YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen West

lines on the record: 115
first: 2025-04-23
most recent: 2025-04-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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. Like you did something and that sacrifice literally opened possibilities for me that land me here in this beautiful place. So thank you very much.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Like how does he not eventually go more in this like 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, famously said he's an artist and not a philosopher.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 like he is 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 just...”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the mistakes, I mean, yeah, definitely. So, I mean, those are people that I find truly fascinating. Yeah. 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simone Vey is often described as a mystic more of a mystic practitioner than she is a mystic. I mean, Julian of Norwick, there's multiple of these that are like, their stories are just fascinating. Dojin. I've only read his name, but he's a Zen. 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”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, a very complicated conversation to try to put into a summary form here, but yeah, I'm more and more interested with what”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say this the older that I get, the more I realize that most of the people that I respect talking about, 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 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. I mean, much more, and 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not going to church every Sunday. 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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. Why we believe what we believe, I think, comes from just engaging in that process more.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 you'll hear a philosopher talk about the philosophy of language or something. They'll talk about like 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”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They might say love is a verb, not a noun. It is. A commitment, an active commitment to 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, this is, 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. I 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 I, you know, 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 it 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, the concepts that basically everybody has thoughts on.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the losers perfect for that, I think.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a bizarre example of a philosopher's work that this is one that I love because it gets you to start thinking of reality and 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. 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 misunderstanding 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. I mean, this is, again, a big oversimplification of it, but like 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. I mean, when you add...”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he's a great example of somebody that is philosophy 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, 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 DeLous, who actually just died in the 90s.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 academic sources. It's usually written by somebody from academia that has dedicated a good portion of their thought and life to What I would say start with a secondary source, meaning don't just go to Barnes Noble, look at being in nothingness by SART on the, it'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. Like, 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 like look into your heart, maybe go into the bathroom and 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. And then when you find it, go to, I would say, the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy. It's like Wikipedia on steroids. It's a free site.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's maybe an important point here for philosophy. It'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. And I just think education, advice giving. People often relegate it to like 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. Don't think of the world as just buildings and people walking around. You think of it as, I mean, education, like truly try to take things from moments and be open to them.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So it's almost always a waste of your time. But if you're the one that genuinely takes advice, and it's ironically,”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, this is a great question because it's like the inverse of me. Like the idea that wisdom can be distilled down into a single quote or like an idea or something, I mean, 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 question.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you're not just planning episodes out into the future, just saying, oh, this is what Tim Ferris would do. You're just living life, and then it's cool. And I guess I'm here as one little small part of that.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, a case study for whether you want to explore something deeper with your audience. It's beautiful, man.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much like podcasting, do you see your ongoing podcast as a serialized version of a book that you're just always writing and like maybe episode 200 through 250 is a book or”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think of the podcast here? Like, Dostoevsky wrote books and 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like I'm writing these episodes, and it is a lot of writing. Like, 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 interesting how the skills translate over. So yeah, maybe.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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. 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 like teaching philosophy forever. I would like to just incorporate philosophical ideas and maybe deliver it in a different way. That's like outside possibility.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And that extends to asking good questions in our lives to try to come up with new ways of seeing things.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, that goes on in every one of these specialized disciplines. The PH and PhD stands for philosophy for a reason. I 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,”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His big book is called Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, one of them. As natural philosophy in the title, it's because the things he's talking about 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. 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Like, it's kind of related to a conversation of why would anybody even care about philosophy at all? I mean, 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 every day? Like, why do you need philosophy? And what that point misses is.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? Yeah. I mean, I don't struggle with it anymore, but I have to be conscious about this every day for that reason.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, it's just I. I will sacrifice efficiency for meaning a lot of times, and it doesn't make me the most productive. The way I justified 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 it, and I'm just not in it, then I will go and hang out with my family. 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”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I really do sacrifice efficiency for meaning pretty often. Reading the four hour work week 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. The last few years, I've just, 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'm 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 a.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 like external rituals to follow, you just end up worshiping at the altar of yourself oftentimes. 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. Like 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.”
2025-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #808: Stephen West — From High School Dropout to Hit Podcast, and from Stocking Groceries to Reading Philosophy for a Living · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT