The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living (#808)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Stephen West (@iamstephenwest), father, husband, and host of the Philosophize This! podcast. He attempts to explain, translate, and humanize philosophy in a way that doesn’t ever aim to tell people what to think but to invite them to better understand their own thoughts by exploring alternatives.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: Stephen, I’m so happy that you’re here in Austin, Texas. Welcome.

Stephen West: Thank you. I made it. I’m here.

Tim Ferriss: You made it. And I want to give a thank you up front to a friend of mine. I think you’ve had some virtual interaction with him. Dave Elitch.

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Professional drummer, all around mensch. Amazing human. And he sent me an article I’m going to quote from very shortly, which was in a sense, a revisiting of you, and not so much your story, but your thinking for me, because I started listening to your podcast ages ago. And our dear videographer, who is helping with everything behind the scenes, listens to Philosophize This. My producer listens to Philosophize This, and in my little world, it is very well represented.

Stephen West: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Stephen West: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s an amazing contribution, incredible craft that you’ve honed. But as promised, I wanted to quote from a piece that was sent to me by Dave Elitch. This was in The Atlantic, written by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Great name. And here’s the line or two that I will share. 11 years ago, Stephen West was stocking groceries at a Safeway warehouse in Seattle. He was 24 and had been working to support himself since dropping out of high school at 16. Okay. We’re going to start there. And actually we’re going to rewind the clock even further. Could you just share a bit about your childhood, how you grew up, anything that comes to mind?

Stephen West: Sure. Yeah. I mean, clearly something went wrong along the way if I ended up dropping out of high school at 16. By the way, great writing from Thomas Chatterton Williams, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible.

Stephen West: Dense writing there. It’s like Hemingway. Anyway, yeah, I mean, my parents had their own issues as people’s parents do. Everybody grows up with their own stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Where were you born?

Stephen West: San Diego. San Diego. And then I moved to Alabama, actually, North Carolina. My dad was in the military when I was very young. So yeah, I went to North Carolina, then Alabama for a while, and then we went back to California. And then, yeah, I was taken by CPS off the streets when I was nine for the first time.

Tim Ferriss: Child Protective Services.

Stephen West: Yeah. We hadn’t had an apartment in a few months, and they just thought it was best. And so yeah, I then went to group homes and I was placed with family members at first, and then they also had pretty toxic relationships. Apparently that’s how it works. My parents come from messed up situations, so when I then get replaced with one of these people, apparently they also have messed up situations. But anyway, taken by CPS again, separated from my big sister early, long-term foster placement when I was 14 up in Washington, which is where I live now, and I haven’t moved since. 

But yeah, when I was 16, I didn’t have any place to stay. There was a long-term foster placement, like I said, and they did me a solid. They said, “Look, in the state of Washington, you don’t have to report somebody as a missing person if they’re over the age of 16. So what we can do for you is, if you just were to run away, because this obviously isn’t working in this whole circumstance, we won’t report you as a missing person.” That was the best offer I’d ever gotten at that point. So I took it. I lived in my friend’s car for a bit. I got an apartment with a person that I was working with at the time. I wasn’t old enough to sign a lease, so I had to just sort of be on an honor system with him. And eventually I moved in with my girlfriend at the time. Anyway, it was a — people make due, and so yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What did your day-to-day, week to week look like at that point?

Stephen West: I worked a lot. That’s why I had to drop out of schools is because I had to work full time to pay my bills. If I had no place to stay, I needed to get a place to stay, and so I made money. And so I worked at Safeway as a bagger for groceries. And then eventually I got promoted to helper clerk, which is like, you stock shelves and you refill stuff, get stuff for customers. So that was the biggest accomplishment of my life at the time.

Tim Ferriss: And when did you get that promotion? What age were you roughly?

Stephen West: 16.

Tim Ferriss: 16?

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Got it. And then did you continue working at Safeway? How long did you continue working at Safeway?

Stephen West: Until I was about 17 and a half. And then, well, actually, I worked at Safeway and I wasn’t making enough money at Safeway making seven, whatever an hour it was. So I worked at Jo-Ann Fabrics, which actually was next door.

There was a Safeway and a Jo-Ann next door. I mean, this is a grandma’s wet dream, and I would just wound the yellow yarn every morning at 4:00 a.m. like stock stuff there. That was literally my life for a while is just I would show up to Jo-Ann at 4:00 a.m. work from 4:30 to 12:30, and then I’d work the night shift at Safeway. Well, not night, but the last helper clerk shift from 3:30 to nine or whatever it was. That was not fun. 

So yeah, eventually I didn’t want to do that anymore. I thought instead of having two jobs, I will just get one job where I make $14 an hour at the warehouse, and I’ll use whatever good reputation I’ve accumulated here thus far. And my manager was cool with it, and I transferred over there at 17 and a half.

Tim Ferriss: So, dumb question. I’m somewhat of a specialist in those. Why does the warehouse pay more than the other roles you had?

Stephen West: It’s harder. It’s harder work. You show up every day, your back hurts at the end of the day. You don’t want to come back the next day. Look — 

Tim Ferriss: That’s why they pay you.

Stephen West: The thing that made me want to start a podcast is looking at the old dudes that were working in the office, and they would walk out to their car just like their backs had been fused together by multiple spinal surgeries. It’s just walking on that hard concrete and lifting 50 pound boxes on a pallet all day long. It’s repetitive labor, and it’s brutal. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I challenge anyone listening if they have never done it, just go stand on concrete for a few hours. It is excruciating.

Stephen West: You need good shoes.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, it is. And people are like, oh, no. Well, I walk on the streets. No, not the same. Asphalt’s different. It’s like a trampoline compared to concrete. What were the best aspects and the worst aspects? I think you covered some of the worst of that warehousing job.

Stephen West: You are so wise for asking that question because you know when you get older, you look back and you notice things that you didn’t notice at the time. The best aspect of it, I miss it sometimes. Talking to the guys in the warehouse, there are a lot of really good guys there, and I don’t have that social element to the podcast. The other thing is, I got to listen to audiobooks all day long. I mean, what other job could I have gotten? I didn’t even know I was stumbling into something that would open up so many possibilities for me at the time. It felt like I was just a day laborer, just horrible. But yeah, I got to listen to philosophy books all day long and talk radio. I got to listen to — 

I mean, Loveline with Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew and Howard Stern, just listening to these people just paint pictures with their words. It was beautiful. Yeah, I mean, if I worked at an office or if I worked at a fast-food place, I easily could have ended up in any of those spots. If I did, I wouldn’t have been able to read books 10 hours a day. That was, in retrospect, an amazing thing about the job. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So for people listening, they may think to themselves, I wouldn’t immediately, if I were in your position, find philosophy. It could have been, not to devalue any of these things, but it could have been Hunger Games, could have been any of a million genres, any of a million authors. How did you end up listening to philosophy, or how did philosophy even enter your life in the first place?

Stephen West: I kind of looked into that one too. I was a dumb 17, 16-year-old kid, right on that cusp. But I knew, I was self-aware enough to know that I had had trauma from the messed up childhood that we just talked about. I didn’t want to just spend my whole life taking that out on the people around me. So I knew that I needed mentors, and I wasn’t in school. I didn’t have people to look up to really, and I wasn’t talking to my family. I literally googled “wisest person in the history of the world.” It was my best idea I could come up with at the time. And one of Plato’s dialogues, Gorgias, came up there and it talked about this guy Socrates. He’s harassing people in the Athenian Agora. He’s asking them questions, trying to find a wise man, and I just got hooked, man.

Tim Ferriss: What was it about it that hooked you? Were there any particular aspects that grabbed you? Because a lot of folks listening to this, no doubt, some of them took compulsory classes in school related to philosophy, and they were just like, please shoot me in the head now. In some cases, not all cases.

Stephen West: No, I don’t blame them.

Tim Ferriss: And it did not have that effect on you, at least with your self-directed exploration. What was it that appealed to you or hooked you?

Stephen West: It was voluntary. I mean, that’s a big part of it is I’m not being forced into doing it. This is why I don’t want to force my daughter, who’s eight, to think about stuff or ask her philosophical questions. I think the best way to get your kid to not do something is to tell them to do it. But yeah, aside from the voluntary nature of it, I think that I just have always been somebody that thinks my way out of problems. And so the idea that this is the discipline. If comedians go to a comedy club and it has this pure endeavor of trying to make people laugh, that’s what makes a comedian what they are. For philosophy, thinking about things like that, forming new conceptual tracings of reality, seeing it in a new way, I mean, of course I would be attracted to something like that, as somebody that always thinks my way out of problems. I mean, that’s the only service I can really provide to the people around me that matter to me.

Tim Ferriss: For the purposes of this conversation, how would you define or rebrand philosophy for people who have an immediate, semi-allergic reaction? Because perhaps they’ve heard a bunch of ivory tower specialists speaking in riddles or speaking in logic/math puzzles that no one can make any sense of. How would you — I shouldn’t say no one. Yes, there are like 17 people who probably make a lot of sense out of all of it. But how would you suggest people think about philosophy?

Stephen West: Yeah, I mean, those guys, I used to dislike those people. I thought that they were being too selfish. They’re making it all about them. I think they have really good intentions. I think it’s hard when you get to be a professor to know what it’s like to just be starting out. For me, I would say philosophy, a way that I’ve heard it described is it’s the disruption of common sense.

I mean, what is looking at the world at all? It’s an approximation. We are works in progress. I look at the world one way for a while, and everybody knows what it’s like to change the way that you see everything in the world. Yeah, I mean, I just think that philosophy is the method of doing that. The question is not whether you’re going to change the way that you think about things conceptually. The question is, how deliberate are you going to be about it? It’s like the gym for rethinking, retracing reality in a new way that opens up new possibilities to you. And it’s also something that needs to go on at the highest levels of conversation.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like recreation or kind of unfocused activity versus deliberate practice. To use your comedy example, I interviewed Jerry Seinfeld, actually, I was at this table and it was a few years ago. But the actual craft, the lifting of the weights, so to speak, the writing, the testing, how do you approach it in a systematic way, and how could you take something like that and then apply it to the love of knowledge or philosophy or reframing things, learning how to stress test your own thinking. When you were in the warehouse, you got 10 hours a day with headphones, were there any particular kind of formative inputs that influenced the path that would later land you in the podcast?

Stephen West: I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and, transparently, The 4-Hour Workweek was a huge book that allowed me to think about possibilities in my life in a new way. I mean, that’s why I think — I get that it’s maybe weird to call it a work of philosophy, The 4-Hour Workweek, because it’s in the business section.

What I love from philosophy books, what they do to me, that book did for me in certain areas. You’re calling into question assumptions that we’re making about things like the “new rich,” what it is to be wealthy at all. Retirement. This is something that most people just assume is going to be at the end of their life. They don’t even really think about it any more than that. What was possible in terms of how to make money or how to automate certain aspects of your life. And you’re also talking about it in contrast to an emerging digital world that at the time was just coming about. New possibilities were presenting themselves in people’s lives that they weren’t necessarily aware of. And yeah, I mean, what philosopher is talking about these issues? So that book was beautiful for me to even think that it was possible to start a podcast. So for whatever it’s worth, thank you for that.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man.

Stephen West: I mean, I wouldn’t be here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So thank you for saying that. And also, what’s wild about the book is I revised it in 2009 and then realized this is an absolutely Sisyphean task to try to revise this because the tech is moving so fast. So everything in that book, from a technical perspective, is completely outdated. All of it. But it’s sort of the philosophical underpinnings, which I think still apply.

Stephen West: Yeah. When you wrote it, did you intend for it to inspire people like me to — I mean, were you thinking about it philosophically, or were you thinking about it? I have all this knowledge and I’m going to trade it for $13 or whatever the book’s price was?

Tim Ferriss: I would say it was more the former. I mean, at that point, I had — let’s see. Had these experiences with my first real business. I had had the corresponding implosion slash personal and professional meltdown, and then the Rebirth from the Ashes, but figuring out the technological approaches and so on. However, when I first was automating my business and traveling, I want to say mid-2004, there were only a few books I took with me. If I’m remembering correctly. I think there were actually three. I think in some places I’ve mentioned two of them, Walden, very aspirational at the time, although the backstory on Walden‘s pretty funny with Thoreau sneaking off to have fancy dinners with Emerson or whatever. But let’s just take it for what it’s worth. Okay, Walden. Then Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on me. An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, I think it is, which is also a very deeply philosophical book, fundamentally. And then the third was the expose, technically The Moral Letters to Lucilius, but Letters from a Stoic. Seneca.

Stephen West: Seneca.

Tim Ferriss: And what I realized over the following year or so, which was well before writing the book, well before selling the book, the tools are secondary to the sort of assumptions based on how you’re going to use them, what you can do with them versus what you can’t do with them and the objectives. And when you come down to those, let’s just say base levels of the pyramid, it turns into a philosophical discussion, whether you use that word or not. It’s a mode of thinking. And how do you cross examine your own thinking?

Stephen West: I think philosophy has a tendency of living in the shadow of the thing we actually give credit to for the thing. And that goes on personally in our lives. I mean, it would be very easy for me to just call what I did with the podcast, a matter of hard work and a matter of circumstance and content strategy or a knowledge thing that I’m doing. But really, it was a philosophical shift that made it possible to even think about. You mentioned Walden, and I mean another one of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a person that had a huge impact on me at this time as well. In fact, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him either.

I used to think something that he talks about in “Self-Reliance” and other essays, that to have a podcast or a YouTube channel or whatever it was, you needed to be a genius. It’s kind of a myth that I think gets promoted is if you’re not a genius, you have nothing really that interesting to say. So who’s ever going to follow you? And that stuff. He was living during a time, right around the abolition of slavery. So in the United States, it’s a crucial time. A lot of changes are going on. There’s also an Irish immigrant crisis going on at the time, and he wants to inspire people with his work to take action, to think for themselves, to be the catalyst for change in the world, if that’s something that they want.

The way to apply what he’s talking about to a YouTube channel is, I mean, look at these YouTube creators. Are they geniuses? Are these people unparalleled geniuses, thinkers of our time? No. They’re people that have a certain message that they’re sending, and that message corresponds to something that already exists in culture. You don’t need to be a genius. You just need to be saying something that resonates with other people. That was huge for me to notice. That you can just be a catalyst for a sentiment that already exists in the hearts of people, and then you become the thing that they connect to. They start to see you as symbolic of that. So really, he made me change my thinking. To write and to say something worth saying is not to be a genius, to be brave. It’s to be the one to say it, and to have courage.

Really, that’s probably a primary factor that determines whether one of these YouTube creators is successful or has a channel or not, it’s just they were the ones to say it. They had the courage to say it and risk all the bad that might come from that.

Tim Ferriss: For folks, where would you suggest people start with Emerson if they haven’t read his writing?

Stephen West: It’s been a while since I’ve jumped in. I’d say “Self-Reliance” and “On Nature” are the two that you absolutely have to read. But if you like what he’s saying in those two, I would definitely go to secondary sources and just read every essay that he ever wrote. He actually didn’t write that much. He was a guy that was kind of preoccupied with other things.

Tim Ferriss: So when did you switch gears and do something other than the warehouse job? Or did you do something concurrent and then sort of fade something in while you’re fading something out? What did the next chapter look like?

Stephen West: I wanted to start the podcast. I mean, I didn’t know if it was possible. I certainly didn’t have a dream of doing it as a living where it could provide for my family. At the time, I was much younger, so I had less responsibilities. I did some math. I realized I needed to make 800 bucks a month to be able to do it. And there’s this guy, Scott, I was playing guitar with at the time, and he inspired me here too. He worked at Duke’s Chowder House. It’s like a seafood place up in Seattle. He was a server, and his mom would give him crap all the time, “Why don’t you get a real job?” He’d just play guitar all day and then go serving at Duke’s Chowder House. 

And I would talk to him about it, and he’s like, “Look, I don’t want to be a rock star. I don’t want to be a millionaire doing this. All I want to do is be able to play a few gigs on the weekend or some studio sessions or something, and then I’m playing guitar for a living. I am literally living the dream if I can do that. And Duke’s Chowder House is just how I pacify my mom. I just pay her some rent.” 

For me, it was like I needed to find a way to make 800 bucks with the podcast. That could satisfy whatever obligations I had at the home, my half of the rent and utilities at the time. And so yeah, at the warehouse, they had this thing weekends only.

Instead of working seven days a week on call, which was the norm, I never had a scheduled day off my entire time working there. I would just work on the weekends. It would be a guaranteed thing I’d come in. And the reason they would do it that way is because they don’t have to pay a benefits package at that point. It benefits the company at some level, but for me, it was perfect. Then I could work five days a week, and if I could find a way to make 800 bucks a month just doing the podcast and writing on the side and stuff like that, I’d just go in on the weekends, eight hours. That was my version of phasing in the podcast and phasing out the warehousing. Another thing I’m very fortunate to have.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s take a closer look at that because I’m so interested in the catalyzing periods. What happened in the span of a few weeks where you thought, “Maybe I could do this, but aren’t those people geniuses?” to, “Okay, I’m actually going to do weekends only and take that, which is a non-trivial step. What did that look like? Was there a particular conversation? Was there a particular week of just gobbling Advil because your back was bothering you? How did it go from, “Maybe kind of in some universe that may be possible, but I have to be a genius,” to, “All right, I’m going to work two days a week.”

Stephen West: It was two things. I mean, on one hand, I’d been working there for years, so my back hurt every single day. It was utter desperation on one level. I hated my life there. Now again, I look back now being in my thirties, and I don’t think I had any reason to hate what I had going on there, but I did at the time. Honestly, that was my experience. And so I was very desperate to try to make anything work. There was a guy named Jimmy Whisenhunt, like a shoutcaster for eSports at the time, but he was my friend.

Tim Ferriss: What is a shoutcaster?

Stephen West: Shoutcaster is like a person that does commentary, like John Madden does commentary for football. This guy does it for Counter-Strike and StarCraft and stuff like that.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, cool.

Stephen West: Yeah. Anyway, I was talking to him at the time and he was just like, look, man, he pulled me aside. And he was like, “It would honestly be a shame if you didn’t at least try something in media. You should just try it, and even if you fail, whatever.” But I’m here to tell you that dude had such an impact on me.

Tim Ferriss: How did you know each other?

Stephen West: I used to play games around this time too. I would play StarCraft II with friends, and I was playing at a pretty high level, so I knew people that were in the business.

Tim Ferriss: In that world.

Stephen West: He was in their circles and stuff, and we just kind of vibed. That’s all.

Tim Ferriss: Nice. Okay. So he’s telling you it would just be a shame if you never tried. You’ve got to try something.

Stephen West: Yeah, that hit me, man. I mean, for a person that’s competitive and then a person that just is already hating my life at the warehouse at the time, yeah, it made me want to take a chance. And then the whole Emerson thing, I don’t even got to be a genius. I’ve just got to be brave enough to say it felt possible.

Tim Ferriss: And what did you look to? This was early days, right? I mean, when was this? Like 2012, 2013? Something along those lines.

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So this is very early, and I mean, to put that in perspective, this podcast that we’re on right now started that in 2014. So you predated me in the world of podcasting and for people who drown in the paradox of choice problem presented by podcast currently, back then, it was a much smaller pond. Who did you look to for inspiration? In some ways, and it’s not exactly the same, the game is a little different. I say this is a huge compliment. You remind me in some ways of Dan Carlin and Hardcore History.

