YouSaid · the spoken record

L.A. Paul

lines on the record: 111
first: 2025-02-20
most recent: 2025-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Of open and creative way. As opposed to just kind of vomit back what I was being told. Okay. Now I'm not going to mention the schools I was at. I mean, I put myself through school. I had to kind of apply. So it was a mix of things that made it go badly. And blame can be spread all around. Anyway, that's what happened.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A straightforward way. It was actually sad. It was Descartes that really she started with. And Descartes talks about the mind body problem, but she didn't make any connection to these sorts of questions. It was just like, oh, the mind is different from the body. And here are these questions. And here's an analysis of what Descartes was saying and what the problem was. And so it wasn't a good experience. And then the second time I took a more applied class and this was a philosophy of law and I tried this. And this also didn't go well. There's another thing which is that I may have mentioned I was a stubborn person. Well, I have views and I was committed to trying to kind of argue something that was kind of creative also with the first paper actually. I wanted to kind of give my own perspective and I'm sure that it was raw and not especially good in various ways. But it wasn't stupid. Do you know what I mean? And I got treated as though I was making a mistake by trying to kind of really engage in a very”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the first time, and part of it was like the class wasn't really designed, it was like designed, these are the things you should know if you are going to think about philosophy as like a 101. And she started out with some history. But it just wasn't when no one seemed to really care about like how to take these abstract ideas and connect them to things that were meaningful in a certain way. Like I care very much about the nature of how we live our lives, the kinds of struggles that individual people have. I'm fascinated by the fact that all of us have these internal worlds. And then there's some way in which we all have these internal worlds and then these internal worlds have to kind of coexist with the external world and we have to try to make sense of everything and try to understand other people. These are like deep puzzles for me. And it's not that analytic philosophy doesn't address this, but it doesn't address it.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I underestimated things, but also the teaching wasn't very good. I put myself through college and I started at a big state school and the class was huge and the professor wasn't really into the teaching and I had some TA. And so, you know, she would stand down there. It was this huge, like there must have been 300 students in the lecture hall and she would stand down on this blackboard and scribble things on the blackboard. And I could barely see it. And I didn't understand really what she was doing. I would do the readings and work really hard to understand the readings. The TA wasn't especially into his job either. And then there was the first assignment. I worked incredibly hard on it. Incredibly hard. And I had taken other classes like writing classes and stuff like that. And the TA hated it. And I was so angry that I just dropped the class. Like, you know, I was like, I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. So I dropped the class.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing worked. I mean, okay. So there were a combination of things, and some of it was me, and some of it was certainly the teachers. And also some of it was analytic philosophy can be extremely inaccessible. It's a beautiful way of thinking and it's a very rigorous, it involves a very rigorous conceptual concepts-oriented approach to thinking about almost anything that you want to pick out in the world around us or how we think and how we make sense of the world. But it's not very accessible in the sense that it doesn't feel very natural. And so the first thing was I was both immature, very impressed with myself in the sense of like, well, I'll just do this, you know. You know, I do mathematics. I do chemistry. I do physics. Like, why, of course, I can do this.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He understood the intellectual problems that I wanted to explore because he explores those intellectual problems. And I had never met anybody who had any understanding of this weird orientation that I had. I can tell you more, but that's how it happened. It was like completely random.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chemistry, and I really loved problem solving, so I loved organic chemistry. And that's what I was really into when I was in college. And I was good at it. Like, you know, I mean, it was my thing. I could have become a chemist. I also drove him back from his talk. But I thought, okay, wow. So he goes off to have his visit and I immediately go to the library, dig out being in time and start reading it. And I was like, this is fantastic, confusing, but really interesting. So then I drive him back. I tell him what I've gotten out of like the first, I don't know, like 10 pages I'd written. It's very dense. It's like, you know, it took me forever to read it. But I managed to get through 10 pages. And he said, you should study with me. Here are my details. Let's figure this out. And so that was how it started. I didn't know anything about him, but he was so great to talk to and so responsive and he understood.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell me about it. And I said, Well, I really care about how to understand who we are in the world. And I think a lot about time. And I'm trying to kind of make sense of what it's like to have kind of a point of view. And so I started just blabbing, you know, basically as I'm, I don't know how old I was, like 22 or something. And he said, as we're driving, he's like, you should study philosophy. You're exactly the kind of person who would be interested in doing philosophy. And I said, well, what should I say? He said, well, you should read Martin Heidegger's Being in Time to start because that's all about the nature of the self and time. And I said, okay. And then we kept going. We kept talking. And I said, okay, I'm going to read this book. And then he said, well, I think you should read the book. And then he said, and I think you also should study with me. This is after like an hour, like an hour because I told him I had studied.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Driving back and forth to the airport to pick up invited speakers. Quentin Smith was an invited speaker. So I drive to the airport and I pick him up. I don't think I knew anything about him. It wasn't like I thought, oh, a philosopher, I want to meet this person. It's just some random. Invitation. He gets in the car. Yeah, some random pickup. Right. I picked him up and he gets in the car and we start talking. It's a long drive. I think it was like, I don't remember.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I thought I really want to study philosophy. I don't know how to do this or what the best way is. And there are lots of different kinds of philosophy, I'll just add. So, you know, you can do kind of Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy. These are rough categories, you know, where, so like Easter might be nimized to be Buddhism or related sorts of kind of faith-based philosophical views. And then within Western style philosophy, there are like sort of continental philosophy and analytic style philosophy, which is what I do. Anyway, so I didn't even have a grasp of these distinctions, but I was committed. Okay, so I needed to earn some money because I graduated and I was just sort of living, hanging out with friends of trying to figure out what my next step would be. So I worked for the college.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was at Antioch College. I had gotten my undergraduate degree, I think, or I was close to finishing. I can't quite remember exactly when I met him, but I was already thinking I wanted to study philosophy, but wasn't sure how to go about it because I don't have an undergraduate degree in philosophy. In fact, I tried twice to take philosophy classes, and each time it was a huge disaster, I realized about three or four weeks into the class this wasn't working for me. So I dropped up. I never managed to take a single philosophy class when I was in college. And yet don't ask me to explain this. I have no idea. I was convinced that philosophy was probably the thing that would be most meaningful for me to study and explore. I don't know what to tell you about that other than can be a reasonably stubborn individual in various ways, as my husband won't be happy to elaborate on.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT