YouSaid · the spoken record

Alain de Botton

lines on the record: 105
first: 2015-11-10
most recent: 2015-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No wonder I get that Sunday feeling when I'm thinking, my God, I've got my dreams on the one hand and my reality on the other, and the gap is too large, and I feel desperate. You know, no wonder we feel that because that is what the whole system helps us and makes us feel. And I don't want to say that it's all wrong, but it is certainly very demanding. Look, my experience of envy and status anxiety, etc., it's a very simple idea. The more you know what you really want and where you're really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. It's at the moment when your own path is that it's most ambiguous, that the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the kind of social media static, that starts to loom large and become very threatening.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In an American story in the 18th century, but it's also deeply troubling for many of us, it crushes us because what a burden to bear. What in a way, what unwitting cruelty to say to everyone, you can't rely on where you have come from. You can't define yourself by your group, by your family, by your ancestors, by the nation. You can't believe in nationalism. It isn't enough for you to feel proud of, you know, your group. You have to be proud only of yourself and what you've achieved in the years since you finished your college education or whatever. That is a heavy and sometimes just overwhelming burden. It's good to realize that we are under this pressure. It's not that that will magically make that pressure disappear, but just to be able to know, hmm, no wonder I'm a little twitchy on Sunday evenings as the sun goes down.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I mean, I think a very vital kind of realization was it's not just me, it's part of being alive today. We've got this ideology of individualism, you know, what historians of ideas call individualism, which is a kind of new idea because we've come from collective societies where your sense of well-being did not depend on anything that you particularly did. You were first and foremost part of a tribe, part of a village. You were part of a family. Your own achievements was only one part and perhaps even only the most minor part of that other, those other sources of identity and sense of self. We've done away with that. Everybody is meant to reinvent themselves. And that's wonderful in liberating and was part of...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they did love the arts, both of them loved the arts very much, and that I inherited from them. Anyway, I inherited various things. Every child is such a mixed bag of things. But I came out of that childhood thinking success is important, but at the same time aware enough of the limitations of success to not swallow uncritically some of the messages about what it means to kind of make it in this world. And so a lot of my work has been kind of exploring and probing what we mean by success and the challenges it brings, etc. So, yeah, I don't know if that explains some of it.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They did manage to achieve great things. Together, they built up a business. My father made it big in the world of finance. He always retained a kind of immigrant panic mentality. He had a Swiss, having not had a passport for long periods of his life, he eventually got a famed Swiss passport, and he would treasure that item like nothing else. And every time he crossed a border, every time he went in and out of a country, there would be panic in his eyes as he just thought, is this going to be the moment when they grabbed me and put me somewhere else, et cetera? So that was kind of part of his DNA. So it was a fact, I was growing up in a family that was at one level comfortable and had all the things in life and another level there was a deep psychological kind of disturbance and fear. I would say that”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I came from a family of very displaced and very neurotic and anxious immigrants. My father was born in Egypt. He was part of the Jewish community in Alexandria that got kicked out in the 50s from one day to the next. He then drifted around the Middle East. He eventually wound up as an immigrant, as a refugee more or less in Switzerland, was utterly penniless and desperate, met my mother who was part of the Swiss Jewish community, and she, for all her own reasons, her family, her father had recently died. The family had lost everything from having come from quite a privileged background. They then lost everything and she was living in very humble circumstances. Anyway, they found each other, they clung to each other, and they were united in their desire to make it in life and to be ambitious and achieve great things.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a few days you live like a dog and you realize that that's possible and it's fine and that removes fear and as they understood coming back to your earlier issue about ambition they realize that often what stops us from realizing our ambitions is fear and therefore if we make ourselves totally at home with failure totally at home with utter disgrace we will feel a curious lightness and sense of possibility because we won't held back by the constant thought what happens if we will have fully explored the question what happens if we'll have made ourselves so at home and seen that there is nothing so bad about failure and that will free us to advance more lightly and with greater courage towards some of our goals”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“he behaved pretty well. And so Stoicism is not necessarily Stoicism attracted a lot of support among the very wealthy and the very successful because it taught them that they could survive without their wealth and their success. And very often when people get wealthy and successful, they become very scared of what would happen and they feel the need for ever more success and ever more wealth from a fear that if they would have to go backwards, it would be catastrophic. And what's very