Alain de Botton has written ~17 books and runs the School of Life YouTube channel, which now has almost 10 million subscribers. And this is a rare interview for him. Some highlights: 1. A clear night sky is a challenge to everything we think we know. 2. If we really took on board what that night sky is telling us, we'd have to lie down and just question absolutely everything. 3. Writer's block is a conflict between shame and the desire for honesty. 4. The effect of mass media is to industrialize and commercialize our thinking, which leaves no room for the free thinker, the honest thinker, and the authentic thinker. 5. You've got to be attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That's the real work of writing. 6. Every person is an incredible library of sensations but so often, particularly in the academic world, people think: “Let’s ignore ourselves as a source of data and find out what Cicero said, or what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said." 7. Writing can be revenge for the silenced person, which is why so many writers are meek in person but fierce on the page. 8. A work of art is the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress, and sometimes, it’s even an alternative to losing your mind. 9. Emerson said: "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts." 10. The thoughts of geniuses aren’t fundamentally different from others. It’s just that they’re able to put words to sensations we’ve long felt but couldn’t articulate. 11. Writing prompt: If there were no rules, if you couldn't fail, if no one was going to laugh, if you were going to be dead tomorrow, what would you actually do and say? How would you write, let's say? That's the thing you should write. I've shared the full conversation with Alain de Botton below. You can watch here or on YouTube, and listen on Apple or Spotify. You'll find the links in the reply tweets.

If we knew the complexity of the world, we'd know that we need hours and hours to process every waking minute. George Eliot said something like: "If we were truly attentive to the mystery and complexity of things, we would hear the squirrel's heartbeat and would hear the grass grow. And we'd go mad from the multiplicity of things. We'd lose our minds." Now that's a paraphrase but the point stands. Can you imagine what it'd be like to hear the heartbeats of squirrels? We repress those things. They're in us, but we don't pay attention to them because, if we were alive to all that's going on in the world, we'd lose ourselves.

You can divide humanity into what people do with their pain. Some people drink their pain away, some people talk their pain away, some people exercise their pain away, some people achieve their pain away, and some write their pain away. But the modern world discourages people from writing about their own experiences. They ask questions like: What's your authority base? What are you claiming this on? It's particularly true in academia, where the feeling is: "Let's ignore ourselves as a source of data. Let's go and find out what Cicero said, what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said." There's not much encouragement for investigating your own mind. In fact, the whole school system is based on trying to get you to find out what other people thought rather than exploring what you think.

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With age, we accumulate scars, which open us up to art. Take Van Gogh’s Irises. When you look at those flowers, you’re not just seeing a pretty painting. You’re seeing a man who was shattered. A man who was suffering deeply like a tormented saint. He was lonely, aching for love, and utterly misunderstood. When Van Gogh painted those irises, he wasn’t merely capturing their color and shape; he was grasping at something to hold onto, something to keep him from drowning in sorrow. The point is that when beauty is viewed through the lens of agony, it can transform into something else entirely: a life raft for your heart. But tragically, even beauty wasn't enough to save Van Gogh in the end. That's what makes his work so moving. Some of the most breathtaking beauty humans have ever created comes from wrestling with nearly unbearable levels of pain.

"AI forces you to do the thing you should've always been doing as an artist: stop exploring what you're supposed to do, and do what you want to do. LLMs only provide a summation of what's already been said and thought. Yes, it can be recombined, but essentially, it's giving you standardized answers, and sometimes they're very good. The pressure is on creatives to further up their level of self exploration to get ahead of this machine. But if I said it, let's say I was going to write an essay on nostalgia, and I said: "Okay, AI, structure me an essay on nostalgia in the style of me." It would do a perfectly decent job, but it wouldn't be picking up on why I'm a writer, why I want to be a writer. I don't just want to be a writer to produce a certain number of words. I want to be a writer in order to honor certain feelings. AI can't know those feelings because it's not me. It doesn't know what I really want to say.” (That's a paraphrase and not an exact quote)

"The effect of mass media is to industrialize our thinking. To commercialize it. That's no good for the free thinker, the honest thinker, the authentic thinker." — Alain de Botton

Writers are the scribes of humanity's thoughts. This is why Emerson wrote: "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts." In other words, geniuses don't necessarily have thoughts that are different from our own. Alain de Botton says: "What they do have is a kind of fidelity to the more neglected thoughts, the thoughts that are not mentioned in the parlor, as it were, that are not brought up at the dinner table, but that are inside everybody and that are neglected through habit, embarrassment, shame, status seeking, whatever it is that gets in the way of a more honest dialogue."