Zibby Owens: I’m so excited to be here today with Alain de Botton who is the international philosopher and best-selling author of fourteen books, essay collections, and novels including How Proust Can Change Your Life, Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, The Course of Love, and most recently, The School of the Life. His first book which he wrote at age twenty-three, Essays in Love, sold two million copies worldwide. He’s the founder of The School of Life, an organization dedicated to his new vision of education, for which he writes essays, leads conferences, produces YouTube videos, and writes books. He has his own production company, Seneca Productions, which makes television documentaries about his work. Originally from Zürich, Alain moved with his family to London. He studied history at Cambridge University and earned a master’s in philosophy at King’s College London. He also started a PhD program in French philosophy at Harvard. He currently lives in London with his family.

Welcome, Alain. Thanks so much for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.”

Alain de Botton: Thank you so much. What a pleasure for me.

Zibby: It’s such an honor. The School of Life: An Emotional Education, your latest book, brilliant per usual. Tell me about how you formed The School of Life itself first. Then I want to hear about the book part.

Alain: For the longest time, I was just an author on my own. I would joke that my life’s ambition was to start something called The School of Life where we would help people. Also, it would have a shop. I’ve always wanted to have shop. About twelve years ago, I was talking like this. Then a friend of mine said, “Why do you always have to be ironic and sarcastic with the things you really want to do? Why don’t you actually just admit you want to do this and do it? It’s quite serious.” This stopped me in my track. I stopped making jokes and actually did it. I got together with some friends and some investors. We started this thing called The School of Life which now has ten branches around the world and lots and lots of customers who access us in all sorts of ways.

The guiding thing is this is a home for emotional resources, resources for emotional life. We offer psychotherapy in person in lots of places. We offer a range of books and products that will help to illuminate all sorts of difficult angles. We run classes pretty much every evening. We have conferences around the world. We work with businesses, going in there and helping them with their emotional issues. At different price points in different ways, sometimes playful, sometimes pretty serious, pretty almost medical, we are dealing with human emotional difficulties. It’s the best fun I’ve ever had. It’s great because it’s a mixture of the theoretical and the practical. We do everything from sit around going, “What are the problems we need to target? What are our customers telling us about where they’re suffering?” to “How does one hire the best therapist in town?” that kind of thing. It’s a mixture of the practical and the emotional.

Zibby: Do you ever worry that the people who might need to go to this school the most refuse to enroll?

Alain: Absolutely. There’s an amazing amount of denial around emotional well-being. The people who need it most will tend to say things like, “Isn’t it obvious? Hasn’t Freud been discredited?” We always say, “The bad news, guys, is that Freud has not been discredited.” Yes, lots and lots of his theories have been nuanced and no longer seem applicable. The basic idea that who you are as an adult sits on top of childhood experiences and those childhood experiences, unless they’re understood and placed in the right context, will continue to have an influence on your adult life in ways that are often quite detrimental, this is never going to go away. It’s humiliating. Who wants to think, when they’re thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, that so much of who they are goes back to when they were five? It sounds ridiculous. I wish it wasn’t true, but I think it is.

The best way of dealing with the truth is actually to start exploring it and to master — we always say the goal of emotional maturity, because that’s often what we’re talking about, isn’t to be totally sane and problem-free. It’s to have a handle on one’s insanities and problems so that you can warn people you love of what’s going on, you can take averting action, and also so that you can, to some extent, attenuate the full force of a response, be it an angry response, a panicked response, a paranoid response, an overly enthusiastic response, whatever it is, to try and move towards that goal of being an emotional adult, which is so hard. It’s so much easier just to be adult. To be an adult’s really easy. You just sit somebody down and give them cereal. They eat. Then they grow. By eighteen, they will be fully grown. An emotional adult, wow, that’s something that only comes about with real effort. You might be three hundred by the time you’re approaching that.

Zibby: How many adults do you think are actually emotionally mature adults, if you had to give it a percentage?

Alain: I think a very high number of people can manage moments of emotional adulthood. Probably ninety percent of people can manage moments. There will also be unbelievable regressions or relationships in which adulthood isn’t possible. Many of us have this with, of course, our parents. However old we are, you could be fifty and you go home and see Mom and suddenly, you’re eleven again whatever your efforts. Then sometimes with our own children, their own immaturity will pull us towards immature patterns of behavior. However committed we are to adulthood, we will regress. That said, it isn’t a disaster to have moments of regression. You need to repair when there have been those moments. Analysts, therapists talk wonderfully about the notion of rupture and repair. Any relationship has moments of rupture. It doesn’t matter about the rupture. The only thing that matters is the capacity for repair. So long as you have capacity for repair, in other words, explaining to the person with whom you have been immature, that it’s happened, why it’s happened, and that you’re keen to move on and do it better next time, that’s the key thing. Lapses in themselves don’t matter.

Zibby: I also find it interesting as a parent when you say that everything in life is affected because of what happens when you’re five. Now I feel like I have the responsibility of my own children to figure out, how am I going to mess them up that it’s going to affect them forever? When you talked about kids in your book, you said that “Childhood is a gentle, open prison. Such is the fragile base of childhood that nothing outwardly appalling needs to have happened to us for us to wind up inwardly, profoundly scrambled.” How do I not end up with scrambled kids? I need sunny-side-up kids.

Alain: Here’s an optimistic thing to bear in mind. No child needs a perfect parent. In fact, if you have a perfect parent, you’ll end up psychotic. A parent who never disappoints you leads you towards a life of madness. The role of a parent is kindly disappointment. You want to try and gently initiate a child to the tragedies of existence until such point your job will long be done when it can accept the fact it’s going to die. It starts with, “I want to stay in the park all day. I want to eat as much chocolate cake as I like.” The job of a parent is, in a kindly way, to let them down. Some parents can never do any of the letting down because they have their own issues around disappointment. The notion is that the child must be happy all the time, which is very dangerous. There are some parents like that around.

The other thing that can be dangerous is the parent who is too brutal, whose own needs were not met. For one reason or another, they therefore cannot adjust themselves to the moments when a child, particularly when it’s very little, needs to feel that they’re in charge. They’re the little emperor. They are the king or queen. I remember talking to a parent of a very, very young child. She said to me, “The thing is, I need my kid to know who’s boss in this house.” Hang on minute. There’s not even a risk that this child who’s currently the size of a hamster is going to become boss. That’s in your head. It’s not in the real world. Obviously, if you’ve had experiences of your authority being questioned in ways that might have been very frightening, then the experience of parenting can bring up all sorts of things. What’s emerging from all this is so much of one’s current responses can be unbalanced by experiences in childhood where things were themselves unbalanced and the child didn’t have a chance to cope.

In childhood, the only response may have been fury to having one’s boundaries repeatedly violated. One got very angry. Is runaway fury the best way of handling it? When you’re forty, no, not really. It’s all about trying to nuance one’s emotions to fit them to the adult world when in fact, if you scratch below the surface, so many emotions were formed in childhood before we really had a chance to work out why we were doing what we were doing. There are adults wandering around the world with a level of anger or of resignation or of paranoia or shame that really owes their origins to moments in childhood that are no longer active, that are no longer part of adult reality. They’re still having an impact in the way that an adult is living their daily life. The more we can unplug past from present, the easier our time will be.

Zibby: Your school is going to do all of this, schools around the world, the videos and the courses and this book?

Alain: It’s all part of it. I think that what we desperately need is a world that is emotionally literate, in other words, where people have more of an understanding of the basics of human psychology. I’m really struck. I don’t know how it is in the US. In the UK, in an average group of educated people, you say, “Attachment theory, what does everybody know?” Maybe fifteen percent of people have ever heard of what attachment theory is. Attachment theory, which was developed in the fifties and sixties in the UK and is now is a globally recommended phenomena is one of the basic tools with which you can understand what you’re going to get up to in relationships and therefore, what sort of people you might need to get together with, to sketch it very briefly.

Psychologists tell us about secure attachment. When you’re securely attached, you’ll be able to love and to trust. You won’t doubt when somebody tells you that they love you. If you are avoidantly attached, your dominant response in an affectionate situation, whenever there’s any threat or perceived threat, is to withdraw, to say, “I don’t need you.” This is the person who reads a lot, who says, “I don’t need other people,” who’s a loner, not because they don’t want contact but because contact is experienced as potentially very dangerous because it was once traumatic. Then there’s the so-called anxiously attached person who can’t necessarily trust in the goodwill and love of another person and therefore constantly probes at it anxiously and very often can end up sabotaging a relationship where someone does really love them. By the time they’ve been asked a thousand times, “Do you still love me?” and also had strange antics like them showing up in the middle of the night or sending a million texts or having them followed by the police or whatever it is, this is no longer so cute. Anxious attachment is also a desperately sad way in which people will try and do that thing that we all long for, which is connect with other humans.

At the end of the day, human beings are wired for connection. We long to connect. We end up very sad if we’re not connecting and very happy if we are. If you look at most divorces and most affairs, which we do quite a lot of — I discuss them quite a bit in the book. An affair is very often seen as a piece of random horniness on the part of somebody in a couple. It’s almost never that. People have affairs, broadly speaking, because they feel disconnected from their partner. This hurts so much in ways that they can’t express. They therefore enact with somebody else, what they wish would happen with their partner, which is connection. It’s desperately unfortunate. It’s even more unfortunate when in response to affairs, people have responses that are better used in the Middle Ages. We need to get psychological about why people have affairs. There’s so much to uncover.

Zibby: You have so much of this in the book. You have a whole section on marriage where you say — this trolled me a little bit. You said, “The whole rationale of marriage is to function as a prison that is very hard and very embarrassing for two people to get out of. The essence of marriage is to tie our hands, to frustrate our wills, to put high and costly obstacles in the way of splitting up, and sometimes to force two unhappy people to stay in each other’s company for longer than either of them would wish.” Why do we do this?

Alain: We do this because we recognize that there’s a lesson. There’s some learning that we need to do. If we keep running away to other people, we’ll never learn those lessons. There are some lessons that can only be learned when you are really secure with somebody, when two people can’t get out of the room. They’ve been locked in the room together. Of course, they could leave, but it would be embarrassing and costly, as I say. Therefore, you’re going to work at it in a way that you would never work at it with anyone else. Sometimes that work leads to amazing results. Sometimes people, in the best marriages, actually grow. Couples who’ve been married a long time will often report something like, “For a while, it looked like we would split up. They weren’t listening. I was on a different wavelength, but we worked it out. In working it out, we learned about ourselves. We are now better, richer people, and stronger people.” It doesn’t happen for everybody. Sometimes it becomes a prison that you can’t work it through. Then you have to leave. Of course, people should be allowed to leave. They should also be allowed to explore.

We have this idea that if you love somebody, you should never want them to change. That’s madness. It may not be politically correct. When you are with somebody in a couple, of course it’s normal that you want them to change. What helps to keep couples strong is when two people can say, “I’m hearing how you want me to change. I take that really seriously. I’m going to try and change because I kind of agree. It may be difficult, but I’m listening to it.” Obviously, the change may be bizarre and really not in line with anything you want. Very often, couples spot things in each other which really do need to be changed. No one else is going to tell you. Your colleagues won’t care. Your friends won’t care. Only somebody who’s properly invested will say, “You’re wasting your talents,” or “When you get angry with the kids, it’s not pleasant. You need to control yourself,” or “You’re letting your mother’s anxieties take over your life.” A friend’s not going to tell you that. Only a lover will tell you that. If you stick at it and hear them, that’s when a relationship is alive.

My rule of thumb is however difficult a relationship, so long as a couple feels that each other is listening properly, is properly taking on board difficult material, then it’s fine. You might be having no sex. You might be arguing a lot. You might have all sorts of procedural difficulties. So long as there’s that communication and feeling of being heard, that’s a safe relationship. The minute I come across a relationship where somebody is saying, “I’ve tried to explain this thing a thousand times. He needs to be warmer. Why doesn’t he put his hand on my shoulder when I come home? There’s nothing,” and the guy has never heard this, it’s not going in. “Why can’t she see that I need some space at times?” Neither party is going giving way. Neither party is listening. Then we’re in trouble. A key feature in a good relationship is a certain degree of modesty that leads one to think, “I’m not perfect. I’m a flawed human. I’m coming into a relationship. It’s going to be very normal for my partner to want certain things from me. I should be open to change.” That’s not an insult. It’s the work of love.

Zibby: It was so great in the book, too, how you put specific questions you can ask your partner to make sure you don’t end up having one of you have an affair. “What would you like sexually?” You have all these questions. I was like, maybe I’ll try asking my husband. I read him one question after another. He was like, “I don’t think we need this. We’re good.”

Alain: The passage you’re alluding to, there’s a lot of emphasis on, “Are you angry with me about anything? Are you annoyed with me about anything?” It sounds like a strange thing, but couples stop having sex. We’ve researched this. Couples stop having sex. It’s got nothing to do with sex. It’s always to do with anger and resentment. You have to have a general cleansing quite quickly. A couple where both people are able to go — fill in the end of the sentence — “I’ve got a little bit of resentment around…” — each person can fill in the end of that sentence and hear the other person without going, “That’s not true. What about you?” No, those are killers. Listen. Take it on board. Try and adjust. That saves marriages. That’s the lifeblood of relationships. It’s also very erotic to feel heard. Don’t bother with candles and fancy hotels. It’s feeling heard. There’s nothing more romantic, in the true sense, than feeling that somebody hears you.

Zibby: And sees you.

Alain: And sees you.

Zibby: This imposter syndrome, to change gears a little bit, you talk a lot in the book about when we feel like imposters. You say, “We feel like imposters not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we can’t imagine how equally flawed the elite must necessarily be under their polished surfaces.” You say, “The solution to imposter syndrome lies in making the leap of faith and trusting that other’s minds work basically in much the same way as our own. Everyone is probably as anxious, uncertain, and wayward as we are.” I loved hearing this. I feel like everybody who comes on this podcast says, “I can barely call myself an author. I’m not really a writer.” Everyone feels this way.

Alain: That’s right. It’s a weird thing. It comes down, at the end of the day, to a psychology that we know our own minds from the inside. We have the full panoply of information about our madness and our strange thoughts at three AM and our doubts as we walk into the door or whatever it is. We know that. We only know what goes on in the minds of other people by what they choose to tell us, which is very often a hugely abbreviated section of what’s actually going on in them. Without anyone lying as such, there’s a real divide between what we know of ourselves and what we know of other people. This leads us all to think we’re very weird. I was in a hall the other day with a thousand people in it. I said, “Who here thinks of themselves as weird?” A thousand hands went up. You’re thinking, hang on a minute, that can’t be true. How can a thousand people think they’re weird? It’s just our dominant sense of what is normal doesn’t fit the reality. This has an impact on, broadly, our confidence.

We always think, “If I were a different person, I could do some challenge. I could rise to be the CEO, ask somebody on a date, or take a risk at work,” or whatever it is. We tell ourselves we can’t because we’re too weird. We’re too fragile. We’re too vulnerable. We’re too strange. We are not the sort of people who do that kind of thing. At The School of Life, we’ve had fun with this one. The standard advice for low self-confidence that people are given, particularly on the West Coast — no insult to people on the West Coast. People will tell you, “Believe in yourself. You’re beautiful. Trust in your glory. You have the divine in you. You’re a fantastic person.” This is a disaster. It’s well-meant, but it’s a disaster. It only rachets up the feeling of inadequacy.

The far better thing to do is to tell somebody — this is somebody who’s really worried that they might be a bit of an idiot. The thing to do is to say, “Look, bad news and good news. Bad news is you are an idiot. It’s true. You know all those fears? They’re true. Good news is there’s seven billion idiots on the planet. Your idiocy does not cut you off from humanity. It, in fact, confirms you as being right at the center of the human race.” If we accept our idiocy with good grace rather than spying it out of the corner of our eyes as some dreadful thing that somebody else might spot about us — imagine if we went to ask that person something and they realized that we were a bit of an idiot. Just accept this with good grace. You’re an idiot. They’re an idiot. Everybody’s an idiot. That’s fine. That’s a better kind of confidence, a confidence built on accepting our humanity and relating compassionately both to our own and to other people’s fragility.

Zibby: This is how you talked about friendship in the book as well. Part of being friends is allowing them to see what you would be completely humiliated to have broadcast about you. You confide this in your friends. That’s how you become close, is sharing your idiocy with other people.

Alain: That’s right, even though it’s a weird thing. We always think that the root of friendship has got to be that we’ve got to be impressive. We make such efforts to seem impressive. We throw lovely dinner parties where everything’s just right; we decorate our homes; we achieve things at work, all so that we’ll be acceptable people. It’s terribly poignant. At the end of the day, though that buys you the certain regard and a certain interest of others, it doesn’t really buy you friendship. It doesn’t buy you connection. The only thing that can buy you connection is the revelation of a vulnerability. Anything that you give to somebody — it is a kind of present that they could humiliate you with if they were nasty; hopefully they won’t be — that becomes the bedrock of friendship, sharing something that makes you potentially look bad, a weakness. What we like to do at The School of Life, we gather a lot of people around. We get people to introduce each other. We get people to say something that they regret, something they’re ashamed of, and something that they’re sad about. Those three things, if you tell a stranger those things and they tell you that back, that’s the beginning of friendship. Try it next time you’re bored with somebody.

