#808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living

24:00I just pay her some rent, right? 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. 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 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.

24:30But for me, it was perfect because 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 just go in on the weekends, eight hours, you know, that was my version of phasing in the podcast and phasing out the like warehousing. Another thing I'm very fortunate to have. So let's take a closer look at that. I'm so interested in the catalyzing periods, right? Like what happened in the span of a few weeks where you thought, well, maybe I could do this, but aren't those people geniuses too? Okay, I'm actually going to do weekends only and take that, which is a non-trivial step, right?

25:09Right. Like what did that look like? I mean, 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, you know, maybe kind of in some universe that's maybe possible, but don't I have to be a genius to, all right, I'm going to work two days a week? It was two things. 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 30s, 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.

25:46And so I was very desperate to try to make anything work. There was a guy named Jimmy Wisenhunt. He was like a shoutcaster for e-sports at the time, but he was my friend. What is a shoutcaster? 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. Okay, cool. Yeah. So 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.

26:19How did you know each other? 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. In that world. So yeah, he was in their circles and stuff. And we just kind of vibed. Yeah, nice. Okay, so he's telling you, it would just be a shame if you never tried. You got to try something. Yeah, that hit me, man. Like, 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. Like, yeah, it just, it made me want to take a chance.

26:52And then the whole Emerson thing, I don't even got to be a genius, right? I just got to be brave enough to say it. It felt possible. And what did you look to? Because this was early days, right? I mean, when was this? Like 2012, 2013? Yeah. Something along those lines. 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, right? Who did you look to for inspiration?

27:32Like in some ways, and it's not exactly the same, the game is a little different, but and this is, I say this is a huge compliment. You remind me in some ways of Dan Carlin and Hardcore History. That's the literal guy that I used to listen to at the warehouse all the time. It's a huge compliment to hear. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So Dan, and for people who don't know, I've interviewed Dan. You can look it up. A phenomenal human. And he is not. He'll be the first person to tell you. Professional historian, right? 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.

28:10But 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 Subodai, looking down, you know, it's just like... Yeah. And that's from Wrath of the Cons if people want to watch. Fantastic series. And I say watch, that's an interesting slip because his language is so visually evocative. Yeah. Okay, Dan Carlin. That makes a whole lot of sense. So is 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.

28:46I mean, Wrath of the Cons, I'm making this up, but it's like four or five parts. Each one is like four to five hours. Yeah, he's fantastic. And 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.

29:19But 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? So I just noticed there were a lot of really smart, really talented people. Peter Adamson, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Partially Examined Life at the time was huge.

29:49And it's like, I just wanted to do something that was a little more humanizing, a little more translating. That's all I was thinking. Okay. And you commit to working two days a week. What else are you committing to? All right, 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? Luckily for me, it took off fairly quickly. So I spent a few months before just researching how to launch a podcast. Like I would just listen to podcasts about podcasting. I would read books about it, about blogging too, because there really wasn't that much.

30:29Like there was this feeling at the time that, I mean, what's the cliche? The radio is to the TV, the TV is to the phone or something like that, right? Like 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. And so, So yeah, I mean, 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.

31:06And 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 launch. And then after that, 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. If you had to hindsight 2020 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?

31:40Recognizing that launching then and launching now are quite different animals, but still, I think there are lessons to be learned. 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 like an afterthought. It was just the free content so you could drive people to funnels to then sell them the premium content or something, right? I saw it as like a very open-ended medium that was beautiful. And it could be a three-hour conversation with people smoking weed, talking about nothing.

32:16it could be, you know, 10 minutes of highly focused. I can't imagine who that is. Yeah, me neither. But it's been highly successful, right? I mean, pretty successful. I mean, the most successful. You could say. No, but it's beautiful. The medium, how versatile it is, you know? So that's what I saw. And so I just wanted to be my own lane there. You know, I didn't want to be a part of podcasting. I wanted to just be a shop. There was an interview with Bill Burr on the Fearless series. He was talking about, I don't really see myself as part of comedy. I just sort of do my thing. And I guess I'm a part of comedy.

