Four days into 2011, Mohammed Bouazizi set him­self on fire. From Tahrir Square to Wall Street and Arab Spring to American Fall, or what­ever it might be, it has been a year of pro­found change in the world; pro­found pos­si­bil­ity, uncer­tainty, and ten­sion. You’re a philoso­pher of the self, by and large—what is the role of such phi­los­o­phy in a year like this one?

I think that changes always hap­pen because some­one has sketched a vision of how an alter­na­tive might look. People get inspired by those alter­na­tives, so any rev­o­lu­tion that you care to think of, and it could be quite a sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, but it could be more a social rev­o­lu­tion, eco­nomic rev­o­lu­tion, there’s always been some­body who’s sketched a vision of how these things should go. You can call that per­son a philoso­pher, we can call them a thinker or a per­son of ideas or what­ever it is, and I’m quite loose about the job title, because I think ‘philoso­pher’ car­ries quite a lot of baggage.

These peo­ple are always required because I think any change requires a prac­ti­cal and a the­o­ret­i­cal drive. In many ways it’s the the­o­ret­i­cal drive that’s the hard­est. Let’s con­ceive of a free soci­ety, let’s con­ceive of a soci­ety where there might be free speech, or let’s con­ceive of a less unequal soci­ety, or what­ever it hap­pens to be. You need some­one to make a clear case for that, and then other peo­ple can know where to head.

It’s prob­a­bly the role of that per­son of ideas to step out­side of the imme­di­ate con­text, and to see the broader pic­ture of ideas and how that works.

Yes, and I think skills are slightly unevenly dis­trib­uted among the pop­u­la­tion. Generally, peo­ple who know how to act don’t really know how to think deeply, and peo­ple who know how to think deeply don’t know how to act. This has been the great prob­lem of our cul­ture, that some peo­ple have had fan­tas­tic ideas but have no idea how to bring them about. Other peo­ple are deeply prac­ti­cal, won­der­ful at mak­ing things hap­pen, but their ideas are not so great. When change comes about, it’s often because you’ve got the mar­riage of the two. You’ve got the the­ory and the practice.

This is what we were talk­ing about on the way here to meet you—change takes being right and being cer­tain, but often the peo­ple that enact that change are more cer­tain than they are right.

Yes, that’s right. Passionate con­vic­tions with­out that flex­i­bil­ity of mind. When peo­ple talk about entre­pre­neurs they some­times say that they’re on the verge of being patho­log­i­cal, but they’re on the right verge. You need a sense that your vision is cor­rect and you want to drive it through, but obvi­ously you need enough flex­i­bil­ity… that you’re still sane.

[laugh­ter]

You work hard to bring dis­cus­sion of philo­soph­i­cal ideas into a pop­u­lar, mass space. Can phi­los­o­phy live com­fort­ably in this space?

I care about a mass audi­ence because I some­how believe that the mass is right. I believe in a demo­c­ra­tic sense that if you’re not reach­ing a broad num­ber of peo­ple with your ideas, that there’s prob­a­bly some­thing wrong with your ideas. It might not be every­thing that’s wrong with them, but some­thing pre­sen­ta­tional or struc­tural. We live in very open soci­eties, where if your mes­sage is a good one it should be able to get out there.

So when the typ­i­cal aca­d­e­mic says ‘Well, you know, I don’t want to be open to pop­u­lar scrutiny’ or ‘I’m not inter­est­ing in dis­cussing my mate­r­ial with just any­one’, my response is, ‘Well, why?’ What is it about your field of study that makes it inevitably beyond a broader pub­lic accep­tance or recog­ni­tion or discussion?

Particularly when you come to the human­i­ties, my area broadly, there’s very often no good rea­son. Why should there be this divi­sion between pop­u­lar writ­ers and aca­d­e­mic writ­ers? Everyone should be aim­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with every­one else. Most gen­uine dilem­mas should be able to be expressed in clear lan­guage, and that by def­i­n­i­tion opens up the topic to a broad audience.

When were you fully aware of this being the space that you were going to inhabit? ‘This is my voice and this is how I’m going to speak with it.’

I went to a so-called good uni­ver­sity, Cambridge, and stud­ied his­tory and ticked all the boxes. Already, then, I was feel­ing uncom­fort­able. I thought that, at one level, this is very priv­i­leged and very nice, but on the other hand why are we study­ing this? Why is the knowl­edge being deliv­ered like this? I was very unhappy with the aca­d­e­mic sys­tem. I was excited by learn­ing and knowl­edge and cul­ture, but I couldn’t get on with the aca­d­e­mic way in which that kind of learn­ing took place. And so right from the begin­ning of my adult life, I was faced with this prob­lem: what do I do with myself—given what I’m inter­ested in and given my problems—with what I’m sup­posed to do when you’re inter­ested in this stuff, which is to become a professor.

I didn’t know what to do, and my career is just an attempt to try to work that out and find some solu­tions. I started off with books. In the last ten years or so I’ve become more inter­ested in insti­tu­tions, and how the things I’m inter­ested in could be col­lab­o­ra­tive and how I could get together with other people.

I reached a point of think­ing that the lone author is quite a vul­ner­a­ble crea­ture, and their voice is quite a small one in a busy world. Since then I have con­tin­ued to meet peo­ple who were inter­ested in the kind of stuff I was inter­ested in, and so nat­u­rally moved my inter­est towards a more col­lab­o­ra­tive way of doing what I do.

And that’s what’s man­i­fest­ing in the School of Life now?

For exam­ple. I first started off mak­ing tele­vi­sion pro­grams, my first attempt to be col­lab­o­ra­tive. I did that for a num­ber of years, and then moved onto the School of Life, which is pre­cisely about try­ing to unite a num­ber of peo­ple who are inter­ested in a cer­tain vision of knowl­edge and culture.

You wrote Essays In Love at, what, twenty-three or something?

… yeah…

What does a twenty-three-year-old know about love?

It’s prob­a­bly the first thing you know about, more than about eco­nom­ics or astro­physics. It’s a topic that strikes you young and prob­a­bly quite hard. When you’re four­teen or fif­teen, peo­ple have the first pangs of love and desire.

I didn’t really ask myself that ques­tion oth­er­wise I would have stopped doing it. I think, like many things that one does, it’s just best not to say, “Why me?” Why not?

As I look back on my first book, I think that it’s very much about a cer­tain kind of love. It’s about roman­tic love. It’s not about mar­ried love; it’s not about long-term love. It’s about sex­ual, roman­tic love, which has a real place in human expe­ri­ence. It’s not the only kind of love, but it’s one kind of love. And I stand by many things I said there, even though it’s not my last word on love.

You prob­a­bly didn’t expect it to be at the time either. Or maybe you did?

… No, no, I didn’t, exactly, I didn’t. Although I’m now going to write a new book on love I think.

That’s what I was won­der­ing. As your ideas of love broaden, it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily inval­i­date those feel­ings of the twenty-three-year-old.

Exactly, and I think that those feel­ings of the twenty-three-year-old, you might feel them again as a fifty-five-year-old in a par­tic­u­lar kind of con­text. The area that I’m inter­ested in look­ing at now is mar­ried, or long-term, love, which is a whole other ket­tle of fish. Also, love of chil­dren is very inter­est­ing to me, in a way that I had no clue of at twenty-three.

How has hav­ing a young fam­ily changed you?

With many peo­ple nowa­days who are my age and below, we’re all deeply aware that what hap­pens in child­hood really deter­mines your life. If you’re doing well or doing badly, thoughts about your child­hood, and what hap­pens in your child­hood, are incred­i­bly important.

So when you come to be a par­ent, you’re really aware that you’re tak­ing on some­thing very big. Not just some­thing prac­ti­cally big but emo­tion­ally big. Like all pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions you’ve got some prac­ti­cal tasks—feed the child, look after it, et cetera—but you’ve also got to do this other thing, which is try not to screw them up.

You may not mean to, but you do.

I’ve taken the job of par­ent­ing really seri­ously. I think about it a lot, I’m fas­ci­nated by it, I’m intel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lated by it and, luck­ily, I really love my chil­dren. Which I thought I might not. I thought, ‘What hap­pens if I don’t like them?’

I always imag­ined myself as the father of girls, and then I ended up hav­ing two boys. Generally I have a prob­lem with many men; I pre­fer women. That’s always the case, but I often pre­fer the com­pany of women, and I’m not so keen on cer­tain kinds of male cul­ture, so I thought, ‘Ooh, this is going to be really tricky’, but, so far, so good. It’s brought out plenty of new sides of me, and it’s gen­er­ally a delight­ful expe­ri­ence. Although par­ent­hood is also, on a bad day, like hav­ing your best friends come over to stay with you but refus­ing to leave. You really like them—no sooner have you gone to bed, you think, ‘Oh they’re so sweet, I wish we could wake them up again’—but it’s the full-on-ness that most par­ents talk about, that relent­less­ness. As a thinker, I need an awful lot of time just to think, with­out inter­rup­tion. That’s really under threat with chil­dren. [laughter]

People, chil­dren espe­cially, don’t tend to see that you are work­ing when you’re thinking.

So my time has become hor­ri­bly squeezed, and I do feel that and am aware of the sac­ri­fice, big sacrifice.

You grew up sur­rounded by incred­i­ble wealth, and the trap­pings of great art and ideas, and all of that stuff clearly fuels you, but I’ve read you say­ing you don’t really regard that entirely as a child­hood of privilege.

I should per­haps cor­rect your sense of my child­hood. I grew up in Switzerland, which is a strictly egal­i­tar­ian and aus­tere kind of soci­ety, although very wealthy. Like many Swiss fam­i­lies, we were priv­i­leged but never led to think that we were. I think that’s the Swiss, very Protestant way of doing things. It’s also a hard-working soci­ety, where the feel­ing is that every­one has to work ter­rif­i­cally hard. This was added to by my fam­ily, as my father was an immi­grant, as part of the Jewish com­mu­nity from Egypt. He’d come over to Switzerland as a pen­ni­less immi­grant, and had to strug­gle very, very hard in his early years. In my child­hood there was a weird sense that, on one level, we were liv­ing in this tremen­dously pros­per­ous coun­try and we lacked for noth­ing in our house, but at the same time there was a sense of the trau­mas that were buzzing around the psy­che of the fam­ily. That’s some­thing I’ve dealt with as an adult, and strug­gled to put things into place. Often as a child you don’t know why you’re expe­ri­enc­ing what you’re experiencing.

