The Warehouse Worker Who Became a Philosopher
9 min read
Eleven years ago, Stephen West was stocking groceries at a Safeway warehouse in Seattle. He was 24, and had been working to support himself since dropping out of high school at 16. Homeless at times, he had mainly grown up in group homes and foster-care programs up and down the West Coast after being taken away from his family at 9. He learned to find solace in books. He would tell himself to be grateful for the work: “It’s manual, physical labor, but it’s better than 99.9 percent of jobs that have ever existed in human history.” By the time most kids have graduated from college, he had consumed “the entire Western canon of philosophy.”
A notable advantage of packing boxes in a warehouse all day is that rote, solitary work can be accomplished with headphones on. “I would just queue up audio books and listen and pause and think about it and contextualize as much as I could,” he told me. “I was at work for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy; a couple hours interpreting it, just thinking about it. In the last hour of the day, I’d turn on a podcast.”
Now it’s his voice that people listen to when their mind is free and their hands are busy. West started his podcast, Philosophize This, in 2013. Podcasting, he realized, was the one “technological medium where there’s no barrier to entry.” He “just turned on a microphone and started talking.” Within months, he was earning enough from donations to quit his warehouse job and pursue philosophy full-time. Now he has some 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, and Philosophize This holds the No. 3 spot in the country for philosophy podcasts on Apple.
In more than 200 episodes, he has covered a slew of subjects—optimism, capitalism, liberalism, Daoism—as he’s introduced listeners to philosophers from Europe, the Middle East, and China, from the pre-Socratics to contemporaries such as Slavoj Žižek and Martha Nussbaum. He treats the philosophical claims of any given thinker, however outdated, within the sense-making texture of their own time, oscillating adroitly between explanation and criticism and—this is rare—refusing to condescend from the privilege of the present. He is, as he once described the 10th-century Islamic scholar Al-Fārābī, “a peacemaker between different time periods.” All the episodes display the qualities that make West so compelling: unpretentious erudition, folksy delivery, subtle wit, and respect for a job well done.
Despite the volume of his recorded output, West has basically no digital footprint, which is one of the reasons I was so drawn to meet him. He never did get that high-school degree—let alone attend a doctoral program in philosophy. His layman’s approach to serious thinking has left him untainted by the self-regard that so often attaches to expertise. One early fan of the show, the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, told me that he’d been so taken with Philosophize This that he reached out to West to offer advice and connect him with an advertising representative. “He’s coming at this stuff from the perspective of a person actually searching for interesting answers, not as someone who is seeking academic legitimacy,” Shapiro said. “Too much philosophy is directed toward the other philosophers in the walled garden. He’s doing the opposite.”
On the other side of the political spectrum, Sean Illing, the host of The Gray Area, another high-quality philosophy podcast, is also an admirer. “Academic philosophy is cloistered and impenetrable, but it needn’t be,” he told me. West, he said, “doesn’t preen or preach or teach; he just talks to you like a smart, curious adult.”
I was drawn to West, too, because he reminded me of my father, a passionate lifelong student of philosophy who, from the 1980s through the aughts, ran a tutoring business out of our home. But “tutoring” doesn’t do justice to what would more aptly be described as a kind of academy. Throughout my childhood, students, neighbors, and friends of all ages streamed into the overflowing library that would have been a living room if he had been a different person. He guided all of us through the insights of Plato, Epictetus, Maimonides, and so many more of the “friends” he would pull from the shelves to commune with. He supported our family this way—with ample stress and worry and very little surplus. But it was in that cramped room that I first witnessed the socially transformative power of “wanting to know more today than you did yesterday,” as West has frequently described his own mission.
My father has never sent so much as an email, but West made me wonder what he might have been able to do if he’d come up in our generation, with a microphone and YouTube and the digital infrastructure to reach all the possible listeners out there who would have been interested in what he had to share.
West lives with his wife, Alina—a quantum physicist from Kazakhstan who reached out to him on LinkedIn after listening to the podcast—their newborn son, and (part of the time) his 7-year-old daughter from a previous relationship in Puyallup, “a city that nobody can really pronounce,” 45 minutes south of Seattle. Maybe because of some combination of his vocal timber and intellectual inclinations, as well as my own assumptions, I had pictured him as a ponderously middle-aged professor in loose corduroys. But West, who is 35, has a red beard and wore head-to-toe athletic gear: black Under Armour sweats, a baseball cap, and Nikes on his feet.
His home is situated in a meticulously ordered new development among dozens of identically pleasant properties. Inside, it was spacious and uncluttered to the point of being sparse. I had imagined books and papers piled everywhere, strewn across the kitchen table and blocking access to doorways and closets. West joked that I was going to be disappointed.
His office held a mixing board, speaker, microphone, keyboard and dual-screen computer monitor. A framed note from his daughter read: “You did so good on your podcast,” in squiggly script. On the wall was a plaque from YouTube presented for accumulating more than 100,000 subscribers, drawings of Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir, and a Jimi Hendrix poster. To my amazement, I counted just six books on a shelf next to a pair of orange dumbbells: The Complete Essays of Montaigne; The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin; Richard Harland’s Literary Theory From Plato to Barthes; an anthology of feminist theory; And Yet, by Christopher Hitchens; and Foucault’s The Order of Things. The rest of his reading material lives on a Kindle. “If you look at the desktop of my computer, it’ll be a ton of tabs open,” he said, laughing. “Maybe it’s the clutter you’d be expecting.”
It occurred to me then that I had imagined something more like the house I’d been raised in. I am old enough now to understand that, like a New Jersey Novalis, “I’m always going home, always going to my father’s house”—and to the foundational story of my family. That is where I can best understand the 20th-century America that both constrained and motivated the man who raised me. In the 1940s, when he was a boy in Galveston, Texas, he wandered behind his neighbor’s house and found a discarded box of books containing, among other things, Will Durant’s 1926 classic, The Story of Philosophy. As he flipped through it, he was magnetized by a picture of Socrates. He wanted to know who the man was and why he commanded our attention across oceans and centuries. The neighbor let him keep the book, and the ramifications of the encounter led him to become the first member of his family not just to attend college but also to pursue doctoral studies in sociology.
If this were fiction, an editor would scribble “Too on the nose!” in the margins: the solitary child who chanced upon Wisdom itself, forever altered by the Socratic insight that the unexamined life is not worth living.
My fondest summer memories revolve around the huge oak desk in the center of my father’s library, my mother and I sitting across from him as we stuffed thousands of envelopes with xeroxed flyers advertising his tutoring services. We’d seal them and address them to households in neighborhoods more affluent than our own. In the weeks that followed, the phone would ring and, somehow, there would always be just enough new students to pay the bills. Many of them, having signed up with the narrow ambition of raising their SAT or GRE score, reenrolled for years simply to prolong the conversation with him. He had a way of elevating even the most troubled and distracted kid to the level of enraptured pupil. He believed—and to this day, at age 87, still believes—that the life of the mind is available to anyone who wants it.
I have always been fascinated by people who, like West and my father, refuse to accept any social or educational proscriptions. When I asked West where he thinks such drive comes from, he demurred to describe his younger self as a victim of circumstance. But he said that many people who are “want to rise up” because “it’s at least one direction you can go.”
He just “always wanted to be wiser,” Alina said. “I mean, when he was younger, he literally Googled who was the wisest person.” (Here we can give Socrates his flowers once again.) “That’s how he got into philosophy.”
Two and a half millennia ago, Plato’s The Republic imagined a utopia whose inhabitants labored not according to their own desires or whims but according to their innate talents and the demands of the collective good. “Doesn’t it greatly benefit society to have things this way?” West asked way back on the fourth episode of Philosophize This: “I mean, it really makes you wonder how many super geniuses that could have cured diseases ended up being Dishwasher Manager at Taco Bell.”
All of us are, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, inexorably the combination of our innate, inimitable selves and the circumstances in which we are embedded. “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.”(Or as Kamala Harris’s mother put it: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”) We are captive to the economic, racial, and technological limits of our times, just as we may be propelled forward in unforeseen ways by the winds of innovation.
One of the people who inspired West to get into podcasting was Tim Ferris, the author of the 4-Hour series of self-help books. Ferris talks a lot about what he calls “lifestyle design,” the idea that people can create an ideal life for themselves. There are moments in history when this becomes more feasible, and now is one of them. Had he been born in any time prior to the past decade, West might have become—privately, locally—an intensely bookish man like my father, but he would never have had the kind of rapid and expansive visibility he’s achieved. He told me that he’d be doing much the same thing even “if I wasn’t getting paid to do it, just in my free time.”In getting to do it as a career, he said, “I lucked out.”
Now he can design any life he likes. “I could be in Bora Bora right now,” he told me. “But I don’t want to be.” He wants to be in Puyallup with his family, in a place “where I can read and do my work and pace around and think about stuff.”
I mentioned to him that my own somewhat logistically demanding work had been keeping me away from my children, and that I was feeling guilty about it. West is a sensitive and serious listener and has a way of naturally injecting ethical inquiry into even casual conversation. “Do you ever think about how morally culpable you are for being in charge of your own schedule?” he asked me. “The number of choices you have in life that you’re capable of making determines how difficult those moral choices are. If you have no options in life, you’re not really making many choices.”
It was, I think, a subtle and generous way of saying: Part of flourishing is regret. I felt he was telling me not to be too hard on myself, while reminding me that philosophy is, first and foremost, equipment for living, for making existential sense of this very real world we inhabit.