32:48I set up a stand in the middle of a mall, he was saying. That's how I see it. I just 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. 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? About 4 ,000 words long. I've read slower back then, so it's about 30 minutes or so.

33:25It would vary back then a bit, but yeah. And what were the first handful of episodes? The pre-Socratics. The first episode, it's so hard to even listen to it. I've had to go back recently. I'm like, listen, I get it. It's just an artist dilemma. Like you go, I mean, I'm not trying to talk down to anybody that enjoys those episodes still, but just from my perspective, you can imagine it's, it's tough to watch yourself, you know, 12 years ago now doing it for the first time publicly. The first episode was literally like I would, I just mentioned the out of Africa theory and how, Oh yeah, people had a lot of free time back then.

33:59And they had to, they talked a lot. So talking leads to philosophy and they kind of settled around the Ionian coast and the Italian coast. And this led to the pre-Socratics. It's just like most of the episodes are me just like telling stories from their life or something. It's brutal, but also beautiful in a way, because it's where it had to start. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of striking not to like overwield the comparisons here, but maybe like the story of the pre-Socratics as you just described it is sort of like the origin of the podcast in the early episodes. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like figuring it out, finding the language, trying to develop a water feel for what this thing is, whatever this thing happens to be, whatever it will be.

34:40For whatever it's worth, people tell me that's one of the endearing things that they like about it. They like seeing somebody kind of 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. All right. So at this point, how many episodes have you done? 225. 225. All right. What's the frequency? About once every two weeks now. There was a period there where I was doing like one a month and stuff like that, but now I've been working a lot more lately. So I've been really enjoying it.

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36:39All right, so if we flash forward and we look at this craft you've developed, the life you've built, what does the philosophy of this ecosystem look like? You have Patreon, right? What are the different pieces of the puzzle as it stands currently? Do you mean from like a monetization? Yeah, yeah. From a business perspective. Yeah. Yeah. I have Patreon. I have ads that I run now and I have this book deal. That's going to be good for 2026, like kind of merging into a different market there. It is centered around the podcast. So yeah, that's kind of the core. And you mentioned you initially weren't planning on or pursuing advertising.

37:22Around what episode did you start doing advertising? 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... You live longer on this planet, you don't know when you're going to die. I'm just, I'm trying to leave something for my kids if I kick the bucket one day. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. All right. It's been fairly recent though, to the thrust of your question. It's like, I don't know, maybe episode 180 or something like that.

37:54Yeah. Okay. So there we go. The reason that 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, right? 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.

38:38It just, it seems to make a lot of difference. I mean, 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. They'll support with their skillset, you know, like professional marketers or whatever will come along and like offer. 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.

39:09If 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. What are some of your most popular episodes to date? Do any stand out? People really like the Dostoevsky series that I just did. we were talking about this before we started recording but so i was trying to figure out was dave you know just 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 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 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 what I should grab.

40:06So Dostoevsky. So from about last October, there's a new arc of the show that I'm doing that's on kind of 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? Is 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.

40:42So what are you interested in? Well, let's see. I mean, I'll tell you if I had a wishlist in this, 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.

41:26It was 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. That would be on my wish list. I would say the Stokes 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.

42:18For instance, right now, 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'm 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. No, no, not at all. So, I mean, sorry to hear about your family. 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.

42:54Cynicism famously is the school of thought of Diogenes. 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 just, I mean, maybe 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? Yeah, I do. I do. Right now I'm meditating twice a day. Okay. So is that practice framed in like a utilitarian way for you? Is it like, I'm doing it so that I can quell anxiety? How do you think of it? Yeah, I would say there are a few different ways that I look at it.

43:29So shameless plug, I'll just mention it because it is so good. There's an app called The Way. Henry Shookman is the teacher. It is Sambo Zen focused. I was introduced to Henry. Actually, I 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.

44:28You 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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. No, for sure. I think philosophy is wonderful, obviously, but it's not a panacea. And it's certainly not something that I would recommend to everybody.

45:04And 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 kind of make philosophy into like an intellectual exercise, but not be open to it in any way that really is transformative.

45:35So 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. It's like Simon Blackburn, 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.

46:10Philosophers do this with worldviews. The philosopher is the engineer, and the worldview is the bridge. world views are made up of concepts that are linked together by assumptions is how I think about it. A concept and philosophy or whatever it's worth is just the way we chop up and make sense of reality. So like a person is a concept, a tree is a concept, democracy is a concept, love may be a concept. So our world views 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.

46:47So 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 would never prescribe it as like 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.

47:18So anyway, I would just say, I think philosophy is limited here. 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. I mean, 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.

47:58Could you explain what this is for people who may not be familiar? Sure. Yeah. I mean, 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, I mean, amor fati translates into love of fate. It's the idea that so many traditions in the religious sectors or just in our, I mean, 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 is going to live his life. I mean, henceforth, he decided, I mean, everything he is going to say yes to, he will be a yes-sayer is what he says.

48:38This 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 mean, I think that really is the essence of amorphity for me.

49:19And I mean, the way that I self-help bastardize this for myself, just 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-helpy i mean what i ended up doing is like okay how could i exaggerate this to go beyond acceptance like if i actually had to find a way to praise to view in a positive light 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 gonna whack your head on a lot of corners.

49:57But in this particular, I was 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 probably dropped my cortisol and resting heart rate tremendously. And that may not be maybe Anic's turning over in his grave with me just to give it a push on this way.

50:38No, 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. like people get into meditation because it's going to help them with anxiety or sleep better or forex their productivity or something like that but if that's what gets you to the deeper stages of that of like your awareness where it's no longer something you're doing for some utilitarian end i mean 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.

51:12And now you can essentially throw out the entire book because we've gotten to this new place. He's talking about like, he compares it to a ladder. It's like 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 kind of pointless, just kind of naive almost. But it was only by having those conversations that got you to this next place anyway.

51:42And 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, like a Morphati 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. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. You have my acceptance there.

52:13I 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 mutually exclusive, but there's also a philosophy that if I read it, it just lets the snow globe settle, right? 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.

52:51I mean, it's kind of a microcosm of on anger, where he's bitching and moaning about some type of bathhouse and gym below where he's living. And they're like sweaty and slapping things around and dropping weights and it's bugging the shit out of it. 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, writers, broadly speaking, with a philosophical bent, or philosophies that have that effect for you.

53:34I personally don't look to philosophy for a set of protocols to live by. I think it's reactive. I mean, the world is always in a state of becoming. It's always changing into the future. And I think 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 20s, 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.

54:08For me, this is what philosophy is. It's the embodiment of a different conceptual tracing of the world. So what does that look like, I guess, if we were to just put it in philosophical tracing for conceptual tracing for dummies, right? What is that in your lived experience? What would maybe an example look like? 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.

54:47I mean, it really is a harmonious thing that's going on and it's fun. But yeah, I mean, I really do try to like... 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.

55:21So if we're looking at Stephen West's version one, or maybe like 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? Yeah. I mean, Nietzsche was huge for me early on in my life. Kierkegaard was very big after that because I realized in my early 20s, I mean, what kind of got me thinking about philosophy was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I think at that time it was Letters to a Christian Nation. It's this whole like new atheism sort of thing that was going on at the time.

56:03I had never read any philosophy before. So I thought, I mean, these people showed me what was possible to like think about the world. And so, I mean, I come from that like new atheist beginning. I mean, I used to just argue with people on the internet incessantly about that kind of stuff. That's what the internet's paid for. Yeah, I mean, I was very young. So 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 just, I started thinking totally differently about the whole question, about the language that people use to describe universal human experiences.