Anyway, I grew up in this mix­ture of finan­cial secu­rity but emo­tional inse­cu­rity. My par­ents had many qual­i­ties but they were not par­tic­u­larly good par­ents, not par­tic­u­larly skilled par­ents, not that inter­ested in par­ent­ing, which fuelled my own desire to once again do bet­ter than them and be ambi­tious in that regard.

I think a really priv­i­leged upbring­ing for a child is to feel deeply loved, respected, to feel that they have a voice, and to feel that they have capac­ity to act upon the world. I think what­ever your mate­r­ial level, that is a priv­i­leged child­hood. Anything that isn’t that is not a priv­i­leged childhood.

That left me a legacy of try­ing to inter­pret the posi­tion of eco­nomic suc­cess within a good life. Both my own per­sonal back­ground and my own coun­try, Switzerland, led me to be per­haps more skep­ti­cal than some peo­ple about where wealth comes in the hier­ar­chy of things we need to be con­tent.

Switzerland is a coun­try where most of the prob­lems that bedevil the UK, say, or most other coun­tries, don’t exist or have been resolved. There are no hous­ing prob­lems. There are no health prob­lems. And yet it’s a soci­ety that has a whole range of trou­bles as well, so that inter­ests me.

Australia is an inter­est­ing exam­ple, Australia has, again, solved many of the prob­lems of most other coun­tries and yet it still con­tin­ues to have lots of issues. I am a writer who is focused on the prob­lems of the pros­per­ous world. That’s just what inter­ests me, that’s the lens through which I look at things.

Some peo­ple say to me, ‘You’ve never writ­ten any­thing about drought’ or ‘You’ve never writ­ten any­thing about third-world pol­i­tics.’ On these top­ics I’m a spec­ta­tor. And maybe one day I will be a writer, but I’m a spec­ta­tor now because you write about what you know. So my books are the prob­lems of a pros­per­ous world, which doesn’t mean that it’s a world with­out prob­lems, but it’s a world with­out the more extreme mate­r­ial problems.

Britain at the moment is cer­tainly not a place with­out problems.

Well it’s a mix­ture. You’ve got 60 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion who are absolutely fine, doing really well. Then you’ve got 20 per cent who are not doing so well, and then you’ve got another 20 per cent who are really strug­gling. So it’s divided, it’s unequal.

It’s offen­sive to any­one with an egal­i­tar­ian spirit to see some of the marked dif­fer­ences in oppor­tu­ni­ties that dif­fer­ent sec­tions of the pop­u­la­tion get. It’s strik­ing and it’s depress­ing. I think this coun­try is closer to the United States in many ways in its tol­er­ance of inequal­ity, and not like con­ti­nen­tal Europe. Or per­haps like Australia, which in this sense I think is more European.

In that sense, yes. Have the events of the last few years caused you to revisit your ideas of the nature of work, as the soci­ety of work col­lapses around you?

Yes and no. I think unem­ploy­ment is a fas­ci­nat­ing, deeply trou­bling, and trou­bled topic. The basic fact is that, at the moment, most major economies have too many peo­ple in them chas­ing too few jobs, and part of the rea­son for that is pro­duc­tiv­ity. Economists are always hail­ing advances in pro­duc­tiv­ity, but really what pro­duc­tiv­ity means is less peo­ple are doing more work. We only know how to call the result of that unem­ploy­ment, and to see that as a real problem.

A Marxist would say, well, this is point­ing the way to the fact that we ought to live in a leisure soci­ety. We don’t need that many peo­ple to be actively engaged in the work­force. So what we need is a redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth through more than just unem­ploy­ment cheques.

These ideas are stim­u­lat­ing. The stan­dard model of cap­i­tal­ism has come to me to seem more urgently in need of ques­tion­ing. Perhaps some vast ques­tions about how we should arrange soci­ety are very live, for me and for a lot of other peo­ple. As I say, unem­ploy­ment is a key thing. The envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis has placed a real ques­tion mark around con­sumerism and con­sump­tion and its con­nec­tion with sta­tus. Obviously there are real prob­lems there for mod­ern soci­ety and how we con­tin­u­ously eval­u­ate our­selves through objects, yet the man­u­fac­ture of these objects is con­strained by the world’s resources.

… and can be incred­i­bly dam­ag­ing in and of itself. When you’re look­ing at these ques­tions your­self, are you turn­ing to any par­tic­u­lar ideas or philoso­phers as touch­stones of understanding?

One of the thinkers I’m really inter­ested in is John Ruskin, a 19th cen­tury thinker. He defies easy cat­e­gori­sa­tion. He’s both very left-wing and very right-wing. He’s both very advanced and very con­ser­v­a­tive. He’s both very Christian and very athe­is­tic. He’s a very extreme thinker, and a very inter­est­ing thinker. He wrote an awful lot, and started off by being inter­ested in aes­thet­ics and how the world should look, and extended from that to how the world should be organ­ised and started look­ing up money, and in mid­dle age he became very fas­ci­nated by what he called polit­i­cal econ­omy. I think what inter­ests me in him is pre­cisely that mix­ture of kind of moder­nity and conservatism.

Many ideas that inter­est me at the moment are con­ser­v­a­tive ideas, not polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive and not right-wing in any kind of tra­di­tional sense but for exam­ple the whole ques­tion of moral­ity, and where moral­ity should be in the pub­lic space. The tra­di­tional view, the lib­er­tar­ian view, is there should be no dis­cus­sion of how to live and how to lead a good life within soci­ety, because that is lim­it­ing people’s free­dom. Telling peo­ple how to live, that’s lim­it­ing their room for manœu­vre. And yet, that really inter­ests me; I see, like many peo­ple see, the lim­its of free­dom. The gen­er­a­tion above mine, and three gen­er­a­tions above mine, were all con­cerned with how we cre­ate more free­dom in a soci­ety. Now that we’ve cre­ated all this free­dom, the ques­tion is how it has helped us in our per­sonal search for ful­fil­ment, and also how it is com­pat­i­ble with a more crowded planet.

In that con­text, it’s inter­est­ing to look at the American soci­etal model of almost pure free­dom in that sense. That is not man­i­fest­ing in a happy coun­try, in any sense, right now.

I think what’s hap­pened to the United States is so fun­da­men­tal. So many of our ideas we can trace back, with a lit­tle bit of hind­sight, to the found­ing ideas of the United States. We also see that they are quite trou­bling, and they don’t nec­es­sar­ily work very well, both tor the United States and for other coun­tries. The kind of hedo­nis­tic indi­vid­u­al­ism and a work-centred cul­ture very nar­rowly focused around profit, as admin­is­tered through large cor­po­ra­tions, stock mar­kets, et cetera–-this is not nec­es­sar­ily the best way to go about things. It may not make us happy, and it may not even work, even more starkly.

Do you look at other polit­i­cal and eco­nomic mod­els around the world, as mod­els for what things could be like? I’m think­ing Scandinavia or third-way polit­i­cal sys­tems that… there are var­i­ous con­ver­sa­tions about how pro­gres­sive they are or whether they’re ret­ro­grade. Do you have thoughts around that?

My over­all feel­ing with many sec­tors that I’ve been involved with and looked at, the dif­fer­ence between good and bad hinges on around five per cent profit mar­gin. If we had five per­cent more we could do some­thing great, if we have five per­cent less it’s ter­ri­ble. Be it the archi­tec­ture, or jour­nal­ism, or what­ever. In other words, we’re kind of ruin­ing the world for five per cent. There’s enough wealth in the world to be able to take that hit. I’m inter­ested in ways in which peo­ple can forgo extremes of profit for the sake of a crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence in improv­ing things.

Is that indi­vid­u­ally as well as from a com­pany level?

Normally a com­pany level, because indi­vid­u­als have got tighter bud­gets. It’s true that there are economies that place less empha­sis on imme­di­ate returns, and have a dif­fer­ent way of eval­u­at­ing finan­cial suc­cess or suc­cess more gen­er­ally. So we’ve been oper­at­ing with some very nar­row para­me­ters of eco­nomic suc­cess. And there are exam­ples all over the world of peo­ple who have tweaked that model in one way or another. I don’t think one coun­try has got it right par­tic­u­larly, but you could look at sec­tors – how the Dutch build houses. The Dutch have found a way to involve the pri­vate sec­tor in devel­op­ment of large tracts of the Netherlands, in a way that is com­pat­i­ble with seri­ously dig­ni­fied and pro­gres­sive kinds of archi­tec­ture and com­mu­nal organ­i­sa­tion. Then there are other mod­els of that hap­pen­ing in the press, or in tele­vi­sion, or in food man­u­fac­ture or what­ever it is, or edu­ca­tion. Lots and lots of sec­tors, that’s what excites me.

Taking it from the macro and back to the self, the indi­vid­ual and hap­pi­ness. These are big dri­ving forces in your work. We’re not pro­grammed to talk about them in our soci­ety in open ways. When we do talk about them, and when texts talk about them, when we talk about them in cul­ture it’s often in this frame­work of ‘self-help’ and that being a cringey thing. Do you find that peo­ple are respon­sive to talk­ing about these ideas when they are reached out to? Do they have to be told how to talk about them?

I’m sym­pa­thetic to people’s desire not to talk about stuff. The human ani­mal is a frag­ile crea­ture, and we’ve got a lot on our plate, all of us. The capac­ity to talk hon­estly and with per­spec­tive and calm about very per­sonal stuff is not going to be in everyone’s remit. There are some amaz­ing peo­ple I know who you just couldn’t go near with these kinds of top­ics. They’re not going to talk to you about their love life, and they’re not going to spec­u­late on the mean­ing of life, and maybe that doesn’t mat­ter. There are lots of ways to live that don’t involve intro­spec­tion or even high degrees of self-knowledge. However there’s no doubt that, gen­er­ally, there’s an improve­ment in people’s level of sat­is­fac­tion and ful­fil­ment if they are able to do that very dif­fi­cult work of tak­ing stock of their lives, their fam­ily upbring­ing, the forces that shape them, the dri­ves that make them do what they do. The more peo­ple are able to get a han­dle on some of these things, the bet­ter able they are to con­trol their lives.

But it’s not for noth­ing that we’ve got this very strong impulse to repress, to deny, to block thought, to head for the tele­vi­sion, to head for alco­hol, to take drugs, to immerse our­selves in dis­trac­tion. A lot of this stuff is too dif­fi­cult to think about, so I’m sym­pa­thetic to that. Personally, my life is about try­ing to raise the level of knowl­edge and self-introspection. That’s what I like to do in my life, and like to do with peo­ple in my social circle.

Does that bug the peo­ple in your social circle?

I now know not to drive them crazy, I know that I used to, because I would try it on with too many peo­ple when they weren’t nec­es­sar­ily ready. At uni­ver­sity I was known as some­one who would imme­di­ately start to inter­view everyone.

Shut up, Socrates…

[Laughs]. So I now know that some peo­ple, sure they want to talk about the weather. Sure, we can talk about many things via the weather. This is a coun­try where we talk a lot about the weather.

So, what was your ques­tion? I repressed your question…

We’ll get it out. I think you’ve gone some way towards answer­ing it. I was ask­ing how peo­ple respond to those ideas beyond just cring­ing away from self-help, and how it might be more valu­able as a way of rais­ing ques­tions as opposed to pre­scrib­ing ways of living.

Look, in our cul­ture we’ve had very bad asso­ci­a­tions sur­round the words ”self-help”, and any­one who aspires to be part of the intel­lec­tual élite, has been seri­ous and gone to uni­ver­sity, you ask them if they read self-help books and they’ll go ”oh no, that’s a ter­ri­ble thing.” Nonetheless, the sales of self-help books sug­gest that peo­ple do go off and read these things, so that inter­ests me. Why is it that some­thing that should be absolutely fun­da­men­tal to the way we approach ourselves–to try and know our­selves, to know our emo­tions, to help ourselves–has such a bad name?

It’s really just a his­tor­i­cal acci­dent that peo­ple who oper­ate the bas­tions of high cul­ture have, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, taken against guid­ance and didac­ti­cism. If you’re a seri­ous per­son, you’re not look­ing for rel­e­vance in works of art. You’re not look­ing for teach­ing in lit­er­a­ture. You are look­ing for para­dox, you’re look­ing to ask ques­tions and you’re deeply sus­pi­cious of any­one who has got an answer, even if that answer is ten­ta­tive. It’s always struck me that you can go a long way by try­ing to put for­ward ten­ta­tive suggestions.

In my books I don’t have set answers to prob­lems, but I like to open up per­spec­tives. I like to say, ‘This is one approach, this is another, let’s play around with these things.’ I like to get ideas in cir­cu­la­tion. I think that self-help has fright­ened peo­ple with its cer­tain­ties and with its dogma, but I am still attracted to the ther­a­peu­tic ambi­tions of cul­ture. I still think that cul­ture could and should guide us, and do that in a way that isn’t dog­matic. It could be play­ful and it could be help­ful, with­out being prescriptive.

So tell me a lit­tle bit about how the School of Life came up around those ideas.

Well for years I thought that my ulti­mate ambi­tion was to cre­ate the University of Life. I imag­ined it as a lit­tle bit like the School of Life is now, an organ­i­sa­tion which would teach and be a global cor­po­ra­tion ded­i­cated to the soul, the inner self, and would able to deliver that kind of thing. As time went by, I kept deliv­er­ing this as late-night aspi­ra­tion, and then one late night, I was talk­ing to some­body who said, ‘You’re jok­ing about this, but that’s just because you’re embar­rassed about it. Why don’t you just try and get seri­ous, because I know you are seri­ous.’ This really hit me like a bolt from the blue. I thought, ‘It’s true, I am seri­ous but I’m pre­tend­ing I’m jok­ing about it because it’s kind of weird and embar­rass­ing.’ But death is on the hori­zon, we’re not going to live for­ever, so let’s go for it.

So I swung into gear and thought I would try to make this hap­pen. I got a group of peo­ple together, back­ers and asso­ciates and friends, and once you start to ask peo­ple, you see that there are net­works latent. So I solid­i­fied a net­work around this idea. The basic thought was, let’s try to start an asso­ci­a­tion that uses cul­ture to address the prob­lems of every­day life. That’s the mis­sion of the School of Life. We wanted to be demo­c­ra­tic, we wanted to be in the mid­dle of life, so we thought we needed a shop in the mid­dle of a high street. We needed to be right in the mid­dle of the action, and we needed to deliver our offer­ings in a way that was appeal­ing and alive to fash­ion, and not aca­d­e­mic whilst still being aca­d­e­m­i­cally ambitious.

We’ve been open two-and-a-half years. It still looks the same but behind the scenes, in the engine room, we’ve been tweak­ing and think­ing and adjust­ing. It’s been a huge learn­ing curve for me help­ing to run an organ­i­sa­tion. It’s been really just the amount it takes, the amount of bor­ing stuff that the cus­tomer never sees and should never see. It’s just mind bog­gling and yet, at the same time, it’s fan­tas­tic to get some­thing off the ground that is touch­ing peo­ple every­day in a cer­tain kind of way. It’s been a real enrich­ment to my life and a real step forward.

Running a busi­ness is a very dif­fer­ent way of liv­ing than being a thinker.

Totally. Totally dif­fer­ent. It’s only really excit­ing to me as a busi­ness because it’s in line with things that I like to think about. Many of my friends are in busi­ness, and for them it’s just the profit, and the process of busi­ness. Whether they’re sell­ing lum­ber, mak­ing screws or pel­lets or what­ever it is, they don’t really care. It’s just the finan­cial oper­a­tion that inter­ests them. For me the finan­cial oper­a­tion is only inter­est­ing because the idea is inter­est­ing behind it. Nevertheless I really respect it. Someone said to me the other day, “Money is a great organ­is­ing prin­ci­ple”. Money sets goals, it sets dis­ci­plines, and it’s very easy as an out­sider and a writer to say that money is just evil and it always com­pro­mises. It does some­times com­pro­mise, but it does organ­ise and focus things. I’m more aware than I was of the good sides of try­ing to put some­thing on a com­mer­cial footing.

