YouSaid · the spoken record

Alain de Botton

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105
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2015-11-10
most recent
2015-11-10
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1
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  1. “Time. You're an incredibly generous host person and an incredibly gifted communicator speaker, writer, inspirer. So it's been a tremendous honor for me. Thank you so much. I know you've done me a serious service in doing this and I fully recognize it. Bowel cancer or no bowel cancer. It's fantastic.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Well, if we're talking about, we were talking a lot about Proust. Actually, no, now let me recommend something else. There's a film on my YouTube channel called Higher Consciousness. It's a rediscussion of this strange term sometimes got about higher consciousness. What is it? What does it mean to achieve higher consciousness? So punch into the school of life YouTube channel, punch in higher consciousness, and you'll get this film about, I don't know, how to look at the world with a higher consciousness. And then if you want to read something, go and check out how Pruss can change your life. I think it's a book that still holds up after all these years, and it's got a lot of things that I deeply believe in. So check that out.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Well, they can come and see my website, which is my name, Alan de Boton.com. They can come and see me on Twitter, just at Alain Deboton. I run a YouTube channel via the School of Live, so come and check out the School of Life at schooloflife.com and come and look at some of the films that I make there. I make three films a week. So there's a lot of”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Today may be the day that in a week you will look back on as paradise because we are so, it could always get so much worse. And I think partly of having children as well, we're very much at the mercy of fortune. You know, the Stoics talked a lot about fortune. Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place and we are done for. And the kind of levels of tragedy that can be all of us, you don't have to push us a little bit and we crack very easily, whether that's the pressure of disgrace or physical illness or financial pressure, et cetera. It doesn't take very much.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “There's a funny thing. My wife and I spotted that I kept talking about cancer and kept saying things like, well, I don't have cancer yet. And what happens if one day I get cancer? And so when we now have this joke between us, because I kept putting it like this. And so now she goes, remember, we're in the years before your bowel cancer. And she's partly teasing me. But really what we're saying, you know, she goes, remember, it's before the bowel cancer. And it's really a way of saying kind of, my God, you know, things can get very miserable very quickly. It only takes a very few cells to subdivide in the wrong way. And a lot of what seems important now will just no longer be. We just have to keep that in mind all the time. Today, which seems so incomplete from so many ways and maybe frustrating in this and that way.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Being ungrateful, you often go like, how do you mean they're ungrateful? It's not ingratitude, it's anxiety again, but I wish that I could have reassured my anxious self and just said that there is time to look out of the window and spot those flowers.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “That's not true, but I think when you're young, it's sort of associated with that. Things like flowers, you see, I had people around me who say things like, well, isn't that flower nice? And a little part of me was thinking, you absolute loser. You've taken time to appreciate a flower. Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, is this the limit of your ambition? And when life's knocked you around a bit, when you've seen a few things and time has happened and you've got some years under your belt, you think, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky or just a morning where nothing's gone wrong and everyone's been pretty nice to everyone else and things are pretty nice and it's you know it's coming up to 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock and things are going well and you think that's nice no one's died no one everyone's okay it makes you a little bit more modest and i didn't have that at all at 30 and i think it was the kind of when people talk about young people”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Where were you? Where were you in the? I mean, 30 was a weird year. My father died when I was 30, very surprisingly. So I was suddenly in a kind of different place. And that was very shocking. At the same time, it was a very successful year. The Constellations Philosophy came out. I met my wife. She wasn't then my wife, but I met the person who became my wife that year. So it was a kind of a year of many things. I mean, I think I would have also said, you know, appreciate what's good about this moment. Don't always think that you're on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view. This is life too. I think it took me a long time to kind of dare to appreciate the moment because I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you're weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Okay, well, what a second. Life is, it would say life is only 400,000 hours long. Be kind or something like that, just to grab the motorist as they're speeding down the highway at insane speed.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Well, I think it would probably pick up on the need to appreciate, the need to be kind. I mean, it could be something stark. I mean, it sums up what we were saying. It could say you have only an average life is however how many hundred thousand of hours this figure?”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “It is written seven or eight longer times bestselling. I mean, it's an odd feeling you feel very left out and there should be a support group started because it's a very isolated position to be in. And one question is one's own sanity sometimes. One thinks one will go over to the light side soon, but one just can't do it. And yeah, there we are.