Factually! with Adam Conover - Philosophize Your Life with Stephen West

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Philosophy has the reputation for being dry and technical, but this week Stephen West, the host of Philosophize This! and self-taught philosophy expert joins Adam to explain how discovering philosophy transformed his life, and how it can improve yours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover, and we're going to continue our little philosophy series on the show today. If you've been listening, you've heard a couple episodes we've had with some incredible philosophers, Quill Kukla, incredible thinker, loved that conversation. Check it out if you didn't hear it. Last week, we had Susan Schneider on to talk about issues with transhumanism and mind uploading and how we need to apply philosophy to those questions. If you've been listening to this show, you know that I studied philosophy a little bit myself,

and that that is what put me on the path to doing comedy and the work I do today. You literally would not be listening to me right now if not for philosophy. It became a really basic part of my thinking. But I also have to admit that philosophy often can feel very confined and very distant from our own lives. You know, if you've taken a philosophy class ever in your life, you probably know the pursuit of academic philosophy can be really conceptual and dry. It sometimes can be hard to know why it matters, how it affects your life. Like, what are the fundamental questions of ontology,

metaphysics, or epistemology have to do with even more fundamental questions? Like, what the fuck should I wake up and do tomorrow, right? Those are the things that actually concern our lives. Sometimes it feels like philosophy doesn't have that much to say about them, but that thought is very at odds with the origins of what we often call Western philosophy. For instance, let's go back to ancient Greece. Ancient Greek philosophers had very strong ideas about how you should live your life. It was basically a world of toga-clad stepdads. Plato and Socrates were all about trying to discover how to live the right kind of life,

what they called the good life. They were asking and attempting to answer the question of what is the right way to live? For instance, Socrates argued that we should focus on the pursuit of virtue rather than the pursuit of, for instance, material wealth. And he conducted investigations into what virtues actually were. Like, what do we mean by that word? What behaviors and values should we consider virtuous? And it wasn't just them. The ancient world developed entire schools of thought about what actions were best and how to live. The Stoics, for instance, thought that negative feelings like

fear or envy were just incorrect judgments in the mind, and that if you were smart enough or moral enough, you wouldn't even feel them. So they believe that you could make yourself immune from suffering and that by feeding yourself a rich diet of virtue, you could be happy. Again, this is a philosophy not concerned with just abstract statements about truth, but how to live and how to be happy in your life. Now, if the Stoics sound less like heroic moral paragons and more like anal retentive buzzkills, well, maybe you'd prefer to follow Epicurus. This dude had a very clear directive for living. Pleasure is the only true and real good for humans. Love that. And pain is intrinsically,

fundamentally bad. Epicurus actually made the argument that pleasure, properly conceived and understood, of course, will lead to virtue, to living the right kind of life. Not bad. And hey, let me tell you, sounds like a blast. And it's not just that question about how to live. We forget that pretty much every field of endeavor used to be wrapped up in philosophy. It wasn't quite a science or an art. It was a way to apply rigorous thinking to your own actions to help you quite literally figure out what to do tomorrow. And this is a question that, you know, we still need answered. I don't know if you've noticed, but people today are still pretty confused about what the right way to live is. A lot of people

have that concern. They're searching for those answers, which leads me to wonder, is philosophy something that could still help us today, not just to understand the universe, but literally in our personal lives? Well, as our guest on the show today, we have someone who very much thinks that it does. And he is the perfect guest to talk to us about this. Stephen West is the host of Philosophize This. It's a fantastic podcast. I've been listening to it for years. It gives a chronological breakdown of the history of Western philosophy for a popular audience. You can listen to this podcast for just 30 minutes and come away with

a whole new understanding of a philosopher's work. It is really wonderful. And most interestingly, Stephen is an autodidact. He did not go to grad school for philosophy. He has simply read more philosophy than almost anyone else I have ever spoken to, including professional philosophers. This is a guy who just had burning questions about the world and how to live his own life and turned to philosophy to answer them with wonderful results. His story is incredibly inspiring and it harkens back to the way philosophy worked way, way, way back then in ancient Greece. So without further ado, please welcome my guest this week, Stephen West. Well, thanks so much for being here, Stephen. No problem. So, I'm a big fan of your podcast,

Philosophize This. I've been listening to it for years. It's a really wonderful way to get capsule downloads of different philosophers' work. Now, we've had academic philosophers on this show before, Quill Kukla and others. But the first time we talked, you and I spoke like probably about three years ago now? Yes, sir. Something like that.

You've got a very different trajectory into philosophy. You had a really different path into it. Can you just tell us about that? Right. So it actually came about by means of necessity. I, long story short, I was in foster care all throughout my childhood, lots of chaos, lots of abuse. And I was homeless at the age of 16 and I needed to drop out of high school. I couldn't go to college. But luckily enough, when I was working full time, then I realized that I was really angry and I had a lot of work to do on myself. And I was looking for answers.

To be honest, I was looking for mentors at the time and I didn't really have any avenues into one. So I literally Googled wisest person in the history of the world thinking if I read the words of somebody that's wise, maybe some of it will rub off on me. And the first result on Google at the time was Plato's Dialogue Gorgias. And it was about a man named Socrates who walked around the Athenian Agora, and he accosted people and asked them questions about courage and temperance. And I honestly was just hooked from the beginning. And I guess to be completely cliche, the rest is history. Like I've read an interpretive philosophy pretty much every day since. Wow. That's an incredible story. That's amazing. You said without going to college,

did you get a high school degree? No, I had to drop out to work full time. What kind of work were you doing? I was bagging groceries at a grocery store. And then I used that. I just worked hard every day and then asked them if I could get a transfer to the warehouse because it paid more. And that's where I spent about nine years of my life, just picking boxes and being completely sore at the end of the day and miserable. And yeah. And reading philosophy, coming home and reading philosophy yes sir i mean it was my passion that whole time but also um you could listen to music at the warehouse technically if you had earbuds but i would just break the rules and i'd listen to audiobooks about philosophy right podcasts and stuff so i was a criminal but got me here

you really think the the foreman would have come around go hey what are you hey west what are you I was a criminal, but got me here. You really think the foreman would have come around and go, hey, what are you? Hey, West, what are you doing? Give me that earbud. What is that? Aristotle. It's actually kind of funny because they would notice that I'd be deep in thought as I was picking and they'd all make fun of me. And they're like, what kind of music are you listening to?

Is this like trance? Like it was actually they could tell I was doing something that other people weren't i have to say i mean do you feel at all lucky uh look a lot of your story i'm sure you would not say you feel lucky um but to have a job where uh often i crave work that where my hands are occupied but my mind is not you know so often a lot of my work is very mental and I can't do those two things at once. And I'm like, I wish I could just, I like doing the dishes because I can listen to an audio book. You know what I mean? And I wonder if that's like, you're doing that kind of work that let your mind work while your hands were busy. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I certainly couldn't do it if I had a job at a bank or something like that. But I also couldn't

apply for a job really, because I didn't have a high school diploma. The only way I could have gotten that job without getting a GED or furthering my education is if I lied on the application and told them I had a high school diploma and they just never checked. And also on the contrary to what you said before, I do in fact feel lucky for my childhood and I mean how it was raised. It got me to where I am now.

There's a famous quote by Nietzsche. It's one of my favorite quotes that he, I mean, that he wishes self-mistrust and the wretchedness of the vanquished and you know, all these horrible things upon people because it shows the thing, the only thing that can show whether you're worth anything or not that one endures. And I've always related to that quote because of that. I feel lucky for having those experiences. Like, can you, can you dig into that a little bit more? Like which experiences and how did they, is there a specific one that you feel contributed? Sure. I mean, when you're, I'm sure there's something about me needing to bring order to chaos. That is the reason why I'm capable of explaining philosophy the way I do.

I mean, people say that I have a gift. I don't really see it as a gift. I see it as like, I mean, when you're nine years old and you're homeless and you get picked up by CPS and you're going from group home to group home to respite home to foster home, that's a very chaotic, crazy environment to live in. And if you can't make sense of it as a child, you develop skills to be able to make sense of it, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that. But I have to say, look, I mean, people listen to the show. No, I was a I have a bachelor's in philosophy, right? That's that's very it's the least degree you can get. I'm by no means an expert. But, you know, so much of my time was spent wishing I could like dig into the reading more. Right. Like I was fascinated by the ideas, but I was like, I'm having trouble getting through Kant. You know what I mean? more privileged, relaxed circumstance where in fact, my only job right for four years of my life was to do that kind of reading. And I still struggled with it. And you seem as though you

were, you just sort of were able to start inhaling it, even though you were in much less comfortable circumstances. And I'm curious what you attribute that to. Cause I, cause I listened to that. I'm like, man, that's impressive. I wish, I wish I could do that. I think I was as desperate and I cared. I knew that I was messed up. I knew that I needed to develop myself as a person. And I didn't really have any strong leads other than that. And so I just became super passionate about it. I mean, if you're obsessed with something,

you need to be obsessed with something. I just picked philosophy. Yeah. And at what point did you decide to start the podcast? About 2013. Yeah. And at what point did researching how to start a podcast and I mean, how to build a community online, SEO, you know, all the stuff that people research when they want to start a podcast. And about six months in, I just said, man, I'm going to do it today. And so I did it and people seem to enjoy it. It's, it's grown since then a lot. So that's good. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's an solid podcast, and you not only, you sort of have gone through philosophy chronologically in a way, right?

Yeah, definitely at first. I've skipped around a bit just for the sake of what listeners have wanted over the years. I've changed strategies. But this last year, I extensively covered political philosophy in the 20th century, and that was chronological. So I guess, yeah, it is chronological. And I think that's important when you're learning about philosophy, because you can see how the next generation's polymath genius refuted the previous generations. And you can see in real time the assumptions that Plato had that Aristotle corrected that then the Hellenistic

period corrected in Aristotle and then so on and so forth, you know? Well, so let's go back a second to when you started reading, you said you started with Plato's dialogue, gorgeous, gorgeous. Yes. And from there, where did that take you? Like, tell me a little bit about your own like personal progression through the history of philosophy. I you literally following that thread that whole way yourself from Plato to Aristotle to the folks who commented on them? trajectory was that I read Gorgias and then I quickly realized I was so lucky to quickly realize this to learn about hermeneutics. And I quickly realized that I read Gorgias and thought that I understood Plato and really just conferred tons of modern prejudices and biases onto Plato and thought that I understood them. When in reality, there's so much context that you need to even come close to be able to understanding those source texts. And so then I started reading a lot of secondary

work. And I did that for about four or five years. And that really gave me a huge basis of historical and cultural context to work off of. And then I started reading a lot of the source stuff. Is that what hermeneutics is? I actually don't know what hermeneutics is. So hermeneutics is the process of biblical exegesis or philosophical interpretation of the interpretation of philosophical works. So there's a lot of people that get into philosophy and they just go down to Barnes and Noble and they get a few books off the shelf and they read them and they either don't understand them and are frustrated or they feel like they understand them and they don't really understand them. And that's a poor approach, I think, because there's so much about, like if you read a book from 600 years ago,

you may as well be reading a book written by somebody that lives on a distant planet in a far away solar system. I mean, there are so many cultural differences. You need to know about their personality. You need to know what's been going on regionally at the time, during their time. You need to know what questions they thought were worth answering, where they exist within the history of philosophy. And it's not until you consider all of these things and many more

that you can really get to the bottom of what they were trying to say rather than, I mean, again, conferring modern prejudices onto it. Yeah. So easy to do. Yeah. And it's very much like even in my, you know, I had a very liberal arts philosophical training, but it's still very much like a lot of times in the way philosophy is taught, it's taught almost like math equations, you know, like like we're we're just looking at hey

we're going to take these thoughts it's words on a page you know and we're going to evaluate them based on their internal consistency etc um and see how others refuted them uh etc etc and there isn't as much of a focus on at least in my own training on like the world that those folks lived in um i mean sometimes it's there but but there is a tendency to treat philosophy as like divorced from the world. There's actually Quill Kukla and I talked about this quite a bit, when in fact, it's like really rooted in the world. And so you need to understand where those philosophers lived, what their world was like. Yeah, I actually agree with you in your intro to that episode. You were talking about how philosophy is probably best used in a practical sense. How can it be applied to people's lives, actually? And I think there's a distinction that can be made between continental and analytic traditions that probably is useful there, but there's a lot of crossover and there's a lot of continental people that do work that is doing linguistic analysis like you're talking about or logic, or just, I mean, tons of stuff like what you're talking about, where it is more academic and setting. But yeah, I think that is one of the big reasons philosophy is valuable,

is that it can help people in their lives. In fact, in many ways, I'm walking proof of the fact that it can help you develop yourself as a human being. And yeah, I mean, that's, fact that it can help you develop yourself as a human being. And yeah, I mean, that's, that's, I mean, that's my story. And yeah, let's talk about that piece of it a little bit. What, what were you sort of craving? You talk about order and chaos, right? But what, what was it that you were craving and, and why did you find that in philosophy? Like, it sounds so much like, find that in philosophy? It sounds so much like people find that sort of solace or meaning in their lives. You hear people talk about religion in that way, for instance. It seems rare for that to happen with philosophy. Tell me about that piece of it. Well, I think the answer is that we're all telling ourselves a story at a certain level and nobody's going to put a deadlock on the capital T objective truth out there. And you shouldn't feel bad about that at all. we're all telling ourselves a story at a certain level and lock on the capital T objective truth out there.

And you shouldn't feel bad about that at all. Like we're all telling ourselves a story at a certain level because we come into this world and our parents tell us stories. I mean, they tell you that there's a flying fairy that lifts up your pillow and gives you a quarter. They tell you there's a giant bunny that leaves you eggs for some reason. I mean,

like, and then those stories develop as we age. And then at a certain point, around 18 to 22, I guess, for a lot of people, when they're forced formal education ends, they just sort of decide that they're good, that they don't need to question the assumptions that they use to make sense of and chop up the world. And I think that's honestly how it helped me. I realized that whenever you come from a background of chaos and of fear and of abuse, you can become jaded so quickly. You can just look around your world and oversimplify it and just think that you have it all figured out

and then drink yourself to sleep every night. But that wasn't going to be my fate. And so I think philosophy really is in the business of questioning those base assumptions that we have every day that allow us to oversimplify, I guess. Yeah. I mean, that was certainly, I mean i my story is very different but that was certainly like my attraction to it was i felt compelled to continue to question those stories you know like and that's very much you know i was 17 18 years old that's sort of like what you do right people are telling you things and you're like why is everyone just swallowing this shit? Like, wait, hold on a second. And, you know, I was really, this is much more cliche, but, you know, I remember being very taken by,

taken by Descartes' project. I think that was probably the first piece of philosophy that was introduced to, I literally, my first philosophy class, I was like in college and running around from, you know, literally some other class i wanted to take was like full and i was like i'll take a philosophy class right why not and um the first i think the first thing we did was you know descartes investigation of like uh you know the the i

think therefore i am essay i actually don't remember what what the name of the piece is um but just that like investigation of like how can i be sure of anything right um how can i be sure of like the reality around me what's like the number the one thing that i can hold on to you know right um and that sort of like project i was very intoxicated by like what do you what do you start with right um uh that that like undermining of everything that you think that you know is like still to me like the main i don't know the main project that fascinates me what's interesting to me is that you can think that you're questioning

all the sheeple out there and still yourself be engaged in a story or a narrative that is completely oversimplified and be so confident in it i mean yeah that was my story when i was 18 when i was 18 i was working at that warehouse and I listened to talk radio to and from work, conservative talk radio, like hardcore stuff. I listened to everybody. And I was so convinced that all these sheeple Democrats out there just didn't understand the world like I did. And I've been burned so many times before that like now philosophy has just given me this level of humility where I'm just never going to be that way again. I mean, I think that is the ultimate value of philosophy personally, is that it takes you down a peg or two. Like I've never met anybody that's truly well-versed

in the Western canon of philosophy where they've truly done the legwork and spent thousands of hours reading that is trying to proselytize a worldview or convert people to a way of life. Like they're always couching their statements and well, surely somebody knows more about this than I do. Maybe I don't understand this position well, but here is my position. And I just admire that humility. And I think it's a sign of maturity. I agree with you, but it's so interesting that you put it that way because you said you were looking for you know order and uh you know to help you understand the world right and so often people will gravitate towards one of those intermediate stories that you mentioned you know no everything's bullshit here's what's really going on right yes right uh uh you know i'm i'm washed in the blood

of christ or uh there's uh lizard people who are uh controlling the world and you know, I'm, I'm washed in the blood of Christ or, uh, there's a lizard people who are controlling the world and, you know, et cetera. Right. And there's a, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to conflate Christianity with that sort of conspiracy theory. Those are two different types of things, but people, we sort of default to these stories that give us almost a simpler explanation sometimes. Right. Um, but what you did was you engaged in an investigation that leaves you with no clear answer, right? With no clear narrative that you're stuck to all the time, which strikes me as a much harder thing. Yeah. I mean, it took me 15 years of reading philosophy to get there. I mean, at first I did gravitate towards those vast systems within the history of philosophy.

This week I was a Nietzschean. This week I was a fan of Hume. And then eventually I got burned so many times in a row. I mean, that's the thing about philosophy. You think you're right about things, and then you find out you're wrong the next day. And then you think you're right about that, and then you're wrong the next day after that. And that's the beauty of philosophy on one hand, but the frustrating part about it on the other. And I just, that's my story is that, you know, I subscribed to so many narratives over the years and then questioned the assumptions of those and

looked for the counterpoints, played devil's advocate, found out I was wrong so many narratives over the years and then question the assumptions of those and look for the counterpoints, played devil's advocate, found out I was wrong so many times that now I just try to remain humble. Is there a particular example of that that you have of you used to believe this philosophical position or philosophical point, and then you read a particular refutation that turned you around? Yeah. I mean, I have hundreds. I used to believe in Plato's idea of an ideal world of forms and that if only we reason clearly and distinctly enough in the Athenian Agra long enough with our friends that are also philosophers, then we can get to the bottom of what the essence of a tree is, why we can go into the forest and see all these trees that are slightly different, but still identify that they're all trees. There must be some essence to them that we can arrive

at. And maybe we can arrive at perfect definitions of things and then chisel them into stone and just have a language that's much more accurate than ours is. But then I read Wittgenstein for the first time, and he just totally made me feel like an idiot. And Derrida, you know, I just, the idea that words gain their meaning through their use within a linguistic community that from a democratic perspective the meanings of words are decided by the people that are actually using them and that happens regionally that happens by culture that happens worldwide so yeah there isn't an essence of a tree underneath because tree is is a category that exists in the human mind.

Right. That was a little bit more psychological than linguistic, but it's sort of the same principle. Yeah. Well, I mean, I like I think that they were looking for the definition which they saw as the perfect essence. Like, I think that they were conducting a form of linguistics, even though I don't think that they would have seen it that way. It's, yeah, I think that when you think that you can arrive at the essence of something because that is somehow fixed, fixed eternally into the fabric of the universe,

then I think when you read Wittgenstein or Fichte, I mean, whoever you want to read, it's just irrefutable once you realize how language works, that it's a living, breathing organism that's constantly moving and constantly shifting. It's so much more complex than the idea that there can be a philosopher king that writes down Merriam-Webster's dictionary, what all the words mean, and we're just going to learn them and use them. It changed constantly. But have you arrived at any of your own positions at the end of all this? I mean, again, what you're talking about, this process of self-undermining, do I really understand this? Oh, here's a refutation that makes me think differently. That's the philosophical process, at least as I've experienced it and certainly as you've experienced it much more intensely.

But at the end of the day, do you hold any positions yourself? Clearly, they've stuck with you in some ways, some of the things that you've read. So I've never formed anything on my own. I just have put together a conglomeration of everybody else's ideas and tried to live my life as happily as I can. I mean, the goal of philosophy was always the utility of it for me. It wasn't for me to eventually become a philosopher. In fact, I don't see myself as a philosopher at all. I see myself as more of an educator. But when you are, you know, when you're reading, you're probably the one of the folks is most widely read in philosophy. I've spoken to a couple academic philosophers, but I feel like, you know, you've you've just mainlined a lot of reading the last 15 years. Are there not some of those positions that you've read that you're like, yeah, that's the one I've landed on, at least for now. Right.

the one I've landed on, at least for now, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I was saying, is that I have a conglomeration of a bunch of different thinkers that come together into a working theory with reality. And I mean, also, the thing that a lot of people might be thinking is that if you think that you know that you can know nothing, then how can you know that you know nothing? A classic philosophical debate, right? Right. I just want to be clear, that's more of a pragmatic, personal thing to me than a claim that I'm making about how things are. Like I'm, like, I'm really just saying that's my experience of things. And I, because I've read things and believed them and then been proven wrong the next week, so many times in the past, I just, for pragmatic reasons, I just try to remain humble when I am interfacing with reality.

When I talk to somebody else about their worldview, short of it being just cartoonishly dumb, I just really try to respect people. I really try to not relegate my teachers to people with patches on their elbows that work at a university. There's so much wisdom all around you if you look for it. Yeah. I get what you're saying. It's not a matter of not having beliefs or not having positions. It's a matter of holding them loosely, of realizing that, like, well, this is what I believe right now. But there's a lot of folks who are smarter than me or there's a lot of new ideas that I haven't experienced yet.

And so when you're having a conversation with another thinker or reading something, it's a matter of like, well, here's what I think right now, but I could be proven. I could be wrong, right? Like I'm open to hearing. I'm open to new information. I'm open to being refuted. Yeah, I mean, totally. And I think a lot of people would hear that prognosis on life and they would think that it sounds kind of depressing. Like how can you ever, I mean, if you can never be confident in anything, then how can you really live life fully? But

I would say I'd compare my experience in it to like, if you go to the gym and you're working out and you see results in the mirror and you're that, that gives you this surge of dopamine and you feel really good about it. For me, when I've been proven wrong and I find out something new and I find out that I didn't know everything, I get that surge of dopamine. And that's what keeps me going back to the philosophical gym every day, I guess. What are you reading right now? I am reading a lot of secondary stuff on the philosophy of humor because it's my next episode. On the philosophy of humor? Yes. Also rereading Twilight of the Gods by Nietzsche because this quarantine's been, it's been a deal, man. This is not how humans are supposed to live.

Yeah. I mean, you maybe have that thought of like, well, I'll get a lot of reading done. But then, I mean, you can't just spend all your time inside reading. It makes it harder to do your reading when you try to live that way. So there's a lot of people in my building that are over 80 years old. your time inside reading. It makes it harder to do your reading when you try to live that way. So there's a lot of people in my building that are over 80 years old. I live on the water and I have had to like take extra precautions when it comes to this quarantine. I literally have not left my house in four and a half months, except for once. Except for the trash compactor, which is two feet away from my door. I have not spoken to another human being. You're the first person I know of.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's, it's, it's been rough, man, but I mean, we all have a responsibility and I just want to make sure that I'm doing my part. Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, I want to hear more about the philosophy of humor. Obviously, it's very, uh, a topic of interest to me, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Stephen West. OK, we're back with Stephen West. You mentioned the philosophy of humor.

You have an episode coming up about it. I won't ask you to I won't ask you to spoil the whole thing, but I'm really curious about this, because when I was when I was studying philosophy and I was also starting to do comedy, I wanted to know what philosophy had to say about comedy and humor. And there's very little. I remember there was one book about jokes that I read. And there's very little. I remember there was one book about jokes that I read. I forget who wrote it, but it was really analyzing like the linguistic structure of basically street jokes of like a rabbi walks into a bar jokes. And I was like, this is not even comedy to me. It's not interesting. And there was another one called, I think, on humor, which I didn't get much out of.

It was written by very old people, you know, who who were writing about a kind of humor that I didn't agree with. I've read about, uh, you know, occasionally a theory will come across. Uh, I remember reading about like benign violation theory, which was, uh, uh, someone's idea that like, you know, it's funny to have a violation of a certain more or value that we have in a way that's actually harmless because it's in the context of a joke or a story. I'm like, well, that covers like maybe 10% of all things I find funny, like fall into that category. So I find it interesting. There's been so much philosophical writing about beauty. For instance, I took a whole class on, you know, art and aesthetics, and, you know, that's a whole subfield of philosophy is is philosophy and art aesthetic philosophy comparatively extremely little on laughter and humor despite the fact that it's uh you know a very basic human thing

that we all do like crying or you know uh or anything else like that right right um why do you why do you think that is and and what have you found in your own research into it? So I think it's because the history of Western philosophy has largely been concerned with metaphysical claims and epistemological claims to try to figure out the universe. I think we're very spatially minded as human beings, and I think that people thought for so long that philosophy could give us access if only we had the right math equation if only we had the right theory then we could understand all of the first principles of the universe through philosophy and i think that there's been i mean like me not just with comedy although what you said is true the actual research of this episode has been pretty sporadic i think there's only like 10 or 12 books throughout history that have been written in the gold standard by the way is henry bergson in the early 20th century um but i'll check it out i what's that what's the name what's the name of his work on it i think it's on humor okay i'm reading it on a kindle so i don't think i read the title um but yeah i mean i think that there's been an overall starvation of uh

philosophical interest when it comes to a lot of internal experiences. And that was one of Bergson's big points when actually writing that book is that, like, I mean, generally speaking, philosophers have ignored a lot of things about our internal experience. And he wanted to, I mean, that's the scope of his work is that he wanted to explore those more. Yeah. I mean, what a strange thing that, again, there's this sort of, you know, human function, like certain things happen. We make a sound that's involuntary in many cases. Right. It seems not tied to culture, at least entirely. It's something that's done across cultures.

It's something that is physical, yet also mental and cultural. Right. Sorry. It's because it happens in you experience it when another human does something or create something. Right. Yet it creates an involuntary reaction in you. So it's this occupies this weird space where it's simultaneously social and physical. And it's it's humans have been doing it as long as there've been humans.

And yet there's so little, you know, philosophy, which covers so many things has barely covered it. It's fascinating. Yeah. It's actually funny that you say that. I mean, like, I mean, approaching it from the inverse, cause that's what Kant did as well. He, he described laughter and humor, not as anything that can be described psychologically, but actually a physical sensation. And we associate the mental experience that we're having with an actual sensation that we're having. Like we're tensing up our muscles,

we're shaking, like you said, involuntary sounds. And yeah, I mean, that's super interesting, but there are tons of other theories. I mean,

there's theories that go all the way back to the ancient Greeks that whenever we laugh at something, it is because we feel at some level we are superior to some victim in that joke. Like we laugh because a thing is funny to us because we experience a feeling of superiority to that thing that's going on. And there's been tons of theories since then that i cover on the pot on on the episode so have you one of the things that's most fascinating to me about doing comedy that i that i noticed when i started doing it is that uh there's also a huge amount of it where the people the person experiencing the comedy

loses control over the course of their own thoughts, right? Over their own train of thought. And instead, it's controlled by the performer, right? The classic experience is you join an audience. And this is something I had to learn when I became a comedian is that you need to, as a comedian, you need to take the audience, which has previously been a whole bunch of individuals who are all thinking different thoughts. Right. They have different little bits of chatter going on in their brain. You need to get them to all focus on you and all have the same thought simultaneously and follow the same train of thought. And then eventually you're going to introduce a thought that makes them all make the same sound at once.

Right. Right. And that's like what you're physically trying to do. And that seems to be a big part of the experience right it's not uh it is like that sort of weird subsuming of the individual consciousness into a group consciousness right and if you imagine someone watching a comedy on tv kind of works the same way you're not necessarily with a lot of other people but you know you're all watching the same episode of 30 rock in your own living rooms and you've all been sort of entranced and like you're now all following the 30 rock train of thought rather than your own mind like burbling around right it seems to be a weird part of the

experience it seems to be a critical part of the experience to me i wonder if you have any thoughts on that um no not not different from yours i mean i think that's a really good point and it is super interesting i don't know how that would be connected but i do find it interesting and like i mean not to step on the other episode that you did too much, but I find it so interesting that there are such similarities between comedians and philosophers in the sense that they are observational. They're looking at the world around them, trying to subvert the actual order of things. And yeah, I mean, I just find that connection between comedy and philosophy increasingly interesting. Yeah, that is a really interesting connection. It's also like, you know, very, you know, our image of the ancient philosopher is not someone who was like sitting

alone up in a room, you know, writing and reading, but someone who was like out talking with other people and like giving a giving a speech right on the street um which is very similar to a stand-up comedian in a way yeah very similar and i think i mean some of them lived on the streets and they like i think that's something that's lost in our modern world i think that we're but i think we're moving in the right direction honestly the world has become increasingly politicized over the last four years. People are having these conversations about philosophy more and more, whether they realize they're doing it or not. And I think we're living in a time where we're starving for values in this modern world, but we're also increasingly having these conversations where we need to engage in philosophy. increasingly having these conversations where we need to engage in philosophy. And these philosophical conversations, I mean, especially in the world we're living in right now,

a classic philosophical question like, what is justice? How can we apply that justice to our society? How can we implement it? That is an extremely important question. And to question the value of philosophy when asking those big questions is the only way that we can get there, I mean, I think is wrong. And it's funny because I feel like sometimes there's a stigma with talking about philosophy. If you were at dinner and you brought up a big question like that, like, what is justice? Let's go around the table and give me your opinions on that. I think a think, I think a lot of people would laugh. Like, I mean, people talk about philosophy as though it's this pseudo-intellectual field where people are just rambling about unverifiable speculation.

But I think it's important to have it because it's the only realm, it's the only forum where we can ask those big questions and try to make our societies better. realm. It's, it's, it's the only forum where we can ask those big questions and try to make our societies better. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say I've been guilty of turning my nose up in that way of the kind of philosophy that people do because people do do it in their daily lives, but we, we do look down on it a bit, you know, like, like something just an image that always, uh, uh, stuck with me was, was being at a wedding. I don't remember whose wedding wasn't someone I was close to, but the best man at the wedding saying like, oh, dude, all those days you and me spent like out on the back porch, like smoking blunts and talk about philosophy. You know, I mean, like that sort of thing. And I was like, oh, man, these guys, I have a bachelor's in philosophy.

Like, what were these guys talking about? Like, I had a little bit of a snootiness in me in that moment. And like, oh, they're probably talking about the matrix or whatnot right um and that was when i started taking philosophy was was right after the matrix came out and so every class was like it was you know was was descartes through the matrix right of of how you know how do we know whether our reality is real or not um but i don't know i feel i feel stupid for uh for looking down my nose. That's because everyone has those questions. Right. And like those, those folks are still engaging in that, in that philosophical inquiry, even though they're just, they're just

getting started. Right. Exactly. They're just, they're just newbies. That's how I'd see it is that they just haven't engaged in that process for very long, which I think is a lot of people's experience when they first get out of higher education and they try to learn things and they start studying philosophy. It's just, they're like, wow, I actually have a lot to learn here. And maybe they're not even self-aware of it in the moment. They think that they're talking about really deep stuff. But I think, I mean, personally, I would still encourage that behavior because I think that it's valuable. Eventually they're going to wake up one day and realize that, wow, I've grown a lot here. But like I mean, that said, your snootiness

is not completely unfounded. I mean, people misappropriate the word philosophy all the time. And again, words get their meaning from their use within a linguistic community. So, And again, words get their meaning from their use within a linguistic community. So who am I to say what the word philosophy means? But I think if a person calls the Bible philosophy, like if a person asked me for a recommendation of a philosophical text, I wouldn't give them the Bible. And it's not because I don't think that there's great insights in there or ways that you can live your life. It's not because I don't think there's any meaning that can be gleaned from there. It's that it's just not useful. It's so different from the

projects of people like Kant, people like Wittgenstein, people like Nietzsche. They're just trying to do something so different that it doesn't seem useful to even refer to it as philosophy. What's your relationship with the academy, right? With academic philosophy? I mean, clearly you've read a lot of its output, right? But it's not something that you've sought to go into yourself. At least I assume it isn't. Has it been? No, it hasn't at all. Why is that?

Because I feel the same way that you do. I tend to agree with you that the best place for philosophy is in practical usage. I mean, that's why I do the show is that I try to make philosophy more accessible to people that are looking for it to be able to improve their lives, make themselves happier, not be totally encumbered by irrational beliefs that they haven't policed yet. I mean, that's the story of a lot of people. They live their entire lives believing in irrational things. I mean, you talked about lizard people earlier. If you believe that Hollywood was run by lizard people, think of how that could be holding you back from so many things in your life if you don't police that irrational belief. I mean, that could be the reason they kick

you out of the job interview after five minutes. That could be the reason you never go on a second date. That could be the reason you don't leave your house because you're scared the lizard people are outside. I mean, there's so much opportunity cost potentially if you have an irrational belief. And that's why I think philosophy is important as a process to engage in. Sometimes I feel worried that philosophy, as much as I enjoy it and as much as I dive into it, is not capable, though, of changing my at root beliefs and that instead they're coming from somewhere else. was really engaged with again in my brief four years studying philosophy seriously was uh what is consciousness right what is the question of consciousness i wrote a senior thesis on on the question of you know the mind body problem right is is the is consciousness uh a physical thing right or is it something else right right and uh i did a lot of reading i'll be honest

at the end of those couple years i spent on that, I was I had read only a very small portion of all the writing that's been done on that subject. And I certainly had no way of proving any position I might have. Right. I had read people much smarter than me who had made arguments in every single direction. Right. And I was basically at sea with it. But I left thinking, you know what? direction right and i was basically at sea with it but i left thinking you know what i think consciousness is a physical uh phenomenon because i'm fundamentally feel i'm a materialist i believe that you know like the physical world is the only kind of stuff that exists for the most part right um and that's just sort of where i'm landing and it makes the most sense to me right um but i always and i and i sort of felt myself settling on that position. But I was also aware, like, well, I'm not I haven't actually like proved that to myself in any substantial way.

That probably comes more from, say, my upbringing. Right. I was raised by scientists. Right. Who have a very materialist view of the world. That's sort of like my emotional starting place. Right. Like the point of I'm basically defaulting the point of view I started with for the most part, even though I learned plenty and I, you know, exhumed many of my ideas, I still sort of defaulted to that. And I don't know, I wonder if that's what a lot of us do. Like, you know, when I, I've talked with psychologists, you know, for instance, David Dunning about, you know, the the backfire effect and all these other psychological phenomena where, you know, the smarter that we get, the better we are at just proving what we already believed, for instance, that like, you know, that's how human minds work in a lot of ways. We're very limited and we end up snapping back like a rubber band much more than we expect that we do. And even there's phenomena where even learning about that process

doesn't stop you from doing it. Right. That's what David Dunning said on our episode was he's like, I'm aware of all these biases that I have and all of these flaws in my rationality. That doesn't mean I can escape them. Right. I can be aware of them, but that doesn't mean I can I can fight back against them. And so I wonder I wonder what your feeling is about that, because you have a very optimistic view that like, hey, by learning these things, we can really improve our lives. Whereas what I just laid out is a much more pessimistic view. Yeah. So, I mean, you very well like I mean, you very well may be right about that. about that. I'm only going off of my own subjective experience and the experience of getting thousands of emails from people saying that they've fundamentally changed their worldview by listening to the show and engaging with the ideas. That said, that's only the plural form

of anecdote. But yeah, I mean, I think that you could absolutely be right. Yeah. I mean, I think that you could absolutely be right. I mean, what's funny is that there are thousands and thousands of stories that we can believe at any point in our life. I mean, I actually agree with that person that, I mean, there's a philosopher, Carneades, where he didn't believe that the person that won the debate was more correct. He just thought that they argued it better. I agree with him. Yeah. I mean, he's actually one of my favorite philosophers and super fascinating. And yeah, the idea that you could have some narrative that actually isn't more true than any other narrative at all, that they're all sort of equal, but you just argue it to yourself better and better. And anybody that comes in to try to put a chink in the armor, you're just really good at arguing your positions against them. And so you have this defense, this, this iron dome that keeps out any sort of progress.

That's totally possible too. I'm, I'm, I'm down with that. Yeah. I mean, I was talking to, uh, my, uh, my friend Siobhan Thompson is very funny comedian, uh, was telling me a story about, I think, a family member who was involved in cult deprogramming or something like that who told her, you know, don't get into a debate with a cultist, right, with like a Scientologist, say, because they're way more prepared than you. Don't walk into the Scientology building and say,

I'm going to take you folks down, right, because they've been trained. They know how to win the debate. They've got a decision tree of like, you say this, I say this, you say this, I say this, right? And the reason that works is because it worked on them. You know, they lost a debate at some point in their life and they said, okay, well, I'll go in there and I guess I got to join. And that doesn't make them right. You know, the fact that they can beat you at that. And and yeah, I think accordingly, like the the narratives that we have, just because it's very convincing to us doesn't mean it's true. Like stories and narratives and trains of thought are features of the human mind, not the reality outside of our minds.

So it's certainly possible for something to hook into us more than its truth value justifies. here. Neither of them has got the truth. I'm just stepping into their environment that they're comfortable in. Come talk to me about philosophy sometime. And they never do. I'm just here alone in quarantine. How do you try to get people to like, do you just try to have more conversations about philosophy in your daily life? I used to. In my earlier 20s, I actually was kind of an asshole. I used to bring up conversations all the time to people just so I could refute their points, just for some sort of weird satisfaction that I gained out of it, probably because I was insecure. But anymore, no. I honestly never talk to people about philosophy, if, I mean, except for listeners sometimes on my discord but

yeah I mean I just can't it's it's such a personal thing to me now honestly and I don't I'm like I'm not going to be swayed by anybody and like a person recommends a book and I've already heard of it not to sound arrogant there at all I've just been doing this for a long long time and so I just I feel like I don't get much value out of it. And so I try to spend my time just making these episodes because that's what makes people happy. It's, it's, it's a way that I can serve people around me that make my life possible. I know that feeling where you're like, oh man, it would take me so much time to catch you up, you know? And I would love to, but it's, it's, oh, oh yeah. I actually know

where you're going with this and like, oh, it would, and I don't want to condescend. So let's just not talk about it. Right. There's like 10 years of reading that you'd have to do to get to this point. And it's like, that shouldn't actually be like an arrogant statement. I don't think like if a person goes to the gym and works out for 10 years and you ask them to be your personal trainer, you say that they're in better shape than you, then that's not really a controversial statement. It's kind of self-evident. People just look at them and they look at you and they're like, oh yeah, I mean, obviously. But because there's no six pack on your brain that you can see that there's no six pack on your forehead, it's tough because it's almost like you're telling them that

their thoughts are illegitimate because they haven't read these books that you have, which sounds so douchey just in itself. So you've read so much historical philosophy. Are there contemporary philosophers you're a fan of? Nick Bostrom. He's the person that wrote the first paper on simulation theory. I'm a fan of Peter Singer, I'd say. I like reading Noam Chomsky. I don't really understand him yet. He's kind of fun to read sometimes. But yeah, I mean, I usually read the philosophy that I'm doing on my show these days.

So, and then if I'm not doing that, then it's kind of like, I mean, you go to work all day and you're reading. I mean, if you do anything at work all day, when you get home, you just kind of want to unwind from that. So yeah, I don't really read much anymore. I mean, those are, those are some philosophers who are very involved in the world, right? Like Peter Singer is very much about, you know, kickstarted the effective altruism movement, which we've talked about on this show of like, you know, taking his ethical, you know, his ethical arguments and like trying to actually change people's behavior

using them rather than just arguing, oh, what's good to do? He's like, what is good? And hey, now let's do it. Yeah, exactly. And there's actual actionable steps you can take after reading his work which you can't say about most philosophers i mean if you read something that compels you by

montaigne he's so long dead there's no montaigne society trying to like enact his philosophy it's just yeah it's it's cool i'm actually looking forward to doing a arc on a contemporary philosophy later this year so oh that's great yeah because it is odd that so much of our we forget that philosophy is something that is actively being done right um what uh so you've mentioned a couple times you know it's we're in a really troubled moment in uh american history world history are there any philosophers who you've read that have helped you understanding what's going on now? You did an episode on Hannah Arendt about a year ago, maybe,

that felt extremely relevant to present day to me. Yeah, the banality of evil is definitely something that is super relevant right now. I'd say read Camus' The Plague. I think it's about a city that has a pandemic, and there's a lot of philosophical musings that I think have been helpful to me. As far as philosophers that have made me think differently about what's going on, Giorgio Agamben, he's a French philosopher, I believe. He wrote an essay or kind of an article where he brought up a really good point where he talks about states of exception, which is a term from Foucault where essentially it's just saying moments within history where extra constitutional powers granted to the government and people don't live their lives in the normal way that they would.

Things like natural disasters, things like world wars. things like natural disasters, things like world wars. And he talks about how, I mean, if we just look at it historically, so often when we have these states of exception, we've needed technological innovation to get out of it. We've invented things to solve a new problem. And what's crazy about that is that oftentimes these things carry themselves into the world after we've returned to a state of normalcy. So, I mean, he gives the example of a barbed wire after World War I, nuclear power after World War II. I mean, these are things that were innovated to solve certain problems. Yeah.

And he just asked the question of what is going to endure after this particular state of exception? And that really worries me. I mean, that's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. What social innovations or inventions are going to continue to move on? What about people's mental health is going to change and the way they interact with people? It just seems scary that we might see each other more as carriers of disease in the future, potential carriers of disease, rather than as fellow human beings because there's so much more to human life he would say than just staying alive um yeah but we're entering and we're in the middle of what looks like is going to be a multi-year period of our society looking very different of it i mean it

feels like what you're talking about a state of exception where our lives have entered a different we're living in a different way we're seeing the government take on more responsibilities and do different things than we ever saw it do before uh maybe it'll do so in a different way if there's uh you know depending on the result of the election in november but yeah i mean it has it has struck me that we might start conceiving of each other and our place in society very differently. That like the notion of the notion of the crowd, which is like just like what do we think of crowds? What do we think of large groups of people is a pretty foundational part of society, right? How do we act within them?

And that's going to be radically different in a few years it's radically different now and i think it'll be radically different for a while right and to reference something you said before i mean your job needs crowds in order to function properly yes i mean dave chapelle and people are doing things with lawn chairs six feet apart and everything and that's good for now but when we return it is good for now i don't think that's good enough for me personally i'm like because it just misses something uh i also don't know that it's that it's safe i don't know that i believe that you know when i see personally comedy shows that are like taking those sorts of steps i'm like uh not safe enough you know okay i'm sorry i wasn't making like a moral judgment

about we should be out in comedy clubs i was just just saying. No, no, no. I didn't think you were. I mean, if the crowd will never return post-pandemic, what does that mean for stand-up comedians? Are they going to be on Skype? Like, it just seems like they're going to miss something that was magical. And on a broader societal level, if we're no longer as comfortable, if society is 20% even less, less comfortable gathering that changes society on such a profound level, right? Like if, if 20% of our work becomes like we're doing right now, telecommuting, right? Um, that changes the way we see each other in such a profound way that could be immensely damaging. I mean, I think about the difference between when people are in, you know, the road rage versus people on the street. You know what I mean? Like the difference. One of the things I really liked about living in New York City was,

you know, when you're on the subway or walking down the street, everybody knows everybody else is a person. You know what I mean? You're like, you sort of have this general awareness. Hey, everyone's got somewhere to go. You know what I mean? So like you sort of have this general awareness hey everyone's got somewhere to go you know what i mean so people sort of act in this way where it's like i'm going to make sure that other people can get by i'm not going to block the sidewalk for the most part you know like like there's this uh there's this general sense and people don't do that in cars right coming to la that was a huge difference because suddenly you're not seeing people anymore you're seeing big objects and the person inside is anonymized and obscured. And so, you know, now everything is an obstacle to you. Right. And I found that very alienating and very

distressing. And it made it a lot harder for me to feel, you know, community in the place that I live. And I worry about that same effect more broadly societally. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it certainly allows people to dehumanize people more. It actually reminds me of a point made by Robert Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where he talks about how he went around and traveled on a motorcycle simply because when you're in a car, it's all sort of, I mean, in a way, dehumanized. I mean, not actually dehumanized, but you're looking through a screen almost. You're not feeling the wind. You're not smelling the world. You're not feeling the, like, I mean, something important about it. And if more people stay inside and live their life, I mean, even 20% more, like you said, if they just stay inside more because they fear crowds and fear other people more. I mean, what does that say about the way we might see the world through our windows? It's scary to think about, but also interesting to think about. I mean, I don't, I'm like, I'm not a doom and gloom

person, but it's, it's crazy to think what might carry over from this time because certainly things are as the philosopher would say. And what was that philosopher's name again? Who? Giorgio Agamben. Giorgio Agamben. Yes. A-G-A-M-B-E-N. Look him up.

Let me ask you this because talking to you rekindles my love of philosophy, inspires me to read more. you, you know, rekindles, rekindles my love of philosophy, inspires me to read more, you know? Um, but, uh, I, I know that's, that seems to be your purpose and I really thank you for doing it. Um, but you know, a lot of my experience reading philosophy was, uh, reading something and not understanding it. Right. Um, reading Nietzsche, for instance. I enjoyed reading Nietzsche. I thought it was cool. Right. I took a class. It was a fun class. But, you know, reading Thus Beg Zarathustra myself. Right. Before I went to I would read it right before I went to the class and I'd be like, this is poetry. Right. I don't even understand the point that is being made here. Right. Then I would go to the class and have it broken down for me like oh okay i see how this poetry you know relates

to this or that idea um but you know it's very opaque to me um and or for instance reading kant right which i had to read it another time uh entirely different problem reading kant almost felt like literally reading algebra but done done with language, you know, just like such density and such like, here's what I mean by this term. Now, when you compare this term to this term and we bring this into that, you know, it's like extremely like a dense formula, right? Absolutely. Yeah. How did you with, you know, again, I had the benefit of a teacher's explaining this to me. You were just reading the books, right? How do you push through those moments? What do you do when you encounter that level of resistance and how do you recommend other people deal with it?

So I think that school is a great way to learn philosophy, but I think sometimes you can be relegated to a particular curriculum, which means you're relegated to a particular teacher or group of teachers and their interpretation of a work and the way that they teach that. And I think that I actually benefited from not, from like wanting to learn about philosophy so much, but not going to school because it allowed me to assign my own reading list. It allowed me to reach out to teachers in Europe or China, or just like the people that were leading pillars in this area. And I'd also say that I didn't start with source text. Again, I started with secondary stuff and then eventually graduated to source text years later.

And if there's anyone I'm reading now, I think the last person I had that experience with was Deleuze. I just reach out to somebody that knows their stuff and ask them. You just like looking for to lose experts on, on Google and calling them up. There's probably three to lose experts, but no, I actually have the benefit of, I mean, people have, people have emailed me over the years that are professors. And I just sort of have like a Rolodex of people that are specialists in different areas. And I had a few that were big specialists on post-structuralist thinking.

And so I just reached out to them and they got me on the right track. What were those first secondary works that you read that sort of helped you make sense of philosophy? Well, at the time I was reading books on Plato. I don't remember the exact name. I mean, it was 15 years ago. I can get them for you and send them. No, that's fine. That's fine. But it was, but it's like, it's interpretive work, work like your podcast itself, which is like saying, Hey, here's what this person meant by this. And here's what we can take away from it. And then eventually you graduate to the original work itself.

Yeah, they're way better than I am. But I mean, that's exactly right. It's people that have spent, because here's the thing, like you can study a particular thinker for six months and feel like you have a solid grasp of them. But to be honest, you could study, there are people for every one of these philosophers that have dedicated their entire lives to understanding their work in particular. And those are the people you want to go to because they're the people that have done the legwork for decades and really care about this thinker and doing justice to their work. And that's what I seek out are people that have dedicated their lives to it. One thing I'm always really curious about is the, the you know a lot of what we've talked about is is like the western canon of philosophy right um both like analytic and continental

all these different schools right um but do you ever find that limiting because uh like are you do you ever delve into uh work that you would consider philosophy but which isn't normally taught in the academy. Does that make sense? Either from different countries or from different cultures or different backgrounds. Do you mean like African philosophy or Eastern philosophy or South American philosophy, things like that? I always think about Nietzsche, right? Like, like Nietzsche, why was he considered, why is he included in philosophy and not as a poet, right? Because half of his work is like almost literally poetry. And how many thinkers are just, you know, who have ideas that have that much depth are not included in the canon? And how do we bring them in is my question. how do we bring them in is my question. Right. So I'm sure there are many. I mean,

I think there's a lot of people that would rather be considered authors or social commentators. Philosopher doesn't really have the best connotation associated with it sometimes. But in terms of Nietzsche, you're absolutely right. It's a common criticism that he wasn't a philosopher as much as a social commentator. And the people that say that are probably right. What he was trying to do is so much more, it's so much different in scope than many other philosophers that I would entertain that thought. But nonetheless, he had ideas that influenced philosophers for hundreds of years to come. Well, not hundreds of years, a hundred years or so. And so, yeah,

I mean, I think he needs to be included in a philosophy podcast or a philosophy book just because of that fact. But are there works that influenced your thought philosophically that are not traditionally part of the philosophical canon? Off the top of my head, I can't really think of many. Dostoevsky's really good. I like him. I don't read that much fiction, honestly, over the years I've, or, or, uh, poetry. I mean, a lot of music has inspired me. I take inspiration from a lot of standup comedians. I take inspiration from people that, uh, do podcasts, but that's more creative stuff. That's not really like ideas. Um, but I'm totally open to it. I just

have only been focusing on philosophy and I'm still young, man. I'm only 31 years old. So I got a lot of reading to do left. Um, I mean, to be honest, I, yeah, a lot of growing to do. Damn. Uh, I love talking to you, man. You, uh, it's really fascinating to hear your perspective because again, you come at this from such a different angle than most people doing philosophy, right? Most people you could talk to about philosophy on this level are either professors or grad students or bachelor students who were annoying shits

like me at like 18, where I read like a little bit of like the fucking assigned readings in my classes and thought I knew anything about anything. Um, wrote a senior project for half a year and thought i understood you know the mind body problem um do you feel you have any different perspective on the issues than folks who come at it from an academic setting um probably not i mean they're specialists right i would be arrogant to say anything otherwise i think that I, to be honest,

I just like to focus on me and my personal growth and then how that can relate to the people out there that make my life possible, how I can serve other people within the world and the people that listen to my show. I mean, I just want to give people something that they can listen to and be happy or like be thought provoking

and give them access into this, I mean, obscure realm of philosophy when it can be so abstruse. It can be so difficult to penetrate, you know? And so that's what I try to focus on is not correcting academic philosophers. Just let them be. Honestly, they're miserable. And they lock themselves in a tower anyway, I couldn't get in there. I have to say, I think we have similar missions, you know, cause, cause what I do is like, you know, I think of myself as the last step on the informational food chain, you know, that there's people out there who have really interesting, big ideas

and I'm just getting them from other sources of media as well. I'm reading a summary of their work in a magazine or hearing them on a, you know, interviewed somewhere or reading their book and then saying, okay, let me bring this to people who wouldn't normally have access to it, right? Like, let me condense this down into seven minutes that we can put on basic cable at 11 p.m. And, you know.

Come on, man. You're so much more than basic cable. Basic cable is literally what I've been on for the for the last couple of years. I mean, yeah, but I feel like, yeah, bringing bringing this way of thinking to people is is such an important, an important thing. It's what I've built my life around. It sounds like that's what you've built your life around, too. Yeah, it's it's the most gratifying existence I've carved out for myself. It's, it feels so good to get those. Look, what other job could I do work and do a good job?

And I'm going to get emails from people telling me that I've done a good job and that I've affected their life in a positive way. I mean, I'm spoiled. Like if, if, if I worked on a cubicle, my manager would come up to me like once a month and say, Hey, good job on those reports, Steve. And then, you know, tell me to do something else. It just, I feel so fortunate to be able to carve out an existence, just giving people something that they can turn on and feel excited about when they see the notification. I mean, I just think about all that stuff all the time. I'm just grateful for it, man. Yeah. Well, I really hope folks check out the podcast if they haven't heard it already. Uh, philosophize this it's, it's a really wonderful.

And, uh, thank you for coming here and talking to me about it and for the work that you do, man. It's really awesome talking to you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for the work you do, man. It's way better than mine. I mean, I don't, don't't don't don't diminish yourself so much. I mean, it's true, everyone. Well, thanks for being here. All right. Thank you, man. Well, thank you again to Stephen West for coming on the show.

His podcast, once again, is Philosophize This. I really hope you check it out. It is wonderful. That is it for us this week on the show. His podcast, once again, is Philosophize This. I really hope you check it out. It is wonderful. That is it for us this week on Factually. If you enjoyed the show, please, please leave us a rating or review wherever you subscribe. I know every podcast host says that,

but it actually does help us out. If you're listening in that podcast app, just go to that review section, give us a five star or a four star, whatever star rating you think is right, and leave us a little review, too. If you'd like to offer any suggestions for the show, you can send me an email, by the way, at factually at adamconover.net. And I want to thank this week our producers, Dana Wickens and

Sam Roudman, our engineers, Ryan Connor and Brett Morris, Andrew WK for our theme song. You can find me at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. And that is it for us this week on factually. Thanks so much for listening. That was a hate gun podcast.