Zibby: Maybe those will be my questions from now on.

Alain: Absolutely. They’re the royal road into someone’s deep self. They are actually what friendship is based out of.

Zibby: What do you think made you start this whole thing? Why you? How have you become this person? How have you started this? What in your own life made you want to take what you’ve learned and help everybody else? What do you think?

Alain: I think that most people are trying to solve their own problems through their work, if not the problems of their parents. There’s a lot of intergenerational activity that goes on there. I grew up in a household that was really quite crazy in many ways. There was a lot of distress, a lot of emotional distress. From a young age, I wanted to see if I could make it better. Some of my work is addressed to me and my loved ones most immediately, from years ago now. It doesn’t quite make sense. As an adult, lots of other things come in the way. That’s certainly a very vital seam. Then maybe it’s also living in the UK as I do and seeing that this is a very wealthy country, a very successful country in many ways, where so many lives are blighted by an ignorance of emotional life. I had a so-called elite education, which taught me all sort of things about interest rates and governments in the nineteenth century and trigonometry. It didn’t teach me anything about marriage, about love, about anxiety, about death, all of these topics.

I created, together with colleagues, The School of Life as a kind of home, as a welcoming place where you can go and find out about this sort of stuff in a way that would be welcoming and non-medical. We think a lot about the gap between the medical and the everyday consumer. We live in a consumer society. So many consumer items are incredibly appealing. You walk into shops selling you sneakers and makeup. It looks lovely. It’s beautifully presented and all the rest of it. Then you take a step into the mental well-being area. It gets very grim very quickly. The language is bad. The products, at least alarming sometimes in the language that they use. It’s a strange point to mention, but aesthetics has been really important in terms of what we do. It’s got to look nice. That’s not superficial. It’s looking after your mind. Your emotional well-being belongs to the desirable world of the rest of your life. It’s not some embarrassing cul-de-sac. It’s something that fits in very naturally next to other things you already do.

Zibby: If you could pick some passage from this book, or some course from The School of Life’s conferences, or some little sliver that you think people in America, for instance, would really benefit from the most, of all the many, many, many things and pieces of advice, is there anything in particular that jumps out?

Alain: There’s one idea that I’ve been very impressed by which comes from the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who was a child psychoanalyst. He spent a lot of time observing children and their parents. He came up with the theory of the true and the false self. The theory goes like this. All of us, when we’re very little, have spontaneously, what he called, a true self. That true self is just how we feel at that moment. We could be deliriously happy and giggly. We could be furious and want to kick and bite. We might be feeling pensive and just want to look out of the window. This is us aged three months. The baby is born with an authentic self, a true self. Winnicott thought that it was incredibly important for that true self to have time when it would be respected and not too easily squashed or diminished or educated to be so-called good. This was very hard for many parents. Many upbringings Winnicott observed have the birth of a false self that has been overlaid on the true self.

The false self is all about compliance. It’s all about doing well in the eyes of other people. It’s about not screaming because that might upset Granny. It’s about smiling because that would make Daddy really happy. It’s about doing a really good job drawing in a picture because we know that’s what the audience wants. That’s impressive, but it’s not authentic. I think in many, many lives, there’s a tension between the true and false. For Winnicott, many people in later life, many, often, very successful people, will have what gets called in common diction, a breakdown. A breakdown is very often a breakthrough that’s trying to force its way out of the breakdown situation. Somebody has been in a state of compliance for decades. No one has ever really taken care to think about their true needs. It becomes, at some point, unbearable. Really, what I’m saying is there are many good boys and girls out there. They’re the smiling ones. They’re the ones who do really well at the office because they’re so good at working out what other people need from them. In modern business, modern society, these guys are often the winners.

They’re often, deep, deep down, not very happy because their success has been bought at a very heavy cost of overcompliance. The message is, if that rings a bell, if you do feel “Maybe I’m that good boy or girl. I’ve been very good, but the goodness is killing me,” take that thought very seriously. What would it mean to be a little bit usefully so-called “bad” or even usefully selfish? Selfishness is a word that we think about quite a lot at School of Life. It’s normally seen as a terrible thing. “So-and-so’s selfish. How awful.” Many of us are suffering from not an excess of selfishness, but a deficit of selfishness. We literally do not know how to put ourselves forward at key moments because it’s never really happened. We haven’t found our voice. This is an old and familiar but always relevant story about our search for authenticity and true adulthood, which might be compatible with sometimes being a little upsetting for other people around us in order to fight for things that we really care for that we’ve perhaps had to give up too early.

Zibby: Have you ever thought about partnering with all the universities in the world or colleges or making this some sort of required course as opposed to electing to take this later when you are self-aware enough to know you need it, that everybody should have these courses before they go out into the world?

Alain: I think that little kids — this is good and bad news. Little kids need, not lectures on any of this stuff. They need love. More than anything, they need love. They need intelligent love. The job is to educate parents, not five-year-olds. You don’t want to deliver lectures on Winnicott.

Zibby: No, I’m thinking about college.

Alain: Yes, sure. At college, it would be fantastic. My experience of the world of colleges is that these guys are tremendously invested in what they do. They do certain things that they do really, really well. They’re not interested in that deeper dream, I think, of college, the dream that I had when I went to college, which is college as a place to really learn about yourself and become an adult in the true sense. I think that mission often doesn’t quite work. I believe passionately in education. I think that education is something that happens throughout your life in big ways and small ways. One of the things we do is we have a YouTube channel. YouTube is the educator of the world now. It is the world’s education channel. One could go, “That’s not serious, three-minute films on all sort of things on YouTube.” We feel we’ve had a tremendous result on YouTube. We’re really proud of the work we do there. Education is so key, but education isn’t just college. It’s really everything. Your podcast is education. It’s true. The wonderful thing about the new digital world is that we’re learning to educate ourselves constantly in new and inventive ways. We’re continuing to learn. I’m so passionate about that.

Zibby: What is coming next for you? You have ten centers. Are you opening more centers? Are you writing more books? What’s on the docket?

Alain: We always start with the human being and their problems. We work out from that. We’re constantly asking ourselves, how are we suffering? How are human beings suffering now? What can we do? How can we be in a position to help? For example, we’ve just released a little book on affairs because we’ve noticed that that’s a big area of problems. We’re releasing a book on how to cope with a broken heart because that’s a big thing. We’re going to be publishing a cookbook because how people eat is so central to their emotional state. We’d like to do a book on exercise and emotional life. We very much believe that we are embodied creatures. Our bodies play a role in all this. It’s going to go on until death touch wood. There’s so many issues, so many ways in which we’re suffering, and so many interesting responses we can make to that suffering.

Zibby: Would you have any advice to someone who is attempting to work on some sort of treatise of life like this one is, advice to help people or just another type of —

Alain: — Yes. The best advice is start with yourself. You are the best source of information on all sorts of things to do with emotional life. The other thing I would suggest is go and see a therapist. Therapists are a wonderful way of getting a perspective on your inner life that it could be hard to get just totally on your own. Self-knowledge is the way to try and know other people. This is the thing. Sometimes people say to us, “You seem to have worked out my secret. How did you know?” We’re like, “No, no. We haven’t worked out your secret. We’ve worked out our own secret. Along the way, we worked out things that you didn’t know about yourself.” If you want to become a mind reader, if you want to be able to read the minds of other people, go and read your own mind. Then unlock its secrets. You’ll have a magic key for everybody else’s mind. Believe, trust that everybody else’s mind is more like your mind than you could ever dare to believe. That will give you the secret.

Zibby: Wow. Is this everything you expected it to be and more? Do you get tremendous satisfaction through all the things you’re doing?

Alain: Yes. On a good day, it’s such a privilege to be able to think about — I was always one of these people. I love talking about emotions. I love talking about relationships. I love talking about psychology. This is my hobby. I suppose I’ve made my hobby into my work. Vacations are painful things. I’m like, get me back on vacation, the real vacation, which is what I do most of the time.

Zibby: That’s amazing. Thank you for not only coming on the show, but for all you do to help, truly, all of humanity and to help the world really be a better place. You have to start with emotions. It’s perfect.

Alain: Such an honor. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thanks for coming on.

Alain: Thank you.