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For the Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams Profiled Stephen West: “The Warehouse Worker Who Became a Philosopher”

A man in a black t-shirt leans over the railing of a boat, the water in front of him as he looks down.

Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams. Photo by Emli Bendixen

“A notable advantage of packing boxes in a warehouse all day is that rote, solitary work can be accomplished with headphones on,” writes Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams for the Atlantic. In a profile of Stephen West, Williams traces West’s trajectory from high school dropout to the host of the hit podcast Philosophize This, which now boasts “some two million monthly listeners on Spotify and 150,000 subscribers on YouTube.” West’s interest in philosophy started when, while working a job stocking groceries at a warehouse, he had a lot of time to listen to audiobooks. “I was at work for eight hours a day,” West told Williams. “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.”