Do the pun­ters on the street get it straight away? Does it take some education?

They got it straight away. There was no prob­lem. The press was almost unan­i­mously pos­i­tive. People just got it, so from that side of things we’ve had really plain sail­ing. The dif­fi­culty has been how to prop­erly expand and where to focus our ener­gies. We have eight mil­lion ideas a day. We try to do every­thing, but we’ve since had to scrap a lot of things and come back and do them properly.

Are you the per­son with the eight mil­lion ideas?

Yep. I’ve forcibly been put in a cage and got peo­ple to lock me up. I’ll just go for long peri­ods where I’m going to throw any new ideas out, because we’re just try­ing to get the ones we’ve got to work absolutely prop­erly before we move on to the next thing. That’s just because of my back­ground, where I can think up an idea in a para­graph and off I go. What that means from a legal point of view and finan­cial point of view is just incred­i­bly com­pli­cated. It’s been a learn­ing curve [laughs].

Tell me a lit­tle bit about Living Architecture. That’s a fas­ci­nat­ing project.

That’s the sec­ond prac­ti­cal project I’ve been involved in. Really, aside from books, the last years have been taken up with just these two projects. To put it very pre­ten­tiously, these two projects are guided by my two main inter­ests, which are beauty and wis­dom. I’m very inter­ested in the way the world looks, I’m a very aes­thetic per­son. I’m inter­ested in dri­ving for­ward change to improve the look of the world. And then I’m very inter­ested in wis­dom, which is to increase the level of ideas about how to live a good life in soci­ety. So you could say that’s what I’ve been doing in my books one way of another, but in terms of projects, School of Life is about wis­dom, and Living Architecture is about beauty.

It’s build­ing what you could call show homes which test all sorts of new things–-new arrange­ments of space, new con­struc­tion tech­niques, new fund­ing mod­els. What we’re try­ing to do with each house is show the indus­try that you can do things dif­fer­ently, and show the gen­eral pub­lic that there could be demand for this, and this could be exciting.

On one level it’s a the­o­ret­i­cal organ­i­sa­tion, and on another level it’s a hol­i­day rental com­pany. You can rent all these houses, you can go and stay there. You might just choose to go there and pay no atten­tion to the archi­tec­ture at all, just like the kitchen and be in a nice place. But if you look at it in another way, these are houses where each one is try­ing to push the enve­lope on some­thing and explore some­thing. We’ve got five houses on the go, three are open, one’s open­ing in a few weeks, then we’ve got another two next year. So we’re pro­gress­ing. The idea is to open one new house a year, if we can keep it going. We’ve had now a lot of sup­port from the con­struc­tion indus­try in the UK. We’re slowly but surely mak­ing a mod­est but real impact in people’s ambi­tions of what hous­ing could be like here.

In terms of ”peo­ple” you mean archi­tects or buy­ers and builders of houses?

Construction com­pa­nies, buy­ers less so because there’s always been a demand, I think it’s just not been met. More con­struc­tion, and try­ing to invig­o­rate archi­tects to not be too depressed with what they’re up to..

So you find that the con­struc­tion com­pa­nies when shown these pos­si­bil­i­ties actu­ally do respond and say ”we could be doing that”?

Yeah, and that’s what we’ve tried to do. The houses are on dif­fer­ent bud­getary lev­els, but some of them are extremely cheap–what we’re try­ing to show is that just because the budget’s tight, it doesn’t have to be ter­ri­ble at all. Some of the time, we’ve stuck with this square foot price that an ordi­nary con­struc­tion com­pany would use. We’ve just said look, we could do a hundred-million times bet­ter, and this is just one exam­ple. It’s a dif­fer­ent way of doing it. I sat down and thought if you’re inter­ested in archi­tec­ture and you’re try­ing to improve it, what can you do, and this is a pilot project if you like. It’s just one way of try­ing to change the world. You can try and do it on a mass scale, or you can try and do it on a pilot project, try­ing to build out from that. Trying to have an impact.

Lead by example.

Lead by exam­ple, yeah. This is some­thing I’m always wrestling with in my mind. How does change come about? How do you effect change? No-one has unlim­ited time or energy or resources so how do you try and get a big hit with some­thing? This was my go with architecture.

Are there any of these projects you have tried that just haven’t worked?

No, I mean these two things have worked. It’s more the pace of them. They’re suc­cess­ful, but they’ve been incred­i­bly slow and full of rever­sal. On the sur­face, every­thing looks fine and it is fine, but it’s been a long hard road. I’ve learnt a lot of skills as a human being. I used to be very shy about ask­ing any­one for any­thing, I would just never want to ask. I’ve been doing noth­ing but ask­ing strangers for a huge array of things in the last five years. And it’s changed my per­son­al­ity, prob­a­bly for the bet­ter. I’m more out­go­ing and bet­ter able to win peo­ple round to some things that they might not have thought they’d be inter­ested in.

I won­der about that. When the philoso­pher arrives at the bis­cuit fac­tory and meets the worker, and you have to build that rela­tion­ship with some­body who doesn’t really get what the hell you’re doing there, that must require a cer­tain out­go­ing nature.

