YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen West

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115
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2025-04-23
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2025-04-23
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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

  1. “What can this person do for me? The conversation's boring to me. Or there's a way to not filter the person through all of your own agendas and projects, but just to see them as they are. It's like a self-empting. It's like cannotic. 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.”

    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

  2. “Dude, 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. She didn't want to have some theoretical understanding of what it was like to be a factory worker. She wanted to be there. She just has this concept of attention, man. Her example that she writes in her journal is just 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”

    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

  3. “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. Man in the sky stuff. And then I read Kierkegaard and I just started thinking totally differently about the whole question, about the language that people use to describe universal human experiences. I mean, Kirkegaard 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 being like, it just hit me like a ton of bricks one day. I'm like, oh, I listened 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 in religious conversations more generally, it just totally rocked me. And then that led me to Simone Vey, who's been top five favorite philosophers ever for me. And yeah.”

    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

  4. “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 that I think at that time was letters to a Christian nation. It's this whole new atheism sort of thing that was going on at the time. I had never read any philosophy before. So I thought, I mean, these people showed me what was possible to like think about the world. And so, I mean, I come from that new atheist beginning. I mean, I used to just argue. With people on the internet incessantly about that kind of stuff.”

    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

  5. “Yeah, I mean, I really do try to entertain ideas without accepting them. And it's given me a lot of peace because I just realized like 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”

    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

  6. “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. Hacking it onto the way that I see the world. It is just almost method acting a thinker. In service to these other people that want to know about the think or two. I mean, it really is a harmonious thing that's going on, and it's fun.”

    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

  7. “I personally don't look to philosophy. 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. For me, this is what philosophy is. It's the embodiment of a different conceptual tracing of 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

  8. “It's just, I think a utilitarian approach to practice or to this like a more fati thing, how else are you going to get to deeper levels of understanding of it? Or who's to even say that that's a deeper level of understanding it? Maybe this is just the best practical way for you to be using that in your life. I would not knock on you at all for doing that.”

    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

  9. “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. And 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 seem kind of naive almost. But it was only by having those conversations that got you to this next place anyway. And Wittgenstein talks about how you kick this ladder out from underneath you. You climb up the ladder, you use it, and then you kick it out from underneath you and you don't need it anymore.”

    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

  10. “No, not at all. No, I think that it's an extension of what we talked about with the meditation practice being utilitarian framed. And by the way, I don't think that should be a knock against it. People get into meditation because it's going to help them with anxiety or sleep better or 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.”

    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

  11. “Nietzsche said a more 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. This is an affirmative stance towards reality, where even if things are bad or uncomfortable or horrible, we're going to affirm reality as it is and not idealize it into something that it's not. It's very common for people to do, even when they're not religious, is to think of reality as though it owes you something, but to affirm reality fully is to accept the good, the bad. It's not to rationalize about it and to try to make excuses for it or frame your suffering in a way where it makes it go away, to truly affirm life and reality is just to be in it and to have life itself be enough truly. So yeah, I mean, I think that really is the essence of a morphati for 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

  12. “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, a morphati 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.”

    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

  13. “Deliberately. So I do think for somebody that's struggling emotionally, being able to be good at that skill of shaking up their static definitions of how things are in the world and seeing it in a new conceptual tracing, that is valuable to that person potentially. I just wouldn't ever prescribe it as 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 like really entertain and be open to these things in a way that they can change you. So, anyway, I would just say, I think philosophy is limited here.”

    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

  14. “Worldviews, the philosophy engineer, and the worldview is the bridge. Worldviews are made up of concepts that are linked together by assumptions is how I think about it, a concept in philosophy or whatever it's worth, is just the way we chop up and make sense of reality. So like a person as a concept, a tree is a concept, democracy is a concept, love may be a concept. So our worldviews are piecing these things together based on assumptions and philosophers are the people that are shaking up those rigid definitions that we have of these things and allowing us to see the world in a new way and the systematized practice of doing that.”

    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

  15. “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.”

    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

  16. “So I can list you 10 different practical philosophers and their systems and stuff like that if you want to study them. But for me philosophy is more a process. It's a verb. It's not a noun. It's like. Simon Blackburn, famous philosopher, wrote a book called Think, and he describes philosophy as conceptual engineering. It's a great metaphor. Yeah.”

    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

  17. “Makes sense, no, for sure. I think philosophy is wonderful, obviously But it's not a panacea, and it's certainly not something that. Would recommend to everybody, and it's not something that solves, I just think that what you're talking about about quelling anxiety, it's a trap, I think, to try to think a philosopher or a philosophy is going to fix that. I think it's more in a daily lived practice like what you're talking about. And that lies outside the bounds of philosophy. There's a quote from Philosopher, we were just doing an episode on, we 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.”

    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

  18. “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?”

    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

  19. “No, no, not at all. I mean, sorry to hear about your family. So, you're talking about the Hellenistic age, basically, or you're talking about Epicureanism, you're talking about Stoicism. So there's two more there, skepticism and cynicism. Cynicism famously is the school of thought of Diogenes. 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? I mean,”

    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

  20. “Absolutely 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, 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 sort. So if you're looking for a place to start I'll say this if I'm ever recommending a place for people to start, I just ask them what they're into. So, what are you interested in?”

    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

  21. “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 skill set. Professional marketers or whatever will come along and 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. If you do amazing content that people don't want to live without, you can't keep it a secret. That's why I focused on that for so long. I would never put something out that isn't content that I hope people don't want to live without.”

