Interview with Stephen West of “Philosophize This!”

Stephen West is the host of Philosophize This!, one of the longest running and most popular philosophy podcasts in the world today. For over a decade, he has introduced listeners to a dizzying array of thinkers from the pre-Socratics to contemporary theorists of artificial intelligence. In a time of intense political polarization he has somehow avoided categorization, even when tackling contentious thinkers for an audience that is all over the map in terms of age, ideology, and anything else you care to name. He’s working on a book, and we probably should have waited until it came out to ask him for an interview, but we decided to seize the day and catch up with Stephen from his home in Puyallup, Washington, on a weekday afternoon in March. [Editor’s note: our Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Stice is a graduate of Puyallup High School. Go Vikings!]

Just so you know, some of these questions are going to be a little longer in the delivery.

Nice. Okay.

And I swear I’m not going to talk about myself for half of the interview.  Some of the questions just need a little bit of setup.

No, man. I've done a few interviews for the show and, not being an interviewer, I'll talk to these philosophers and I'll get starry-eyed because I've read all their work and everything. I try to set up questions in the interest of being considerate towards them. Really, I'm just thinking about them and I want to make them know that I see and hear them. I'm not just asking this question from a naive place.

From what I understand, you had what most people would consider a difficult childhood: some foster care, some homelessness, some moving around. And you've said before that books and reading were really important to you from an early age. And so my first question: can you tell me about the first books? The kid books that were really important to you?

Children's books? Are you talking, See Spot Run or are we talking, early books that really stuck with me?

We can skip past Dick and Jane. Sure, the first books where you found yourself entering the world of ideas.

Before I even get into it, I'm curious as to the sentiment of the question. So there's early books and then in fifth and sixth grade I started reading Harry Potter. But I don't know if that's really what you're asking. These things didn't stick with me in any sort of emotional way. Are you talking about when I was 16 or 17 and I first started trying to challenge the way that I see the world trying to get a better understanding of it?

Sure.

It was right around when the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse came out: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion; Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape. These books, even before I ever got into philosophy, made me understand the value of questioning the conceptual framings of reality and the value that can be had in that sort of conversation.

So yes, those aren't really philosophy per se, but they certainly were formative for me, I think, at that time. If I'm thinking back to the first thing that I ever read that really made me sit there and have an experience with a book where I'm thinking about what I just read, I'm pausing and I'm doing that reflective active reading thing, it's that. Otherwise, I'm just lost in a story before that. You know, Harry Potter is wonderful and all, but yeah, those (Dawkins, Harris, et al.) really were the thing that made me realize what's possible with a book.

This turned me on to the world of philosophy, which then would subvert every assumption in those books. The power of the New Atheist movement was not that they were doing anything new philosophically, but they were communicating these ideas to a culture that craved them at the time and doing it in such a beautiful way. It definitely resonated with me.

Excellent. And so how do we get from there to the canon, for want of a better term? Where was your first stop in terms of the Greeks and things like that?

You mentioned briefly the troubled childhood. I don't even know how to describe it. But what I did know is when I was around this age, the same general time I knew that I was traumatized. I had a couple of therapists and counselors over the years that had told me there was some clear evidence here of trauma that's gone on, so we need to get to work on this, and so I wanted mentors. I had to drop out of school, as well. So I just saw my future of working jobs with my hands and my back, and not really having much to strive for when it comes to maturity. I didn't have a father that I was talking to at the time. I didn't have friends around me that were trying to better themselves. So I was literally looking for some sort of mentor. And I googled “wisest person in the history of the world.”  The thinking at the time, being a 17-year-old, like I'll just, I'll find somebody wise in their books. Their ideas will sort of bleed off onto me, hopefully.

That's what I typed in: “wisest person.” And what came up is Plato's Gorgias dialogue. It was talking about Socrates and the Athenian agora. He's engaging with the sophists at the time and that really did open my mind up to what philosophy was as distinct from things like The God Delusion or The Moral Landscape.

And did you find yourself looking for historical context just to establish who these people were, what schools of thought they represented, why it mattered 2,500 years ago?

Yeah, I mean, I was obsessed. I started reading secondary sources almost immediately because I realized reading the actual text was probably me projecting a lot of my modern biases onto it. The first couple of years was a very slow process of just being discouraged, being frustrated. I couldn't get to the information. But then discovering more and more that there are professors and people out there that have written books that try to bridge the gap between these things, so a lot of historical context can come by way of that.

So I guess it makes sense to me then that you would have, when you had the opportunity, taken a philosophy class at the local community college. And from what I understand, it didn't go well. It wasn't what you were looking for. Can you tell me something about that?

Yeah, it's interesting. First of all, I only went to a few classes at community college and that was not in my college years. There's a program up here in Washington called Running Start. It's around the country, too. You can spend your last two years if you qualify in high school going to college for both high school and college credit. So, you graduate, you get an associate's degree and a high school diploma at the same time. Pretty good deal for anybody that is young like that. That was my initial ambition before I had to start working full time to be able to provide for myself.

But yeah, I went to this philosophy class. I wasn't even interested in philosophy yet, but I found it to be really boring, really elitist, very much like the guy is speaking a different language than everyone else. And it's really cringe, like he liked the fact he was speaking a different language than everyone else. It's weird putting myself back in this headspace. Back then, it really rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't see it any deeper than that. It didn't really inspire me to read more philosophy.

And I'm sorry, just to get the chronology right, this is before or after you'd found your way to Plato?

This is before I found my way to Plato. And in that class, we didn't really even talk about philosophers or the historical context, like you're talking about. He didn't even set you up to receive the ideas in a way that was going to impact you. It was just like, “let's talk about natural law versus epistemology” or versus different ethical theories. Egoism, natural law, utilitarianism, consequentialism–even though utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism. It's just a bizarre overview for this community college class that didn't really resonate with me at all.

Was he older or younger?

Way older.

So when I look back at the early episodes, it seems like at least at first there might have been an idea to move chronologically, to start with the pre-Socratics and move through. Now, if I have that right, what was the original plan for the show? What did you see as being the starting point and the ending point when you first set out to do it?

Yeah. I didn't see an ending point. The starting point was me being able to do anything other than pick boxes for a living, my back aching. The goal of the podcast was to create a product that delivered a little philosophy to people. At the time in podcasting, it made a lot more sense than it does now, given what the show's become, more of an artistic endeavour or a thing that really changes people. At the time I wanted to provide value, from a really good-faith place. I genuinely just wanted to help people and I knew a bunch about philosophy. So I'm like, “I'll try to create philosophical things that I wish I had and that I feel are missing in the podcast market at the time.”

And, you know, I'm also 25 years old when I start the podcast. So I have these really naive ambitions of philosophy as practically a panacea. “If only more people studied philosophy of the world to be such a better place and we need to get it in schools and this is going to be the start of a philosophical revolution.” I don't think I ever went that far, but that kind of utopian mentality where philosophy is what's missing and I'm the guy to provide it. It changed, but at the very start, I think I did see philosophy as this panacea-like thing

Listening to recent episodes, I don't sense you've totally abandoned that.

I think philosophy is important. I think that it's a very underappreciated aspect of the world that often operates in the background. People often attribute the results of philosophy to things in the sciences or things in politics, but I definitely don't see it. I see it more now as something that appeals to a certain kind of personality. I think there's a lot of different paths to development out there. People can do martial arts. They can do literature. They can do philosophy. And I think that to a certain type of personality that enjoys philosophy, where it resonates with you, it's a fantastic one. It's just hard to access and hard to translate. And if you don't have somebody that's like a sherpa with you or a teacher, you know, a curriculum, it becomes very difficult to get into it with any depth. I think it's definitely a path to development for a specific kind of person, a thing that somebody who knows who they are can get obsessed with.

When you engage with a philosopher, how do you break down their work into an episode format?

I think of a thinker–because I've been doing this for so long–as two things. A thinker is a collection of assumptions, and a set of questions that they thought were worth answering during their time.

Those two things combined, they use the assumptions to answer the questions and this makes up the tapestry of a thinker. The assumptions often, the way that I see them, they'll begin in their metaphysics, an assumption that they make at the level of metaphysics ladders up into assumptions they make about epistemology, the study of knowledge.

Assumptions they make about knowledge ladder up into assumptions they make about ethics and how to treat each other. Assumptions and ethics ladder up into politics and how they think we should treat each other on an abstract, broader scale. And this is how I think about it. It's systematized like that. And so if I can understand what assumptions they're making, I can understand a larger picture of their work in terms of a whole vision. And then, when I'm breaking it down in the episode, I'll just start on the assumption that they're making–and then they usually have all sorts of fun justifications for that assumption.

And then it'll lead to certain conclusions and it'll just feel like a story. It'll feel like we started with a justification for this new framing of a concept, and then it'll lead to different outcomes in the world in terms of how we should be looking at things.

That's how I think about it. It's a story. It's been told.

It seems to me that there was a point where the remit of the show broadened and changed. You did the series on Dostoevsky. There was an episode about The Stranger more recently. And then there are also episodes on philosophers who are not just newer philosophers, but newer philosophers who are very contemporary in their concerns, like Byung Cho Han or Mark Fisher. Was there a pivot point where you said, okay, I’ve done everything I can do within this one particular tent, and now it's time to think about other ways I can ask these questions and other material I can turn to, to do that?

In the last few years, it's been listener-driven. I just go to my email inbox and I pay attention to what people are asking for. There have been multiple pivots throughout the history of the show, though, like this whole political arc. It was more chronological at first and yes, there was a distinct pivot a couple of years ago towards more contemporary thinkers: questions about consciousness and AI and free will and determinism, just trying to cover these sorts of issues.

But the stuff with Byung Cho Han and everything like that, that's all listener-generated in terms of demand. And it's funny, it can seem like it's a big giant plan. I don't know if that's another question you have. It can seem like it's all planned, but in fact, It's a bit like a chicken or the egg thing. Like me and my wife were talking about this the other day. If I just make an episode and then people come to me in good faith and are just like, “I love this episode. It reminded me of this other thing that I really like that I've read before. I would love if you covered that thing.”  If I get 20 emails that are like that, then I decide for that to be the next episode. It is adjacent to whatever it is I just talked about, and it looks like this led to that. When in fact, I'm just sort of going along with what it reminded people of that they felt compelled enough to tell me about. It's a great example of what Simone Weil talks about–of being a conduit where the universe speaks through you. Then your actions look like they were planned from the other side, if you look back on them, it looks like there was a big “I planned this two years in advance or something.” In reality, it's just following genuinely what people want to hear about and what it reminds them of.

I sense, especially hearing how much input the listeners have in what you decide to cover, you have a pretty interesting relationship with your listeners. Obviously they're diverse, but do you have a sense of who your listeners are and what they're looking for?

It's very broad. In fact, I've been told by people on the ad side of things that I don't have a transactable market because it is so diverse. The age range is so broad. Usually people who run ads want to do 18 to 35, this particular interest group, right? And it's just not focused like that. Philosophy is so interesting to so many different kinds of people. It's tough to know what any one of them are. I think the people that gravitate towards the show are curious people.

When I listen to, say, Michael Cohen extolling the virtues of Tommy John underwear. I don't have any belief that Michael Cohen wears Tommy John underwear. But when I listen to you talk about the products that you talk about–VPNs, health supplements, an online therapy service–I get that I get the sense that it's more real, or at least it feels that way. And so I was wondering if you could talk about this, because this is a question of applied philosophy, I suppose. Can you talk about the ethical guardrails you established when you first started taking on ads and how you approach that, what you say yes to, what you say no to?

It's something I continue to navigate. The ethics of it is iterative. You show up every day and every different approval is a different approval. You have to do your own research into that, and you have to accept the limitations of the amount of research you can do into a company. You have to accept that every company, if you dig deep enough, has some sort of bad thing about them, which does not excuse anything. it’s an acknowledgement of the real circumstances that you're in when you are in any way pseudo-partnering with a company.

I try to use stuff. I always use stuff because I can be selective right now, stuff I actually use that I've gotten a benefit from and I don't need to lie or present myself as the ambassador of Tommy John underwear when I'm not that. But I would never want to imply that I did some soul-searching at the beginning of it and now I have a policy that I live by. I'm conflicted about it. I don't like running ads. I don't like the process of having to read anything that somebody tells me to do. I don't like the process of needing to hit certain beats. I find it arduous. If I had millions of dollars in the bank, if I knew that my son and daughter could go to college and my wife was going to be taken care of, should I die in the future, I would never run another ad again. It's just an instrumental thing to try to provide for my family and, like many things in life that we take on for the sake of additional money or opportunity, it creates new conflicts in your life and you have to learn to navigate those each day as honestly as you can.

That's the best answer I can give. I don't like it, and I will stop it as soon as I possibly can.

That's a great transition to another question I wanted to ask about parenthood.

And I know I'm also a parent of young kids and I'm often surprised at how much it has changed the way that I look at the world and reordered my priorities. And I'm curious if and how that's been the case for you. When it comes to philosophy and when it comes to the life of the mind generally, are there things that you underestimated before but that now that you're a parent, they seem much more important. Are there things that seem much more serious before that seem kind of facile now?

I don't try to come up with rules for things as much. I just think it's impossible with parenting. I think it's a very easy temptation as a parent to look for either the overly authoritarian approach where there's way more rules and then the kids follow the rules and I don't have to do as much work. There's rules written down or the no school parents are just like, oh, I'm going to let them be them. And who am I to be a tyrant against them?

It's two poles that I think avoid the middle. And I think parenting for me is navigating either side of that a lot and showing up every day and doing it. And so in that sense, it's taught me how iterative life is kind of along the lines of what we were just talking about with the complexity of ads and stuff like that. There's just no escaping it.

What parenting is also like is it was tough at first to admit, but I am not the center of attention anymore. Life is not solely about me. And that's something I resented at first, low-key. I mean, I didn't go around screaming at people about it, but I felt bad about that. So I'm on the back burner all the time now. I'm never the one that gets to choose where we go out to dinner or something like that.

But then I just have realized there's benefits to being on the backburner. It's a real nice place sometimes. You can do things from the backburner when you're not the center of attention that you can't otherwise do. And you can do things collectively as a family that you could never do alone.

It's kind of the case with relationships, too. And I try to revel in being on the backburner and making it about my daughter and stuff. And my son now. So those are the two things. I think that it really has been a sort of an ego death in that I just see myself as how I'm needed as part of a family and part of a unit that's around me. That's more of a framing that I put myself in since I've had kids.

And of course, I can link this back to philosophers, including the iterative thing. I mean, there's philosophers that speak about these things. I just always looked at them in terms of abstract ideals like, you know, if I was hearing about the iterative from Deleuze, I would think that this is talking about identity and differentiation. If I was thinking about putting yourself on the back burner and seeing yourself at a different scale, I think of dialectics. I think of Susan Sontag and her example of the knife on the plane. Anyway, it's changed from abstract to real for me, sort of an embodied thing.

My last question is about politics, or rather the absence of politics. Almost all of the podcasters who have been really big in the last 10 years and who maybe have some audience overlap with you have at this point been compelled to declare for whichever side of the culture wars. You have resisted that in a way to me that seems very skilful. And it seems to me that your audience is ideologically very diverse. And this is, I think, no small thing at a time in America when there's such a level of polarization. How do you do that, especially when you're so often talking about political philosophy?

In terms of the technical writing question, there's certain ways to word things. But I think more generally, I'm of a strange mindset and it's not something I really link to any thinker. I just think that people have their eye on the wrong ball when it comes to politics sometimes. I think that they think they're doing politics, when in fact, they're doing philosophy. And the fact that they see themselves doing politics renders them impervious to criticism a lot of times. At least if we're doing philosophy and I have a worldview, it's expected that you'll come and try to load test it or you'll try to put weight on it and challenge it and everything like that.

And if you're a philosopher and you stop engaging that process, it's almost like you're not a philosopher anymore. You've become just sort of a social theorist. You've become somebody that just has a snapshot of reality that you say is the way that it is. This is truth. In some sense, that's the opposite of the essence of philosophy, which is to continue testing our definitions that are always evolving as the world's evolving.

I think politics becomes this heading that people put over certain philosophy that they hold inside of their thinking that invites them to not critique it as much as they otherwise would. It becomes an invitation to say, these are my values. These are my principles. This is who I am, and if you challenge that, well, then you're my political opponent. It becomes a way to abstractly engage in it where you're a flip flopper if you question your political motives every day. If you show up every day, you're somebody who's inconsistent. Pick a side. We need to pick a side or else Hitler is going to arise or something like that.

Camus has a great line inside a speech that he gave called “The Crisis of Man,” where he says politics is massively overblown as a sentiment. But he says politics should do the housekeeping; it shouldn't settle our domestic disputes. And so as soon as we can–and he's not even saying in that speech that this is the time to do it–but he's saying as soon as we can, we need to realize that politics has become this thing that people have expanded into a world. It gives people a worldview now. It gives people a theory of love. It gives them a theory of how society should be structured. But to me, this is in the realm of philosophy. And what's missing is the critical spirit of philosophy in these people's perspectives. It becomes this thing that they can just sort of embody.

So anyway, the point is, when I'm not taking a side politically, it's really because I'm just continuing to engage in philosophy.

 Interview conducted by Joel Tannenbaum