From Stocking Shelves to Philosophy Stardom: How One Google Search Changed Everything

A high school dropout working in a Safeway warehouse Googled "wisest person in the history of the world" and built one of the most successful philosophy podcasts ever.

Key Takeaways

• Sometimes the most desperate circumstances create the perfect conditions for discovering your calling
• Philosophy isn't about memorizing ancient texts - it's "the disruption of common sense" and learning to see reality differently
• You don't need to be a genius to create valuable content; you just need courage to say what resonates with others
• Working a physically demanding job while consuming audiobooks can accidentally become the perfect training ground
• Starting with secondary sources rather than primary philosophical texts prevents most people from giving up immediately
• The question "why do you believe what you believe?" becomes unanswerable the older you get, which is precisely why it's worth exploring
• Sacrificing efficiency for meaning often leads to better long-term choices and sustainable creative work
• Philosophy works best when coupled with daily practice rather than remaining purely theoretical
• Taking advice seriously - from books, mentors, and even random circumstances - accelerates growth more than most people realize
• The skills that seem completely unrelated to your dream job might actually be exactly what you need to succeed at it

When Google Becomes Your Philosophy Professor

Stephen West's entry into philosophy wasn't through ivy-covered halls or prestigious mentors. It started with desperation and a search engine. At 16 or 17, he was a high school dropout working warehouse jobs, carrying trauma from a childhood that included being taken by Child Protective Services at age 9 and bouncing through foster homes.

"I was self-aware enough to know that I had had trauma from the messed up childhood that we just talked about. So, I didn't want to just spend my whole life taking that out on the people around me," Stephen explains. "I knew that I needed mentors and I wasn't in school. I didn't have people to look up to really and I wasn't talking to my family."

His solution was beautifully naive: "So, I literally Googled wisest person in the history of the world. It was my best idea I could come up with at the time."

• One of Plato's dialogues, Gorgias, came up in the search results
• It described Socrates "harassing people in the Athenian Agora, asking them questions, trying to find a wise man"
• Something about that approach immediately hooked him
• The voluntary nature mattered enormously - "I think the best way to get your kid to not do something is to tell them to do it"

What grabbed Stephen wasn't academic philosophy but practical philosophy - the idea that thinking could be a discipline like comedy, where "comedians go to a comedy club and it's this pure endeavor of trying to make people laugh." For philosophy, it was about "forming new conceptual tracings of reality, seeing it in a new way."

This resonated because Stephen had always been "somebody that thinks my way out of problems." Philosophy offered systematic training for exactly that skill.

The Accidental Philosophy Education

Here's where Stephen's story gets interesting. Working at the Safeway warehouse meant standing on concrete for 10 hours a day, lifting 50-pound boxes, with backs that "had been fused together by multiple spinal surgeries." It was brutal physical work that most people would see as a dead end.

But the warehouse had one unexpected benefit: "I got to listen to audiobooks all day long. I mean, what other job could I have gotten?" Stephen realized later, "If I worked at an office or if I worked at a fast food place, I easily could have ended up in any of those spots. If I did, I wouldn't have been able to read books 10 hours a day."

The combination was perfect by accident. While his body was occupied with repetitive labor, his mind was free to absorb philosophy, talk radio, and everything from Howard Stern to The 4-Hour Work Week. "It was in retrospect an amazing thing about the job," he reflects.

• He consumed philosophy systematically while getting paid for physical work
• The contrast between mind and body created focus - no digital distractions
• 10 hours daily of audio content accelerated his philosophical education beyond what most college programs offer
• The physical discomfort motivated him to find an alternative path

Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Work Week particularly impacted Stephen because it demonstrated philosophical thinking applied to practical problems. "What I love from philosophy books, what they do to me, that book did for me in certain areas. You're calling into question assumptions that we're making about things like 'new rich,' what it is to be wealthy at all. Retirement."

The book wasn't shelved in the philosophy section, but it was "a philosophical shift that made it possible to even think about" starting a podcast.

The Courage to Be a Catalyst, Not a Genius

One of Stephen's biggest breakthroughs came from reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, specifically around the myth that you need to be a genius to create valuable content. This belief was keeping him stuck: "I used to think something that he talks about in self-reliance and other essays like to have a podcast or a YouTube channel or whatever it was, you needed to be a genius."

Emerson was writing during the abolition of slavery and Irish immigrant crisis, trying "to inspire people with his work to take action, to think for themselves, to be the catalyst for change in the world." His insight changed Stephen's entire approach:

"You don't need to be a genius. You just need to be saying something that resonates with other people. That was huge for me to notice that you can just be a catalyst for a sentiment that already exists in the hearts of people and then you become the thing that they connect to."

• Look at successful YouTube creators - "Are they geniuses? Are these people unparalleled geniuses, thinkers of our time? No."
• They're people with "a certain message that they're sending and that message corresponds to something that already exists in culture"
• "To write and to say something worth saying is not to be a genius. It's to be brave. It's to be the one to say it and to have courage."
• The primary factor determining success is often just "they were the ones to say it. They had the courage to say it and risk all the bad that might come from that"

This realization, combined with friend Jimmy Weisenhunt telling him "it would honestly be a shame if you didn't at least try something in media," gave Stephen permission to attempt the transition from warehouse work to podcasting.

Building a Philosophy Practice That Actually Works

Stephen's approach to philosophy evolved significantly from his early days as a "militant atheist" arguing with people on the internet. His current perspective treats philosophy as a verb rather than a noun, emphasizing practice over theoretical knowledge.