Stephen West: That’s the literal guy that I used to listen to at the warehouse all the time. It’s a huge compliment to hear.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Stephen West: Thank you.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Yeah. So Dan, and for people who don’t know, I’ve interviewed Dan, you can look it up, A phenomenal human, but he’s not, he’ll be the first person to tell you, a professional historian. He doesn’t check all the boxes on the CV, and yet he makes it so compelling. And like you said, having the bravery to say what’s in the hearts of others. But fundamentally, the way I see it is you are sharing what is in your heart, Dan is sharing what is of interest to him. “Imagine, if you will, General Subutai looking down.” And that’s from Wrath of the Khans, If people want to watch — 

Stephen West: A fantastic series.

Tim Ferriss: And I say “watch,” that’s an interesting slip because his language is so visually evocative. Okay. Dan Carlin, that makes a whole lot of sense. So was there anybody else who you’re like, ah, maybe I can take a little bit of that, a little bit of that? Because Dan Carlin also does mega series. His podcasts are long. I mean, Wrath of the Khans, I’m making this up, but it’s like four or five parts. Each one is like four to five hours.

Stephen West: Yeah, he’s fantastic. I mean, in terms of inspiration at the time, I remember consciously not wanting to copy other people. In fact, I was listening to a Dave Chappelle interview at the time, I think, and he was just talking about how it was Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie or something like that, just at the beginning of their career when they were playing trumpet, they just did an impression of another trumpet player. And you see this in a lot of industries where people will just be even subconsciously trying to do an impression of what they think success looks like. But I had read enough philosophy at that time to really not want to fall into that trap. I mean, I knew I was highly inspired by him, so I didn’t want to sound too much like him. I wanted to be able to develop my own style. If anything, it was a negative inspiration because I noticed there was a gap in the philosophy sort of market. I was a big fan of podcasts, so I would be listening to philosophy, just trying to find something to pass the time at work, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Stephen West: So I just noticed there were a lot of really smart, really talented people. Peter Adamson, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, The Partially Examined Life at the time was huge, and it’s like I just wanted to do something that was a little more humanizing, a little more translating, so that’s all I was thinking.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. And you commit to working two days a week. What else are you committing to? So now you have five days a week. What does the experimental or prototyping phase look like? Did you apply some constraints right up front? How did you approach that?

Stephen West: Luckily for me, it took off fairly quickly. So I spent a few months before just researching how to launch a podcast. I would just listen to podcasts about podcasting, I would read books about it. About blogging too, because there really wasn’t that much. There was this feeling at the time that, what’s the cliche? The radio is to the TV, the TV is to the phone or something like that. The phone, this narrow casting that is developing is going to be big, but there’s no playbook for how to actually do it. So yeah, I started researching just how to take advantage of the launch phase of a podcast. Nobody really knows what the algorithms are doing or why they’re doing it, but there’s theories and so I would just read every theory I possibly could. So yeah, that’s what I did. On the day that I launched the podcast, I got everybody that I know to listen to it and leave an honest review, and I tried to take advantage of all that I could there.

And so the first week, I was on the New and Noteworthy section on iTunes. It was a successful lunch. And then after that, the people I host the podcast with started reaching out and talking about ads. I didn’t really want to do ads at that point, but it started taking off pretty quickly, so there luckily wasn’t too much of a time period there.

Tim Ferriss: So if you had to, hindsight 20/20, look back and identify some of the other, say, critical decisions, whether you made them really consciously or not at the time, what were other things you did right with the launch of the podcast? Recognizing that launching then and launching now are quite different animals, but still, I think there are lessons to be learned.

Stephen West: I think I just made it as much me as I could. I leaned into that aspect of podcasting. What I loved about Dan Carlin is that it just felt like I was there and he was talking to me. I think a lot of people at the time saw podcasting as an afterthought. It was just the free content so you could drive people to funnels to then sell them the premium content or something. I saw it as a very open-ended medium that was beautiful, and it could be a three-hour conversation with people smoking weed, talking about nothing. It could be 10 minutes of highly focused — 

Tim Ferriss: I can’t imagine who that is.

Stephen West: Yeah, me neither.

Tim Ferriss: Just kidding.

Stephen West: But it’s been highly successful, pretty successful.

Tim Ferriss: The most successful.

Stephen West: You could say. No, but it’s beautiful, the medium, how versatile it is, so that’s what I saw, and so I just wanted to be my own lane there. I didn’t want to be a part of podcasting. I wanted to just be a shop. There was an interview you did with Bill Burr back on the fear{less} series. He was talking about, “I don’t really see myself as part of comedy. I just do my thing, and I guess I’m a part of comedy. I set up a stand in the middle of a mall,” he was saying. That’s how I see it. I didn’t think about what a podcast was and try to appeal to that. I just tried to make it as authentic as I could, and I think that was one good thing that I did.

Tim Ferriss: All right. And in the beginning, my understanding is you approached it chronologically. Maybe you can explain, because there are a lot of different ways you could approach the canon of Western philosophy or any philosophy really. How long were the episodes when you started?

Stephen West: About 4,000 words long. I read slower back then, so it’s about 30 minutes or so. It would vary back then a bit, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And what were the first handful of episodes?

Stephen West: The Presocratics. The first episode, it’s so hard to even listen to it. I’ve had to go back recently and listen.

Tim Ferriss: I get it.

Stephen West: It’s just an artist’s dilemma. I’m not trying to talk down to anybody that enjoys those episodes still, but just from my perspective, you can imagine, it’s tough to watch yourself 12 years ago now doing it for the first time publicly. The first episode was literally, I just mentioned the Out of Africa theory and how, oh yeah, people had a lot of free time back then and they talked a lot. So talking leads to philosophy, and they settled around the Ionian coast and the Italian coast and this led to the Presocratics. Most of the episodes are me just telling stories from their life or something. It’s brutal but also beautiful in a way because it’s where it had to start.

Tim Ferriss: It’s sort of striking, not to overwield the comparisons here, but maybe the story of the Presocratics, as you just described, it’s like the origin of the podcast in the early episodes. You know what I mean?

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Figuring it out, finding the language. Try to develop a water feel for what this thing is, whatever this thing happens to be, whatever it will be.

Stephen West: For whatever it’s worth, people tell me that’s one of the endearing things that they like about it. They like seeing somebody build their craft over the years. It’s just my audition tape is on camera for everybody to see. That’s how I see it. That’s cool though, I’ll take it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So at this point, how many episodes have you done?

Stephen West: 225.

Tim Ferriss: 225. All right. What’s the frequency?

Stephen West: About once every two weeks.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Stephen West: There was a period there where I was doing one a month and stuff like that, but now I’ve been working a lot more lately, so I’ve been really enjoying it.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So if we flash forward and we look at this craft you’ve developed, the life you’ve built, what does the Philosophize This! ecosystem look like? You have Patreon. What are the different pieces of the puzzle as it stands currently?

Stephen West: Do you mean from a monetization perspective?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, from a business perspective.

Stephen West: Yeah, I have Patreon, I have ads that I run now, and I have this book deal. So that’s going to be good for 2026, emerging into a different market there. It is centered around the podcast, so yeah, that’s the core.

Tim Ferriss: And you mentioned you initially weren’t planning on pursuing advertising. Around what episode did you start doing advertising?

Stephen West: I’m not sure. Around the episode that my son was coming into the world, and I prayed at an altar that people listening would be sympathetic to the fact that I’ve been doing it for so long with no ads and now I’m trying to — I don’t know. You live longer on this planet, you don’t know when you’re going to die. I’m trying to leave something for my kids if I kick the bucket one day.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. All right.

Stephen West: It’s been fairly recent though. To the thrust of your question, it’s, I don’t know, maybe episode 180 or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay, so there we go. The reason that I was hoping, I didn’t know the answer but I was hoping for that — I threw a very, “You were hoping,” on there. So the reason I was hoping that the answer would be something like that is that you were able to hone the craft for a while, for a pretty good long while before distracting yourself with the preoccupations or maybe the easier path, in my case. If I don’t want to write, what do I want to do? I want to talk about and think about and brainstorm marketing and these things because I find it much easier. But you, for a very good stretch of time, were able to focus on figuring it out, finding your footing, honing the craft. And for people who can make that work, I just want to say I recommend it very, very highly, to have that type of focus. It seems to make a lot of difference.

Stephen West: I’ve tried marketing things. One of the good things about podcasting is that people will reach out and they’ll want to support and they won’t want to support financially but they’ll support with their set, like professional marketers or whatever will come along and offer, and I’ve been doing it 12 years so I’ve done things like that. I am not an expert in this field and I just feel that when it comes to content, the content is the number one focus for me. If you do bad content, you may be able to market it amazingly and then that’ll be successful in some way. If you do amazing content that people don’t want to live without, you can’t keep it a secret. That’s why I focused on that for so long. I would never put something out that isn’t content that I hope people don’t want to live without.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of your most popular episodes to date? Do any stand out?

Stephen West: People really like the Dostoevsky series that I just did. 

Tim Ferriss: I’ll tell you what, I’m just taking notes because I’m putting together my own reading list, and we were talking about this before we started recording but I was trying to figure out, was Dave the first person who introduced me to Philosophize This!? It’s possible. Or did a post I put, apparently on Twitter, predate that, where I was listening to it — I think in my car. It could have been in an Uber or something like that, but I took a photograph or a screenshot, and I do remember that really clearly. I think it was in my car. And for that reason, I’m putting together my to listen list and just using this question selfishly so I can take notes on — 

Stephen West: Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss: On what I should grab. So Dostoevsky.

Stephen West: Yeah. So from about last October, there’s a new arc of the show that I’m doing that’s on religious phenomenology. It’s about the limitations of philosophy, it’s about phenomenology as a movement at the beginning of the 20th century and this bridge between philosophy and religion. Is religion just this superficial connection to a man-like God in the sky, or is a belief in God something much deeper than that and something much more embodied in a daily practice every day? It’s been really fascinating for me and people have been really liking it for whatever it’s worth, so if you’re looking for a place to start. But I’ll say this, if I’m ever recommending a place for people to start, I just ask them what they’re into. 