56:39I mean, 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 just, it totally rocked me.

57:07And then that led me to Simone Weil, who's been the top five favorite philosophers ever for me. And yeah. Okay. That name you just gave, how do you spell the last name? W E I L. Okay. And how do you pronounce that? I don't even know. They, they, they, Simone V and for whatever it's worth, it's in another language. I'm just a dumb American. I've definitely fucked that up at least a dozen times. I'm just a dumb American. It could be something totally different. You know, if we added up all of my mispronunciations on this podcast, I mean, it would, it would be the size of one of my phone books that I write.

57:36Dude, she is 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 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.

58:08She 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 like, when you're talking to somebody, you can approach that conversation and filter every bit of it through this idea that 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. What can this person do for me? That conversation is boring to me. It doesn't. And 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.

58:41It's like a self-emptying. It's like canonic. 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 that's something I would write down. 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? 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.

59:19It 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 like external rituals to follow, you just end up worshiping at the altar of yourself oftentimes. And narcissism is like 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 mean, I was like 25 or something at the time. And then it really didn't hit me fully until I was like 32.

59:50Like 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 it was incredible. 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? It's fair. I think it's just a lack of talent. I think it's a, you know, I mean, generally speaking, that's what's going on there. Nobody wants my footprints in there.

1:00:31There's got to be more to it. There's got to be more to it. Is it? Yeah. I mean, you could be doing choreographed dances on TikTok if you wanted. No, I couldn't. That's where you're wrong, Tim. No. No, I mean, what do you, like, I mean, people give me offers. I try to keep the grass cut, I guess. I mean, one element of it is I try to keep my life simple. I have my wife and kids. I have the show. And that's about it. I mean, 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.

1:01:09So I'm just super grateful. 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? Yeah. I mean, I really do sacrifice efficiency for meaning pretty often. Like reading the four-hour workweek was transformative for me and it really put a fire underneath me to like 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've just, I'll find myself burning out if I separate myself from the task.

1:01:51If 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'm giving myself, okay, the next four hours, and then I'm going to meditate with baby Yoda on top of a mountain and then I'm going to like do a, me and my cat are going to report on our podcast. Have you been watching my nanny cam? No. So yeah, it's just, I will sacrifice efficiency for meaning a lot of times and it doesn't make me the most productive.

1:02:25The way I justify it 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 and Dave. And so yeah, that's a line that I set for myself, I guess. Yeah. I suppose if I were to add something to, 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, I don't know how that first book really did what it did.

1:02:59I 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

1:03:20on one level to a certain degree, right? And the dose makes the poison. That's paracelsis, 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, right? 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.

1:04:13And that ends up being a very painful way to go through life. And I feel that. Yeah. So for me, it's like, I have more and more, and I really liked 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.

1:04:55And 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. 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. I think there are like 10 % of the things I do are default hyper-efficient.

1:05:34And then I think people would be disgusted and shocked if they were to have seen the first half of my day-to-day. 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. I asked the hard-hitting questions. I know. I didn't see this turn of events when I was prepping for this conversation. But I do think more and more, I mean, who knows? Maybe that's a book in the future, but they'd 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 podcast just the long game what does it mean to play long game yeah 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 yeah and then to feel quasi alienated from everything you're doing like you're looking at yourself from the outside or something i mean For me, this is what I struggle with, right?

1:06:32Yeah. I mean, I don't struggle with it anymore, but I have to be conscious about this every day for that reason. Mm-hmm. So there are a couple of cues I have here 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. Right. What is that? 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. It's kind of related to a conversation of why would anybody even care about philosophy at all?

1:07:11It 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. I mean, 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 in that book, motion, optics, the relationship of particles.

1:07:48This was the domain of natural philosophy before Newton comes along and writes this landmark work, and then it becomes a specialized field. I mean, 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, in ethics, in 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 like an economist at first.

1:08:21He 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 at 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 I mean, how to treat each other. We're already thinking about things the best we ever have. What I'm saying, 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.

1:08:58And 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. So if we go and double click on better conversations, I mean, 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. We have developed incredible technology. We have this fantastic framework, scientific method for principally not fooling ourselves, but testing hypotheses, right 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 that philosophy for me has been fertile ground for finding good questions and by the way that goes on in every one of these specialized disciplines the ph and phd stands for philosophy for a reason.

1:10:08I mean, 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 I mean, it is compartmentalized and specialized and technical and I mean, all the things that it is when we're just talking about an experimental setting. I think you're right. Anybody at the top of these fields has to be doing philosophy.

1:10:37And that extends to asking good questions in our lives to try to come up with new ways of seeing things. 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 very firmly believe that, that you have much more anti-fragility built into it for surviving in an audio format.

1:11:32It'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? I mean, you mentioned the book projects. That's one way of kind of diversifying format, maybe opening new doors. But how are you thinking about playing the long game? I mean, 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 mean, I genuinely have just been listening to people tell me what they want to hear about and showing up every day, I mean, completely iteratively, like just trying to do it the best I possibly can.

1:12:20That 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. Here's the heart of your question. Maybe something you want. Like I would like to write philosophical fiction at some point. I would like to not be like teaching philosophy forever. I would like to just incorporate philosophical ideas and maybe deliver it in a different way. That's like a, like outside possibility. I don't think so. I don't think so. I'll be, I'll be like the shoutcaster. Really? Oh yeah. Really? I don't think it's an outside. Maybe this is the moment.

1:12:47I don't think it's in a, yeah, we have it recorded. I don't think that's an outside possibility at all. You think people would enjoy hearing about these philosophical ideas, it delivered to them in fiction? As long as I'm a decent writer. 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 not, this is a bit of a strained metaphor, but like delivering the medicine with some honey? Absolutely. I think people are drawn to it already. They just wouldn't necessarily describe it that way. I feel like I'm writing these episodes and it is a lot of writing.

1:13:22Like I, 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 like not real. It's a, it's, it's interesting how the skills translate over. So yeah, maybe someday. Oh yeah. Yeah. I would, I would say, I don't think that's an outside chance. Right. Particularly. I mean, 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.

1:14:11So 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? And then the answer might be fiction that has a lot of philosophy embedded. So I think that is a helpful hypothetical plan 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.

1:15:02or they end up doing, in my case, the three-hour workweek, then the two-and-a-half-hour workweek, then the so on and so forth. And when you travel that path, you end up painting yourself into a genre corner, which is the reason I did the four-hour body after the four-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 it's really something you want to try, it doesn't work, you can always go back to the first. How do you think of the podcast here?

1:15:35Like 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. Much like podcasting, do you see your ongoing podcast as like a serialized version of a book that you're just always writing and like maybe episode 200 through 250 is a book? 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.

1:16:17where I can, much like I've seen comedians do, for instance, even on the podcast, I've had comedians who 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've got, at this point, seven out of seven 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.

1:17:10I really think you can - You get captured. Yeah, you can get captured and shaped. You can turn it 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 up front so that i don't get oversteered by the audience now let me see what really resonates you 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 it's like i don't want a six out of 10 from 80 % of my audience.

1:18:09I want a 10 out of 10 from like 20 % 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 a very wise way to do it. It's very lived. It matches with your experience. Like you're, 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.

1:18:44It's, it's beautiful, man. Because you're not just planning episodes out into the future, just saying, Oh, this is what Tim Ferriss would do. You know, like you're, you're just living life and then it's cool. And I guess I'm here as one little small part of that. I don't know how small man, I mean, I'll give you an example. So you're talking about fiction. 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 kind of self-imposed limitations around it or procrastination.

1:19:27So who knows? I mean, maybe I'll look back and I'll be like, fuck, I accidentally called myself out. Shit, didn't see that coming. And my interactions with guests have had such a huge impact on my life. It's impossible to overstate. I mean, enormous, gigantic. All right, 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.

1:20:06What might you put on the billboard? Jeez, 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. I mean, this is kind of the antithesis of what I'm doing. Like, it's a way of thinking wisdom. It's not a particular idea. If I have to come up with one, let me see. Good, yeah. Great question for you. How about that, be the one that takes advice? How about that? I like that. I don't give advice because if a person is asking for advice, I mean, typically they're not the person that really takes the advice, really.

1:20:44So 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 like six months. You'll be the one giving it, right? So maybe that's what I put on the billboard. 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? Like how might they change how they relate to people or the world or otherwise? What might that look like? I don't know.

1:21:11man, they'd have to like 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 deliberate, like a motivational video on YouTube, but just 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 like, I mean, education, like truly try to take things from moments and be open to them. It's maybe an important point here for philosophy.

1:21:44It's 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. I just think education, 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 like if you strip away all the rules there and like re-territorialize it, it is just, I mean, education is constant. It's constantly going on.

1:22:18Yeah, 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. It's a hit with the kids. Yeah, exactly. You know, 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 so i used to give like overviews of philosophy and stuff like that i don't do that anymore um 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 like look into your heart maybe go to the bathroom and like flip the lights on and off for a while and just stare at yourself in the mirror and really, really think about what you're interested in.

1:23:10And 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. Like 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 like academic sources. It's usually written by somebody from academia that has dedicated a good portion of their thought and 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 and Noble, look at Being in Nothingness by Sartre.

1:23:47It's like 700 pages long and just pull it off and start trying to read it. It's just, 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. So when you say secondary source, what you mean by that is someone who is commenting on the work. Some expert that is trying to humanize this work, trying to make it available, that may be 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.

1:24:24I 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. 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. Nice. Obstacles away and so on. Or I think it's just called On the Good Life. William Irvine, I believe it is. Yeah. Could be getting that wrong, but something along those lines, which then comments on Epictetus and so on, all of these. Right. And 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?

1:24:58Yeah. You can wade through all of the astronomy and cosmological arguments and not throw the book away in anger and confusion. Are there any really bizarre philosophers or philosophies strange that you're like, kind of into it? Like philosophy kink. Is there any like - 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. How do you spell the last name? D-E-L-E-U-Z-E. Got it. So he's a great example of somebody that his philosophy is an invitation.

1:25:38The 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, the ways we chop up and make sense of the word in terms of nouns. They think of them in terms of like a thing that exists statically. But I mean, 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 like misunderstanding the world if we think about things in terms of fixed categories, snapshots of the world at all.

1:26:16So because of this, he thinks of the world mostly in terms of verbs, you could say. I mean, 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 fixed identity at all.

1:26:53I mean, 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. Like, what would reality be structured around adverbs, for example? It would just be the modulation of the way that things are arising or leaving. Quickly, cheaply. 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.

1:27:28So Deleuze is perfect for that, I think. 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 sure yeah i mean certainly at the beginning of the show yeah yeah 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 yeah i think that was something towards the beginning of my show because i just find the question personally to be unanswerable, like older that I get.

1:28:12I 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 mean, 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 things like concepts that basically everybody has thoughts on I mean 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 like 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.

1:29:06It'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. It's 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.

1:29:37It'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 act of commitment, a little slice of the universe in 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. This is the essence of love. Now, even if you disagree with that, that's just, 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.

1:30:08I mean, 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. And yeah, I mean, 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. I mean, this is why like, you'll hear a philosopher talk about like the philosophy of language or something. They'll talk about like, what does it mean to mean something or something like that?

1:30:38And 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 and the new conceptual tracing, massively valuable. I mean, 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.

1:31:11So anyway, why we believe what we believe, I think comes from just engaging in that process more. Let's do a callback to the new atheists sam harris jadalkins both tremendous writers fantastic so you used to yell at people on the internet hard to yell over the keyboard but you type very ferocious 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 I'm not going to church every Sunday. Yeah. 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?

1:32:00No, no, I don't. But I will say this, the older that I get, the more I realize that most of the people that I respect talking about the, 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 And they're just being people. They got kids. They got a job to go to. They don't got time to sit around and read philosophy and religion all day long. Like you need a story that's going to relate to them. And it guides them to wisdom that's written into it. I mean, I don't think that God needs to be anthropomorphic like that.

1:32:34I mean, much more in this religious phenomenology thing, it's been much more along the lines of like Aquinas, where he just believes God is being itself or somewhere along these lines. I mean, obviously a very complicated conversation to try to put into a summary form here. but yeah, I'm more and more interested with what... How would you answer that question on a billboard? Right. Three words. 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.

1:33:08And that's all I can do really, I think. 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, 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. It 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.

1:33:46I'm going to read this. I'm going to read Dogger. I'm going to gather the Avengers of the 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 a really important lifeline slash raft that he needed in a life of incredible instability at that point in time. I didn't end up pressing it. But then over time, well, I don't want to make this like some TED talk for me right now, but the question for you is, you know, I've softened around those edges a lot.

1:34:27And 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 have had these direct experiences with different labels, revelatory experiences, divine experiences, whatever they might be, or who struggle to define something. And again, maybe they use terms that you've learned to see as symbolic, right? Much like the rap music, right? 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.

1:35:13That is what on some level has happened to me through a few different channels. You've read the mystics. Yeah, I do read a lot related to whether it's Sufism or could be in the Christian traditions for sure. 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 anything. right now, like divine or both accessible and perhaps ubiquitous and everywhere while at the same time being or feeling hidden to most people, right? Something like that.

1:36:03It'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, right? And various different types of self-emptying where just through a practice, you can feel communion with the stuff around you at a level that's just, it's fascinating to me, the limitations of philosophy there, where there are aspects of the human experience that cannot be put into abstractions. Yeah, it's dope, man. I'm super fascinated by it myself and excited to keep going deeper into these waters.

1:36:38Yeah. Any particular, again, for lack of a better words, mystics who've grabbed your attention? Simone Weil is often described as a mystic, more of a mystic practitioner than she is a mystic. I mean, Julian of Norik, there's multiple of these that are like, their stories are just fascinating. Dojen, I've only read his name, but he's a Zen. Yeah, Dogen. 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. He's the first cousin, at least. Really? To the mystics, I mean. Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, those are people that I find truly fascinating, yeah.

1:37:15And 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, right? But he is so interested in a pre-theoretical, justifying our behavior without justifying it with rational abstractions and just absurdism, 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.

1:37:56He rejects philosophers. Famously said he's an artist and not a philosopher. He made a tough assignment for himself. Yeah. He died in a car crash unexpectedly. I honestly stay up at night these days thinking about what his late work would have 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. The thing that we're talking about, turning that into a God of itself. Anyway, he's fascinating to me. Well, I look forward to more episodes.

1:38:31And 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. Philosophize This. On X, I am Stephen West. That's with a P-H, Stephen West. YouTube, at philosophizethispodcast. anything at all that you'd like to say before we wind to a close? I guess I would just say thank you for being patient with me. And, uh, you know, I get going in my head talking about philosophy.

1:39:09I 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, uh, 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 land me here in this beautiful place.

1:39:42So thank you very much. Thanks, man. I really appreciate that, and I love doing it. I mean, how did I end up with this as a job, man? Yeah, definitely. And I am 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 definitely yeah so to be continued and everybody listening we will link to everything that we discussed in the show notes as per usual tim.blog slash podcast if you search west i think you may be the only west I've interviewed.

1:40:25So Stephen West with a PH. You haven't gotten Kanye? Kanye hasn't been on this? He's not returning my texts. I don't know. He's very unpredictable. Why'd I even come? And 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. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel.

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1:45:35Thank you.