"Philosophy is more a process. It's a verb. It's not a noun," he explains, referencing Simon Blackburn's description of philosophy as "conceptual engineering." Like an engineer examining a bridge, "philosophers do this with worldviews. Worldviews are made up of concepts that are linked together by assumptions."

The practical application involves what Stephen calls "the iterative process of showing up every day for the show and reading a philosopher and truly trying to embody their work for a moment. But it's provisional. It's not something that I'm accepting. I'm almost method acting a thinker."

• He emphasizes "entertaining ideas without accepting them" rather than adopting rigid systems
• Philosophy becomes about "shaking up those rigid definitions that we have of these things and allowing us to see the world in a new way"
• The goal is developing skill at "being good at that skill of shaking up their static definitions of how things are in the world"
• This creates new possibilities: "seeing it in a new conceptual tracing that is valuable to that person potentially"

One concrete example Stephen gives is applying amor fati (love of fate) during challenging family medical issues. Rather than just accepting circumstances, he pushed the concept further: "If I actually had to find a way to praise, to view in a positive light, if I had to - that was an obligation with everything that's going on right now. How would I do it?"

Just spending 10 minutes on this exercise "probably dropped my cortisol and resting heart rate tremendously." The key is starting with utilitarian applications that then open deeper understanding, like Wittgenstein's ladder metaphor - "you climb up the ladder, you use it, and then you kick it out from underneath you and you don't need it anymore."

Why Sacrificing Efficiency for Meaning Actually Works

One of Stephen's most counterintuitive insights involves deliberately choosing meaning over efficiency, which sounds like business suicide but actually creates better long-term outcomes. This philosophy shapes everything from his minimal digital footprint to his podcast production approach.

"I really do sacrifice efficiency for meaning pretty often," Stephen admits. "I've done so many different productivity type efficiency things over the years, but the last few years I've just - I'll find myself burning out if I separate myself from the task."

His reasoning challenges conventional productivity wisdom: "If I'm giving myself, okay, the next four hours and then I'm going to meditate with Baby Yoda on top of a mountain and then me and my cat are going to watch my nanny cam - I struggle when I'm doing things for efficiency personally."

• When he's writing or researching and "just not in it," he'll "go and hang out with my family or I'll go and do something else, talk to my friend Dave"
• This approach prioritizes long-term sustainability: "I want to still be doing this for my family in 20 years. I want to still be writing and loving what I'm doing"
• The "long play" requires knowing "what game you're playing," which requires introspection that efficiency culture can rob you of
• With years of efficiency training, "you can't help but be efficient at a certain level when you do things. So it's just part of your embodied world"

Tim Ferriss adds that learning to value your time highly has dangers: "If you land on some type of number for what you are worth, what your time is worth per hour, you can end up feeling the agony of wasting time anytime a minute is sacrificed doing something that you don't think is high leverage."

Stephen's approach of prioritizing meaning paradoxically leads to better effectiveness - choosing what to do - because "when you start to focus on meaning, I think you get better at choosing the what." The introspection required for meaning-focused decisions improves long-term strategic thinking in ways that pure efficiency optimization cannot.

The Evolution from Atheist Warrior to Mystic Explorer

Perhaps Stephen's most dramatic philosophical evolution involves his relationship with religion. He started as part of the "new atheist" movement, influenced by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, "arguing with people on the internet incessantly about that kind of stuff."

His transformation began with reading Kierkegaard: "For years I just wrote off every religious argument as just nonsense. Just like absolute man in the sky stuff and then I read Kierkegaard and I just started thinking totally differently about the whole question about the language that people use to describe universal human experiences."

The breakthrough came through an analogy: "I listen to rap music and they use different words, but I can relate to it because I'm feeling what they're feeling. We're both human beings. I may not come from Englewood or something like that, but I can understand what they're saying here. They're using different words."

• Religious language might be symbolic rather than literal - describing real experiences in culturally specific terms
• This led him to Simone Weil, who "just has this concept of attention" and demonstrates philosophy through lived practice
• Weil left academia to work in factories "just to see what it was like to be somebody working on the front lines"
• Her approach to attention involves not filtering people "through all of your own agendas and projects, but just to see them as they are"

Currently, Stephen explores "religious phenomenology" - examining whether "belief in God [is] something much deeper than that and something much more embodied in a daily practice every day." He's fascinated by mystics who describe "direct encounter with something that is both accessible and perhaps ubiquitous and everywhere while at the same time being or feeling hidden to most people."

This isn't about returning to traditional religious practice - "I'm not going to church every Sunday" - but recognizing that "most of the people that I respect talking about these issues, most of the high-level theologians and philosophers that talk about these issues don't believe in a god like that either."

Stephen's current stance: "I'm deeply fascinated in it and humbly reading these thinkers and genuinely opening myself to trying to understand what's being said deeper and that's all I can do really." The journey from militant atheism to humble exploration demonstrates philosophy's power to continuously reshape how we see fundamental questions about existence and meaning.

The conversation reveals someone who discovered that the most unlikely circumstances - childhood trauma, warehouse work, internet arguments about atheism - can become the perfect training ground for a life dedicated to helping others think more clearly about the biggest questions we face. Stephen's story suggests that sometimes the path to wisdom doesn't require prestigious credentials or perfect conditions. Sometimes it just requires curiosity, courage, and the willingness to Google "wisest person in the history of the world" when you're desperate enough to actually want an answer.