So what are you interested in?

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s see. I’ll tell you, if I had a wish list, and maybe this is the episode that I tracked down of yours. I’m not sure. I, in my reading of Seneca, realized, and look, this is going to be a very sloppy, simplified way of looking at things, but I was like, okay, the Stoics seem really good at self-regulation on their good days, but they don’t seem great at, and it may be even antithetical to them to maximize joy on some level. And in The Moral Letters to Lucilius, Seneca the Younger keeps referencing Epicurus.

And there’s a whole backstory that’s pretty interesting as to why he was doing that. Was it a rhetorical device to be like, “Okay, okay, you guys like Epicureanism. Sure, I’ll give you that. Great guy. Look at this amazing thing he said. Now let me lead into my argument and what I want to tell you.” But my ability to track down writing for a number of reasons related to Epicureanism has been pretty limited, and so that would be on my wish list. I would say the Stoics are always good reminders, even though some people might feel like I just threw them under the bus, but I still remain an avid fan of Stoicism.

And then I would say, and this is not going to be very helpful perhaps, but I could turn this question around and maybe ask for your help in finding philosophical systems or philosophies, schools of philosophy that are imminently practical. Where it’s like, okay, this is something I’m going through. For instance, right now, a very challenging period with medical issues in my family. And as much as I enjoy getting into the rarefied air of deep conceptual philosophical discussions, I’m like, no, I am stressed the fuck out and having trouble sleeping and have anxious rumination. I would like some tools in addition to the ones I’m familiar with for delving into that. So that’s a bit of a meandering answer.

Stephen West: No, no, not at all. So sorry to hear about your family.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks.

Stephen West: So you’re talking about the Hellenistic age, basically. You’re talking about Epicureanism, you’re talking about Stoicism. So there’s two more there, Skepticism and Cynicism. Cynicism famously is the school of thought of Diogenes. So I think all four of these, it’s been said, represent some aspect of the character of Socrates just turned into its own system, so maybe to fill that out might be a really cool thing to do because then you’ll know the whole period, right? Practical stuff. Don’t you do meditation a lot?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do. Right now, I’m meditating twice a day.

Stephen West: Okay. So is that practice framed in a utilitarian way for you? Is it like I’m doing it so that I can quell anxiety or is it more — how do you think of it?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I would say there are a few different ways that I look at it. So, shameless plug, I’ll just mention it because it is so good. There’s an app called The Way, Henry Shukman is the teacher. It is Sanbo Zen focused. I was introduced to Henry, actually had him on the podcast, by Kevin Rose. Thank you, Kevin. And I would say that on one level, it is very utilitarian for me. If I use it to boot up in the morning, 10 minutes, that’s it, and I use it to wind down at night. If I have it as bookends on my day, I just find that my resting anxiety level is lower. So it’s very, very practical in that way, and the exercises in the meditations are not explicitly geared to deal with anxiety, but they’re more, I would say, training awareness of different types, and contracting and expanding awareness in ways that allow you to not be compulsively in the washing machine of your own thoughts.

You can step outside of the door of the washing machine and look at your thoughts, and then maybe you can step outside of the room and ask yourself, “What the hell am I doing in this room in the first place? Maybe I should go to a different room,” etc. etc. So there’s that. And then there are, I think deeper, I don’t want to say deeper, but other layers of payoff from the meditative practice that are not driven by that type of symptom addressing, if that makes sense.

Stephen West: No, for sure. So I think philosophy is wonderful obviously, but it’s not a panacea, and it’s certainly not something that I would recommend to everybody, and it’s not something that solves — I just think that what you’re talking about about quelling anxiety, it’s a trap I think to try to think a philosopher or a philosophy is going to fix that. I think it’s more in a daily lived practice, like what you’re talking about, and that lies outside the bounds of philosophy. There’s a quote from a philosopher we were just doing an episode on where he said, “Religion without philosophy is blind, and philosophy without religion is vacuous.”

It’s like you can just make philosophy into an intellectual exercise but not be open to it in any way that really is transformative. So I can list you 10 different practical philosophers and their systems and stuff like that if you want to study them, but for me, philosophy is more a process. It’s a verb, it’s not a noun. Simon Blackburn, a famous philosopher, wrote a book called Think, and he describes philosophy as conceptual engineering. It’s a great metaphor.

If an engineer looks at a bridge and they know about the raw materials of the bridge and they know how they connect to other parts of the bridge and everything, if you can show an engineer one bridge, a particular bridge, and he’d be like, “Well, it holds weight over here, but if we put weight over on this side, it’s going to all start crumbling down.” Philosophers do this with world views. The philosopher is the engineer and the worldview is the bridge. Worldviews are made up of concepts that are linked together by assumptions is how I think about it.

A concept in philosophy, for whatever it’s worth, is just the way we chop up and make sense of reality. So a person is a concept, a tree is a concept, democracy is a concept, love maybe a concept. And so our worldviews are piecing these things together based on assumptions and philosophers are the people that are shaking up those rigid definitions that we have of these things and allowing us to see the world in a new way, and the systematized practice of doing that deliberately. So I do think for somebody that’s struggling emotionally, being able to be good at that skill of shaking up their static definitions of how things are in the world and seeing it in a new conceptual tracing, that is valuable to that person potentially. I just wouldn’t ever prescribe it as the way if you’re feeling bad about some real issue in your life with your family going through problems.

For me, it’s been really helpful, but I think it takes years to even get to the place where you can embody ideas without necessarily accepting them, where you can really entertain and be open to these things in a way that they can change you. So anyway, I would just say I think philosophy’s limited here.

Tim Ferriss: I think it’s limited, but for me, I would say I could think of it as necessary but not sufficient, if that makes sense. And you mentioned years, but I will give an example of something that is not new to me, but revisiting it today in preparation for this conversation. This is a philosophical concept. You don’t even really need the modifier “philosophical” if it complicates things for people listening, but amor fati. So this is something that helped me over lunch while I was preparing for this because it helped me to reframe. Could you explain what this is for people who may not be familiar?

Stephen West: Sure, yeah. It goes back probably before the Stoics if we’re being honest, but my favorite formulation of it is in Nietzsche where he’s talking about amor fati translates into love of fate. It’s the idea that so many traditions in the religious sectors or just in our everyday lived experience are renunciative. They aim at denying some aspect of ourselves or of reality in an attempt to try to make it better.

Nietzsche said “amor fati” is how he’s going to live his life. Henceforth, he decided everything he’s going to say yes to. He will be a yes-sayer, is what he says. This is an affirmative stance towards reality where, even if things are bad or uncomfortable or horrible, we’re going to affirm reality as it is and not idealize it into something that it’s not. It’s very common for people to do, even when they’re not religious, is to think of reality as though it owes you something. But to affirm reality fully is to accept the good, the bad. It’s not to rationalize about it and to try to make excuses for it or frame your suffering in a way where it makes it go away. To truly affirm life and reality is just to be in it and to have life itself be enough, truly. So yeah, I think that really is the essence of amor fati for me.

Tim Ferriss: And the way that I self-help bastardize this for myself, that could be a book title or a chapter in one of my forthcoming books, but if you wanted to bastardize this into something very self-help-y, what I ended up doing is okay, how could I exaggerate this to go beyond acceptance? If I actually had to find a way to praise, to view in a positive light, if I had to, that was an obligation with everything that’s going on right now, how would I do it with the recognition that if you do that with everything, you end up running around with rose-colored glasses and you’re going to whack your head on a lot of corners?

But in this particular case, like, okay, let me try really hard since I’ve been so focused on the things I can’t control or hyper aware of them, and the challenges and the hardship, not just now but that are going to probably be sustained for quite a few years now. That sitting down and just asking myself, what are the silver linings here? If I had to view this through a positive lens, what would I see? Just doing that over lunch for 10 minutes, I’d probably drop my cortisol and resting heart rate tremendously. And that may not be, Nietzsche’s turning over his grave with me just even approaching it this way.

Stephen West: No, I think that it’s an extension of what we talked about with the meditation practice being utilitarian framed, and by the way, I don’t think that should be a knock against it.

People get into meditation because it’s going to help them with anxiety or sleep better or 4x their productivity or something like that, but if that’s what gets you to the deeper stages of that, of your awareness where it’s no longer something you’re doing for some utilitarian end, that’s beautiful. There’s a famous thing from the end of the Tractatus by a philosopher named Wittgenstein where he talks about how all these arguments in this book have led us to this point, and now you can essentially throw out the entire book because we’ve gotten to this new place. He compares it to a ladder. So often in life, we’ll have a conversation about happiness, say. How do I become happy? What’s the best way to be happy? And then you climb this ladder and then at the end of getting to this new place, all these conversations get you to this new perspective in life, and then all the conversations about happiness just seem pointless. They just seemed naive almost, but it was only by having those conversations that got you to this next place anyway.

And Wittgenstein talks about how you kick this ladder out from underneath you. You climb up the ladder, you use it, and then you kick it out from underneath you and you don’t need it anymore. It’s just, I think, a utilitarian approach to practice or to this amor fati thing. How else are you going to get to deeper levels of understanding of it, or who’s to even say that that’s a deeper level of understanding it? Maybe this is just the best practical way for you to be using that in your life. I would not knock on you at all for doing that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that.

Stephen West: You have my acceptance there.

Tim Ferriss: I would love to ask you, and maybe this will be helpful for people to hear. In my case, there are certain philosophies that for me are almost like operating systems. Stoicism would be one in some respects where it gives you recommendations or instructions for how you might reframe or respond in certain circumstances. And what I’m about to mention are not usually exclusive, but there’s also a philosophy that if I read it just lets the snow globe settle. It’s intrinsically calming just in the process of reading. That could be say one of Seneca’s letters. There’s one that I just thought was so hilarious.