relaxing and nice about stoicism is that it partly says, well, you know, it's survivable. Of course it is. And one of the favorite stoic exercises that they would perform was that once a month or so a stoic was advised to wear their dirtiest cloak and sleep on the kitchen floor. Seneca advised in the dog basket. I don't know how big that might be. And you would drink the dog's water. And the idea was that for”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he was ridiculed not for that issue, but he was ridiculed for making a lot of money, which he did in politics and business, and also having a pretty luxurious lifestyle. And people said, hang on, how do you meet you? You're supposed to be a stoic, you're supposed to be a philosopher. You're supposed to have one cloak and live an earth thing. And your house is pretty nice. And so there was some mockery. And he has some funny answers to that. I mean, he rebuts the charges head on. And he says the true philosopher, it's not the true philosopher must have no money. It's just that he must be ready to lose it, that he must hold on to. And in fact, this could sound like, oh yeah, you know, pull the other leg. But in fact, he did practice what he preached because twice in his life, he did lose everything. He was exiled. He fell into political disgrace, etc.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You tend to have these fears like I'm a woman so I can't or I come from a working class background so I can't or I'm an elite person so I can't. There are a lot of people who have these kind of blocks. I can't do this because of that in my past. And a good teacher says no. How do you mean? You can't do engineering and be a woman. Of course you can. Or you can't be a working class guy and read poetry. Of course you can, et cetera. And that's what a good teacher does, shakes you free from some of these kind of dichotomies. And so for me, a good teacher of philosophy is that someone who calms down the audience, like you thought that because you're a busy dentist, you can't read philosophy. It has no place in your life. Of course you can. So that's what a good teacher does. And there are some out there and we need more.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have a colleague that I like very much called John Armstrong, who operates out of Australia, and he writes some wonderful things. There are also, as I mentioned, some called Martha Nussbaum, who's doing a really nice job. There have been others. But it is hard. Popularization is hard. One of my favorite popularizers is Jamie Oliver, the cook, chef. And what I love about the guy is that he's taught the UK how to cook. And the way he's done that is to speak in the language of ordinary people about some pretty unordinary things like how to cook a, you know, duck a lange or something. And he's got working class English males to kind of put on an apron and do some weird stuff. And I think that's what a good teacher is, a good teacher is the person who takes your fear.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Study that was akin to studying nuclear physics. And that was all to make sure that the professors would get tenure and that departments would get funding and that governments would be suitably impressed. I can understand and sympathize with people's need to progress up the career ladder, but it's been a complete disaster for the rest of us because it's meant that wisdom that was supposed to circulate freely and democratically around the nation has become bunched up in some kind of centers in the universities and is not doing its job. Meanwhile, we know what happens on TV and down the airwaves.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, totally. And the unfortunate thing is that the humanities, so all the great, you know, the great wisdom of the ages, at a professional level, they started to have to compete in the 20th century with the sciences for money and attention in universities. And the way that they decided to take the battle is that they sort of try to turn themselves into pseudo-sciences so that they suggested that you would study them like a scientist would study. So you would do things like research. You would find a poet and you would research the poet and you would do some kind of complicated weird stuff in the back engine room around this person. Previously, the humanities wasn't handled, they weren't handled like this. They were handled by ordinary lay people who would spend half an hour in the evening dipping into a volume of philosophy or poetry. Suddenly this stuff became the subject of kind of, you know,”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He appeared on television. He had a regular radio program. Many philosophers attacked him for this. They said that he was cheapening and deadening his son. But this was a man who knew his staff. He wasn't going to be bullied and patronized. And he understood that the things he cared about would only live if he managed to get ordinary people properly engaged. So he was a wonderful, wonderful, vulgarizer in the best sense.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But out in the street there isn't that democratic pool of knowledge. And I've always been attracted to the great Democrats of knowledge. So someone like Voltaire in 18th century France, he wanted to write for everybody, someone like Emerson in the American tradition. Again, he was a man who toured the country and gave impassioned speeches about the highest and most meaningful things, but he was in the church hall talking the language of ordinary people to get his message across. And that seems to have been so hard for many 20th century philosophers. And Bertrand Russell is in a company of almost just one in his decision that here was a guy who had a column in a daily newspaper in England. He wrote articles for American vote.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, to my, I so sympathize that was my experience as well, and it enrages me and saddens me. And I think that Look, the older I get, the more I realize that the great challenge of our own age is to take the good ideas and make them available to a wide public. And the universities often do weirdly the opposite. I mean, they inform a kind of narrow coterie of students, but they stand outside the kind of democratic project. And that's critical because we live in a mass culture. We live in a world where ideas have to have followings in the millions if they're ever to get traction. And when people wring their hands in despair and go, why don't we do this or why don't we do that or why is the world, etc. A lot of the reason is that the good ideas are not on network TV. They're not on the mass channels of communication. So that a few people in the Ivy League universities have got full command of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Phenomena, it wants to take those somewhere. It wants to inform and reform us. So the book I wrote after Bruce Can Change Your Life was a book called The Consolations of Philosophy. And in that book, I looked at six great philosophers. I looked at Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. I looked at these guys as for very practical guidance. It was an attempt to say to these great names, how can you show us what to do and how to live? And so that was a kind of classic style that I was developing. And then I was getting good results from. And that's a book of mine that won many readers around the world. And it's still probably the book of mine that sells the best. And it does what it says on the tin, which is to look for consolations among the work of some great philosophers.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. And that's deserved because philosophers don't tell us how to live and die anymore. There are a few. There's a great philosopher who was at Princeton called Martha Nussbaum. She's terrific. There are a few others out there who are doing good work, but really not very many. Not very many that you would recommend, let's say, I don't know, you had a friend who was interested in philosophy and was having a little hard time in life. There's very few names that you would recommend. Nevertheless, what philosophy really is, is a discipline that's distinct from, say, poetry or religion. But like poetry, it wants to talk about the things that are meaningful. And like religion, it wants to give us guidance. But unlike religion, it's not using the supernatural. It's no appeal to supernatural or mysterious forces, forces you can't define. It's based on anything that you can kind of reason with. And unlike poetry, it's not merely interested in kind of beautiful.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“how to actualize ourselves, how to relate to others, etc. These things become the province of psychology. And throughout its history, philosophies had a habit of casting off bits of itself and kind of spur on sort of subgenres. It used to be that the study of the stars was what philosophies did. Now that's astrophysics. Philosophy has this split in the 20th century. And nowadays, philosophers tend to be really only ever employed by universities or was a danger sign. When your subject matter, no one will pay directly for your subject matter, that's often a sign that something's gone wrong.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Epicurus, like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato. You know, these people are all very much worth reading. Philosophy continues to be interesting for many centuries. I mentioned the name of Montagn early on. He's fantastic. In the 19th century, you get a great German philosopher Schopenhauer. He's fantastic. You get Nietzsche who can be read with very rewarding results. When we hit the 20th century, the number of interesting philosophers tails off because something happens to philosophy that is not often remarked upon, which is basically it splits in two. And from my money, the interesting stuff goes into psychology. And the whole tradition that comes out of Freud, not just psychoanalysis, but psychology more generally, the interesting stuff about how to live, how our minds were.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that's such a good question. I mean, first of all, I'd like to apologize on path of philosophy. It's not my role, but I'll do it anyway, playfully. The general public's disinterest and suspicion Of philosophy is well earned. It's deserved. The general public hasn't just forgotten about philosophy by mistake. Philosophers operating today have on the whole forgotten about the public. Insofar, from my point of view, as philosophy is interesting, I think it's most interesting in its very opening moves. When philosophy begins in ancient Greece and Rome, it sets out to be therapy for the soul. It sets out to be a practical tool that can help you to live and die well. Philosophers in those days are interested in finding out how families work, how money works, how status works, what we should do about public opinion, what we should do about death and illness and ambition. And all of these things that trouble us every day, that was centrally what philosophers were interested in and discussed. And the great philosophers of those days, people...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of darkness that a glass of beautiful lemon juice or a sincere conversation with a friend or a moment when yes things do go right and everything does go right why these things matter so much and perhaps much more intensely it's it's like the joy of the convalescent who's come out of the hospital and they are seeing the sunlight strike you know the leaves of a daffodil and that daffodil seems more beautiful than it's ever done to the robust you know”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be gloomy all the time you may encounter moments of pure ecstasy as you realize that there are some very fine things in a world which is otherwise very dark. I don't think a backdrop of stark realism slash pessimism about all sorts of things that death and illness can visit us very suddenly without warning that all our grandest plans can be undone by a blood clot in under a minute that some of the finest ambitions fall prey to the meanest realities etc that many of us perhaps all of us are going to go to our deathbeds with some very important parts of us still unexplored I think it's because things are so dark because we are operating against a backdrop”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's such a key question. I think you're putting your finger on a key thing, which is that very often people think that having mature, we could call a mature expectations or slightly low expectations in some areas is going to mean that you lose ambition, that you cannot have ambition and realism. You cannot be sober in some areas and still deeply excited to get out of bed in the morning. I think that's not really true. I think there is, you can have these, what you could call paradoxical positions on issues. For example, I like to explore the idea of being a cheerful pessimist. Now, you go, hang on, how can you be a cheerful pessimist, right? But if you explore that, if you're a little pessimistic, but about how a lot of things go.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No more loneliness. And I've realized that there's a kind of beautiful intolerance, so both beautiful, but really kind of negative. It's the breeding ground of a certain kind of impatience. And that's kind of dangerous. And that helped me a lot in my personal relationships. I think it made me a slightly more patient, more humble kind of person to be around.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for example, I'd mention love, but it's not that I'm now cynical about love In a way, he rather dark, proved rather darkly says all of us cannot be understood by another human being perfectly, that there is an area of loneliness inside everybody, and to blame someone for not understanding you fully is deeply unfair, because first of all, we don't understand ourselves, and even if we do understand ourselves, we have such a hard time communicating ourselves to other people. And therefore, to be furious and enraged and bitter that people don't get all of who we are is a real kind of cruel piece of immaturity. And that came as a real shock to me as a guy in his 20s who really thought, no, no, love is this sort of magical communion where I see into their soul, they see into mine, there are no secrets, and there is no”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of maturity that I didn't necessarily possess at that age. I was 26, 25, 26. And I learned from him it was like sitting at the feet of a kind of wise person who's seen a few things and who says steady on, calm down. Maybe, you know, look at it this way. And he gracefully prized me from certain of my more immature positions in relation to a number of things.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, I guess both to address the second very good point. I think that there were many attitudes that I found in Proust that were incredibly seductive and charming in the best sense. So Proust's anti-romanticism. But I mean by romanticism, Proust was reacting against many of the things that he saw in the 19th century that he disagreed with. The idea of the individual as a hero, the idea of love as the answer to everything, the idea of certain kinds of career success as being the only way to live, etc. He took kind of a skeptical position vis- ⁇-vis a lot of these things. It wasn't that he rejected them wholeheartedly, but he was a little skeptical, beautifully skeptical. And I found in him a kind of, you could say.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, look, I think the liberation of that book for me was going up to a really big name, an authority that was spoken of by professors in reverential tones. And what I did with that is to fire some pretty naive questions at this kind of colossus of kind of Western culture. And I really asked the most essential but the most naive question, which is how can you help me to live? And I think in a way this is the best question to ask anyone one meets, in many ways, that's what you tend to ask in your podcasts. It's such a valuable question to ask. Very often we're too shy. We're reserved, we think that other people are going to be bored by that question or everyone else knows it already, etc. The book liberated me to be a kind of Of person who would be able to go up to works of high culture and culture generally and kind of shake down the”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. And this is what makes Proust such an enchanting writer that he is so interested in daily life and he wants to make daily life magical. And that's what he resents and hates about snobbery because snobbery constantly makes you think that there's a group of people out there who are more special than the ordinary people, etc. And Proust, the son of a kind of aute bourgeois, wealthy family, etc has this tremendously deeply profoundly democratic vision about the value of each individual and the capacity of an artistic gaze to tease out that value and therefore make life meaningful. So that's some of what I discovered and that provided the spine for my own study of Proust that I wrote.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's also, you know, it's also a kind of secularized Christian message, which is really that ordinary modest life has grace, is in contact with the glory and dignity of the universe kind of thing, to put it.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And what he appreciates is that Vermeer painted daily life that he saw in daily life an extraordinary richness and level of kind of psychological involvement, etc. that he was living life to the full. Another painter he really liked was the French 18th century painter Chardin, who rather liked Vermeer painted modest interiors, families around the kitchen table, loaves of bread. He painted about 20 loaves of bread. One of the first painters that kind of spent so long with bread. And really it's a kind of...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A haircut kind of situation. So it's a big PAR job on art. But he's more generous. You can certainly read him in ways that are more generous than merely art, as then you've got to immediately enroll on a fine art degree or something. He's not saying that he is seeing the great works of art, not all art, but the great works of art as examples of life as it's lived to the full. And he's interested, particularly in certain artists. So he talks a lot about the painter, the Dutch painter Vermeer, who he thinks.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fill totally in the arms of another person, etc. And gently and with humor and generosity Proust unpicks some of these hopes. And again, gradually we realize that love, like social status, is perhaps not the meaning of life. So what is, well Proust ends up, like many writers, defending his own art and craft. He defends art as the meaning of life. And what he means by art is...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Himself, etc., and it follows. It's very funny, it's warm, it's self-deprecating, but essentially the search for the journey, he does manage to get into the inner sanctum, but he discovers that actually these people are often brutal, brutish, not that interesting, and not really interested in him properly. And he has a kind of moment of existential despair around this goal of social status. He then moves on to another possible goal of life, which is romantic love. And a lot of the novel is spent tracing the love affair of the narrator for a beautiful late teenage girl called Albertin, whose charming, headstrong, gamine, the kind of boyish charmer. And virtually there are all sorts of disappointments. And he realizes some of the real limitations of love, which is that we go to love because we think that someone will understand us fully, that we can be full.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Proust is really a philosopher more than a novelist, and his book is about search for how you can stop wasting your life and start to appreciate life and live fully. So the title is very accurate. The title of his long book is In Search of Lost Time. And it's literally one man's search for how you can stop wasting your life. And it follows the narrator hero as he tries out three things that he thinks may turn out to be the meaning of life. The first thing he tries is social status. A position in society. And a lot of the book follows how he tries to get in with the top people in Paris. He wants to get in with nowadays there would be the celebrities, the business people, etc. But in those days, they were the aristocrats. And so he's trying to get in with them. He's trying to make a name for them.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing in the 16th century again just spoke in this wonderfully direct, intimate way. So yes, he was telling you about Plato and he was telling you about history, etc. But you always felt I'm actually with someone and I've always really appreciated the personal.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, the books that I always most enjoyed were the books first of all where you feel the presence of an author in the text who feels like a nice person. And that could sound kind of trivial, but it just sounds like someone that you could kind of get to know and have a chat with. I mean, if we think of someone like Thoreau, Thoreau sounds like a really great guy. He's friendly. He's sometimes sarcastic, but he's always witty. He's humane. He's generous. He's sometimes impatient, etc. But you kind of get a sense of a person. You get that someone who's reading great writers letters. I don't know, the journals of Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example. You get a flavor of a person. So someone like the French philosopher Montagn was a great influence. He was a man who...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the excitement of a love story. So it was kind of trying out a genre and in all my works I've always been a little impatient by the kind of models out there for how to write, like a classic novel must be X pages long, must feature. I've always been provoked a slightly pull at those rules. And so just as I wrote a self-help book, but it was half about this great 20th century writer, and that's not normal. So I was writing a novel, but that wasn't quite that normal way of writing the novel. So I was impatient with some of the rules that writers get given.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a mix of the two because Tim, you know, what I love about novels is the local color, the intimacy of language, the kind of the sense that you're suddenly in a real place and you know what the weather's like and etc. What drives me crazy about novels is that sometimes you feel that the novelist is cleverer than allowing their characters to be. You feel that there's all sorts of stuff that is discussed in non-fiction ways that somehow just doesn't find its way into the novel where it's all supposed to be about showing, not telling. And I didn't like those rules. So my novel was explicitly an attempt to tell a love story as well as show it, to have a mixture of analysis and also more sensory descriptive bits. Because I wanted to touch the reader and make them think. I didn't want to tell just another ordinary love story. I wanted to analyze love in the course of a love story so that the kind of knowledge bits would be well wrapped up.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“proved itself around the world. And so I was in the very odd and fortunate position that come the age of 27, I'd had this book that had worked. And I was kind of, you know, I was aloft, at least for a time. So that's how we ended up doing what I do.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is heresy among the universities that believe, partly for economic reasons, that only if you enroll in their sacred fraternity, do you really have the right tools to be able to interpret and enjoy the masterpieces of civilization? I passionately disagreed with that. I am by nature a popularizer and a Democrat of the mind, and I did not appreciate that kind of cloistered vision of knowledge. took a lot of what I've been thinking and reading and really tried to express it so clearly and I would write sentences 20 times to make sure that they could be understood by everyone I would try material out on people who'd been educated and people who hadn't been educated at all and I wanted to make sure that it would work at all levels and so that was an extra layer of work and I'm really proud and happy to say it did work and the book”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Carry on and relatively soon after I then wrote what turned out to be my breakthrough book which was called How Pruss Can Change Your Life and thanks to American readers and reviewers that book did extremely well and it was an unlikely moment because here was a book written about an early 20th century great French writer that was at the same time a self-help book and I deliberately chose to kind of mash up these two genres a kind of scholarly essay and a self-help book. It wasn't just a kind of sly commercial trick. There was serious intent which is that I always felt that high culture by which I mean literature, philosophy, plays etc these things do not just belong in the ivory tower they have a richness to them which can be absorbed and should be transmitted to the widest possible public.