Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this.

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I hope you love the show today. So today is the first episode in a series on a man named Arthur's

Shope and Hour. The Toriously a Guy that thinks this world is a pretty miserable place.

The Toriously a Guy that sees our everyday lives as similar to being in a sunny plane

with a dark cloud looming over your head that follows you around.

You see the sun light all around you, try to get to it, but you never will.

He's notoriously a guy that sees the pinnacle of human virtue, or a sage in his particular

philosophical system, is someone that rejects any sort of worldly human desire and spends

their days living like an ascetic monk, depriving themselves of everything.

Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the majority of people listening to this probably

don't view their lives in the same sort of pessimistic way that Shope and Hour does.

Probably a little confused right now. Why? What do you say that?

In this series we'll ask the hard-hitting questions. Is Arthur a Shope and Hour just a drama queen?

Is this the world's oldest 13-year-old kid that didn't get an iPad for Christmas?

Or is there maybe something that Shope and Hour presents as a foundation for why all these

things aren't dramatic as they might initially seem? Quick spoiler. One of the things that makes

Shope and Hour super interesting when it comes to the history of human thought is that he's a first

major philosopher to use only the work of Western thinkers before him and independently arrive at

...