It’s a microcosm of “On Anger,” but where he’s bitching and moaning about some type of bathhouse and gym below where he’s living and they’re sweaty and slapping things around and dropping weights, and it’s bugging the shit out of him. And it’s just so hilarious and also humanizing to be like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, I’m not the only impatient asshole who’s running around overreacting to these little things.” And then he offers some suggestions. But there are other things that I find very calming in and of themselves to read, and I’m wondering if there are any philosophers or writers broadly speaking with a philosophical bend, or philosophies that have that effect for you.

Stephen West: I personally don’t look to philosophy for a set of protocols to live by. I think it’s reactive. I think the world is always in a state of becoming, it’s always changing into the future, and I see a philosopher taking a snapshot in their work as a beautiful picture to look at, but not something that I really want to live by, at this point. I used to by the way. Throughout my twenties, it helped me immensely, but just for whatever it’s worth at this point, this is just where I’m at. It’s almost like painting is not the Mona Lisa. Painting is not Starry Night by van Gogh. Painting is a verb, it’s a process. For me, this is what philosophy is. It’s the embodiment of a different conceptual tracing of the world.

Tim Ferriss: What does that look like? I guess if we were to just put it in Conceptual Tracing for Dummies, right?

Stephen West: Right.

Tim Ferriss: In your lived experience, what would maybe an example look like?

Stephen West: Well, it’s the iterative process of showing up every day for the show and reading a philosopher and truly trying to embody their work for a moment, but it’s provisional. It’s not something that I’m accepting. I’m not tacking it onto the way that I see the world. It is just, I’m almost method acting a thinker in service to these other people that want to know about the thinker too. It really is a harmonious thing that’s going on and it’s fun, but yeah, I really do try to entertain ideas without accepting them. And it’s given me a lot of peace because I just realized who I am is not one set of protocols. It’s this weird mix of contradictions and I feel two ways simultaneously sometimes, and I’ll take pieces from this thinker and that thinker and put them together. Just for me personally, that’s more how I’m seeing philosophy. It’s this exercise that I’m engaged in. The snow globe settles, to use your metaphor, by being engaged in that exercise more personally.

Tim Ferriss: So if we’re looking at Stephen West’s version one, or maybe version 3.5, in your twenties when maybe you had a different lens on these things, were there particular philosophies or philosophers or writing that hopped out that we haven’t touched on?

Stephen West: Yeah. Nietzsche was huge for me early on in my life. Kierkegaard was very big after that, because I realized in my early twenties, what got me thinking about philosophy was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I think at that time was Letter to a Christian Nation. It’s this whole new atheism sort of thing that was going on at the time. I had never read any philosophy before, so I thought, I mean, these people showed me what was possible to think about the world. And so I come from that New Atheist beginning. I used to just argue with people on the internet incessantly about that kind of stuff.

Tim Ferriss: That’s what the Internet’s made for.

Stephen West: Yeah. I was very young. But yeah, I remember for years I just wrote off every religious argument as just nonsense. Just like absolute — just man-in-the-sky stuff. And then I read Kierkegaard and I started thinking totally differently about the whole question, about the language that people use to describe universal human experiences. Kierkegaard talks about God and he is a Christian. He’s describing a crisis in the church that’s going on during his time. But I remember it being like, it just hit me like a ton of bricks one day. I’m like, oh, I listen to rap music and they use different words, but I can relate to it because I’m feeling what they’re feeling. We’re both human beings. I may not come from Inglewood or something like that, but I can understand what they’re saying here. They’re using different words. And when I approached Kierkegaard like that and religious conversations more generally, it totally rocked me. And then that led me to Simone Weil, who’s been top five favorite philosophers ever for me. And yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, that name you just gave, how do you spell the last name?

Stephen West: W-E-I-L.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. And how do you pronounce that? I don’t even know.

Stephen West: Weil.

Tim Ferriss: Weil. Okay.

Stephen West: Simone Weil. And for whatever it’s worth, it’s in another language. I’m just a dumb American.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve definitely fucked that up at least a dozen times.

Stephen West: I’m just a dumb American. It could be something totally different.

Tim Ferriss: If we added up all of my mispronunciations on this podcast, it would be the size of one of my phone books that I write.

Stephen West: Dude, she’s incredible because she just is living in this time in the beginning of the 20th century, she’s very skeptical of Marxism and capitalism and fascism and all these things that are going on. She had the ability, she was smart. She went to school. She had the ability to stay and be a professor and just sit behind a desk and write for the rest of her life. She didn’t do that. She got out of her position at the university and went and worked in a factory voluntarily just to see what it was like to be somebody working on the front lines to try to understand it as much as she possibly could. She didn’t want to live in theory, she didn’t want to have some theoretical understanding of what it was like to be a factory worker. She wanted to be there.

She just has this concept of attention, man. Her example that she writes in her journal is just when you’re talking to somebody, you can approach that conversation and filter every bit of it through this idea that like, what use is this person serving to me? Everything that they say, if I’m looking for similarities, it’s just so far as it’s commensurate with the way that I already look at things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Stephen West: What can this person do for me? This conversation is boring to me, it doesn’t — or there’s a way to not filter the person through all of your own agendas and projects, but just to see them as they are, it’s like a self-emptying, a kenotic. It’s very like you just try to receive them on their own home ground as much as you possibly can. And it’s a totally different framing, and it literally changed my life when I first read about it. So, yeah, that’s something I would write down.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Let’s talk more about that, the self-emptying. Was it a particular phrasing or story that you read that hit you like a ton of bricks? Was it then trying to use it in your life? Can you say more about how it was impactful?

Stephen West: Sure. It was not a special story that she told. Again, like most of her writing in particular, she never intended for it to be published. It was just personal journals. But it hit me like a ton of bricks because I was realizing at that time that I had very narcissistic tendencies as a lot of people do in the modern world. I just think when we don’t have gods to worship and external rituals to follow, you just end up worshiping at the altar of yourself oftentimes. Narcissism is a default that you can sort of fall into if you’re not careful about it or aware of it. So when she said this though, and I was just, oh my god, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I was like 25 or something at the time, and then it really didn’t hit me fully until I was like 32, just how much every encounter that I’m having is just framing people in the world in terms of what it can do for me rather than for what purpose do I exist in this network around me? And yeah, it was incredible.

Tim Ferriss: So maybe looking at, I don’t know if it would be too presumptive of me to say a reaction to that, but can you speak to your decision, if it is a decision, to have as small a digital footprint as possible? Is that a fair question?

Stephen West: It’s fair. I think it’s just a lack of talent. Generally speaking, that’s what’s going on there. Nobody wants my footprints in their — 

Tim Ferriss: There’s got to be more to it. There’s got to be more to it.

Stephen West: Is it?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You could be doing choreographed dances on TikTok if you wanted.

Stephen West: No, I couldn’t. That’s where you’re wrong, Tim. No. No. Look, people give me offers. I try to keep the grass cut, I guess. One element of it is I try to keep my life simple.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Stephen West: I have my wife and kids, I have the show, and that’s about it. I love it that way. I love being able to be fully present in these things and not have 10 things going on in my head, and the people that support the show make it possible for me to live a life that simple and that focus. So I’m just super grateful.

Tim Ferriss: What are things, if any, that you’ve trained yourself to categorically say no to or be wary of in service of simplicity? Do you have certain rules for yourself?

Stephen West: Yeah, I really do sacrifice efficiency for meaning pretty often. Reading The 4-Hour Workweek was transformative for me, and it really put a fire underneath me to find a way to come up with protocols to live my days by and everything like that. And I’ve done so many different productivity type efficiency things over the years. In the last few years, I’ll find myself burning out if I separate myself from the task. If I do things for efficiency, personally, and I also realize who I’m talking to here. I know the people that listen to this show are — I have so much respect for what you guys do and how you can be peak performers and all that stuff. It’s just, for me personally, I struggle with it. I struggle when I am giving myself, okay, the next four hours, and then I’m going to like meditate with Baby Yoda on top of a mountain, and then I’m going to like do — me and my cat are going to report on our podcast — 

Tim Ferriss: Have you been watching my nanny-cam?

Stephen West: So yeah, it’s just, I will sacrifice efficiency for meaning a lot of times. And it doesn’t make me the most productive, but it — the way I justify to myself is like, it’s a long play. I want to still be doing this for my family in 20 years. I want to still be writing and loving what I’m doing. So if I’m writing and I’m not feeling it, or I’m researching and I’m just not in it, then I will go and hang out with my family, or I’ll go and do something else, talk to my friend Dave. And so yeah, that’s a line that I set for myself, I guess.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I suppose if I were to add something too, there are a number of things I would add, but if I were to update, which I don’t think I’ll do because I don’t want to step on the butterfly, so to speak because I don’t know how that first book really did what it did. I think it would be arrogant of me to think that I could even really deduce what happened there. But if I were to add a few things to that book, one of them would be the dangers of valuing your time very highly and making that an immovable pillar of your life. What I mean by that is on one level, to a certain degree, and the dose makes the poison, I think that’s Paracelsus, but you can apply it here, which is learning to value your time is a valuable skill that allows you to learn, especially in the early stages, what makes sense to delegate and what does not, what is worth doing versus what is not worth doing.

And so you start to develop the ability to then later do things like 80/20 analysis and automation and all of the things that are in that book. However, if you land on some type of number, whether it’s ill-defined or very precisely defined, for what you are worth, what your time is worth per hour, you can end up feeling the agony of wasting time, anytime a minute is sacrificed doing something that you don’t think is high leverage, and that ends up being a very painful way to go through life.

Stephen West: Yeah. I feel that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So for me, it’s like I have more and more, and I really like the way you phrased it, sort of sacrificed efficiency for meaning. But I would also say that when you start to focus on meaning, I think you get better at choosing the what. If effectiveness is the what of what do you do, so choosing what to do, and then efficiency is how well you do something? 

I think paradoxically, perhaps, when you start to sacrifice efficiency for meaning, you make better long-term choices, like you were saying, in service of the long game.

Stephen West: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Right?

