Welcome to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien and in yesterday's episode

we learned about how Friedrich Nietzsche's work and legacy was distorted by his sister

Elizabeth. Today to talk a little bit more with us about Nietzsche

and the field of philosophy in general, I'm joined by Stephen West. Stephen, thank you for being here, but more importantly, thank you for your incredible

podcast philosophize this.

It was absolutely indispensable to me as I was working on this episode and I feel like I had a lot

less work to do because you had done so much of it distilling the work of literally

every philosopher ever into these easily digestible

episodes. What led you to launch such a massive undertaking?

Well I didn't like my life. I was working at a warehouse doing manual physical labor for 8 to 10 hours a day a lot of time.

I, you know, prior to that, I was raised raised I was taken by CPS when I was nine years old and

then I was put into group homes foster homes different if the houses of different family members and so I like me long story short when I was

16 years old I got kicked out of a long-term foster placement and they gave me two

options they said look you can run away and the state of Washington at the time you don't have to report somebody a missing person if they're over 16 years of age or you can go and live with your mom and some other part of the country and I hadn't talked to my mom in years so the

the only option I had was to be homeless in my eyes and so I started working and

had to drop out of high school. So that left me in two like a I I had two things that mattered to me then it was making a living and

Trying to resolve the trauma that I had in my past I was very self-aware of the fact that I was traumatized and I needed

wise friends or mentors to try to give me some guidance and I didn't have anybody. So I

literally googled wisest person in the history of the world and one of Plato's dialogues came up called Gorgias talking about a guy

named Socrates and the Athenian Agra talking to people and the rest is history I mean I just have read

or interpreted philosophy pretty much every

day since it really has helped me develop myself and so when I was about 25 years old

...