    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

  22. “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.”

    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

  23. “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 trying to leave something for my kids if I. Kick the bucket one day. Yeah.”

    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

  24. “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 emerging into a different market there. It is centered around the podcast.”

    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

  25. “About once every two weeks, 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. I've been really enjoying it.”

    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

  26. “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. So I see it. That's cool though. I'll take it.”

    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

  27. “I get it. It's just an artist's 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 tough to watch yourself 12 years ago now doing it for the first time publicly. The first episode was literally like I went, I just mentioned the out of Africa theory and how, oh yeah, people had a lot of free time back then and 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. Brutal, but also beautiful in a way because it's where it had to start”

    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

  28. “There. 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. I set up a stand in the middle of a mall, he was saying, you know, that's how I see it. Like I just. 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.”

    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

  29. “You could say no, but it's beautiful. The medium, how versatile it is. So that's what I saw. And so I just wanted to be my own.”

    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

  30. “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? And it could be a three hour conversation with people smoking weed, talking about nothing. It could be 10 minutes of highly focused.”

    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

  31. “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 you know, it started taking off pretty quickly. So luckily wasn't too much of a time period there.”

    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

  32. “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 just read every theory I possibly could. And 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. First week, I was on the new and noteworthy section on iTunes. It was a successful lunch, you know, and then after 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

  33. “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. Like there was This feeling at the time that I mean, what's the cliche? The radio is 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.”

    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

  34. “Even subconsciously trying to do an impression of what they think success looks like. But I 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? Just noticed that 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. And it's like, I just wanted to do something that was a little more humanizing, a little more translating.”

    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

  35. “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 what 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 like industries where people will just be”

    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

  36. “Yeah, that hit me, man. Yeah. 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 made me want to take a chance. And then the whole Amerson thing, I don't even got to be a genius, right? I just got to be brave enough to say it. Felt possible”

    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

  37. “I used to play games around this time too. I would play StarCraft 2. With friends, and I was playing at a pretty high level, so I knew people that were like in the business. So, yeah, he was in their circles and stuff. And we just kind of vibed.”

    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

  38. “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. Like you should just try it. And even if you fail, like whatever, but I'm just, I'm here to tell you that dude had such an impact on 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

  39. “It was two things. On one hand, I had 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. And so I was very desperate to try to make anything work. There was a guy named Jimmy Wisenhunt. He was like a shout caster for esports at the time, but he was my friend. Shout caster is like a person that does comedy like John Madden does commentary for football. This guy does it for counter-strike and StarCraft and stuff like 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

  40. “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 warehousing. Another thing I'm very fortunate to have”

    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

  41. “Would just work on the weekends. It would be a guarantee thing I come in. And the reason they would do it that way is because they don't have to pay benefits package at that point. It benefits the company at some level. But 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.”

    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

  42. “Don't want to be a rock star. I don't want to be like a millionaire doing this. All I want to do is be able to play a few gigs on the weekend or some studio sessions or something. And then I'm playing guitar for a living. I am literally living the dream if I can do that. And Duke's Chatterhouse is just how I pacify my mom. I just pay her some rent, right? For me, it was like I needed to find a way to make $800 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.”

    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

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

    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

  44. “Just read every essay that he ever wrote. He actually didn't write that much. He was a guy that was kind of preoccupied with other things.”

    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

  45. “So, I'd say self reliance and on nature are the two that you absolutely have to read. But if you like what he's saying in those two, I would definitely run into go to secondary sources and...”

    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

  46. “For me to notice that. You can just be a catalyst for Sentiment that already exists in the hearts of people, and then you become the thing that they connect to. Like they start to see you as symbolic of that. So really, he made me change my thinking to write and to say something worth saying is not to be a genius. It's to be brave. It's to be the one to say it and to have courage. Really, that's probably a primary factor that determines whether one of these YouTube creators is successful or has a channel or not. It's just they were the ones to say it. They had the courage to say it and risk all the bad that might come from that, 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

  47. “Have a podcast or a YouTube channel or whatever it was, you needed to be a genius. This is kind of a myth that I think gets promoted is like if you're not a genius, you have nothing really that interesting to say. So who's ever going to follow you and that stuff? He was living during a time right around the abolition of slavery. So in the United States, it's a crucial time, a lot of changes are going on. There's also an Irish immigrant crisis going on at the time. And he wants to inspire people with his work to take action, to think for themselves, to be the catalyst for change in the world, if that's something that they want. And the way to apply what he's talking about, like a YouTube channel, is, I mean, look at these YouTube creators. Are they geniuses? Are these people unparalleled geniuses, thinkers of our time? No, they're people that have a certain message that they're sending. And that message corresponds to something that already exists in culture. You don't need to be a genius. You just need to be saying something that resonates with other people. That was huge.”

    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

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

    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

  49. “Yeah, when you wrote it, did you intend for it to inspire people like me? I mean, were you thinking about it philosophically or were you thinking about it like I have all this knowledge and I'm going to trade it for $13 or whatever the book's price was?”

    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

  50. “I mean, and you're also talking about it in contrast to an emerging digital world that at the time was just coming about, like new possibilities were presenting themselves in people's lives that they weren't necessarily aware of. And yeah, I mean, what philosopher is talking about these issues? So that book was beautiful for me to even think that it was possible to start a podcast. So for whatever, it's worth thank you for that.”

    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