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And to play the long game, at least as far as I can tell, really well, you have to know what game you’re playing. And all of that requires a level of introspection that you can rob yourself of if you are trying to operate in the red zone at 500 miles an hour in the name of efficiency.

Stephen West: Yeah. And I’m not saying don’t be efficient, just make it a second or third order priority. And with as much work as you’ve done learning efficiency techniques, I’d imagine you can’t help but be efficient at a certain level when you do things. So it’s just part of your embodied world.

Tim Ferriss: I think there are like 10 percent of the things I do are default hyperefficient, and then I think people would be disgusted and shocked if they were to have seen the first half of my day today. They’d be like, “What is he doing? He looks like a Roomba with bad software. What is he doing in his house? I have no idea what’s happening right now.”

Stephen West: I think that’s the hard-hitting question.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know. I didn’t see this turn of events when I was prepping for this conversation. I do think more and more — who knows? Maybe that’s a book in the future, but they take me too long to write. So I either need to get faster at writing or I need to find a better format. Maybe it’s a podcast. Just the long game. What does it mean to play the long game?

Stephen West: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Because I think in a reactive, modern, digitally saturated environment, it’s very easy to get pulled into short games that are not of your own designing.

Stephen West: Yeah. And then to feel quasi alienated from everything you’re doing, like you’re looking at yourself from the outside or something. For me, this is what I struggle with. I don’t struggle with it anymore, but I have to be conscious about this every day for that reason.

Tim Ferriss: So there are a couple of cues I have here that are related to exploratory bullets, things that we can dig into. And maybe we’ve already covered it, but at the risk of repetition, I have here the non-obvious way that engaging in philosophy helps us grow.

Stephen West: Right.

Tim Ferriss: What is that?

Stephen West: I just think, as I said before, philosophy always lives in the shadow of the thing that we give credit to. There’s many examples of this and it’s related to a conversation of like, why would anybody even care about philosophy at all? It would definitely be something that I would think. We’re already thinking about things the best we’ve ever thought about them before. Look at the sciences. Why do we need old men yelling at each other about unverifiable speculation? Why do you need philosophy? And what that point misses is that philosophy is how we got to the point where we’re looking at the world in the way we do now. Some examples of this, Isaac Newton. Big name in the sciences, apparently. His big book is called Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. One of them. It has “natural philosophy” in the title. It’s because the things he’s talking about that in that book, motion, optics, the relationship of particles. This was the domain of natural philosophy before Newton comes along and writes this landmark work, and then it becomes a specialized field.

Another example, psychology isn’t a specialized discipline until the end of the 19th century. Before that, questions like identity and how we behave around other people, these are questions in the philosophy of mind and ethics and epistemology, depending on what background you come from. One more example, Adam Smith. Scottish Enlightenment, wrote The Wealth of Nations. It’s like a cornerstone of modern capitalist thought. But he wasn’t an economist at first. He was an ethical philosopher. He starts asking questions about what sort of lives do we want to guarantee for people? What is a good life? How do we treat other people? This is what then scales up into his conversations at the level of economics and then turns into capitalism.

My point is that any point along the way here, somebody could come along and say, “Why do we need these philosophers abstracting about the individual human mind or something like that, or how to treat each other. We’re already thinking about things the best we ever have.” And what I’m saying is this is the role of philosophy, is to ask questions that seem a little bit wonky to us living during this moment, but they will become the best practices of tomorrow, and this will always be going on, and it’s still going on today. And it goes on in the lives of individuals and at the scale of the conversations, we’re trying to have better and better conversations.

Tim Ferriss: So if we go and double-click on better conversations, what strikes me, at least as one of the benefits I’ve derived from reading philosophical works, and honestly, it could even be a novel with interesting questions, which is what I want to focus on, that we have developed incredible technology. We have this fantastic framework, scientific method for principally not fooling ourselves, but testing hypotheses, which may start as a question. But I don’t find, and I’m happy to be disproven here, but that the scientific method itself helps people to generate better questions automatically. And at least as an adjunct, philosophy for me has been fertile ground for finding good questions.

Stephen West: Yeah. And by the way that goes on in every one of these specialized disciplines. The Ph in PhD stands for philosophy for a reason. The highest level of abstraction in any field is going to be philosophy. If you’re somebody well-educated in a field at the top of your field, in order to make progress in that field, you have to subvert the existing set of protocols and assumptions, axiomatically, that are going on in that field. To move the field forward, you have to be doing philosophy. And science is wonderful, but it is compartmentalized and specialized and technical and all the things that it is when we’re just talking about an experimental setting. But I think you’re right, anybody at the top of these fields has to be doing philosophy, and that extends to asking good questions in our lives to try to come up with new ways of seeing things. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m so curious, since you are hoping to do this 10, 20 years from now in some form or fashion, how do you see it adapting? That may not even be the right word, changing over time in terms of format. And there may not be a need to do that. And I feel like you, by choosing a very well-defined, narrow lane that had not been filled before, you actually have more existential health insurance for your podcast than most podcasts by being that focused. I actually very firmly believe that, that you have much more anti-fragility built into it for surviving in an audio format.

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s not the type of thing, especially given the duration that I feel would be forced into video for discovery. Maybe there are benefits to be had, but it can be an option and not an obligation perhaps for at least a period of time. How do you anticipate this could change over time? You mentioned the book projects, that’s one way of diversifying format, maybe opening new doors. But how are you thinking about playing the long game?

Stephen West: I’m not restricting myself to a plan, certainly. I think I’m just going to continue with what got me to the dance. I genuinely have just been listening to people tell me what they want to hear about and showing up every day. Completely iterative, just trying to do it the best I possibly can. That will change, but it won’t be planned. I think that I’ll just keep listening to the listeners and see what they want to do. I guess, here’s the heart of your question, maybe something you want. I would like to write philosophical fiction at some point. I would like to not be teaching philosophy forever. I would like to just incorporate philosophical ideas and maybe deliver it in a different way. So that’s like an outside possibility, if people are interested.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I’ll be like the shoutcaster.

Stephen West: Really?

Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah.

Stephen West: Really?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it’s an outside — 

Stephen West: Maybe this is the moment.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it’s a — yeah, we have it recorded. I don’t think that’s an outside possibility at all. No.

Stephen West: Really, you think people would enjoy hearing about these philosophical ideas, it delivered to them in fiction? As long as I’m a decent writer.

Tim Ferriss: Especially if it’s not banging them over the head. In the sense that if it’s more of a Trojan horse and you are delivering, and this is a bit of a strained metaphor, but delivering the medicine with some honey. Absolutely. I think people are drawn to it already. They just wouldn’t necessarily describe it that way.

Stephen West: I feel like I’m writing these episodes and it is a lot of writing. Like I did the other day, started writing some fiction just for fun on the side, and I was like, wow, I’m doing the same thing that I do when I write the episodes. It’s just not real. It’s interesting how the skills translate over. So yeah, maybe. Maybe someday.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would say I don’t think that’s an outside chance. Particularly, here’s what I would say, my recommendation, if I could be so audacious to give you completely unsolicited advice, but in the world of publishing, I have a couple of rounds under the belt. I would say hope, even though it’s not a strategy, but hope and plan based on the track record that you’ve produced so far. The market validation, that sounds so sterile and terrible, but that you’ve proven with what you’ve done that your first book, particularly with your built-in audience, will do well. So then, as a thought exercise, what do you do once you have bought yourself permission to do something that deviates from what you are known for?

Stephen West: Right.

Tim Ferriss: And then the answer might be fiction — 

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — that has a lot of philosophy embedded. So I think that is a helpful hypothetical plan to think on, because otherwise, what happens to a lot of folks is they have a book that is unexpectedly to them, although in retrospect, it could have been predicted successful, which just means it buys you the right to have a second book. But because they feel pressure from an agent, a publisher, a family member, whatever it might be, to try to capitalize on the success, they end up doing version two of the same book. Or they end up doing, in my case, The 3-Hour Workweek, then The 2½-Hour Workweek, so on and so forth. And when you travel that path, you end up painting yourself into a genre corner.

Stephen West: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Which is the reason I did The 4-Hour Body after The 4-Hour Workweek, because I knew I could always go back to the first thing. That’s a two-way door. In other words, if you have the first book that’s a huge smash, you try the second book, which is off menu, but is really something you want to try. It doesn’t work? You can always go back to the first.

Stephen West: How do you think of the podcast here? Dostoevsky wrote books in installments. He would release them in papers. He got paid, and he would release a couple chapters at a time or something like that. It was serialized.

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Stephen West: Much like podcasting. Do you see your ongoing podcast as a serialized version of a book that you’re just always writing and maybe episode 200 through 250 is a book?

Tim Ferriss: I would say my goals and insecurities and fears vary too much week to week, month to month for me to spot. I’m sure there are three lines, but I wouldn’t group it in that fashion. I view the podcast as my laboratory or my workshop, maybe both where I can, much like I’ve seen comedians do, for instance, even on the podcast, I’ve had comedians who have later I realized were testing material they were going to incorporate into their special. And I will kick things around that test the waters, see how my audience responds to guests, see how guests respond to certain types of questions. And then I’m like, okay, I’m getting, at this point, 7 out of 7 positive signals. Okay. Maybe I turn that into a dedicated episode that’s a solo episode. I see how that’s received. Maybe I turn that into a blog post and I see how that’s received.

Knowing all the while that there is, I think, a significant risk to your identity to over-relying on audience signal. I really think you can — 

Stephen West: Get captured?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you can get captured and shaped. You can turn into a caricature of your greatest clips on YouTube, and God save you if that ends up happening. It’s much harder to undo than it is to succumb to. So paying attention to all of that still, effectively what I’m doing, and the way that I try to avoid that is effectively to say, all right, here are four or five things I want to do anyway. Now I just want to figure out which of these could be viable. I would be very happy to do any of these four. So I’ve decided that upfront so that I don’t get oversteered by the audience. Now, let me see what really resonates. And we were talking about this a little earlier, but the personal being the most universal. What is the thing inside me that also seems to strike a chord and resonate with at least some subset?

And for me, I’m looking for amplitude of effect. I don’t want a six out of 10 from 80 percent of my audience. I want a 10 out of 10 from like 20 percent of my audience. So that’s how I think about it. But the podcast is really, for me, helping me explore things I otherwise wouldn’t explore, solve my own problems, frankly, get some inspiration when I feel like I need some inspiration, and that’s more or less how I think of it. It’s like I haven’t — 

Stephen West: It’s a very wise way to do it. It’s very lived. It matches with your experience. This becomes a forum for the stuff that you’re interested in. And then like you’re talking about, a test, like a case study for whether you want to explore something deeper with your audience. It’s beautiful, man.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks.

Stephen West: Because you’re not just planning episodes out into the future, just saying, oh, this is what Tim Ferriss would do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Stephen West: Yeah, you’re just living life and then, it’s cool. And I guess I’m here as one little small part of that.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know how small, man. I’ll give you an example. So you’re talking about fiction, like I have also had this be in my bonnet about fiction and wrote 30,000, 40,000 words of fiction about a year and a half ago, two years ago now, I guess. And it seems hypocritical of me to give you the unsolicited advice that I gave you while not revisiting my own self-imposed limitations around it, or procrastination. So who knows? Maybe I’ll look back and I’ll be like, fuck, I accidentally called myself out. Shit. Didn’t see that coming. My interactions with guests have had such a huge impact on my life. It’s impossible to overstate. Enormous, gigantic.

Tim Ferriss: All right, and this is one of the rapid-fire questions, but it doesn’t need to be a fast answer. It’s just intended to be something that’s fun to play with. So the billboard question, right? If there was a billboard, metaphorically speaking, you could put a message on, a quote, a word, a question, an image, anything at all, just to convey it to mass numbers of people, what might you put on the billboard?

Stephen West: Geez, man, this is a great question, because it’s like the inverse of me. The idea that wisdom can be distilled down into a single quote or an idea or something, this is kind of the antithesis of what I’m doing. It’s a way of thinking wisdom. It’s not a particular idea. If I have to come up with one — 

Tim Ferriss: Great question for you then.

Stephen West: How about that be the one that takes advice? How about that?

Tim Ferriss: I like that.

Stephen West: I don’t give advice, because if a person is asking for advice, typically, they’re not the person that really takes the advice, really. So it’s almost always a waste of your time. But if you’re the one that genuinely takes advice, and it’s ironically me giving you advice to be the one that takes advice, but if you can do that, if you can manage that, then you won’t need advice here in six months, you’ll be the one giving it. Right? So maybe that’s what I put on the billboard.

Tim Ferriss: So someone sees that, they’re like, “You know what? I like the sound of that. I want to be someone who takes advice.” How might that manifest? How might they change how they relate to people or the world or otherwise? What might that look like?

Stephen West: Geez, I don’t know. Man, they’d have to really pay attention to the advice that’s being given to them, and that would maybe come from just reading the world around them a bit better. I think advice comes, not just from deliberately like a motivational video on YouTube, but the world around you is trying to tell you stuff all the time, if you’re paying attention to it. So maybe that goes along with it. Just don’t think of the world as just buildings and people walking around. You think of it as education. Truly try to take things from moments and be open to them.

It’s maybe an important point here for philosophy. Like we’re talking about before, it can turn into just this broad theoretical exercise that doesn’t really change you at all, and nobody really takes action. That’s why I think any serious philosophy has to be coupled with openness and curiosity and somebody willing to let the ideas impact them. And I just think education, like advice giving, people often relegate it to a room, a classroom with a teacher in front and there’s desks and there’s pencils and everything. But if you strip away all the rules there and reterritorialize it, education is constant. It’s constantly going on. And so, yeah, I don’t know. That’s what I’d add to it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I dig it. Okay. So let’s say as part of that, people are listening and they’re thinking to themselves, “You know what? I want to try this philosophy thing that everybody’s talking about.”

Stephen West: It’s a hit with the kids.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Minecraft and philosophy, it’s all these kids talk about these days. So how does someone or what advice might you have for someone who wants to find the right book to further explore what they’re interested in or might find interesting within the very broad field of philosophy?

Stephen West: So I used to give overviews of philosophy and stuff like that. I don’t do that anymore. I just think the book that’s best for you is the one that you’re going to stick with. It’s the one that’s going to get you the value proposition of studying philosophy, which is the one that you’re going to be the most interested in. So look into your heart, maybe go to the bathroom and flip the lights on and off for a while and just stare at yourself in the mirror. And really — 

Tim Ferriss: That sounds so intense.

Stephen West: — really think about what you’re interested in. And then, when you find it, go to, I would say, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s like Wikipedia on steroids. It’s a free site and it has an entry for basically anything out there. It’s certainly not like the gospel. You shouldn’t go there reading it and thinking you’re an expert in the field, but it is a step up from Wikipedia. Because it cites academic sources. It’s usually written by somebody from academia that has dedicated a good portion of their thought in life to this particular area. So it’s a great place to start.

That’s what I would say, start with a secondary source, meaning don’t just go to Barnes & Noble, look at Being and Nothingness by Sartre, it’s like 700 pages long, and just pull it off and start trying to read it. You’re not going to get much out of it. It’s a great classic way to just be bored, I guess. Why would you ever do that? There’s so much context about these thinkers and why they’re even interested in the questions that they are.

Tim Ferriss: So when you say, “secondary source,” what you mean by that is someone who is commenting on the work?

Stephen West: Some expert that is trying to humanize this work, trying to make it available, that maybe dedicated their whole life to studying them, but they’re talking about the work itself, giving you context, explaining the ideas, not in the language that a philosopher uses. So I think that’s massively helpful, and I don’t know why anybody that’s just starting out, which is what this example is for, would ever start with something other than a secondary source.

Tim Ferriss: So I guess maybe an example of that for Stoicism would be, certainly, Ryan Holiday’s work. He’s right here, nearby. He’s 30 minutes away or so.

Stephen West: Nice.

Tim Ferriss: The Obstacle Is The Way and so on or I think it’s just called [A Guide to] the Good Life, William Irvine, I believe it is.

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Could be getting that wrong. But something along those lines, which then comments on Epictetus and so on, all of these figures — 

Stephen West: Right, after reading those books, those secondary sources, you read the originals and you get much more out of them, because you know where they’re coming from, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You can wade through all of the astronomy and the sort of cosmological arguments and not throw the book away in anger and confusion.

Are there any really bizarre philosophers or philosophies, strange — 

Stephen West: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — that you’re kind of into it, like philosophy kink? Is there any — 

Stephen West: Yeah, there’s people that are deliberately bizarre to try to invite people to do more philosophy and do it in new ways. So a great example of this is a guy named Gilles Deleuze, who actually just died in the ’90s.

Tim Ferriss: How do you spell the last name?

Stephen West: D-E-L-E-U-Z-E.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.

Stephen West: So he’s a great example of somebody that his philosophy is an invitation. The only reason I use the word, “bizarre,” is because it would seem bizarre to somebody else that just doesn’t really like thinking about philosophy or something. So most philosophers throughout history, if we can paint them into a broad category, think of concepts, remember the ways we chop up and make sense of the world.

In terms of nouns, they think of them in terms of a thing that exists statically. But Deleuze, to put this in extremely simple terms here, he just doesn’t think anything has a fixed formal essence like that at all. Everything is constantly moving and changing. So we’re only setting ourselves up for misunderstanding in the world if we think about things in terms of fixed categories, snapshots of the world at all. So because of this, he thinks of the world mostly in terms of verbs, you could say. This is, again, a big oversimplification of it, but he doesn’t even think in terms of concepts. He thinks in terms of machines. A tree is not a thing that exists out there in the woods. It is only a thing insofar as it connects to many other things that present a problem to us in some way for that tree. The tree is part of a process that’s going on, an assemblage of things, a machine, that is constantly moving and changing. And it can be used for a million different purposes by somebody, but the thing in itself doesn’t really have a static identity at all.

When you ask for a bizarre example of a philosopher’s work, this is one that I love, because it gets you to start thinking of reality in maybe entirely different ways. What would reality be structured around adverbs, for example? It would just be the modulation of the way that things are arising or — 

Tim Ferriss: Quickly and cheaply.

Stephen West: Exactly. And so what would that look like? It wouldn’t be a machine. It would be like a song or something, or a poem, or I’m not even sure, but this is the point. This is philosophy right here. It’s just like, how do we look at the same things through a different framing and then, get exciting new ways of looking at the world, new possibilities for us on the other side of it? So Deleuze is perfect for that, I think.

Tim Ferriss: Great. Thank you. One of the big questions on your show, I believe, please fact-check me, brutally, if need be, but is, in essence, why do you believe what you believe, right? Is that fair to say?

Stephen West: Sure. Yeah. Certainly, at the beginning of the show, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So can you unpack that for us? How does someone begin to attempt to answer that? Or are there toolkits that you would recommend for someone who wants to try to engage with that question, “Why do you believe what you believe?” Why this question at all, I suppose, is where we could start.

Stephen West: Yeah, I think that was something towards the beginning of my show, because I just find the question, personally, to be unanswerable the older that I get. I don’t think we’re in the best place to know why we believe the stuff that we believe. We just come up with rational narratives after the fact that sound good to us, I think. That’s more how I see it. But yeah, I’m telling you, if you want to be more self-aware of your beliefs, the key is to do this very philosophical exercise we’ve been talking about. Take a concept that is seemingly well-known, that everybody has thoughts on, and just shake it up. Love is one that I use on the show a lot, because it’s so common. Love, justice, freedom, these are concepts that basically everybody has thoughts on.

Love. What’s a common way of thinking about love? Love is a thing that happens to you. “It’s not a choice that I made. I was just around this person, and then, I fell in love with them. That’s how I go from this liking somebody to loving somebody.” What is that transition? “Well, it just happened to me. I fell in love. That’s how it happened.” Then somebody else can come along and say, “No, love for me is a choice that I make. It’s a set of conditions. I choose to love someone. And it’s when they meet these criteria, it’s when they make a certain amount, it’s when they look a certain way. These are secondary things, but really, it’s that they provide some kind of emotional service for me. That’s when I know I love someone is when my Starbucks order can be messed up and I get a little testy when they don’t put the extra shot inside of it. And so, the person I love is going to be there for me and submit to me and make me feel good about it.”

But then, a philosopher might come along and just shake those things up. “It’s not something that happens to you. It’s not a set of conditions. Love is something more unconditional,” they might say. They might say, “Love is a verb, not a noun. It is a commitment, an active commitment, to a little slice of the universe and a person that I’m going to affirm them exactly as they are. I’m not going to idealize them. I’m not going to demonize them. I’m not going to make excuses for them, rationalize them in some way. I’m just going to look at them and try to receive them on their own home ground, that this is the essence of love.”

Now, even if you disagree with that, first of all, that’s one of thousands of different ways a philosopher might shake up love and try to get you to think about it in a new way, even if you disagree with that, you have to defend your position on what love is. You’re already doing philosophy, and it’s valuable. It makes you have to come back to your core principles and define them and defend them in a way that’s, I think, good for the world. Yeah, there’s also an outside chance you hear that from the philosopher, and it changes the whole way you see every relationship in your life.

This is why you’ll hear a philosopher talk about the philosophy of language or something. They’ll talk about, “What does it mean to mean something?” or something like that. And rightfully so. Everybody looks at that and cringes, and it’s just like, “Why would anybody be thinking about that?” But I just think, to do it with these well-known concepts, to read the thinking of people that are trying to stir up these rigid definitions and get you to see the world in the new conceptual tracing, massively valuable. People that send me emails will say they feel like they’ve lived 10 lifetimes in the amount of time they used to live one, because with the love example, they might go through five relationships, get their heart broken five times before they think about love in this new way and try to create a new tracing of it. So anyway, why we believe what we believe, I think, comes from just engaging in that process more. 

Tim Ferriss: So let’s do a callback to the New Atheists, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, both tremendous writers.

Stephen West: Fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: And so you used to yell at people on the internet.

Stephen West: Hard to yell over the keyboard, but yeah, I would type very ferociously.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, lots of aggressive typing. And now, you’re looking at, if I remember correctly, sort of the maybe intersections or comparisons between philosophy and religion. Where do you personally sit with religion now?

Stephen West: Well, I’m not going to church every Sunday.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Stephen West: To the spirit of your question, do I believe in a God that is in the sky that has a moral dictate for me to follow, that I’m going to get into the after — no, no, I don’t. But I will say this. The older that I get, the more I realize that most of the high-level theologians and philosophers that talk about these issues don’t believe in a God like that either. This is almost like a dramatized version of a God that speaks to people when they’re just being people. They’ve got kids, they’ve got a job to go to, they don’t got time to sit around and read philosophy and religion all day long. You need a story that’s going to relate to them, and it guides them to wisdom that’s written into it. I don’t think that God needs to be anthropomorphic like that.

In this religious phenomenology thing, it’s been much more along the lines of Aquinas, where he just believes God is being itself or somewhere along these lines. Obviously, a very complicated conversation to try to put into a summary form here, but yeah, I am more and more interested with what — 

Tim Ferriss: How would you answer that question on a billboard with three words?

Stephen West: That’s all you get. No, yeah, for sure. It’s tough. But yeah, I would say that I’m deeply fascinated in it and humble, like humbly reading these thinkers and genuinely opening myself to trying to understand what’s being said deeper. And that’s all I can do really, I think.

Tim Ferriss: So I suppose, if I were to improve upon my question or add a little more context, I suppose what I’m wondering, because I used to also be on, I would say, the militant atheist side of things, in part because of a friend of mine, a very, very close friend, one of my closest friends, was sort of weaponized within a very militant church during a very vulnerable time in his life. And so, I took it upon myself to try to rescue him from that situation. Did not work, but in the process of trying to arm myself with the right tools, I read all the books. And I was like, “Okay, I’m going to read Bertrand Russell. I’m going to read this. I’m going to read Dawkins. Da da da da. I’m going to gather the Avengers of the sort of atheist world or the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse depending on who you ask, and I’m going to go in with all the arguments.” And ultimately, didn’t really work.

I also realized that religion for him at that point was actually really important lifeline/raft that he needed in a life of incredible instability at that point in time. So I didn’t end up pressing it. But then, over time — well, I don’t want to make this some kind of TED Talk for me right now, but the question for you is, I’ve softened around those edges a lot, and I’m wondering if, in your reading of philosophy, if you’ve come across writings from people who might be described as mystics, people who’ve had these direct experiences, with different labels, revelatory experiences, divine experiences, whatever they might be, or who struggle to divine something. And again, maybe they use terms that you’ve learned to see as symbolic, much like the rap music, or basically, you wouldn’t use the same words, but you feel like you understand the intention behind them, where you’re glancing across their descriptions of the numinous, and that’s affected you in some way. That is what on some level has happened to me through a few different channels.

Stephen West: You’ve read the mystics?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do read a lot related to whether it’s Sufism or could be in the Christian traditions for sure. It could be any number. The team, so to speak, doesn’t matter as much to me as clear lucid description of what they feel was a direct encounter with something that is, I don’t want to use this word, but it’s as good as any right now, divine or but both accessible and perhaps ubiquitous and everywhere, while, at the same time, being or feeling hidden to most people. Right? Something like that.

Stephen West: Yeah, it’s not like you’ve argued a set of theoretical abstractions, come up with a philosophical system, and arrived at the divine. It’s like you strip away something, it’s imminent. It’s always sort of there. And various different types of self emptying, where just, through a practice, you can feel communion with the stuff around you at like a level that’s just extreme. Yeah, this is what we’ve been talking about on the show recently, and yeah, it’s fascinating to me the limitations of philosophy there, where there are aspects of the human experience that cannot be put into abstractions. 

So yeah, it’s dope, man. I’m super fascinated by it myself and excited to keep going deeper into these waters.

Tim Ferriss: Any particular, again, for lack of a better word, sort of mystics who’ve grabbed your attention?

Stephen West: Simone Weil’s often described as a mystic, more of a mystic practitioner than she is a mystic. Julian of Norwich. There’s multiple of these that their stories are just fascinating. Dogen, I’ve only read his name, but he’s a Zen — 

Tim Ferriss: Dogen.

Stephen West: Dogen. So I don’t know if he’s a mystic, but he definitely is in this wheelhouse of people as a Zen practitioner that is saying — 

Tim Ferriss: He’s a first cousin at least.

Stephen West: Really?

Tim Ferriss: To the mystics, I mean.

Stephen West: Yeah, definitely. So those are people that I find truly fascinating. And what I find also fascinating are people that are arriving at this kind of insight, but they’re trying to not go into religious practice. Like Camus is a guy that I’m doing on the podcast right now. I’m deep into his work, and he is just kicking and screaming, it seems, in his work to not go religious. Because he’s so skeptical of what it leads to. But he’s so interested in a pre-theoretical like justifying our behavior without justifying it with rational abstractions and just absurdism, as lucid revolt against the absurd, a descriptive endeavor, not a normative one. He’s talking about it in very mystic-sounding language, but then, he’s trying to do it within, not even the realm of philosophy, he rejects philosophers. He famously said he’s an artist and not a philosopher.

Tim Ferriss: He made a tough assignment for himself.

Stephen West: Yeah. He died in a car crash, unexpectedly. I honestly stay up at night these days thinking about what his late work would’ve been like. How does he not eventually go more in this religious direction, a daily lived practice as being the most authentic way to get access to this stuff? Although he was very skeptical of deifying eminence, as he says, this thing that we’re talking about, turning that into a God of itself. Anyway, he’s fascinating to me.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I look forward to more episodes.

Stephen West: Definitely.

Tim Ferriss: And Stephen, we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything we haven’t covered? Any closing comments, requests for my audience, anything you’d like to point them to? Certainly, they can find you at philosophizethis.org on Patreon. They can find you very easily. PhilosophizeThis on X. I am Stephen West, that’s with a P-H, Stephen West YouTube @PhilosophizeThisPodcast. Anything at all that you’d like to say before we wind to a close?

Stephen West: I guess I would just say thank you for being patient with me. And I get going in my head talking about philosophy. I don’t get to have conversations this deep about philosophy with very many people. I’m mostly around my wife and kids who want nothing to do with those sorts of things. So thank you for giving me a forum, and if I was a little too speedy talking through this stuff, I apologize. But just send me an email if you have any further questions, anybody. Thank you for you, man. Thank you for the sacrifice over the years, for doing something when you could have just sat around and did nothing, with your life. You did something. And that sacrifice literally opened possibilities for me that landed me here in this beautiful place. So thank you very much.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man. I really appreciate that, and I love doing it. How did I end up with this as a job, right?

Stephen West: Definitely.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m very excited for more episodes. People check out Philosophize This. It’s so relatable. It is so easily digested. Give it a shot. You will not regret it. And I’m also very excited about your book adventures. So we may offline chat more about that.

Stephen West: Definitely, yeah, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: So to be continued. And to everybody listening, we will link to everything that we discussed in the show notes, as per usual, Tim.blog/podcast. If you search West, I think you may be the only West I’ve interviewed, so Stephen West with a P-H.

Stephen West: You haven’t gotten Kanye? Kanye hasn’t been on the show?

Tim Ferriss: He’s not returning my texts. I don’t know. He’s very unpredictable.

Stephen West: Why’d I even come?

Tim Ferriss: Until next time, as always, everybody, be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but to yourself as well. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete, as Jack Kornfield would say. And also, as always, thanks for tuning in. See you next time.