubt that what you eat, what you drink, how you stand, how you sit, how you breathe, the the chemical constituents of your blood, all these things have a real impact on how you think, how you love, how you view your life etc., and by making certain adjustments you can definitely have a mentality that is more suited to where you want to go in life. And so by all means we should all of us keep an open mind about many of these things. You know, for many of us paying greater attention to our posture might be very good, paying greater attention to the rhythm and the rate at which we’re breathing might be very worthwhile.

40:06 For some of us maybe, you know, the magic mushroom road might be the road to go. For some of us it’ll be psychotherapy. All these things belong to a more generous sense of how our minds work. Our minds are not merely cool, calm, rational organs that are operating on data from right now. These are ancestral machines that are bathing in their own history, that are driven by fears and appetites formed in a past we could hardly remember, we could hardly put words to.

40:42 We are driven by chemicals, by the air we’re taking in, and all of this is part of what it means to be a thinking, sentient being. So if you’re in the thinking space, sure, take an interest in it. And I definitely do. And a lot of your work questions the assumptions that we have about ourselves, like what yours put in now that we’re these really weird, unstable, flawed beings, so let’s just admit that and then we can move forward. I mean, a lot of, yes.

41:07 I mean, look, I think that one of the ideas that I’ve always been really interested in is the concept of imperfection, and, you know, in the modern world, largely because of science, we have an ideal of how we can perfect our lives. You know, out in Silicon Valley, these guys who are pioneering, you know, what that late 21st century is going to look like are looking to eradicate death. That’s the ultimate goal. If you’re a, you know, young tech person, your ultimate dream is not to have to die, and of course none of us want to die, but imperfection stalks us.

41:44 I don’t think we will ever overcome it, and indeed the quest to be immortal, to be free of blemishes, to be always correct, to say and feel always the appropriate thing, is in itself a form of madness and wrongness. And I think that we best accommodate ourselves to the conditions of life by accepting in an a priori way that we are flawed, those around us will be floored, we will errors, those around us will make errors, we are largely in the dark, therefore we need to go easy on ourselves and be generous towards others. We need to adopt, if I can put it this way, a tragic perspective on life.

42:21 Greek tragedy was born from the insight that only the gods know. That we humans are blind creatures, we stumble into error, and we must be kind to ourselves and others because of our, because we’re constituted out of base and imperfect matter. In Christianity we find the idea that we are originally sinful, you know, the concept of original sin. We are the heirs of Adam and Eve, who ate from the tree of knowledge and who were not perfect beings, and therefore none of us can be.

42:54 Now, I’m an atheist, I’m a committed secular person, but I love this kind of mythology around imperfect imperfection that begins in the Garden of Eden. If you look at Buddhism, Buddhism too goes from the idea that life is suffering. That’s the first rule of the Buddha: life is suffering. In other words, we creatures are primarily well set up to find the glass half empty rather than half full. We register pain more than beauty, suffering more than joy, and once we know this about ourselves, we become more bearable and life becomes more livable.

43:29 I think one of the questions that we should all of us know how to answer, a friend’s family, a date that we’re on, is, how are you crazy? You know, it’s not an insult to be asked how are you crazy? How am I crazy? This all of us are crazy. The question is just how, what particular bit of craziness have you inherited?

43:48 All of us have inherited different bits of crazy, but you know, for sure, without needing to talk to anyone, that they are going to have sucked from the cup of human craziness, and that isn’t a pointed insult, it’s actually the most generous thing you can say about us humans. And if I can say one thing against America, why, why am I talking like this to a nice American level? But, you know, the United States was founded on a kind of millinery and utopianism by people who came across from England with a vision of building the New Jerusalem, and the idea that Jerusalem could be built on this land at this point, not in the next world, now.

44:28 For me the genius of Christianity was always that these guys located paradise not on this earth but somewhere else, because if we have to expect that we’re gonna build paradise on this earth, my goodness, we’re going to be fed up when the train runs late, when our politicians don’t say what we want, when our lovers aren’t as perfect as we wanted them to be. We’ll be in a rage because we thought there was going to be paradise. We thought that happiness was a right rather than an occasional, amazing thing that might visit us in an otherwise dark and tempestuous life.

45:02 So I think that it all depends on your starting point, and one of the things we try and do at the School of Life, we are a self-help institution, but my goodness, one of the first things we try and do is to say this life is imperfect, and you know, if you’re suffering and flawed, it’s not that your life has gone wrong, it’s that you are human, and that’s the basis upon which we, you know, start all our work. But you know, rather than this being come down or a humiliation, most people are really happy to embrace it. They’re like, oh right, okay, so my sense of myself is strange and oddly flawed and always making mistakes.

45:40 This is not some individual curse, this belongs to the human race at large, even though the adverts are not going to tell us that. And once we can provide that kind of public reassurance, it’s very moving. You know, one of the things we do at the School of Life is we gather, we have conferences a couple of times a year, and we gather 500, a thousand people in a large hall, and one of the first things we do is to say to people, you know, that all of us are trying to be impressive.

46:03 You know, we’re all, the first thing we do when we meet somebody new is to try and impress them, and we try and impress them through our status and our power and our flawlessness. But actually what wins us friends, what truly breaks down barriers between people, what wins us enduring loyalty and love and ultimately safety is the revelation of vulnerability. You cannot be friends with somebody if all you’re trying to do is tell them how great your life is.

46:27 The beginning of friendship is the acknowledgment of pain. It’s on that basis that you break down barriers and turn a stranger into a friend. So we tell our people who gather, we say, the doors are shut, no one’s on Twitter, we’re not gonna, this is between us, but could you turn to a stranger on left or right and tell that stranger something you’re ashamed of, something you regret, and something you fear? And at first is a deep intake of breath. Everybody’s like, really, do we have to do this?

46:53 As somebody to breathe, right? But then they embrace it, they embrace it, and people love it, because it’s an opening to a channel of pain that the conditions of ordinary life mean that we normally cannot reveal, but a longing to reveal. And you know, one of the things that we pick up, and I pick up so much in my work, is the depth of shame and isolation and loneliness under which people labor. You know, we think we’re in a social world, we think we’re in a connected world, but my goodness, we’re not.

47:24 We’re still in a very, it’s, we’re still taking the first stumbling steps towards acknowledging what it’s like to be a human being and to own up to really how we feel. I mean, let’s talk about sex. You know, one of the things we try and do at the School of Life is to get people talking about sex in the right way. We think we’re a sexually liberated world. My goodness, we’re not.

47:48 People are so ashamed and embarrassed of what they want, what they don’t want, what they’ve tried, what they haven’t tried, who they are. There is still such a fear, we, you know, the human who has been able to be honest about who they are sexually is still waiting to be born, and that’s remarkable. But again, let’s acknowledge that, let’s get that on the table. Is that come back to Romanticism as well? Is that wrapped up in the sex or is sex, well, I mean, it stinked, sure, it’s linked to.

48:19 Look, we definitely love within a kind of model of a culture that’s drawn from a movement of ideas called Romanticism, which kicks off in Europe in the middle 18th, middle of the 18th century, and then spreads around the world, and it’s now the dominant wave in which we look at love. And Romanticism tells us a story about love that is very particular. It tells us that all of us are going to meet one very special person, we’re going to be with them for life, they’re going to understand us totally, they will be our angel, they will be our ideal co-parent, sex partner, best friend, kindergarten administrator, you know, business associate, etc., etc., etc.

48:59 And then, and we’re gonna have great sex with them as well. And then we’re surprised that we have some problems in not just one area but about twenty, and we think that we’re terribly lonely and what’s gone wrong with us, etc., and it’s like, welcome to the human race. But Romanticism has not prepared us for the challenges of love. I mean, one of the things, for example, that Romanticism madly tells us is that if you’re really with somebody you should be with, you guys should understand each other without speaking.

49:28 There’s an enormous amount of poetry and music and and an analysis of this way in which true lovers understand each other wordlessly. Now, this is a lovely thing. A lot about Romanticism is lovely, but it’s very partial and very dangerous when pushed out as a general philosophy of life. I mean, the idea that somebody should understand you without you using words is catastrophic. It’s like, I mean, this is gonna lead, what it has led to an outbreak of sulking.

49:58 You know, what is sulking? Sulking is, sulking stems from the belief that another person who loves you, claims to love you, should understand you without you speaking what is in your heart. Now, that doesn’t work. You’re gonna have to use words. But if you feel that using words and spelling out why you’re angry, what you want, why you’re disappointed, what you hope for, if you think that spelling that out in a relationship is equivalent to being unromantic or a betrayal of the hopes that you entered the relationship with, you’re going to be in trouble.

50:30 So, and so many couples are because of this. Everyone’s had that experience. I’ve been on the other end of that many times, or both ends. Eeeh, we’re both, you know, because we live in a world that tells us that the true lover will understand us without us needing to speak, and that’s not real, but no one ever told us that this was all based on this, like you said, Romanticism, that’s actually quite recent, and yet we’re swimming in it. Like, I mean, I think it was Terence McKenna that says, I don’t know who discovered water, but it definitely wasn’t a fish, you know.

50:56 And so, you know, until you kind of call this out, it’s hard for me to now say, oh yeah, I do think this and I do that, and Romanticism really pervades and it’s quite destructive. Look, I think, I think the task of culture is to put flags in territory that previously we would not even have seen, to map the landscape, and the more good ideas you can stock your mind with, the more you will walk through your daily life going, hah, that’s an idea that I’m picking up from the Romans, or like, that’s the Greeks here, and it’s the moments of everyday life. And as I say, that is the mission of my life, to try and stock up with as many ideas, as many flags to flag up as much madness and as much pain but also as much beauty as possible.

51:37 You know, what is the history of art, for example, other than a sequence of people taking us and doing, look, come here, look at that diner late at night, it’s not beautiful when people are kind of sitting in a melancholic way and it’s kind of lonely but also kind of redemptive, because it’s a new idea that home could be not just your living room, but home could be the world. And that person’s Edward Hopper, and with the help of Edward Hopper we’re able to see the beauty in the diner late at night, or, you know, an artist like Jackson Pollock enables us to see the beauty in frenzy, in a certain kind of energy that’s manifest in paint but also in one’s own life. And suddenly with, you know, Pollock’s work we can start to see it as a beautiful thing.

52:21 So the great artists have always been eyeopeners, and so much we can see, so much more once painters and artists and cultural figures have helped us to notice what is already but currently unseen and in front of our eyes. Yeah. Anything else we should know about Romanticism while we’re on the topic right now? How, because, you know, people are listening and they’re like, yeah, wow, that’s something that’s something that’s completely made me unhappy in a relationship because I made all these assumptions because I read the fairy books or it’s so permissive in our culture that I didn’t even know I was making those assumptions.

52:53 But yeah, Alain, those are completely unrealistic, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do about it. One of the very basic things is that love may be a process of growing and learning and changing. There’s often a fierce resistance around the notion of change. Sometimes when people get together and want to describe the ultimately lovely person they’ve just met, they’ll use a sentence which sums up some of the problems with Romanticism. They’ll say, I met, you know, Mary or John, and the great thing about Mary or John is they love me for whom I really am.

53:29 This is one of the most dangerous sentences in the English language, to be loved for who you really are. No, no, no, no, no one should be loved for who they really are. All of us should be loved for who we might be, for who we hope one day to be, for a future self which is not yet, you know, fully developed but is a dim light on the horizon. That’s what love, you know, a true lover, the best lover should help us to not just towards a better version of ourselves, they shouldn’t confirm our worse reality right now.

54:00 Of course we want to be treated with generosity, but we want to be helped to develop. And love, for the ancient Greeks, love was a classroom, love was a process of education whereby two lovers would educate each other through and with the help of the generosity that love brings with it to become better versions of themselves. Nowadays, you know, if you told your partner, look, I’ve been reading Plato and, you know, this guy’s terrific and Plato has told me that, you know, this bedroom is a classroom and therefore I’m gonna help to educate you to become a better version of yourself first, which I ran and go, hang on a minute, you know, I thought you loved me.

54:35 You’re trying to, you know, turn me into a pupil who’s gonna take a lesson. And people get very defensive. Now of course the lessons have to be delivered correctly. Most of us try to change our partners late at night when we’ve drunk a bit too much, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and we do it through humiliation, humorless nurse and a kind of badgering insistence on somebody’s faults. No one’s ever learnt under those conditions.

54:57 I mean, you know, if you were a school teacher, if you’re a school teacher, you teach when people are awake, when people are in the right frame of mind, with a little bit of humor and with a full acknowledgement of your own ignorance and your own frailties as a teacher. That’s how you teach. But you know, life asks all of us to become teachers but gives us very few lessons in actually how to become good ones, and we need to be good teachers in the realm of love, and we don’t really know how to.

55:26 And many, many struggles in relationships can be seen really as failed teaching attempts. Someone’s tried but failed to get an idea across to the mind of their partner, and they’ve been maybe too worried about the success of their lesson to ensure that their lesson could be successful, or too worried about being asked to reveal rather too brutally a flaw that they know is in themselves but they don’t have too much courage to look at. And therefore they’re gonna deny that lesson.

56:01 You know, this is what goes on in bad teaching and bad learning, and there’s a lot of it out. And you say we should also treat our lovers like children to a certain extent, or their emotions, acknowledge that they could be childlike? Is that what you mean by? Well, you know, one of the things that we’ve learned how to do is love children. You know, for most of history we were pretty bad at that, but thanks to the work of pioneering psychologists and psychoanalysts we’re now pretty good, and proof of that is that if you come home and you’re a parent and you’ve had a busy day at work and your kid is kind of acting up, and maybe you cook them dinner and they kind of throw it on the floor and go whew, and I’m not particularly polite, you don’t hit them, you don’t say that child is a evil child, I’m gonna lock it up in a cupboard and comfort it in two weeks.

56:44 You immediately go, I wonder why that kid’s acting as it is. Maybe it’s tired, maybe it hasn’t had enough food early enough, maybe it’s jealous of its sibling, maybe it’s feeling a little bit humiliated by, you know, something that happened with the babysitter or something. Children are pretty complicated, complicated beings, they feel a lot of the things we feel. In other words, what you’re doing is using your imagination to try and interpret the less edifying moments in the behavior of another human being.

57:13 That is love. Love is the courage to look with imagination and benevolence at behavior which it would also be possible always to dismiss merely as rude or as bad or as evil. Those words are not words of love, and when we can manage it, and very often we can’t, but when we can manage it, that is what it’s like to look at somebody through the eyes of love. We can do it sometimes with kids and around kids, especially our own. We’re still pretty slow about doing that with our fellow adults.

57:45 You know, when our fellow adult comes in the room and says something a little bit off or whatever, we don’t think, are they tired? They may be envious of their sibling. Have they maybe not had, you know, the best day at work? No, we think they’re evil, they’re trying to bring me down, they’re not respecting me, etc., and that’s how tensions kind of escalate. So love is not an emotion, it’s a skill, and it’s a skill that we need to learn.

58:07 The world is currently very badly set up. We don’t have schools for love. That’s why I try to build one. The School of Life is an organization that is trying to teach, well, first of all me, but then hopefully some other people, all the stuff we never got taught at school: how to love, how to be patient, how to be calm, how to find one’s purpose, all of these things. You know, I had a so-called elite education.

58:32 I missed the class where they told me all that stuff. Right, why are we not systematically, why are we leaving generation after generation to stumble in the darkness and find out the fruits of knowledge by themselves, when they do exist? They are in books, they are there, unfortunately they’re often buried in very long books, and we don’t have the time to read them, or the author of that book has a really weird name, and the book is really boring for the first hundred pages, but there’s a really good page, you know, at page 300, but we never get there, et cetera.

59:02 So we need that knowledge organized, and what I’ve tried to do in my life is to organize the knowledge that I found most helpful into pigeonholes that others will be able to find their way to, even if they’re short of time, even if they haven’t had the fanciest education, etc., etc., that these things will be findable, locatable small pieces of knowledge. You try to stick out there that people can grab on to. Ya, and then go deeper if they want to go. Yeah, and I mean big, big parts of knowledge too.

59:33 I mean, I’ve written, you know, books with five hundred pages, but I’ve also made YouTube films of, you know, one minute. So I’m agnostic in the delivery mechanism, but I’m very fervent and a great believer that what we need to do is to make ideas available so that life doesn’t have to be so lonely in its most acute mode. Okay, tell me about School of Life, and what have you learned since 2008, you know, what surprised you, what did you get right, what did you get wrong, what are you still learning on how to teach people about these things that we’re not taught that we need to learn about?

1:00:09 So look, actually in England, where it’s probably seems like a hard market to get in, people said, as opposed to Berkeley, California? Yeah, so I’d never run a business before, I never worked with a lot of our people before as colleagues, I just simply, you know, given my books as somebody else to turn into a product, so suddenly with the School of Life I was faced with an organization, group of people, and a mission, and some money to do something, and this was terrifying, and I made every single mistake in the book, literally, but we’ve been getting a lot better, and the School of Life is now to my mind exactly what I hoped it would be. In other words, it is accurately mapping the human soul and trying to put the best ideas on a range of pains, sufferings, joys and questions.

1:00:56 But it’s been a long road. I’ve learned all sorts of things. I’ve learned that you need to keep it simple, you need to keep your mission focused, you can’t do everything, try and do a few things really well, really try and get your ideas organized. I mean, my goodness, my mind is a much more organized place now than it was 10 years ago, because you start by going, yeah, we want to make it a really interesting place with lots of fun ideas, like, what, what’s that really gonna mean?

1:01:23 You know, what’s that gonna mean on Monday morning when you’ve got 500 people to teach or a YouTube film to make or some books to publish? So I’ve had to get much more systematic, much more organized. We’ve had to get, you know, a staff of over a hundred to be singing from the same hymn sheet. This has been a massive learning curve, and my admiration for people who run businesses, I mean businesses that are much, much larger than our own, is now off the scale, because my goodness, it’s hard to do this, and it’s particularly hard if you’re trying to do something where you really, really care about the product.

1:01:57 Well, you’re not merely trying to make money, you’re, we’re trying to make money in order to survive and reinvest in what we do. We’re not making money as its own purpose, but even then the profit motive is very hard to align with, you know, a really good product, and you have to work, you always have to work doubly hard because you’re trying to hit the profit target but you’re also trying to hit the quality target, and you’re up against people who don’t care, they’re just trying to give you a sugar high, and so you’ve got to make it fun but also worthwhile, and so that’s, you know, you’re at the sharp end of a lot of competition, and all that’s been very, very hard but gratifying. I’m really grateful for that discipline.

1:02:34 I love that discipline. I think if I’d stuck in academia I would have grown fat from the kind of indulgent system that you’re able to have here. We’re running a very lean operation, we have to prove ourselves, and the ultimate arbiter of whether we’ve succeeded is you, the audience. And that is so right, you know, at the end of the day, and the audience decides, they let you know, they let you know if you’ve hit the target or not, and it’s salutary, and you just know.

1:03:01 I mean, I know, you know, we put out and we’ve made 500 films on YouTube and we just know some of them will land and some of them won’t, and we don’t know ahead of time, but we certainly know five minutes later, and we’ve learned so much, so much about, in I have learned as an artist how to create because of what our audience a tortoise. Why the physical locations? Why so many? What have you learned from that, good and bad, and then talk about digital after that, because that wasn’t really around when you started.

1:03:33 Yeah, so we, I always had this idea that I wanted to place the School of Life in the middle of life, and so, you know, I wanted a shop, not some academy far away, I wanted to be on the high street next to ordinary life, and we are next to a kebab shop on one side and a hairdresser on the other in an ordinary street in London, and we loved that was an ordinary bustling street, so people walk up and down the street and they’re like, I got a minute, I can buy an orange here and a haircut there and psychotherapy here or a book about the meaning of life, you know. And I love that, I love that we are rubbing up against ordinary life, which keeps us on our toes and keeps us connected up with the problems of life as people experience them day to day. So we’re in the middle of life, and we teach in a classroom space on our premises, and we have psychotherapy, we now I’ve got other bill things around the corner, but we’re still true to our roots.

1:04:25 And from quite early on people said to us, hey, can we open a branch of the School of Life in our own country? And at first we’re like, oh, we’re not sure how this is gonna work, but gradually we made friends with these people and saw how it could work, and we now have a business model that people have franchises, and we have a franchise system, and we have branches around the world who teach our material. They’re our friends and colleagues, and you know, we have a beautiful way in which you can get psychotherapy in our branch in Sao Paulo, and you can hear a class on love in Melbourne or in Seoul or in Istanbul, and you’re getting some of the same material and standard and experience.

1:05:06 And you know, you asked why the physical? I tell you why, because people want to connect with each other, not just with the material we’re teaching them. So digital is fantastic at connecting people, material to audience. What it doesn’t do so well still is to connect people together in physical space, people look each other in the eye, and it sounds quaint but it’s central, they make friends. You know, we are a friend-making machine, and we’re proud of the number of friendships that we’ve incubated when people go and study together.

1:05:41 Yes, what’s going on at the front of the classroom is exciting, but was perhaps even more exciting and more heartwarming is the connections that people are building with each other. So whether it’s our conferences that we run twice a year or our classes or all our physical events that we do, they are as much about the connections that are built as the knowledge that is being delivered. You asked about digital. Digital came along midway through our evolution for us.

1:06:09 People told us about YouTube and they’re like, guys, you should be on this channel. I’d no not really understood it, but it’s changed our lives. We now have an audience that really spans the globe. We learn so much from them, and it’s just a wonderful way of getting our message out. We also publish books in the traditional way, but getting them out digitally through Amazon and other online sellers has been a fantastic thing.

1:06:34 We deliver our classes and materials to a business audience, a lot of that is done digitally, so it’s just opened up a whole other realm. I think, you know, a little organization like ours couldn’t survive in the pre-digital age. We would, you know, we would be begging the powers that be to give us airtime and to give us bandwidth, and we don’t have to do that. You know, it’s, I count my blessings every day that we can without asking anyone put our stuff in a week.

1:07:02 We can put out a film on, you know, attachment theory in John Bowlby, and we don’t have to, you know, I worked in television for a while before the digital age, and I remember meetings where people would go, no, that’s too serious, no, our audience doesn’t understand as know, they don’t have an appetite for that, and I would go, believe me, I know that people are interested in this stuff, and you’d get shot down. There was no way of getting that material across, and now it’s just amazing that, you know, we’ve put out a film on Heidegger, it’s at three million views, three-minute, you know, and that’s a small audience compared to other stuff that people are doing, and sometimes we can do with adventurous stuff, so it’s, you know, it’s a dizzying and an amazing age from that way.

1:07:41 It’s fast at any time, you know, and it’s weird because I see weird parallels with the things that we’ve been doing, because we started putting out long phone conversations with people like you, and people get kind of hooked and they say, wow, there’s something in there for me that will change my life, it doesn’t make sense, it’s just two people talking. And then after that they’re kind of curious to learn more. And when we set up our academy about five years ago, I was just gonna go in and teach the way I knew how, we did it with digital technology, but I found, Alain, behind the scenes, people were first of all, vulnerability is one of the rules in my academy.

1:08:13 High five rules: respect, love, vulnerability, action and accountability, and fun. And so right away people were getting vulnerable, because if you’re there, by definition you’re obviously not doing something right. So people started connecting with each other, and then we have graduation ceremonies every quarter here, and people walk in who’ve never met each other and they hug each other and they say, I’m closer to these people digitally than I am with my friends and family, because they’ve never been vulnerable, they’ve never felt it’s okay, it’s like place where you can actually do that.

1:08:42 And it’s been the wildest thing for me to why happen, but clearly there’s a craving for it for people out there to have something. And you talked about this too, that may be used to be taken care of with religion, you know, and Rupert Sheldrake has a great book called Science and Spiritual Practices, where he’s trying to recognize some of those great humanizing practices religion used to give us, you know, coming together and going on pilgrimages and giving to charity and singing and all these things that connect people that are no longer there, and now people are craving for forums where they exist. That’s right, a nice, that’s right.

1:09:16 And I think a role isn’t just to recognize the holes left by religion. This is something I’ve written about quite a lot as well, and I think that, you know, we are living, many of us, in a post-religious age where we’re no longer honoring the things that religion gave us, the need for the transcendent, to experience ourselves a small in a vast universe that is more powerful than us. This, you know, you can do this with the Hubble telescope, you don’t need a God in order to do this.

1:09:44 The need for community built around an acknowledgment of our fragility and frailty, religions used to do it, but you can do it, you know, yourself, etc. So a lot of our needs that religions catered for exist still, and I think our generation’s task is to be creative about inventing substitutes, and unashamedly the School of Life is an attempt to go in the tracks that were first laid down by religion. Those are not religious tracts, but they’re tracks which religion pioneered, but I think now because of our doubts about many of the thoughts that religion wants to propose to us, you know, it’s open to us to create new forms of gathering, new forms of liturgy, new forms of getting married, of dying, of connecting ourselves to the transcendent.

1:10:38 This is all open to us. And culture was supposed to replace religion, or was it, you thought it might? Yes, we thought it might, and I think it can. I mean, the great works of culture, the great books, the great paintings, the great works of architecture, they can replace many of the things that the spiritual domain used to offer us. It’s just that currently this stuff is often in the hands of people who are not interested in our more personal emotional requirements and therefore have a rather frosty relationship to it, so that, you know, if we went to the museum and we broke down in tears in front of an Agnes Martin or a painting by Rothko or Piero della Francesca, this would be seen as weird and not true to the spirit of culture, which is meant to be imbibed with a catalog, with a stony face, and without any pressing emotional needs.

1:11:29 So I think that we should have a more personal relationship to works of culture, and the guardians of culture as currently defined constantly attempting to give us a more dispassionate and more, if you like, formal relationship to this stuff, but this is the stuff we should be using to live and die with. I agree. Talk to me about status and snobbery, and how, again, I think you have, you show these kind of cognitive biases that we’re living, and when you talk about this stuff a lot of people say, oh yeah, maybe that’s why I’m doing that.

1:12:04 What do you see? I mean, look, you know, the first question we’re likely to encounter in a new meeting with somebody is, what do you do? And according to how you answer that question, you’ll either be, you know, praised and become a subject of interest, or you’ll be left alone by the peanuts. And this suggests to me that we live in a world of snobs, and a snob is really anyone who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a universal and rigid sense of who you are and how much you matter.

1:12:33 And the kind of snobbery that is dominant in the world today is not around bloodlines or lineage or your closeness to the Queen of England, as it used to be, but what job you have and in particular how impressive your powers of financial accumulation are, and according to that criteria people will judge you immediately. So it’s sometimes said that we live in a materialistic world. I don’t think we live in a materialistic world, we simply live in a world where material accumulation has become the gateway to the respect and love that we all crave.

1:13:04 It’s not really the riches and the, you know, fast cars etc. that we crave, it’s honor and love, if you like, that they are a conduit to, that they are perhaps the only conduit to. And that’s a different way of looking at so-called greed. You know, the next time you drive, those have you walk down the road, do you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don’t think this is somebody who’s greedy, who’s materialistic, think first and foremost this is somebody with an incredibly intense need for love, who has not been able to find the honor and respect they need in normal ways, and therefore, you know, they’re needing so much more stuff in order to feel they have the right to exist.

1:13:44 If you can deal with just riding a bike through town and that’s okay, something’s gone right in your past. If you’re a parent and your child has no ambition to become famous, you’re doing something right, because that means that that person is able to deal with being them without too much other stuff. And a lot of these things are now magnified by social media. And you never finished your, where you were gonna go with the Americans as well, so we got to get back to that.

1:14:11 But I mean, do you see this stuff getting worse? What do you see social media doing to these things you’re talking about? Look, I think one of the most beautiful but also dangerous ideas, it’s an American idea, is the notion that anyone can achieve anything, right? And we hear these messages from everywhere, that is the spirit of our times. It’s a beautiful message, but it’s a dangerous message, because if you really believe in a world where you can do anything and you’ve only done a bit, you’ve only done something, my goodness, how crushed you will feel.

1:14:44 The possibilities for humiliation are so much greater now. You know, if you go to an American bookshop and you look at the self-help section, there are basically two kinds of books on that shelf. The first kind is books telling you how to make a million dollars in an afternoon, and the other books are books telling you how to cope with what they call low self-esteem, and the two are totally related. If you live in a culture that’s telling you how to make a million dollars in an afternoon, you can have a massive self-esteem problem, because how can you achieve a steamer for yourself when you were going to be part of the 99% not the 1%?

1:15:17 That’s the flaw of meritocracy illusion, is right there, so that most of us are going to have an ordinary life. So what have we done, building a world in which an ordinary life is not good enough? This is crazy, this is a form of self- torture. We’ve now created a life where an ordinary life is materially more comfortable than it’s ever been. An ordinary life, you’re gonna get a good car, you’re gonna be able to have a bath every night, you’re gonna have a roof over your head, you’re gonna have pretty nourishing food, right?

1:15:45 So materially an ordinary life is terrific, but then we’ve put a snake in the grass. We’ve ruined paradise that we’ve built, in our ancestors have built for ourselves, by telling ourselves that actually, contrary to everything we hoped for, actually an ordinary life is psychologically not good enough. It’s not good enough just to drive an ordinary car and have an ordinary house and have an ordinary bath once a day and have an ordinary meal. No, that’s not good enough.

1:16:08 You need to be extraordinary, become Mark Zuckerberg, become somebody else, right? This is a kind of torture that we’ve imposed ourselves. We’re insane. How have we made a life whether the statistical odds of you leading that life, the 99% surety that you will lead that life, has come to seem like a humiliation and the wrong sort of life? This is setting yourself up for disaster.

1:16:32 You know, the Danish are clever, the Danes have built a society for themselves. I was in Denmark recently. They’ve built a society for losers, right? They have understood, unlike the Americans or the Brits, that most of us are going to be losers, so they’ve made sure that schools for losers are gonna be fantastic and trains for losers are going to be beautiful and kindergartens for losers. I’m using the word loser with irony.

1:16:58 I’m using the word loser to define it, actually all of us, the 99% are going to be. We are all of us almost fated, and in every area, in every area of life, we will encounter failure. We’re fated to be ordinary, and an ordinary life is a good life, and let’s not torture ourselves that the only way to be good enough is to be extraordinary. This is poison. There’s a famous line from the movie called Patton, where George Patton is, General Patton’s on stage and he says, Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.

1:17:32 And you know, I grew up there and it’s all about that. It’s like, what have you done? That’s the way you’re gonna be judged. Sure. And look, you know, they’re gonna be wrong.

1:17:41 A bit of ambition is fantastic, a bit of get-up-and-go is fantastic, we’re not in any danger of being unambitious. The danger now is suicide, I’m putting it at its darkest. The danger is that we will feel so inadequate in relation to the expectations placed upon us that we may choose to end our own lives, and this happens in huge numbers, right? We are suffering from an epidemic of mental unwellness, largely bred by the expectation that our lives will be stellar when in fact they are far more likely only to be ordinary.

1:18:16 Our lack of acceptance of ourselves has made us sick, so we don’t need any more reminders from General Patton or anyone else to get up and go and be a winner. We know that, that’s in our DNA now as modern human beings. We’ve had that message and it’s making us sick. We know it’s so well, we know it too well, and we need to hear another message, and that message is you’re OK. It’s OK, it’s OK to fail, it’s OK to be ordinary, it’s OK not to know what’s going on, it’s OK to be lost in a universe most of whose recesses will always be darkness to us.

1:18:50 That’s all of it, OK? And joy is not gonna be making ten million dollars. Joy is going to be a drink with a friend. Joy is gonna be a meal that turns out OK. Joy is gonna be a day at the end of which no one’s died, there’s been no crisis, it’s been more or less all right.

1:19:08 Love is not going to be perfection. Love is going to be occasionally a hand held by somebody who understands bits of you, never the whole of you, but has charity towards your darkest moments. You know, that is the life we’re gonna lead, and let that be OK. I think you’ve said that, like, suicide is 20 times higher when you get into these dense civilizations versus someone who’s not there, and it’s because of, again, this will, this illusion that meritocracy always works, and by believing that, we get inside our heads.

1:19:39 And meritocracy is based on the idea that people will get what they deserve. Now, if you really believe in a world in which those who get to the top deserve to get top, you’re going to be believing in a world in which those who are at the bottom deserve to be there. So being poor and so-called unsuccessful moves from being a problem to being a condemnation of your society on you. You know, you move from being an unfortunate to being a loser, and it’s incredibly punitive, so no wonder people take that very badly, and they do.

1:20:12 How do you feel about the world confident, the word confident? Do people come to you and say, I want to be more confident? Do they come to the School of Life saying that, and is that the question they should be asking? We, look, confidence is an important oil to our efforts and energies, but how to achieve it now? If you like, there’s the Californian way and there’s a School of Life way.

1:20:32 Let me give you the Californian wave when you breathe California, but I’m gonna write this girl, all right, let they let it go, okay. Love California, it’s a beautiful place, but generally a California will tell you, in order to become confident, believe in yourself, and the way to believe in yourself is to see that you are in fact a beautiful person with prospects and skills and talents, and you deserve to get out there and be who you want to be, and your confidence is based on your acknowledgement of your beauty and strength and perfection. That works for some people, but I don’t think it really works.

1:21:05 I think that if you really want to build somebody up, this is what we tell them. We have people coming to School of Life and they go, you know what, I’m in the darkness of, you know, 3:00 a.m., I sometimes have a terrible fear I may be an idiot. I fear that I’m kind of a fool, right, and this is sapping my confidence. I don’t feel that I deserve to get anywhere or jeev anything because I’m just like this area, right? And we say, look, you, there’s good news and bad news.

1:21:29 The good news is, sorry, we start with the bad news. The bad news is you are an idiot. The good news is that so is everybody else on this planet. We are in a planet of seven billion idiots. That should never hold anyone else back.

1:21:42 Of course we are foolish, we bump into doors, we don’t know what’s going on, we say the wrong thing, we misfire, we don’t get our ambitions right. Welcome to the human race, this is what it means. There is no other alternative for a human being other than to be a stumbling idiot most of the time. This should not hold you back. This should merely be the starting point, and with that kind of lightness of heart that can come from looking at one’s foolishness and flawed nature in the face in daylight, you can, you know, we send people out to try, not somebody on a date, try and start the business, try and do whatever it is you want to do.

1:22:19 Sure that failure is the norm, that our idiocy is the bedrock of what’s likely to happen, we can shed some of our pride and therefore in the process lose some of our fear. Hmm, super powerful. We mentioned sex earlier and I’m really glad that you talked about that, Lynne schooled life, because a lot of people would choose not to. Some of our most popular videos on our channel are people talking about sex. How should people think about sex differently?

1:22:49 Because like you said, so many people think, I shouldn’t think this, and I’m no good at this. No, I think, you know, it’s very easy to feel you’re weird around sex, and sex makes us want and do pretty weird stuff. We love a quote from Kingsley Amis, where he said that having a sex drive was like being chained to an idiot for 50 years. If not an idiot, certainly a pretty strange person. I mean, somebody who in the rest of their life, you know, believes in dignity and seriousness and equality, you know, may, when it comes to their sex life, want to be on the floor in chains having somebody else insult them, right?

1:23:23 And you think, what on earth is going on here? Now, it’s our belief at the School of Life that almost every so-called bizarre sexual practice can be traced back to a pretty understandable part of human nature. You know, take the desire to dominate another human being in sex, right? Now, this is one of the most scary things, you know, people who are in ordinary life, as I say, very democratic and kindly and gentle, may feel that the only thing that’s going to be able to turn them on is to hit somebody else with a whip, you know, or to call them rude words, right?

1:23:55 And you think, like, wow, I’m so strange, I’m so ashamed, I can’t possibly admit this to anyone else, what’s going on? And again, people will become mentally ill because they are so divided against themselves. Now when somebody comes along like this to us, we say, look, it’s so understandable. Most, you know, one way to look at sex is sex is a relief from many of the pressures that ordinary life imposes on us. It is an immense sign of trust if somebody enables you, allows you to display your more ruthless, dominating characteristics.

1:24:31 If somebody loves you enough to allow you to do things that 99.99% people will never allow you to do, which is to be a little bit impolite to them and to almost relish your strength and your capacity to, you know, hurt and humiliate. Now you’re not doing this out of hatred, and it’s because it’s on such a fine line that people get so nervous about this, but ultimately this, in a arena of love, is an attempt to get close to somebody. It’s a major act of intimacy to be able to play sexual games, and people like to do this, but so many people are cut off from the origins of their fantasies and the origins of what they so-called really want to do, and they don’t tell their partners, they don’t even tell themselves because it sounds so weird, you know.

1:25:27 They want to dress up as a pirate or they want to put on a strange hat or the kind of watch their father used to wear or a pair of shoes that they once saw somebody wearing, you know, 20 years ago, and it sounds so odd, but very often it’s linked to trying to express bits of our personalities that are important to us, that are too blue in the rest of life, but that we’re taking to tell somebody else about in an arena that’s safe. And sex should be about safety, it should be about mutuality, it should be about an opening up of parts of the self that we can’t share with others. That’s true intimacy.

1:26:04 You know, true intimacy isn’t taking off your clothes, it’s unrolling your soul, and that means putting yourself in a position where 99% of people would laugh and giggle and point, and that’s the point. You found the one person that you’re not gonna be humiliated by, and that’s your pal, that’s your friend, that’s your lover. Okay, powerful stuff. There. I am a parent now with young boys, and you were talking earlier about this kind of true self when you grow up as a kid and then you kind of become this pleaser because our society can it conditions them to be pleasers, and my boys are almost three and four.

1:26:39 Just wondering what advice do you give to parents or how do you say to treat people, because, you know, I don’t want them to go to that boarding school atmosphere where they have to grow up really fast, because it’s unrealistic and creates all sorts of other issues, and yet they also have to grow up in this society. So what, how do you advise? Yeah, I mean, look, you know, for so long the dominant impulse of parents has been to tame this so-called monster that they’ve given birth to, who doesn’t sleep at the right moments, cries when Granny comes, doesn’t say the right thing to the post person, etc., etc.

1:27:16 In other words, that education has been seen as a process of inculcating total compliance in a child. It’s obviously important for the child to understand reality and gradually to go from a kind of megalomaniacal utopianism with which we’re born. You know, you know, young babies are little mini emperors, they want to rule everything, own everything, do everything, eat everything, sleep everything, sick up everything. They want totality. They are, you know, untrained, pure appetite, pure ego, and in a way what education is about is about helping the child to adjust to the conditions of reality and eventually to die, to accept everything that’s real about the world, including the fact it is finite and that it will not meet all their hopes.

1:28:04 Now, if you do that too soon with a child, you break their spirit, and if you never do that to a child, you make them psychotic because they cannot adjust to the conditions of reality. So good parenting is about adopting a sensible glide path towards reality. In many, many households that glide path is too severe, the lessons are too severe, because parents are so anxious that their child may become a savage that they just go in too heavy. Sometimes there’s a lack of boundaries and there’s an excess on the other side, but it’s about finding that place.

1:28:36 It’s also about being unfried, and you know, this is something, your kids are too young, but in adolescence, you know, if a kid turns around and says to a parent, I hate you, the parent should congratulate themselves. It is a victory of parenting if a child feels safe enough that they are able to direct their destructive urges not against themselves in suicidal thoughts that many adolescents have, but against a much fitter target, which is the parent. Good adolescent, a lessons is one in which teenagers are able to feel a host of extremely powerful emotions, including the emotion of wanting to destroy, and direct some of that at their parents, and the parents remain standing.

1:29:22 A kid tries to kill the parent and the parent doesn’t give way, in fact they’re a little bit bored, they’re a little bit uninterested and they’re unflustered. So when the kid says to you, you know, I want you to die, never ask to be born, go, thanks, darling, do you know what’s for dinner? And just move on, because that is to show that you’re a resilient person and that that resilience is something that they’re going to be able to learn from and not panic.

1:29:44 So you know, I think one of the greatest gifts that you can give your child is to be a little bit boring. My goodness, that’s successful parents don’t need an exciting, so our children don’t need an exciting parent, they can get excitement elsewhere from Disney and other channels. What they need is a reliable parent who will be able to tolerate their success and not direct envía their success, but also tolerate their fear and not need to always impose a narrative that isn’t true to what the child is.

1:30:15 You know, one of the things that parents do to drive their kids crazy is the kid will arrive with a certain emotion and the parent won’t listen to that emotion but we’ll put a new gloss on it. So the kid will go, I hate Granny, she’s such a boring person, I wish she would die, and the parent goes, ah, you don’t mean that, you love Granny. And what the kid really means is actually, at this moment my authentic response is that I kind of, I’m really fed up with Granny and maybe I don’t wanted to die, but I’m certainly really annoyed, right?

1:30:47 And a good parent at that moment, good parenting involves saying, mm, I see what you mean, it must be an, if the Granny’s coming around when you wanted to go to the park with your friends, but she is my mother and I love her and I think you love her, but maybe not all the time. That’s good parenting, because it’s acknowledging the child’s feelings, it’s giving the just the room for destruction while also training the child to see their destructive emotions within a more complicated, more multifaceted arena. Now, you know, of course none of us are good parents all the time, but that’s the target to aim for, and again, you can learn this stuff.

1:31:23 It’s not something you’re born knowing. You can learn good parenting like you can learn good loving and good pretty much anything else. Just need the right teachers. All right, you know, it’s interesting you say that, you definitely need to not be reactive as a parent. I actually have a stepdaughter, she’s 15, and my wife gets all of that, and it’s painful, it’s hurtful when she gets that stuff, but, um, I agree, I’d rather she be getting it then it going internal or going external.

1:31:50 I did the same with my mom, she was the one that got all of my wrath. Yeah. Now I realized that the way she reacted was love to me. Yeah, that she first of all she gave me the boundaries, there was love there anyways, and then the fact that she could stay stoic when that happened and stay the course, because if she had reacted I wouldn’t have respected her, and now I see it as love. Because your life is deeply disappointing, and you know, we need to scream at it sometimes, and it’s it’s very difficult for a parent or a need for a lover, but part of what it means to be intimate with somebody is to be faced with some pretty bad behavior, and it’s very unfortunate, and all of us, you’re trying to behave as well as we can, but we know for sure that at some points with some people we won’t be able to, and it is an act of love to be able to hold somebody’s titanic rage at the conditions of existence and say, I know, and not shut them down and not force them to be the good boy or girl that they’re having to be in other areas of their life, and for a time to allow them to be a little crazy and a little unreasonable, a little despairing and very, very sad, that that is a gift.

1:33:05 Yeah. Ten years from now, or doing what’s, what’s, what’s Alain up to? Where’s the School of Life doing? Well, there are different things. Tell me both.

1:33:13 So I think we’d still be true to the mission we have now, but I think hopefully we will be exploring new ways of delivering on that. Maybe in ten years we’ll have a hotel, come monastery, where people will be able to go and spend a week doing some of our staff living together and putting in practice the idea is that at the moment exist on YouTube or in a film or in a two-day conference, but that they might exist, you know, in a whole community that you can go to and check in on. That would be wonderful.

1:33:46 You said monastery, you’re not afraid to use that word? No, I mean, not that we would believe in God, but we would have, you know, a live feed from the Hubble or whatever telescope there is at that time to remind us of the vastness of the universe and therefore we ground us and put some of our problems in perspective. So this is an option to religion, and like you said earlier, you’re not afraid of saying that I cool of life gives you, it’s a religion. Okay, it’s not a religion, but it’s following in the grooves that were made by religion, and it’s very alive to the needs that religion identifies.

1:34:19 Okay, so monastery. So monastery, I hope that we’ll have a powerful and reliable app that will give us all of our material that currently exists here and there and lots and lots of different places and lots and lots of different ways, that it will be an intelligent AI-driven app that will mean that when you’re feeling a certain thing, you’re never more than a few taps away from getting some of our best ideas delivered to you. I hope that we’ll have that, and what else?

1:34:46 That we will be having fun and exploring new areas of pain and joy in the human animal and accurately delivering the best ideas that can contextualize human eyes, console us for everything we have to go through. Okay, what about you personally? I’ll still be alive, that’s not a given, you know, because we’re fragile beings. I hope to be alive, I hope to be in good health, I hope that those who are closest to me will be in good shape, and I hope that there will be love and joy, appreciation, and I know that these are huge asks, so if for whatever reason none of that does happen, so be it.

1:35:30 And you know, I don’t think we can hope on, I don’t think we can lay plans, firm plans, on 10-year increments, you know. Let’s let today go well and let’s hope of course for tomorrow and the next 10 years, but without any assurance, and that insecurity about what tomorrow in the next 10 years will bring should be at the root of our humanity and our sympathy for what it means to be among humans and to be a human oneself. To be a human oneself is to be facing a really uncertain future.

1:36:03 We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, and that’s why when we can we should hold our hug to our fellow fragile human being and, you know, in a generous spirit hope, really hope with them that today will be OK. There’s a line in the movie Fight Club where he says, leave me the chips fall where they may, and do a little bit like your philosophy worth, let’s just see what it is out there. What’s something you do every day that’s non-negotiable, something that’s a pattern for you that just allows you to be man you need to do.

1:36:36 Look, quite a few things, but one of the things I really like to do every day is to think, to try and assemble my emotions and scattered thoughts into a more robust idea that holds a piece of experience slightly more tightly than it was previously held. I try and do that every day, and if I’ve done that in a day then I’m happy. If I’ve had a solid idea that’s great, then I’ve earned my might keep on this earth. Are you always writing or are you always working on a book?

1:37:05 I’m always trying to either write or nurture the things that need to be there in order for me later to write, and some of that might just be, you know, you never know where good ideas will come. I mean, it might be chatting to a friend or doing something really quite unconventional and unusual, but that, you know, three years down the line that’ll be the thing that opened up a door to an interesting idea. Have you always been a good public speaker, communicator, or did you work at that?

1:37:29 I’ve never thought about it. I don’t think of myself as a public speaker or communicator. I’m only focused on the idea and its transmission. If anything else goes right in the process, I’m unaware of it, and I’m in a way, if I’ve got any gift, it’s that I don’t care. I’m unselfconscious about it because I am merely a vehicle for an idea, and I think that if you’ve got a fear of public speaking, forget yourself, forget yourself, just focus on what you’re trying to get across, and you know, it doesn’t matter how it comes out, just do the idea justice.

1:38:01 Yeah, that’s why you’re good at it. I think, I think fear of public speaking comes from fear of judgment, and then you’re making it about you, and then it’s not about you, you’re up there to transmit an idea. I hope the people in the audience, exactly, if it means you looking stupid to make that point, exactly, that should be okay. And this is a moment also where the fear of death can be deployed to good effect, because knowing that everyone in the audience is going to be dead quite soon, you’re going to be dead too, and you know what’s more, and one immortal words of Michel de Montaigne, one of my favorite philosophers, where he goes that kings and philosophers and so do ladies, in other words that we are all ultimately human, earthy beings.

1:38:38 You know, what is that a fear? We are, you know, we’re just among our fellow animals, and let’s not be too scared of what we are and who we are. A man, if I were to ask five year friends, what is Alain’s superpower? How are you able to do everything you do? What would they say?

1:38:53 What is this kind of? Well, they would immediately say the guy never stops asking us questions. True. Yeah, if I meet somebody, I am just a question machine, partly because I’m bored of myself. I know everything about myself.

1:39:05 I want to know about other people. You ask me a lot of questions. Yeah, so all I want to know is other people, and also I have a relatively low tolerance for superficial conversation, so we don’t necessarily quite get to the limit, but I want to know, you know, what’s making someone’s tick, take, where is the area of grief, where are they trying to grow, you know, what is the regret, etc. I want to go deep. I mean, it makes me quite a weird person to meet, because as I say, I’m just gonna go straight in there, and sometimes people are like, wow, I feel I may be to share a little too much, and that’s not how I see it.

1:39:35 It’s not like sharing, not sharing, it’s just we touched on some of what it is to be human, and that to me is an encounter. I’m not, I’m not interested in ordinary chitchat, friendship, that’s not friendship to me. I’m only interested in deep-level emotional connection and the exchange of ideas, and anyone who’s not kind of keen on that, I’m just gonna have, you know, a slightly harder time with. And, but I hope that I create an environment around me, and I think I do, where it comes quite naturally, and I think that one generalization you can make them was anyone is there came to offload, because life’s difficult for everyone, so if you create safe conditions, everyone wants to offload, and I want to, I want to know what it is you want to offload, cuz I’ll offload on you afterwards, and that’s what it is to be a friend.

1:40:26 It’s a vulnerability, right, way, right away, that’s how we do it, that’s how friendships are building eyes. Otherwise you’re to stay on your, I mean there’s a time for staying on your own, but if you’re gonna meet with another human, do that stuff. So counterintuitive, because everybody wants connection, but everyone thinks that they have to get the best version of themselves on the meets, but that won’t get you the connection, the vulnerability will.

1:40:46 Yeah, and yet again it’s a strange bias in our head, but we’re running a loop or, and we’re in a cage that’s killing us, and we repeat the same behavior. We can’t see it largely because, you know, this is how a life was when we were 15, and we’re still the heirs of a very frightened fifteen-year-old who, you know, learnt what the other kids laugh at and what they like. You know, schools are brutal places, and we spend a big chunk of our lives in them, and often in our heads we’re still at school.

1:41:09 Takes a long time to realize you’re no longer at school, there’s no longer a teacher, there’s no longer bullies, you’re free, the door is open, walk out and, you know, do it your own way. But we’ve been, we’ve been too well schooled. Yeah, and you were at an amplified version of those schools, different and alternatives. Yes, I mean, I was at, yes, I use it, an amplified version of that school, and I’ve tried to set up a very, very different school. So yeah, yeah.

1:41:32 What was the best day of your life and the worst day of your life? Best day of my life, well, the birth of my children was probably the best day of my life, best days of my life. And the worst? Did you ever think about not having children, was that always in the cards? I thought about not, and there might have been a time you know, and by the way, I think you can have a very, very good life without children, and I think you know, there can be a bullying atmosphere in society, you need to have children in order to be a, you know, nanana.

1:41:59 You can have a very, very nice life, and, you know, children ruin your life in some ways. You know, even the loveliest one scan, and you know, when you have children other things in life go out the window, and you’re not going to be able to have certain kinds of pleasures and and joys, so you know, it’s not for everyone and just worth absolutely getting that across. The worst day of my life, hmm. Look, I’ve had many dark days, you know, many, many dark days, days when I’ve been very scared, when things went very wrong, when enemies were at the door, when very destructive forces who wanted to annihilate what I am and who I am were, you know, getting the advantage.

1:42:41 I think that having days that feel like the worst days of your life is very normal, and we need to be ready for those, and we need to make sure that we have friends for the worst days of our lives. You know, these are the friends we need, and you can kind of have a worst-day-of-your-life radar in the back of your mind when you meet a new person, and you kind of know it in your blood whether this is somebody who’s going to be there that day, and it’s it’s a good criteria when sifting through possible social options. Yeah, and back to the kids thing, I think we’re all maternal and fraternal, and in maternal and fraternal in so many ways we don’t realize, you know, as men, whether you have kids or not, a lot of times you are being very fatherly, you know, or motherly to a lot of people.

1:43:28 What smiles don’t even notice it. So I think it flexes that muscle definitely. And I think that now I hazard to say that maybe women are better at this than men with pre-children. I think as a man pre-children, you look at children, think, oh, I don’t know what that is, etcetera. Women are better at identifying across the divide that separates those who have or haven’t had children, and maybe making that leap.

1:43:49 Not all women, not at all times, but some women at some times are better sometimes than some men, just to make that caveat. But I, I certainly as a man didn’t see the boy in the man, the child in the adult, at all, and now I instinctively do. I’ll be chatting to a 25 year old and like, I’m like, ah, I wasn’t so long since you were a kid in a way, and I can still see that in you, and that I kind of know that in a way that I didn’t know that as younger man, and it inspires a kind of generosity and kind of kinship with that person.

1:44:21 And also in older people, you know, you see, you see an 80 year old, you like, ha, I know what a kid’s like, and you were a kid, and I know that about you. So yeah, you can bridge that divide, and that is empathy. You know, we’ve all that, like, what is empathy? I think empathy is to see the child in the adult, the adult in the child. It goes both ways.

1:44:40 Yeah, what scares you? I think people who can’t forgive, people who were so angry and so hurt and in prey to so much violence that there is no capacity for forgiveness without forgiveness, we can’t move on, we can’t seek true justice, because true justice means acknowledging that at some points we don’t get our just deserts, that injustice is baked into the system, and maybe that’s what we’ll have to accept at certain points. And I think people who cannot forgive are so righteous that they are unable to make the necessary accommodations with the reality of other human beings, and that scares me.

1:45:31 And so whenever I see like a forgiveness that frightens me. Do you see it often or meet people like that? Yeah, yeah, it’s out there, it’s out there. It’s a temptation of the human mind, right, to get stuck in an attitude of righteousness and lack of forgiveness, because all of us have the right to be a bit righteous, we have the right, but is it sensible, and is it a strategy that’s really gonna work, and is it advisable? No, no.

1:45:59 I think we need to accept that life has dealt all of us some unfair cards, but we need to take it on the chin and accept it and forgive, forgive, and be able to live with that kind of imperfection. What will we be surprised to learn about Alain de Botton? Something you do in your spare time that might throw us a curveball. I’m very moved by some of the music of Phil Collins, which I think is surprising, cuz Foley had a bad rap and Cena’s not a great artist, but he’s got some fantastic lyrics, and he’s explored some areas of the human heart that are intriguing.

1:46:40 So I can sometimes be found putting on some folk on is quite loudly, and also eating a lot of chocolate that is pretty, pretty unhealthy. I’m very alive to appetite, and I’m not the good boy I should be in that area. So yeah, so being a little bad around these things. Chocolate, normally over 70% you know cocoa content, and so, and yeah, some of the joys, I mean look, I’m somebody who’s, and it does come with a CH, who likes small pleasures, because I think that some of the large pleasures of life are not available or not realistic, organic, land you up in trouble.

1:47:28 But if you’re able to enjoy, you know, some of the smaller things, like, you know, some lemon juice and you know, a nice song and, you know, a chat with a friend, you’re well set up to deal with the inevitable difficulties that life proposes. And so often our society measures out its pleasures in very large and unrealistic increments. Take flowers, right? You know, most young people like a laugh at the idea of enjoying a flower, it’s like, what, that’s ridiculous, like flowers, like, I want an amazing career, I want to go places, I want to see the world, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna stay home with a flower, right?

1:48:04 It’s ridiculous. It’s very hard to find someone post 70 who’s not moved by flowers. Why? Because once some of the big plans you’ve got have taken a hit, once you realized how compromised a lot of stuff is, boy, you’re gonna be moved by one of these little manifestations of the beauty of nature. You’re gonna take the flower, it’s not everything but it’s there and it’s pretty nice, and like, wow, that’s a good thing, you’re gonna bank that.

1:48:29 And that’s why almost all older people are into gardening, not necessarily as a practical activity but as a theoretical activity. And I’m on the side of that flower. I don’t garden, but I’m on the side of that flat of appreciating those small absolutable things and taking a moment. Absolutely. Yeah, when you could just rush by and go.

1:48:47 What keeps you awake at night? As I say, a lot of thoughts that I’ve not had in the day. My mind’s a full of a lot of stuff, and often I’ll need extra kind of processing time. I’m, you know, I will worry about a lot of stuff that I’m still trying to understand, a lot of stuff that is pre-verbal, a lot of fear that is probably, was set off in me before I knew how to think but I already knew how to feel. You could call it trauma.

1:49:24 That’s, I think, the stuff that stops me from being as relaxed as I could be. I think in my very, very, very earliest years I wasn’t soothed at a skin-to-skin basic level, and I think it’s left me a more jittery creature than I should be in my bones. It’s made me incredibly interested in everything related to soothing, but it’s made it that little bit harder for me to soothe myself for some of the things that are, as I say, pre-verbal. Hmm, that’s super powerful.

1:49:57 And what about the world, does the world keep you awake at night? Look, I take a fairly robust view of the survival of our species. Are we going to take a hit in some ways? Sure. Is a lot of stuff gonna go wrong?

1:50:11 Sure. Are we gonna make it? Probably, and the long, long term we’ll make it. Will a lot of things will not go as we wanted it to and all of expectations will be betrayed? But we’re resilient species, and if we fail, if we blow ourselves up, so be it.

1:50:29 You know, I think the idea that this manifestation of life should succeed at all costs is designed to increase your anxiety. We sure we should try everything to make Homo sapiens as successful as it can be in the broad sense, but if we don’t manage, we will not have deserved to be the custodians of this earth, and others and other things will come in our place, and they will hopefully do a better job, and it’s not for us to judge that process. You know, that process, we’re on that train to there, so it’ll either work or it won’t work.

1:51:07 So do everything you have to do to help the planet and to help our species to do well, but at the end of the day, you know, history and time is gonna tell whether we’ve deserved the chances that we’ve been given. And that’s kind of all rolled up into your philosophy in your School of, don’t being so anxious about this thing and accept something that doesn’t always have to be perfect. And you know, you maybe today, maybe, I mean that said, of course, fight with every fibre you’ve got, but there comes a point when imperfection also has to have its claim on us.

1:51:41 Yeah. I always ask a few questions at the end. On end, you know, if you could pick up the phone and call up the 20 year old Alain and give him some advice, I guess you’re a Cambridge at this point, I think maybe based on everything you know now, what would you tell him? You know, would you listen? school.

1:52:26 It’s no easy business to do what you’re doing and to put it out there and to be on the high streets and to try to introduce a new way of people learning about life and themselves. And I really applaud it. I think most people would agree that our current system of educating people about life is not working, so so it’s a wonderful thing, so thank you for that. And your IP is fascinating, I love how you describe things that it stick in people’s minds, and it’s really powerful stuff, from the Lamborghini that needs the attention to the loser’s being taken care of in Denmark.

1:52:59 It’s really powerful stuff. School of Life.com is where they can find all of your books and enroll in courses. It’s absolutely, and here on YouTube or there on YouTube is or films etc. Yeah, you’d like School of Life.com is the main home. Yeah, and your YouTube channel’s fascinating, in so many videos, so many nice little snippets to get you started on all this stuff.

1:53:18 And as you know, on YouTube if you watch one you’ll pull the string and the rest will be served up to you as you go on your adventure. So all the best in your future work. Thank you so much for sitting down, really enjoyed this.