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was nice one. This was the summer of 1991. And a lot of my friends were just finding things to do, taking jobs in bars, etc. And I asked myself, what do I really want to do? And I thought, what I really want to do is write books. And I dare to admit that to myself in a kind of late night session of self-honesty. And I thought, well, why don't I just start now? And I've been thinking a lot about writing and self-expression and all the rest of it. And so I kind of gradually felt my way to writing my first book, which was published when I was just 22. And it was a book called Essays in Love in the US. It was titled On Love. And I put my heart and soul into it. It's a very intimate dissection of a love story. And the book did very well. I mean, very well, certainly for 22-23-year-old. And it gave me the confidence and the courage to...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I graduated, I was very aware that time was short and that there are immense pressures on young people to prove themselves pretty early on. And I felt that very much. I'd come from a family of high achievers and I was born with a sort of sense of like, you know, you've got to prove yourself. And it was a kind of madness I now recognize. It was not easy or the best thing. I don't think that's a great ideology to have. But there we have it. So no sooner did I graduate that I really started asking him as of the biggest questions, like, where do I want my life to go? I applied for various jobs, but I graduated in the midst of a recession, and it was very hard to find”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I studied what they called over their history of ideas, which was a wonderful course that really looked at the evolution of big concepts through time and how attitudes to different things had changed. So we would study a word like freedom and look at all the different ways in which that word has changed and how differently it was interpreted, say, in the 5th century AD to the way it was interpreted in the 18th century, the way it was interpreted in America versus in China, etc. So that was really fun and really good.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this struck me and my career in many ways was designed to try and find some answers that would work for me and would work for others. And by answers, I don't only mean solutions. I also mean interpretations. When you're suffering from something, you don't necessarily always want or expect there to be a fix, but at least just understanding what it is that's the problem and express kind of eloquently, that's at least half the battle. And I didn't have any of that. And that's what my career has been spent trying to do.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My all sense of loneliness, loss and drift would be healed, it would be like a sort of secularized version of a meeting with a deity. And I was on the lookout in bars, clubs, dinner parties for this person, this angelic deity who'd graciously come down to earth. And that was going to solve my love problem that I also was facing a work problem. And the kind of ideology I'd grown up with was you're going to work very, very hard and then you will find a precious bit of you and you will put that on a commercial basis. Whatever it is, that inner precious core, you will turn into money in good time, you will be both creative and also financially productive, etc. Now, I'm not saying that either of these things is impossible, but they're very hard and we're very alone with them, very alone indeed.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally in the ancient Greek sense, therapy, which is the kind of nourishment and nurture of the soul, the inner bit, the precious bit of you, there just wasn't any support. I felt very cut off from that. And gradually I felt my way through books, through conversations to a kind of way of living where I could just begin to understand some of the things that I was suffering from. But if I were to diagnose my younger self, I was a classic example of somebody living in a prosperous world city in the middle of a kind of heyday of capitalism, suffering from all the angst that comes with that. I'd been taught that happiness, personal happiness came from finding one very, very special person with whom there would be an ecstatic sense of communion. And she happened to be, and I would meet, it would be wonderful.”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've come to see with age that there wasn't a coincidence, that these are the two areas of massive insecurity, doubt, and most important the lack of guidance. We live in a society where we very much believe in freedom and individual self-realization, which is fantastic from one point of view and leaves us desperately searching for guidance, clues, etc. And we're left very much alone. I had a so-called elite education. I went to Cambridge University in the UK. I got a good degree, et cetera. So I was a kind of well-educated citizen of the modern world. And yet, boy, oh boy, I was so lost. I just didn't know, you know, I hadn't had enough of the right sort of conversations. I hadn't met the right sort of people. Broadly speaking, I wasn't living in a therapeutic environment. I don't mean Oprah. I don't mean a psychoanalyst. I mean...”
2015-11-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #118: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT