Alain de Botton, THE SCHOOL OF LIFE
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the web-enominated podcast.
[0:12]Moms don't have time to read books.
[0:13]I'm really excited to announce my partnership with Book of the Month Club, Book of the Month.com.
[0:19]Book of the Month has been around since 1926, although not as a website obviously.
[0:24]And each month you can pick from the five books that they think are the greatest,
[0:28]which are their books of the month, and you can pick the one you want the most.
[0:31]And they'll send to you.
[0:32]It's really fantastic.
[0:33]In September, they had an early release of Adrienne Broder's Wild Game,
[0:37]which I'm releasing this week.
[0:38]And it's fantastic.
[0:40]I have a special code for my listeners, Code Zibi Z-I-B-B-Y.
[0:45]So if you put in this exclusive code, you will get your first book for just five dollars,
[0:51]which is an exclusive offer that they're not offering to anybody else, and that's really exciting.
[0:55]So you should definitely sign up, use Code Zibi Z-I-B-B-Y.
[0:59]They really have fantastic books, and I use the service myself.
[1:04]I've given it as gifts.
[1:05]I adore it, and you should definitely sign up.
[1:08]And let me know what you think.
[1:10]I'm so excited to be here today with Ellen DeBoto, who is the International Philosopher
[1:14]and Best Selling Author of 14 Books, essay collections, and novels, including how
[1:19]priest can change your life, status anxiety, the architecture of happiness, the course of love,
[1:24]and most recently the School of Life.
[1:26]His first book, which he wrote at age 23 essays in love, sold two million copies worldwide.
[1:31]He's the founder of the School of Life, an organization dedicated to his new vision of education
[1:36]for what he writes essays, leads conferences, produces YouTube videos, and writes books.
[1:41]He has his own production company, Seneca Productions, which makes television documentaries
[1:45]about his work.
[1:46]Originally from Zurich, Ellen moved with his family to London.
[1:49]He studied history at Cambridge University and earned a master's in philosophy at King's College
[1:54]London. He also started a PhD program in French philosophy at Harvard.
[1:58]He currently lives in London with his family.
[2:00]So welcome, Ellen. Thanks so much for coming along.
[2:02]I don't have time to read books.
[2:04]Thank you so much. What a pleasure for me.
[2:05]Oh, it's such an honor.
[2:07]So the School of Life, an emotional education, your latest book, Brilliant,
[2:11]Per usual, tell me about how you formed the School of Life itself first.
[2:16]And then I want to hear about the book.
[2:17]Yeah, so for the longest time, I was just an author on my own, and I would joke that my
[2:22]life's ambition was to start something called the School of Life, and where we would sort of
[2:27]help people, but also it would have a shop, because I've always wanted to have a shop.
[2:30]Anyway, ages about 12 years ago, I was talking like this, and then a friend of mine said,
[2:35]why do you always have to be ironic and sarcastic with the things you really want to do?
[2:39]Why don't you actually just admit you want to do this and do it? It's quite serious.
[2:42]And this stopped me in my tracks. I stopped making jokes and actually did it.
[2:46]So I got together with some friends and some investors, etc.
[2:48]And we started this thing called the School of Life, which now has 10 branches around the world,
[2:53]and lots and lots of customers who access us in all sorts of ways. And really, the kind of
[2:57]guiding thing is this is a home for emotional resources. So resources for emotional life.
[3:04]And so we offer psychotherapy in person in lots of places. We offer a range of books and products
[3:10]that will help to illuminate all sorts of difficult angles. We run classes pretty much every
[3:17]evening. We have conferences around the world. We work with businesses going in there and helping
[3:22]them with our emotional issues, etc. So at different price points, in different ways,
[3:26]sometimes playful, sometimes pretty serious, pretty almost medical. We are dealing with human
[3:32]emotional difficulties. And it's the best fun I've ever had. It's great because it's a mixture
[3:37]of the theoretical and the practical. So we do everything from sit around going, okay, what
[3:40]are the problems we need to target? What are our customers telling us about where they're suffering
[3:44]to, you know, how does one hire the best therapist in town? That kind of thing. So it's a mixture
[3:49]of the practical and the emotional. Do you ever worry that the people who might need to go to
[3:53]the school the most refuse to enroll? Absolutely. You know, there's an amazing amount of denial
[4:00]around emotional well-being. The people who need it most will tend to say things like,
[4:04]isn't it obvious or hasn't Freud been discredited? We always say, you know, the bad news guys is
[4:09]that Freud has not been discredited. I mean, yes, lots and lots of his theories have been, you know,
[4:14]nuanced and no longer seem applicable. But the basic idea that who you are as an adult sits on top
[4:20]of childhood experiences and those childhood experiences unless they're understood and placed
[4:24]in the right context will continue to have an influence on your adult life in ways that are often
[4:30]quite detrimental. This is never going to go away. And it's humiliating because who wants to think when
[4:35]they're 30, 40, 50, 60 that so much of who they are goes back to when they were five. It sounds
[4:41]ridiculous. I mean, I wish it wasn't true. But I think it is. And the best way of dealing with
[4:46]the truth is actually to start exploring it and to master, you know, we always say the goal of
[4:52]emotional maturity because that's often what we're talking about isn't to be totally sane and
[4:58]problem-free. It's to have a handle on one's insanity and problems so that you can warn people
[5:04]you love of what's going on. You can take a voting action and also so that you can, to some extent,
[5:11]attenuate the full force of a response, be it an angry response, a panic response, a paranoid
[5:16]response, an overly enthusiastic response, whatever it is to try and move towards that goal of
[5:23]being an emotional adult, which is so hard because it's so much easier just to be an adult.
[5:28]To be an adult's really easy. You just sit somebody down and give them cereal and they just
[5:34]and then they grow. You know, by 18 they will be fully grown. But an emotional adult, wow,
[5:38]that's something that only comes about with real effort and you might be 300 by the time you're
[5:44]approaching it. How many adults do you think are actually emotionally mature adults if you had to
[5:48]give it a percentage? I think, look, I think a very high number of people can manage moments
[5:54]of emotional adulthood. So, you know, probably 90% of people can manage moments,
[5:59]but there will also be unbelievable regressions or relationships in which adulthood isn't possible.
[6:05]I mean, many of us have this with, of course, our parents. So, however old we are, you know,
[6:09]you could be 50 and you go home, see mum and suddenly, well, you're 11 again, whatever your efforts
[6:15]and then sometimes, you know, with our own children, their own immaturity will pull us towards
[6:19]immature patterns of behavior so that however committed we are to adulthood, we will, you know,
[6:25]regress. That said, it isn't a disaster, I think, to have moments of regression. I think you need to
[6:31]repair when there have been those moments, you know, analysts, therapists talk wonderfully
[6:36]about the notion of rupture and repair that any relationship has moments of rupture. It doesn't
[6:40]matter about the rupture. The only thing that matters is the capacity for repair. So, long as
[6:44]you have capacity for repair, in other words, explaining to the person with whom you have been
[6:49]immature, that it's happened, why it's happened and that you're keen to move on and do it better
[6:54]next time. That's the key thing. Laps is in themselves doing that. So, I also find it interesting
[7:00]as a parent when you say that everything in life is effective because of what happens when you're
[7:05]five. So, now I feel like I have the responsibility of my own children to figure out like,
[7:10]how am I going to mess them up that it's going to affect them forever? And when you talked about
[7:13]kids in your book, you said that childhood is a gentle open prison and such is the fragile base of
[7:19]childhood that nothing outwardly appalling needs to have happened to us for us to wind up inwardly
[7:24]profoundly scrambled. So, how do I not end up with scrambled kids? I need like sunny side of kids?
[7:30]Okay, well, look, here's an optimistic thing to bear in mind. No child needs a perfect parent. In fact,
[7:36]if you have a perfect parent, you'll end up psychotic. A parent who never disappoints you,
[7:41]leads you towards a life of madness. The role of a parent is kindly disappointment.
[7:48]You want to try and gently initiate a child to the tragedies of existence. Until such point,
[7:54]you know, your job will long be done when it can accept the fact it's going to die.
[7:58]And, you know, but it starts with, I want to stay in the park all day or I want to
[8:01]eat as much chocolate cake as I like, etc, etc. So, the job of a parent is in a kindly way to let them
[8:06]down. Some parents can never do any of the letting down because they have their own issues around
[8:10]this appointment. So, the notion is that the child must be happy all the time, which is very dangerous.
[8:17]And there are some parents like that around. The other thing that's going to be dangerous
[8:21]is the parent who is too brutal, whose own needs were not met. And for one reason or another,
[8:27]they therefore cannot adjust themselves to the moments when a child,
[8:32]particularly when it's very little, needs to feel that they're in charge, that they're the little
[8:36]emperor, that they are the king or queen. And from a very, I mean, I remember talking to a parent
[8:42]who, of a very, very young child. And he said to me, you know, the thing is, you know,
[8:47]I'm my kid to know who's boss in this house. And I thought, hang on a minute, there's just not even
[8:52]a risk that your child who's currently, you know, the size of a hamster is going to become boss.
[8:57]If that's in your head, it's not in the real world. But obviously, if you've had experiences of
[9:02]your own authority being questioned in ways that might have been very frightening, then the experience
[9:07]of parenting can bring up all sorts of things. So, I mean, what's emerging from all this is
[9:13]so much of one's current responses can be unbalanced by experiences in childhood where things
[9:22]were themselves unbalanced. And the child didn't have a chance to cope. So in childhood,
[9:27]the only response may have been fury to having one's boundaries repeatedly violated. So one
[9:32]got very angry. But is runaway fury the best way of handling it when you're 40? No, not really.
[9:37]So it's all about trying to nuance one's emotions, to fit them to the adult world. When, in fact,
[9:44]if you scratch-play the self as so many emotions were formed in childhood before we really had a
[9:50]chance to work out why we were doing what we were doing. So there are adults wandering around the
[9:54]the world with a level of anger or of resignation or of paranoia or shame.
[10:00]that really owes their origins to moments in childhood
[10:04]that are no longer active,
[10:07]that are no longer part of adult reality,
[10:08]but they're still having an impact
[10:10]in the way that an adult is living their daily life.
[10:14]And the more we can unplug past from present,
[10:17]the easier our time will be.
[10:19]And your school is gonna do all of this.
[10:21]Go around the world, do you guys in the courses in this book?
[10:24]Look, it's all part of it.
[10:26]I think that what we desperately need is a world
[10:28]that is emotionally literate in other words,
[10:31]where people have more of an understanding
[10:34]of the basics of human psychology.
[10:36]And I'm really struck, you know,
[10:38]I don't know how it is in the US,
[10:39]but in the UK, at an average group of educated people,
[10:42]you say, right, attachment theory,
[10:44]what was everybody know?
[10:45]And like maybe 15% of people have ever heard
[10:48]of what attachment theory is.
[10:50]Attachment theory, which was developed in the 50s
[10:52]and 60s in the UK, is now a global, globally recognized phenomena,
[10:55]is one of the basic tools with which you can understand
[10:57]what you're gonna get up to in relationships.
[10:59]And therefore, what sort of people you might need to get together
[11:03]with, just to sketch it very briefly, you know,
[11:05]psychologists tell us about secure attachment.
[11:08]When you're securely attached, you'll be able to love
[11:10]and trust and you won't doubt when somebody tells you
[11:13]that they love you.
[11:14]If you are avoidantly attached,
[11:17]your dominant response in an affectionate situation,
[11:21]whenever there's any threat or perceived threat
[11:23]is to withdraw to say, I don't need you.
[11:25]This is the person who reads a lot, who says,
[11:28]I don't need other people, who's a loner,
[11:30]because not because they don't want contact,
[11:32]but because contact is experienced
[11:34]as potentially very dangerous,
[11:36]because it was once traumatic.
[11:38]And then there's the so-called anxiously attached person
[11:41]who can't really necessarily trust in the goodwill
[11:44]and love of another person.
[11:46]And therefore, constantly probes that it anxiously.
[11:49]And very often can end up sabotaging a relationship
[11:52]where someone does really love them.
[11:53]But by the time they've been asked a thousand times,
[11:56]do you still love me and also had strange antics
[11:58]like them showing up at the middle of the night
[11:59]or sending a million texts
[12:01]or, you know, having them followed by the police
[12:03]or whatever it is, this is no longer so cute.
[12:05]So anxious attachment is also a desperately
[12:08]sad way in which people will try and do that thing
[12:11]that we all long for, which is connect with other humans.
[12:14]I mean, at the end of the day,
[12:16]human beings are wired for connection.
[12:18]We long to connect and we end up very sad
[12:21]if we're not connecting and very happy if we are.
[12:24]And if you look at most divorces and most affairs,
[12:29]which we do quite a lot of,
[12:30]and I discuss them quite a bit in the book,
[12:32]and a fair is very often seen as a piece of sort of random
[12:36]horniness on the part of somebody in a couple.
[12:38]It's almost never that.
[12:40]People have affairs broadly speaking
[12:42]because they feel disconnected from their partner.
[12:45]And this hurts so much in ways that they can't express
[12:48]and they therefore enact with somebody else
[12:51]what they wish would happen with their partner,
[12:53]which is connection.
[12:55]It's desperately unfortunate,
[12:56]but it's even more unfortunate when in response to affairs,
[13:00]people have responses that are better used to in the middle ages.
[13:04]So we need to get psychological about why people have affairs.
[13:08]There's so much to overcome.
[13:09]And you have so much of this in the book.
[13:11]You have a whole section on marriage where you say,
[13:14]and I don't know, this troubled me a little bit,
[13:16]but you said, the whole rationale of marriage is to function
[13:19]as a prison that is very hard and very embarrassing
[13:22]for two people to get out of.
[13:23]The essence of marriage is to tie our hands,
[13:26]to frustrate our wills,
[13:27]diffide high and costly obstacles in the way of splitting up,
[13:30]and sometimes to force two unhappy people
[13:32]to stay in each other's company for longer
[13:34]than either of them would wish.
[13:35]Why do we do this?
[13:36]We do this because we recognize that there's a lesson,
[13:40]there's some learning that we need to do.
[13:43]And if we keep running away to other people,
[13:45]we'll never learn those lessons.
[13:46]There are some lessons that can only be learned
[13:49]when you are really secure with somebody,
[13:52]when two people can't get out of the room,
[13:54]they've been locked in the room together.
[13:56]Of course, they could leave,
[13:56]but it would be embarrassing and costly, as I say.
[13:59]And therefore, you're gonna work at it
[14:01]in a way that you would never work at it with anyone else.
[14:04]And sometimes that work leads to amazing results.
[14:08]Sometimes people in the best marriages actually grow,
[14:11]and couples would be married a long time,
[14:13]will often report something like,
[14:15]for a while, it looked like we would split up.
[14:17]They weren't listening, I was on a different wavelength,
[14:20]but we worked it out, and in working it out,
[14:22]we learned about ourselves,
[14:23]and we are now better richer people and stronger people.
[14:27]It doesn't happen for everybody.
[14:29]Sometimes it becomes a prison that you just,
[14:32]you can't work it through, and then you have to leave.
[14:34]And so of course, people should be allowed to leave,
[14:37]but they should also be allowed to explore.
[14:39]We have this idea that if you love somebody,
[14:42]you should never want them to change.
[14:44]That's madness.
[14:45]It may not be politically correct,
[14:46]but when you are with somebody in a couple,
[14:49]of course it's normal that you want them to change.
[14:51]And what helps to keep couples strong is,
[14:53]when two people can say, I'm hearing how you want me to change,
[14:58]and I take that really seriously.
[15:00]And I'm gonna try and change,
[15:01]because I kind of agree, it may be difficult,
[15:03]but I'm listening to it.
[15:05]Obviously the change may be bizarre
[15:06]and really not in line with anything you want,
[15:08]but very often couples spot things in each other,
[15:12]which really do need to be changed.
[15:14]And no one else is gonna tell you.
[15:15]Your colleagues won't care, your friends won't care.
[15:18]Only somebody who's properly invested will say,
[15:21]you're wasting your talents,
[15:22]or when you get angry with the kids,
[15:25]it's not pleasant.
[15:25]You need to control yourself,
[15:27]or you're letting your mother's anxieties take over your life.
[15:32]A friend's not gonna tell you that.
[15:33]Only a lover will tell you that.
[15:35]And if you stick at it and hear them,
[15:37]that's when a relationship is alive.
[15:40]And my rule of thumb is,
[15:43]however difficult a relationship,
[15:45]so long as a couple feels that each other is listening properly,
[15:50]is properly taking on more difficult material,
[15:52]then it's fine.
[15:53]You might be having no sex.
[15:54]You might be arguing a lot.
[15:55]You might be all sorts of procedural difficulties.
[15:58]So long as there's that kind of communication
[16:01]and feeling of being heard,
[16:03]that's a safe relationship.
[16:04]The minute I come across a relationship
[16:07]where somebody is saying,
[16:08]I've tried to explain this thing a thousand times.
[16:11]He needs to be warmer.
[16:12]Why doesn't he put his hand on my shoulder
[16:14]when I come home?
[16:15]There's nothing.
[16:16]And the guy has never heard this.
[16:18]He's not going in,
[16:20]or why can't she?
[16:21]I don't know.
[16:22]See that I need some space at times or whatever.
[16:24]And neither party is giving away.
[16:26]Neither party is listening.
[16:27]Then we're in trouble.
[16:28]So a key feature in a good relationship
[16:31]is a certain degree of modesty
[16:33]that leads one to think,
[16:34]I'm not perfect.
[16:35]I'm a flawed human.
[16:36]I'm coming into a relationship.
[16:38]It's gonna be very normal for my partner
[16:39]to want certain things from me.
[16:40]And I should be open to change.
[16:42]That's not an insult.
[16:43]It's the work of love.
[16:45]And it was so great in the book too,
[16:46]how you put specific questions.
[16:47]You can ask your partner
[16:48]to make sure you don't end up having one of you
[16:51]have an affair, like,
[16:53]what would you like sexually blah, blah, blah?
[16:55]You have all these questions.
[16:56]And I was like, well,
[16:57]maybe I'll try asking my husband.
[16:58]And he's like, I read one question out or another.
[17:00]And he was like, I don't think we need this.
[17:01]We're good.
[17:02]Right.
[17:03]Well, I think the passage you're rooting to,
[17:05]there's a lot of emphasis on,
[17:07]are you angry with me about anything?
[17:09]Are you annoyed with me about anything?
[17:11]It sounds like a strange thing,
[17:12]but couples stop having sex.
[17:14]And we've researched this.
[17:15]Couples stop having sex is got nothing to do with sex.
[17:17]It's always to do with anger and resentment.
[17:20]So you have to have a kind of general cleansing quite quickly.
[17:25]And a couple where both people are able to go,
[17:28]fill in the end of the sentence,
[17:30]I've got a little bit of resentment around
[17:32]and each person can fill in the end of that sentence.
[17:35]And hear the other person.
[17:37]Without going, that's not true.
[17:38]But what about you?
[17:39]No, there's a killer.
[17:40]No, no, listen and take it on board
[17:43]and try and adjust that saves marriages.
[17:47]That's the lifeblood of relationships.
[17:50]It's also very erotic to feel heard
[17:52]is that don't bother with candles and fancy hotels.
[17:54]It's feeling heard.
[17:55]There's nothing more romantic in the true sense
[17:58]than feeling that somebody hears you.
[18:01]And sees you and sees you.
[18:02]So this imposter system to syndrome,
[18:06]to change gears a little bit,
[18:07]you talk a lot in the book about
[18:09]when we feel like imposters.
[18:11]And you say we feel like imposters
[18:12]not because we are uniquely flawed,
[18:14]but because we can't imagine how equally flawed
[18:16]the elite must necessarily be under their polished services.
[18:19]And you say the solution to imposter syndrome lies
[18:22]in making the leap of faith
[18:23]and trusting that others' minds work basically
[18:25]in much the same way as our own.
[18:26]Everyone is probably as anxious, uncertain,
[18:28]and wayward as we are.
[18:30]And I love hearing this
[18:31]because I feel like everybody who comes on this podcast
[18:33]says, oh, I can barely call myself an author.
[18:36]I'm not really a writer and everyone feels this way.
[18:39]That's right.
[18:40]I mean, it's a weird thing.
[18:41]Look, I think it comes down at the end of the day
[18:42]to our psychology that we know our own minds from the inside.
[18:46]So we have the full panoply of information
[18:49]about our madness and our strange thoughts at 3 a.m.
[18:52]and our doubts as we walk into the door or whatever it is.
[18:55]We know that we only know what goes on in the minds
[18:57]of other people by what they choose to tell us,
[19:00]which is often very often a hugely abbreviated section
[19:04]of what's actually going on in them.
[19:06]So without anyone lying as such,
[19:09]there's a real divide between what we know of ourselves
[19:13]and what we know of other people.
[19:14]And this leads us all to think we're very weird.
[19:17]I mean, I was in a hall the other day with 1,000 people
[19:19]and I said, who here thinks of themselves as weird?
[19:21]And 1,000 hands went up.
[19:23]And you're thinking, hang on a minute, that can't be true.
[19:24]How can 1,000 people think they're weird?
[19:26]It's just our dominant sense of what is normal
[19:29]doesn't fit the reality.
[19:32]And this has an impact on broadly our confidence
[19:35]because we always think if I were a different person,
[19:39]I could do some challenge.
[19:41]I could rise to be the CEO or ask somebody on a day
[19:44]to take a risk at work or whatever it is.
[19:47]But we tell ourselves, but we can't because we're too weird,
[19:50]we're too fragile, we're too vulnerable,
[19:52]we're too strange, et cetera.
[19:53]We are not the sort of people who do that kind of thing.
[19:56]And at the School of Life, we've had fun with this one.
[20:00]So, the standard advice for low self-confidence that people are given,
[20:05]particularly on the West Coast, no in South people on the West Coast.
[20:08]But, you know, people will tell you, look, believe in yourself, you're beautiful.
[20:12]You trust in your, you know, glory and you have the divine in you
[20:16]and you're a fantastic person.
[20:18]This is a disaster.
[20:19]I mean, it's well meant.
[20:20]It's a disaster.
[20:21]It only ratchets up the feeling of inadequacy.
[20:24]The far better thing to do is to tell somebody,
[20:27]this is somebody that's really worried that they might be a bit of an idiot.
[20:29]So, the thing to do is to say, look, bad news and good news.
[20:33]Bad news is you are an idiot.
[20:35]It's true.
[20:36]You know, all those fears?
[20:37]They're true.
[20:38]Good news is there's seven billion idiots on the planet.
[20:40]So, your idiocy does not cut you off from humanity.
[20:43]It in fact confirms you as being right at the center of, you know, the human race.
[20:48]And so, about it, you know, if we accept our idiocy with good grace
[20:52]rather than spying it out of the corner of our eyes
[20:55]as some dreadful thing that somebody else might spot about us.
[20:58]You know, imagine if we went to ask that person something
[21:01]and they realized that we were a bit of an idiot.
[21:03]It's like, just accept this with good grace.
[21:05]You're an idiot.
[21:06]They're an idiot.
[21:07]Everybody's an idiot.
[21:08]And that's fine.
[21:09]That's a better kind of confidence.
[21:11]A confidence bill on accepting our humanity
[21:13]and relating compassionately both to our own
[21:16]and to other people's fragilities.
[21:19]And this is how you talk about friendship in the book as well.
[21:22]That part of being friends is that allowing them to see
[21:25]what you would be completely humiliated.
[21:28]To have, with broadcast about you, you can find this in your friends
[21:31]and that's how you become close.
[21:33]It's sharing your idiocy with other people.
[21:36]That's right.
[21:37]It's a weird thing because we always think that the root of friendship
[21:39]has got to be that we've got to be impressive.
[21:41]And so, we make such efforts to seem impressive.
[21:44]You know, we throw lovely dinner parties where everything's just right
[21:46]and, you know, we decorate our homes
[21:48]and we achieve things at work
[21:50]also that we'll be acceptable people
[21:52]and it's terribly poignant
[21:54]because at the end of the day, though that buys you
[21:56]to a certain regard and a certain interest of others,
[21:59]it doesn't really buy you friendship.
[22:01]It doesn't buy you connection.
[22:03]The only thing that can buy you connection
[22:05]is the revelation of a vulnerability.
[22:08]Anything that you give to somebody
[22:10]and it is a kind of present that they could humiliate you with
[22:14]if they were nasty.
[22:15]Hopefully they won't be.
[22:16]That becomes the bedrock of a friendship.
[22:19]So, sharing something that makes you potentially look bad.
[22:23]A weakness.
[22:24]So, what we like to do at school life
[22:26]when we gather a lot of people around
[22:27]is we get people to say to introduce each other
[22:29]and then just say we get people to say something that they
[22:33]regret, something they're ashamed of
[22:35]and something that they're sad about.
[22:38]So, those three things.
[22:39]If you tell a stranger those things
[22:42]and they tell you that back,
[22:44]that's the beginning of friendship.
[22:45]I mean, try it next time you're bored with somebody.
[22:47]You know, it's...
[22:48]Maybe those will be my question now.
[22:50]Absolutely.
[22:51]Absolutely.
[22:52]Because they're the royal road into someone's deep self.
[22:56]They are actually what friendship is based on.
[22:59]So, what do you think made you start this place?
[23:03]Like, why you?
[23:04]How have you become this person?
[23:05]How have you started this?
[23:06]Like, what in your own life made you want to
[23:08]take what you've learned and help everybody else?
[23:10]What do you think?
[23:11]I think that most people are trying to solve
[23:15]their own problems through their work.
[23:17]If not, the problems are their parents.
[23:19]It's a lot of intergenerational activity
[23:21]on that.
[23:22]I grew up in a household that was really quite crazy
[23:25]in many ways.
[23:26]There was a lot of distress.
[23:27]A lot of emotional distress.
[23:29]And from a young age,
[23:31]I wanted to sort of see if I could make it better.
[23:34]So, I think some of my work is addressed
[23:36]to kind of me and my loved ones most immediately
[23:38]from years ago now.
[23:40]It doesn't quite make sense
[23:41]because as an adult,
[23:42]lots of other things come in the way.
[23:44]But that's certainly a very vital seam.
[23:47]And then maybe it's also living in the UK,
[23:51]as I do,
[23:52]and seeing that this is a very wealthy country,
[23:54]a very successful country in many ways,
[23:56]where so many lives are blighted by an ignorance
[23:59]of emotional life.
[24:01]And I had a so-called elite education,
[24:03]which taught me all sorts of things about interest rates
[24:06]and governments in the 19th century and trigonometry,
[24:09]but it didn't teach me anything about marriage,
[24:12]about love, about anxiety, about death,
[24:16]all of these topics.
[24:17]And so I created together with colleagues at School of Life
[24:20]as a kind of home, as a sort of welcoming place
[24:23]where you can go and find out about this sort of stuff
[24:26]in a way that would be welcoming and non-medical.
[24:31]We think a lot about the gap between the medical
[24:35]and the kind of everyday consumer.
[24:38]And we live in a kind of consumer society
[24:40]where so many consumer items are incredibly appealing.
[24:43]You walk into shops selling you sneakers
[24:45]and make up et cetera.
[24:46]And it looks lovely and it's beautifully presented
[24:48]and all the rest of it.
[24:49]And then you take a step into sort of mental well-being area
[24:53]and it gets very grim very quickly.
[24:55]The language is bad.
[24:57]The products are at least alarming sometimes
[25:01]in the language that they use, et cetera.
[25:04]So it's strange, it's a strange point to mention,
[25:06]but aesthetics has been really important
[25:08]in terms of what we do.
[25:10]It's got to look nice.
[25:11]And that's not superficial.
[25:12]It's saying, looking after your mind,
[25:15]your emotional well-being,
[25:17]belongs to the desirable world of the rest of your life.
[25:21]It's not some embarrassing cul-de-sac.
[25:24]It's something that fits in very naturally
[25:26]next to other things you already do.
[25:28]If so, if you could pick some passage from this book
[25:32]or some course from the School of Life's conferences
[25:35]or some just little sliver that you think
[25:38]maybe people in America, for instance,
[25:40]would really benefit from the most.
[25:43]Love all the many, many, many things in pieces of advice.
[25:45]Is there anything in particular that jumps out?
[25:47]Look, there's one idea that I've been very impressed by
[25:50]which comes from the English psychoanalyst,
[25:53]Donald Winicott, who was a child psychoanalyst.
[25:55]So I spent a lot of time observing children
[25:57]and their parents.
[25:58]And he came up with the theory of the true and the false self.
[26:01]And the theory goes like this.
[26:03]All of us, when we're very little,
[26:05]have spontaneously what he called a true self.
[26:08]And that true self is just how we feel at that moment.
[26:12]We could be deliriously happy and giggly.
[26:14]We could be furious and want to kick and bite.
[26:17]We might be feeling pensive and just want to look out of the window.
[26:20]This is us aged three months, right?
[26:22]The baby is born with an authentic self, a true self.
[26:26]Winicott thought that it was incredibly important
[26:28]for that true self to have time
[26:31]when it would be respected
[26:33]and not too easily squashed or diminished
[26:36]or educated to be so-called good.
[26:39]And this was very hard for many parents, many upbringings.
[26:43]Winicott observed have the birth of a false self
[26:47]that has been overlaid on the true self
[26:49]and the false self is all about compliance.
[26:51]It's all about doing well in the eyes of other people.
[26:54]It's about not screaming because that might upset Granny.
[26:56]It's about smiling because that would make Daddy really happy.
[26:59]It's about doing a really good job drawing
[27:02]in a picture because we know that's what the audience wants.
[27:05]And that's impressive, but it's not authentic.
[27:09]And I think in many, many lives,
[27:11]there's a tension between the true and the false.
[27:14]And for Winicott, many people in later life,
[27:18]many often very successful people,
[27:20]will have what gets called in common diction, a breakdown.
[27:25]And a breakdown is very often a breakthrough
[27:29]that's trying to force its way out of a breakdown situation,
[27:33]where somebody has been in a state of compliance for decades
[27:37]when no one has ever really taken care
[27:40]to think about their true needs.
[27:42]And it becomes a somewhat unbearable.
[27:44]So really what I'm saying is there are many good boys and girls
[27:47]out there. They're the smiling ones.
[27:49]They're the ones who do really well at the office
[27:50]because they're so good at working out
[27:52]what other people need from them.
[27:54]They're running modern business, modern society.
[27:56]These guys are often the winners,
[27:58]but they're often deep, deep down, not very happy
[28:01]because their success has been brought at a very heavy cost
[28:05]of over compliance.
[28:07]And I think the message is,
[28:09]if that rings a bell, if you do feel,
[28:11]maybe I'm that good boy or girl,
[28:13]I've been very good, very good,
[28:14]but the goodness is killing me.
[28:16]Take that thought very seriously.
[28:18]And what would it mean to be a little bit
[28:20]usefully so-called in a very common's bad,
[28:23]or even usefully selfish
[28:26]because selfishness is a word
[28:28]that we think about quite a lot at school of life.
[28:30]It's normally seen as a terrible thing.
[28:32]Oh, so-and-so selfish, how awful.
[28:34]Many of us are suffering from not an excess of selfishness,
[28:37]but a deficit of selfishness.
[28:39]We literally do not know how to put ourselves forward
[28:42]at key moments because we just,
[28:44]it's never really happened.
[28:45]We haven't found our voice.
[28:47]So this is an old and familiar,
[28:49]but always relevant story about our search for authenticity
[28:52]and true adulthood,
[28:54]which might be compatible with sometimes
[28:56]being a little upsetting for other people around us
[28:59]in order to fight for things that we really care for
[29:02]that we've perhaps had to give up too early.
[29:05]Have you ever thought about partnering
[29:07]with all the universities in the world
[29:09]or colleges or making this some sort of required course,
[29:13]as opposed to electing to take this later
[29:16]when you are self-aware enough to know you need it?
[29:18]Like that everybody should have these courses
[29:21]before they go out into the world.
[29:23]Look, I think that little kids,
[29:25]and this is good and bad news,
[29:27]and they need not lectures on any of this stuff.
[29:29]They need love.
[29:30]More than anything, they need love.
[29:31]They need intelligent love.
[29:33]So the job is to educate parents,
[29:35]not five-year-old.
[29:36]You don't want to deliver lectures.
[29:37]No, I'm thinking about college.
[29:39]Yes, like, great.
[29:40]At college, we fantastic.
[29:41]Look, my experience of the world of colleges
[29:44]is that these guys are tremendously invested in what they do.
[29:48]They do certain things that they do really, really well.
[29:51]They're not interested in that deeper dream,
[29:55]I think, of college.
[29:56]The dream that I had when I went to college,
[29:58]which is college as a play.
[30:00]to really learn about yourself and become an adult in the true sense.
[30:05]I think that mission often doesn't quite work.
[30:07]So look, I believe passionately in education,
[30:11]but I think that education is something that happens throughout your life
[30:15]in big ways and small ways.
[30:17]And I think, you know, one of the things we do is we have a YouTube channel
[30:20]and YouTube is the educator of the world now.
[30:23]I mean, it is the world's education channel.
[30:25]And we could go, well, that's not serious. Three-minute films on all sorts of things,
[30:28]on YouTube. Well, we feel we've had a tremendous result on YouTube.
[30:33]And we're really proud of the work we do that.
[30:35]So I think education is so key,
[30:38]but education isn't just college.
[30:40]It's really everything.
[30:42]And your podcast is education.
[30:45]You know, it's true.
[30:45]And I think the wonderful thing about the new digital world is that
[30:50]we learned to educate ourselves constantly in new and inventive ways
[30:54]and we're continuing to learn.
[30:56]And I'm so passionate about that.
[30:57]So what is coming next for you?
[30:59]You have 10 centers. Are you opening more centers?
[31:02]Are you writing more books?
[31:03]Like what's on the docket?
[31:05]All the time, we always start with the human being and their problems.
[31:09]And we work out from that.
[31:10]So we're constantly asking ourselves,
[31:12]how are we suffering?
[31:13]You know, how are human being suffering now?
[31:15]And what can we do?
[31:16]How can we be in a position to help?
[31:18]So for example, we've just released a little book on affairs
[31:21]because we've noticed that that's a big area of problems.
[31:24]We're releasing a book on how to cook the broken heart
[31:26]because that's a big thing.
[31:29]We're going to be publishing a cookbook
[31:31]because how people eat is so central
[31:34]to their emotional state.
[31:36]We'd like to book on exercise and emotional life
[31:38]because we very much believe that we are embodied creatures
[31:40]and our bodies play a role in all this, etc, etc.
[31:44]So it's going to go until death, touchwood.
[31:47]You know, there's so many issues, so many ways
[31:50]in which we're suffering and so many interesting responses
[31:52]we can make to that suffering.
[31:54]Would you have any advice to someone who is attempting to
[31:57]work on some sort of treatise of life like this one is
[32:00]advice to some people or just another type of?
[32:04]Yes, I mean, look, I think the best advice is start with yourself.
[32:08]You know, you are the best source of information on all sorts of things
[32:13]to do with emotional life.
[32:14]The other thing I would suggest is go and see a therapist
[32:17]because therapists are a wonderful way
[32:20]of getting a perspective on your inner life
[32:23]that it could be hard to get just totally on your own.
[32:27]So self-knowledge is the way to try and know other people.
[32:31]I mean, this is the thing.
[32:33]You know, sometimes people say to us,
[32:34]you seem to have worked out my secret.
[32:36]How did you know?
[32:37]And we're like, no, no, we haven't worked out your secret.
[32:39]We've worked out our own secret
[32:40]and along the way we worked out things
[32:43]that you didn't know about yourself.
[32:44]So if you want to become a mind reader,
[32:46]if you want to be able to read the minds of other people,
[32:49]go and read your own mind and then unlock its secrets
[32:52]and you have a magic key for everybody else's mind.
[32:54]Just believe trust that everybody else's mind is more like your mind
[32:58]than you could ever dare to believe.
[33:00]And that will give you the secret.
[33:02]Wow.
[33:03]Is this everything you expected it to be and more?
[33:05]Do you get like tremendous satisfaction
[33:08]through all the things you're doing?
[33:09]Yes, look on a good day.
[33:11]It's such a privilege to be able to think about,
[33:15]you know, I was always one of these people.
[33:17]I love talking about emotions.
[33:18]I love talking about relationships.
[33:20]I love talking about psychology.
[33:22]This is my hobby.
[33:23]And I suppose I've made my hobby into my work.
[33:27]And so vacations are painful things
[33:29]because I'm like, get me back on vacation,
[33:31]a real vacation, which is what I do most of the time.
[33:35]Wow, it's amazing.
[33:36]Well, thank you for not only just coming on the show,
[33:38]but for all you do to help truly all of humanity
[33:42]and to help the world really be a better place.
[33:44]I mean, you have to start with emotions.
[33:46]So it's perfect.
[33:47]Such an honor.
[33:48]Thank you so much.
[33:48]Thanks for coming on.
[33:49]Thank you.
[33:50]Thanks again for my new partnership with Book of the Month Club.
[33:54]Book of the Month.com.
[33:56]Use code ZibiZIBBYY to get your first book for just $5
[34:00]and sign up for this really fantastic subscription box service.
[34:04]Thanks for listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[34:07]You can follow me on Instagram at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[34:11]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[34:15]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[34:16]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[34:19]Thanks for listening.
[34:20]You can always email me at Zibi at Zibi Owens.com.