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I'm unfussy. I'm pretty unfussy about what I write on all kinds of pads. I have a wonderful Japanese pen called a pilot, you know, those pilot pens, and it's called a GTEC4. And I write religiously only with those. I'm also very, I'm the last person on the planet to work with a BlackBerry and I write all sorts of...”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Books have begun out of one word that I sort of caught in my, and it's a kind of housekeeping. It's a kind of intellectual housekeeping. I like to call it a kind of philosophical meditation where you just turn over what's going on in your mind. And I think insomnia, I went through a stage of having insomnia and I think that insomnia is a kind of revenge for all the stuff that you haven't thought about enough that demands to be thought about and will wake you up in order that it gets its fair share of thought. And if you can do that before bed with a pattern paper, it can be the best sleeping pill you've ever had.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Well, you know, there was a lot of talk a few years ago and still now of meditation and mindfulness and getting into a certain state. And I thought a lot about this and I thought, why is it that it's not quite working for me as it's defined, but that there's something here that I really like. And I realized that what I love doing at the end of the day, or at the beginning of the day, is the kind of download my brain. It's to just download those thoughts that are buzzing around slightly shapeless, slightly directionless, and they need a little help. And if I don't get to grips with them, they will disturb my sleep, or they'll wake me up early. So what I like to do is just sit with a pad and paper and write down in very small, slightly scrawly legible handwriting. Lots of things. It could just be a word, an image, something, and they will be the starting points of things.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “In pomegranate rations for every citizen. They would be forcibly on sale in every gas station across the United States. And I think genuinely the health, but more importantly, the happiness of Americans would rise exponentially.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “That's a good trick. You hit it a few times, and out they fall. And it makes a delicious kind of snack and you feel good and you feel virtuous, but it's nice as well. So I really recommend that. I think in my ideal nanny state, there would be pomegranates in every”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Time of game for pomegranate. To split them in half, and then while you've got your hand with your fingers slightly open over the pomegranate face down into the palm of your hand, you then strike the pomegranate hard with a wooden spoon, which gets the seeds to shake out. They go into a little bowl.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Someone told me about pomegranates and that they could be really interesting things to eat and make part of one's diet. And it's a thing I now regularly have. They're not cheap. Each one is a few pounds. But they're deliciously weird. And you'd think, wow, it's great, this kind of thing exists on this little blue dot this thing grows. So that's brought me constant pleasure upon the life of pomegranates.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I've really discovered that pomegranate and the pomegranates were just a weird thing. I never even knew they existed really. I knew the word. I just didn't know what it was. Anyway.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And it's a weird feature of British life like everyone knows Seven Up sort of thing. And it just comes along every seven years. And we know these people and their lives show such a variation, ups and downs, and sometimes, you know, sometimes things are going really well, other times are going terribly, etc. And again, it's so much the art I like. It's very much attuned to the everyday. It's concerned with, broadly speaking, with wisdom and how we can live. And very undramatic, but quietly, so powerful. For my money, it's probably the best documentary that exists. I very much recommend it. So that's one that comes to mind.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Well, I very much enjoyed a documentary, which I don't know if you'll know called Seven Up, which was done in the UK. And what it did is it followed a group of children every seven years starting from their seventh birthday. And these children were picked deliberately from a wide variety of social backgrounds, different kind of families, etc. And every seven years these kids were revisited. And we traced their lives. And of course, this is one of the things that art can do for us. It kind of traces lives over time spans that we normally can't have access to. So now these people are in their 50s and they're still making the documentary and it gets updated every seven years, every seven years there's a new”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Who are you to say? It doesn't have any fact behind it. They may be right, but because we live in a society that's quite obsessed by science and facts and won't accept things unless they're backed up by facts and science, we may just need to wait a little until some of these more humanistic truths and insights have got the backing that is required to allow them to have sort of mass uptake.