Alain de Botton

speaker

86 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Alain de Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Resilient Mind · The Hidden Reason You Can't Stop Overthinking - Alain de Botton · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

In other words, ignorance, a capacity to acknowledge one's ignorance is at the root cause of sophisticated thinking.

that you should be returning to a kind of basic ignorance.

Remember the story of Picasso, who went to an art school in old age, and he looks at some children scribbling and doing drawings.

And he said, you know, when I was their age, I could paint like Raphael.

And now I'm learning again how to paint like them.

And

That's really a story about giving up the old map and allowing oneself to be ignorant again.

And I think that's a true gift we give to ourselves when we allow ourselves to say, you know what, I don't know very much at all.

I mean, people often say to me, they must say this to you, you know, people say to me, oh, you must know so much about, you know, love or death or this or that, you know, spend all the time thinking.

And I rush to tell them, I literally don't know anything.

And I'm not, this is not false modesty.

It's a genuine sense that, you know, with every passing day, I know less.

And, you know, it's not even wisdom.

It's just comedic, really.

100%.

Exactly.

So someone who's providing a guide to goodness probably finds goodness really hard.

Somebody who's really interested in wisdom is really in touch with the chaos in them and in the world.

You wouldn't do it otherwise.

You're right.

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