Every project I do, I’m only inter­ested in it if it’s going to be risk­ing dis­as­ter. If it’s kind of famil­iar and I know how to do it, I won’t do it. So that book on work was tremen­dously risky and uncom­fort­able. It was an uncom­fort­able project because it basi­cally meant that I kept hav­ing to go into new organ­i­sa­tions and talk to strangers and watch them, often for quite con­sid­er­able lengths of time, doing what they did, and often slightly lie to them about who I was and what I was doing, because some of these organ­i­sa­tions wouldn’t have let me in otherwise.

I am now very used to being the only per­son in a room who is a com­plete out­sider while thirty peo­ple are talk­ing in advanced ways about accoun­tancy reg­u­la­tions. It’s jour­nal­ism in a way, but it’s the kind of jour­nal­ism that most jour­nal­ists don’t do any more because there’s no bud­get for it and no time for it. To spend a cou­ple of weeks in an envi­ron­ment and fol­low up a story, this used to be what non-fiction jour­nal­ists or reportage would be about, but it doesn’t hap­pen very often.

It must have been fas­ci­nat­ing try­ing to do that in Heathrow’s Terminal 5, to attempt to step out­side and observe tens of thou­sands of people.

Definitely. I heard that Heathrow Airport wanted to put a writer in their ter­mi­nal and imme­di­ately I got very excited about it, because I’ve always loved air­ports and describ­ing the processes and the atmos­phere of the mod­ern world.

I thought this would be great fun so I really fought to get that gig. It was very pres­sured, it was an attempt to write an instant book, and some peo­ple have writ­ten to me and said, ”oh, I was a bit dis­ap­pointed by that book, it was really short. Why didn’t you make it longer? It looks like you wrote it in a hurry.” The prob­lem is that it was writ­ten in three weeks, and mostly in public.

It was as much a piece of per­for­mance art as any­thing else. It was a really inter­est­ing exper­i­ment, and I think what really inter­ests me is how can a writer be wit­ness to bits of the mod­ern world that nor­mally don’t get described. One thing that really pains me in the world of lit­er­a­ture is that most writ­ers just sit at home all day, because it’s eas­ier and you don’t need to ask any­one. Then their expe­ri­ence becomes very intro­spec­tive and they tend to write about domes­tic life or their child­hoods, and that’s what’s on offer. Most lit­er­ary works are not about the broader world. That seems to me a pity. Polemically I’m inter­ested in get­ting writ­ers out there.

You talk about inse­cu­rity and awk­ward­ness, but you’ve gone through your career with­out show­ing much doubt in how you oper­ate. Is that some­thing you don’t suffer?

No, I have unbe­liev­able doubt all the time. Lately, I haven’t had cat­a­strophic doubt for a few weeks. Generally I do. Most days I am ques­tion­ing my entire life, because I’m inter­ested in impact and chang­ing stuff. I’m con­stantly thinking—am I lead­ing the right sort of life, have I done the right sort of thing? Is the School of Life actu­ally the right thing, or is it not? Is Living Architecture okay, or maybe not? Are the books I’m writ­ing alright, or should I do some­thing else? I’m often think­ing I should retrain and do some­thing else, or focus my ener­gies in a new way. So I’m very, very rest­less and impa­tient with exist­ing cat­e­gories. I’m impa­tient with the lit­er­ary world in many ways. I find the assump­tion of what a writer is… I feel (indis­cernible) the writer box is deeply con­strain­ing, frus­trat­ing, offen­sive in many ways. At the same time, I’m aware of my lim­i­ta­tions as a finan­cial busi­ness oper­a­tor. I know now, bet­ter than five years ago, that I’m very bad at doing some things. I’m bad at finan­cial fore­cast­ing, I’ve often got the wrong impulses. I’m mod­est but rest­less and full of doubt. But that’s just my personality.

If you were to retrain, have you thought about what you would do?

I think archi­tec­ture is the thing. If I could have my life over again, I would love to train as an archi­tect, because I’m really aware of skills I’m lack­ing there that I would love to have now. I would really want a finan­cial back­ground, if I go back to being eigh­teen. I would have loved to have stud­ied eco­nom­ics, pre­cisely because I’m not at all suited to it and I wish I under­stood it bet­ter. Sometimes I think I should have trained to become a man­age­ment con­sul­tant for a few years, done some­thing utterly, utterly counter to my nat­ural incli­na­tions and strengths. I should have really played to my weak­nesses, rather than my strengths. When you’re younger you do always play to your strengths because it’s most nat­ural, it’s the eas­i­est thing. Then you explore your strengths and that gets bor­ing, then you realise that the only way for­ward is to look at some of those weak areas and try to strengthen them.

Are there great archi­tects work­ing cur­rently that inspire you?

Sure, there are lots of them. Most of them we’ve tried to snap up for Living Architecture, but there are lots of oth­ers too. Many in Australia, all over the world. There are many tal­ented archi­tects, most don’t get a chance to build enough, and the stan­dard of archi­tec­ture really doesn’t reflect the wealth of tal­ent that’s out there. There’s this des­per­ate sit­u­a­tion where build­ings are mediocre, yet there’s some really great archi­tects sit­ting around twid­dling their thumbs, so it’s pretty heartbreaking.

Do you have an approach of ‚‘I have one book and I’m work­ing on it’, or are you more ‘I have ten half-formed books and I’m work­ing on all of them’?

What I tend to do is I’m work­ing on one book, and I have a few other books cir­cling around. I’ll have a file open on my com­puter, that I’ll add stuff to them to so they’re incu­bat­ing but not active. But there’ll be one that’s active.

I’ve recently been devot­ing myself to this book on reli­gion that’s com­ing out in February, and that’s been the project that I’ve been focused on in the last few years.

What sort of per­spec­tive are you tak­ing on religion?

It’s a book called Religion For Atheists. It’s a look at reli­gion from the view of a com­mit­ted athe­ist, which I am, really ask­ing, ‘What can we learn from these guys?’ What can we steal from them? Chiefly at the level of organ­i­sa­tion, not at the level of doc­trine. I’m unin­ter­ested in what reli­gions have to tell us about how to live, but I’m really inter­ested in struc­ture, expe­ri­ences, edu­ca­tion, time, rit­u­als, all of these things really inter­est me. You know how peo­ple say things like “I can’t bear reli­gion but I’m really inter­ested in Christmas, Hanukah, pil­grim­ages, and reli­gious archi­tec­ture,” and that’s my start­ing point. Somebody who’s not inter­ested in the doc­trine, but looks at cathe­drals and thinks ”wow, some­thing inter­est­ing is going on”, or looks at prayer books that make sure that every­day you’re going to read a cer­tain pas­sage and think ”wow, that’s really inter­est­ing.” Religions are the most accom­plished dis­sem­i­na­tors of ideas in the world… these are edu­ca­tional machines, and they’re really suc­cess­ful. There’s a lot to learn about how ideas can be made effec­tive in the world, because reli­gious ideas are supremely effec­tive. I don’t think they’re the right ideas, but they’re really effec­tive. So the under­ly­ing ques­tion in the book is how can we get good sec­u­lar ideas as effec­tive as bad reli­gious ideas.

I was in Israel ear­lier in the year, and in Palestine as well, but I had this pro­found moment stand­ing at the Western Wall, as some­body who doesn’t believe in a God, but can’t deny the idea of faith. When you put your hand on that wall, and you can feel the power of the thou­sands of peo­ple who have also put the hand on that wall, and their wishes on that wall, and their mes­sages in that wall, it’s pro­foundly moving—there’s some­thing there that you can’t deny. That faith dri­ves those ideas and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of them. Is there a sec­u­lar equiv­a­lent to that?

The Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall as it’s known, is a fas­ci­nat­ing thing. What is it? It’s a pub­lic space in which people’s lamen­ta­tions and sor­rows are given an air­ing. Very weird idea. In my book I try to imag­ine; what would a sec­u­lar equiv­a­lent of that be? What would it be like if our sor­rows were writ­ten on the walls of our cities? (indis­cernible) used to say with­out God the whole thing doesn’t work. My answer to that is that is we don’t have a solu­tion to the wail­ing, but we still have a pub­lic expres­sion of the wail­ing, and that seems really impor­tant. It’s a place where grief can be made communal.

I look at many reli­gious rit­u­als and tra­di­tions and think there is some­thing we can use here. If you look at pil­grim­ages, that’s a way of using a jour­ney with a set ambi­tion to reform your life. People could go; ‘Yeah, but there are not saints that could change your life any­more’. Still that ambi­tion to use a jour­ney in a cer­tain way is a legit­i­mate one, an ongo­ing one. We could reha­bil­i­tate that, give it a form. In Orthodox Judaism, you’re sup­posed to have bath every week to cleanse your­self of your sins and stuff you’ve done wrong, and come out of it puri­fied. I’m fas­ci­nated by the way reli­gions will use phys­i­cal events like a bath, or a cer­tain kind of food, or a journey–-something involv­ing the body–-and will anchor to it a psy­cho­log­i­cal or spir­i­tual les­son. We don’t tend to do that in the mod­ern sec­u­lar world. We very much split apart the mind and the body. We don’t involve the body in the mind’s attempts to change itself, but I think we should.

Again, that’s some­thing we’ve been toy­ing around with at the School of Life. How can you cre­ate expe­ri­ences around ideas? So we’re look­ing at food and we’re look­ing at jour­neys, that sort of stuff, a lot of which has been informed by reli­gious tech­niques really.

Have these explo­rations of these ideas of faith and of reli­gion had an effect on you? Not in terms of find­ing faith…

I sup­pose it’s led me to see the gaps in the sec­u­lar world. It’s led me to see that the sec­u­lar world is really good at doing some things, but really quite bad at deliv­er­ing solu­tions in other areas. I’m def­i­nitely not one of these peo­ple who is spir­i­tual or who is look­ing for some­thing else, and doesn’t believe in organ­ised reli­gion but is mes­merised by stars, it’s really not that. For me it’s much more prac­ti­cal, and it is about look­ing for lessons we can apply to sec­u­lar life that can take some of the best and most nour­ish­ing bits out of reli­gion, with­out import­ing what for me are the more dubi­ous doc­tri­nal thoughts.

At the end of life, what is it that you want peo­ple to say you’ve brought to the world?

I think I would want to be some­one who’s remem­bered as hav­ing made a few stabs at try­ing to bring élite cul­ture into cir­cu­la­tion, into the wider soci­ety so that it can be made effec­tive. So it’s both an attempt to spread cul­ture and ideas, and also it’s about try­ing to make those ideas effec­tive. Have an impact. We’re not short of good ideas in the world, the prob­lem is that most good ideas are slum­ber­ing somewhere.