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I think that's absolutely right and fascinating. And I too have been very interested in artificial intelligence of late. And I think that what we're talking about is... The broad recognition that we are not very good at making decisions, that our brains are extremely faulty in all sorts of ways. At the same time, we have this idea that no one should tell us how to live. And what can slightly break the logjam is big data, scientific information, so that in the Google of in 50 years' time, you will say, who shall I marry? And the answers will really be quite accurate and personally attuned to and akin to having gone to psychotherapy for 10 years in their level of awareness of the issues facing you. So I think you're absolutely right that artificial intelligence will break through many people's resistance to insights, which currently because they're not based on science and hard data, seem, are just too vulnerable to being shot down by the kind of line of like,”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “seeking help, therapeutic help in the broader sense is part of adult life that saying, you know, no one teaches me anything. I'm just my own person. Totally is a kind of slightly brittle version of maturity. And I'm interested in a more dependent relationship on others where we can seek help, where we're not offended if someone offers help to us. Of course, we can turn it away, but we're not offended by the offer of help. And so these are some of the things that I think about late at night and it would offend and frighten everybody.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “in chaotic noise and unable to find a kind of balance. And I think that I'd be up for a little bit more vigilance about that and a little bit more nannying of the best kind. So that's the kind of thing that I'm very careful not to tell you. I don't know why I've told you and your millions of listeners now, but I'm aware, you know, because I use YouTube a lot and I'm aware that if you put anything out there that says even anything like that, an unbelievable torrent of messages comes through along the lines of you're a communist or you're a fascist or you're trying to infantilize me or blah blah blah. And my view is always, hang on a minute, you know, we're all adults and when you know you're an adult, you can also admit that actually”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “My view should be on the national broadcaster should be programs that systematically address all the largest failings and dilemmas of the nation, including for the failures of around parenting, around family breakdowns, around violence, around anxiety, around loneliness, etc. We know government statisticians know what the problems are in large populations, but they refuse the tools that they have, like say the BBC. And the idea is, well, no one should tell anyone how to live. There's such a fear of fascism, communism. And I can't help thinking that we have made a bogeyman here, that that isn't really the threat. The real threat is that we are drowning.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “I believe in the nanny state. We live in a very, you have that expression in the States, right? The nanny state. So I believe in the nanny state. I'm not coming at it from the left or the right. Irrespective of that. But I believe essentially in a public sphere which should offer guidance. I think the idea of the neutral public sphere where, for example, it's just completely left to the market to decide. And if you've got the money, you buy an advertisement. If you want to pay for a billboard, et cetera. And I think that I'm interested in the way that we went from religious societies which guided people towards important truths to societies that have just”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Well, there was a stage before I got married and when I was on the dating scene, when I gave a lot of copies, this was the 90s. I gave a lot of copies of Milan Kundera to people. It suggested the unbearable lightness of being was a book that I gave out a lot. I don't know if I still would, but I do admire this Czech writer very much. And it has all kinds of wisdom and beautifully written and impactful as well. I've given quite a lot of copies of Montaigne's essays to people down the years. And I've not given Proust because it's a little heavy. But yes, that kind of thing.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Absolutely. And you say taught. I mean, we need reminders of this. Otherwise, people go, oh, yeah, you know, when you tell someone that, they go, oh yeah, that's obvious. I knew that. And you go, yeah, but is it alive? There's such a difference between an idea being in theory in your brain and alive in your brain. And those kind of ideas about appreciating every day, et cetera, are generally not alive in our brains. And that's a problem of art, really. They are not artistically alive. That's something to bear in mind.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “That's right. That's why I was kicking myself when the very word success has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc. And that's really unhelpful, that ultimately to be properly successful is to be at peace as well. I've seen too many people who are so-called successful who were not at peace. That's a problem”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “The world is full of such people, people who represent what you might call an ordinary genius, an ordinary genius at the business of living. And we walk past these people because they don't star in any of our calendars. I'd go so far as to say that perhaps a few more of them are women than men and they are utterly unheralded, but they are out there and they are the true philosophers.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “It's funny, I was recently in Switzerland where I come from, and when I was little, I was partly brought up by my parents, but also partly brought up by a very kindly lady who lived with us in the family. She's helping the family, etc. And she was almost like a second mother to me. And she's now 83 years old and lives in an isolated Swiss village. She's in amazing health for her age. And she is a true saint. She's not religious, but if you wanted to offer somebody up to science as somebody who is well balanced, you won't read about her in the newspaper. You won't see her face, etc. But you actually sit in her kitchen and you talk about politics with her. You talk about child raising, you talk about the meaning of life. This is a person with an inherent ballast who's no nonsense, who knows how to be kind, who knows how to laugh, who knows, etc.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Taken hold and fathomed their talents, made the most out of those talents, and reconcile themselves to their weaknesses. They are not ranting and raging about their weaknesses, they have a sense of what those weaknesses are. They're not blaming the world for them. They know them, they own them at the same time, they've had a sense of their strengths and they've been able to make something of those strengths. And maybe that thing's relatively modest, but they've still managed to externalize those strengths. That's asking a lot. That is a successful life. Very few of us are lucky enough to get there. But I think that's what it might be.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “I didn't want it to, but unfortunately Steve Jobs came to mind and I'm really annoyed about that because I don't actually see him as the quintessence of success. Look, I think a successful person is somebody who has”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “That's right. That's right. I mean, I love that. Wasn't it Clinton who said that when dealing with anyone who's upset, he always asks, has this person slept? Have they eaten? Is somebody else bugging them? He goes through this kind of simple checklist. But we are, you know, we know so much when we're handling babies and the baby is kicking and crying. We almost never does one say that baby's out to get me or she's got evil intentions. We go, you know,”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “with a source of wisdom in another, which is like how to get through your day. And we're misinterpreting what we need for both realms. We're thinking we need the kind of scientific version in personal life where actually it's really super unhelpful.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Out of connection with these simple truths. And they are so key, and this is something you mentioned Buddhism, this is something the Zen Buddhists are very keen on, Zen Buddhist philosophy and poetry is often unbelievably simple. And rather than seeing that as an argument against it, the great masters will ponder a sentence, turn it over, write it down in ever more beautiful, refined but simple ways on a piece of paper, etc. And I think that we've got, unfortunately, because of science and the glamour of science, this addiction to the idea that the most valuable things must be very complicated and constantly new rather than perhaps very simple and repetitions of some basic quite old truths. And it's just, I think we're mixing up a kind of source of wisdom in one area, which is flying rocket.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “That's pretty Yes. I mean, I often think someone once said this to me, and it's really stuck in my mind that when people seem like they are mean, they're almost never mean. They're anxious. That's what inspires the behavior that we read as meanness, but it very frequently is not meanness. And these are very basic bits of psychology. But I should say, again, the older I get, the more I think we are relatively simple creatures, just as to nourish us physically, we need quite basic things, some bread, you know, an olive or two, some water, and off we go. So when it comes to our kind of inner psyches, many of the things that we need have an almost breathtaking simplicity. It is things like the person is mean, not worried. They're almost like mantras. They are simple things. And I think we are so highly educated. We overeducate ourselves.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “You have to deduce. But I think you have to deduce from everybody's sake. And very few of us learn on the spot. If somebody told me or told you a big central truth about you, the thing about you, Tim, is, or the thing about you, Ala is, if that was said, even just vaguely brutally or just even with a little whatever, we shut down. We get defensive. We go, no, that's not true. How do you know? What are you trying to do, etc. We shut down quickly. We don't absorb that information. And we should, we should try and get less defensive. And at the same time, when we're in the kind of giving feedback role, we should really think carefully. So I think this whole business of listening and feedback is a key issue that I'm always trying to work on.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “And that requires kind of rules and disciplines and just simply blurting it out, simply kind of exploding in some way or emoting in some way is normally the worst way. And at the same time, we have to learn to become students, which is to listen properly, to interpret. Maybe somebody's making a bit of a mess of trying to tell you something, but try and listen to what they might be telling you beneath the surface. I've got relatively small kids. They very often don't tell you what they feel. They can't tell you directly what they feel. You have to do some guesswork. And a lot of work.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “If I'm agitated and get annoyed quickly, that immediately shuts off communication. If I blame them, that shuts off communication. They will not hear. If I humiliate anyone, that message will get lost. So if you're trying to get something across, resist all those bad habits that we all have around communication. I think it's trying to learn how to be a better teacher and a better student. Teaching has these sort of weird connotations you think of like some guy teaching history in a high school or something like that. But in order to have a good life, all of us need to learn how to be good teachers and good students of one another. Because every day creates moments when we need to teach something. We need to give somebody a lesson. It may be in what time we're going to be home tonight or how we're feeling about some event on the horizon or whatever it is. But we're going to need to get something across.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Look, it's a very classic one that so many of us are guilty of, which is not properly communicating. And what I mean by properly is not properly teaching others about myself, what I'm feeling, what I would like, what bothers me. And instead of properly communicating, merely acting out and symbolizing things and expecting to be understood. And this is a constant effort really to not imagine that those around me should mind read. They can't know what I feel unless I tell them. And also they won't hear me unless I speak in a certain way.