Alex O'Connor

You know what I mean?

And those can kind of be both true.

And so it's difficult to sort of psychologize.

But I was thinking like, yeah, maybe the fact that I had this slightly sort of acting out rebellious attitude.

that meant that when I came across the New Atheist movement, something about the debate, something about the theatre attracted me to it because I had that kind of attitude as a child.

My memory would be kind of like walking into school at like midday, wearing the wrong uniform and having somebody kind of say, you know, you really should be wearing black shoes and

Me just saying, oh, I'll sort it out tomorrow.

And that kind of just being the kind of childhood I had, which is maybe not what people would expect given how much I care about being a bit more like studious these days and how I'm kind of associated with...

Like academics, I'm not an academic myself, but I speak to them all the time and I've got a university degree and this kind of stuff.

I find that's also kind of like helpful for people to hear sometimes because a lot of people listen to my stuff who are really interested in like philosophy or theology or whatever it is, but they don't like school.

They don't do so well at school, not interested.

And I kind of want to say that's okay.

Like don't flunk out, like do the best you can, but don't take...

school or your your sort of desire to be in school or academia as a proxy for your desire to like learn about the world you know so it sounds like there was a bit of a rebellious anti-establishment pushing back version of you but maybe not everyone likes to say that right everyone likes to sort of be what i was such a i was a rebellious child and i used to sort of win debates with my teachers so like yeah but you know nothing super profound just like your normal kind of slightly annoying

Yeah.

So you would have got good grades.

Eventually, right?

The first time I did what we call A-levels in the UK, which is like the last two years of high school, I did further maths, maths and physics.

And I did critical thinking as a side sort of thing.

And I got three U's, which is like, if you go like A, B, C, D, E, F, U stands for unmarked.