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Thank you. And really what we're trying to do is to take a lot of stuff that I care about, but try and find other channels down which to distribute it. I mean, your career more than anyone shows how that can be done and that is done. And so I felt a kind of restlessness, which perhaps you felt as well at a certain point, about what it means to be a writer. And it's perhaps an intersection of writing and business for me and learning how to create a business out of something that might previously have just been seen as a kind of romantic inspiration of the kind of lone artist. Anyway, all of that's been very interesting. And you ask about the goals in the next few years. I really hope to continue to make a contribution there and to make school of life as good as it can be for us to touch as many lives as we can in as diverse a way as we can.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “No, You care so much, but I can explain why we're not in the United States in a minute, but if you want to. No, no, I'd love to be one day, but we're not yet. Anyway, we run classes. We publish books. We put on events. We run a YouTube channel. We do all sorts of things. And it's just...”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “religion related well, which was the kind of the group bit, the institutional bit, the embedding in daily life bit. And I thought, couldn't we do some of that now? And I also looked backwards to ancient Greece and I realized that philosophers, many of them had started up schools, Epicurus had started a school called the Garden, the Stoics had, you know, the Stoa, Plato had his school, the Academy, etc. And it's not that I wanted to directly imitate that, but I thought how interesting that these were people who thought it isn't enough just to be you in a book. Anyway, many of these sorts contributed to my beginning this thing that I call the school of life. And it's been the focus of a lot of my energy in the last four years. To give you just a sense of it, this thing has its HQ in London, but we now have 10 branches around the world.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Their deepest thoughts down in a book, and that's it. They support things by having communal activities, group activities, getting very involved in the arts, getting involved in this thing which we call ritual. I mean, we can talk more about that. What is a ritual, but ritualized actions, repetition, the repetition of ideas, not just, you don't just read them once, you repeat them maybe with other people. You might use music to get a point across. All of these things fascinated me. And I realized that as religion declined in Europe in the 19th century, in many parts of the United States, even now, etc. As religion disappeared, it was in many places replaced by culture. People who in previous ages would have been religious got very interested in music and literature and philosophy and all these sort of things. But I realized that those things were missing one thing that”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “of life, which was very much in line with things that I've been caring about in my books for a long time. But there were a few differences. For a start, it wasn't just about me. It was actually about gathering together with a group of like-minded but different people with different talents and different skills. And starting something that could be a proper collective and an institution. The reason I started where I did was that I read a lot about religion because at a certain point in my kind of crisis about the meaning of being a writer, etc., I got very interested in religions because I thought religion. I don't believe, but I'm very interested in religions and very sympathetic to many of the things you find in religion. What I realized that you find in religion is a machine, organization. Religions don't just believe in writing.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Well, I mean, if I can mention the professional, one of the things that's been really absorbing me in the last few years is a writer for most of my professional life. And then I always had a sense that writing books wasn't quite enough. And what I mean by enough is I didn't feel that sending people 200 pages glued together was necessarily always going to be the solution to many of the issues that I cared about. I felt a sort of crisis of the soul where I realized that this idea of being a writer that I'd wanted so badly when I was younger was no longer fully satisfying me because I realized that so many problems were not going to be amenable to treatment by books, that you needed other things. And that led me to begin an organization which I call the school.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “To calm down, first of all, you have to realize that your ultimate responsibility is to yourself, not the neighbors, not your parents, not the expectations that were put upon you. This is where the thought of death is tremendously releasing, that your only real responsibility is to yourself as a kind of mortal, very temporary being a constellation of particles and proteins that are hanging together in a particular shape for a few years before disappearing forever. That's you. And there are more ways to be than your college graduation speech led you to think. So, yeah, these are some of the tensions of the modern soul.”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Ourselves. As you know, we're not very good at understanding what it is that we really want. We're extremely prone to latch onto suggestions from the outside world. When everybody was saying tech was big, a lot of people who never thought about it thought tech was really for them. When banking was big, people thought banking's for me, when people were telling you that romantic love is perfect, you think, well, I must be finding perhaps even feeling romantic love, etc. So we've got a lot of models out there that don't necessarily suit us, but are deeply powerful. And I think that”

    2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT