There Will Always Be People Who Don’t Get It | Hasan Minhaj Tests Ryan Holiday’s Stoic Knowledge

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

There will always be people who don't get it.

“Do you think everyone understood why Keto was so alarmed about Caesar?”

Do you think everyone understood why Thracia or Agrippinus refused to bend the need to narrow or why Routillius Rufus made a legal martyr of himself when corrupt interests brought him up on false charges? Of course they didn't. In fact, Routillius's friends begged him to defend himself, Keto and Thracia and Agrippinus

were seen as obstinate, alarmist, even annoying. People are busy. People are misinformed. People have skewed priorities and conflicts of interests. They're not always going to understand, they're not always going to get it.

Whether it's politics or business or personal, you just can't expect everyone to see what you see. Honestly, if they did, it would probably mean that you're heading in the wrong direction.

“That's what Cracip is said anyway, that if you wanted to follow a mom, he wouldn't have”

become a philosopher. Stoicism isn't about being appreciated. It's not about fitting in. It's about doing what's right, it's about saying what needs to be said. It's about being who you feel you need to be.

So if you're waiting for your friends to understand you, if you're holding back until you get approval from family members or colleagues, if you hope 100% of your audience is

going to be on board, you're waiting for something that may never come.

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use code [email protected] for half-off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at Monarch.com code Stilik. Hey, it's Ryan, welcome to another episode of The Daily Story Podcast. Okay, so in the fall, I went and I did something in New York, and I posted about it on Instagram or something, and I got a text from Hassan Monarch, who said, "Hey, why didn't you tell

me you were in town? We should have linked up." And I said, "I didn't tell you I was in town for two reasons. I thought you live in Connecticut, and two, I just didn't think you would want to hang out with me."

And he said, "No, no, first off, I have an office in the studio in New York, and I would

and we'll get together."

And I'll say, "Sweet, that's amazing."

Hassan Monarch and I, first of all, I'm a huge fan of his comedy, but we had very different yet also very similar childhoods. He'd both grew up in Northern California, although when people think Northern California, they don't think Sacramento or Davis, but that is Northern California. And it's a very, well, John Diddym was right, which I call that the Midwest of California.

Anyways, I've gotten to know him.

“We've got connected, I think, over something with the Sacramento Kings.”

He's a Kings fan. I'm a Kings fan. I love his comedy. He'd read some of the books. Anyways, he did have me come out to the studio, and we had a really awesome conversation.

I want to bring you a little chunk of that. If you don't listen to his podcast, Hassan Monarch doesn't know his hilarious. It's produced by Lemon on a Media. You can watch it on YouTube. You've almost certainly seen a million of the clips.

He's hilarious. And actually, it does a really great interview, and I thought I'd bring you a little chunk of that, go listen to the whole episode, I'll link to that, but in the meantime, here's me talking with my friend, who I'm glad that I told I was in town. So we're going to play a simple game.

I'm going to read you a quote from one of these 12 philosophers. You tell me who said it. Okay. However, there is a catch. Some of these are from Kanye West.

So while I know it by the virulent anti-Semitism, I mean, you're going to have to navigate this yourself. All right, ready? Yes. Okay.

Let's go with number one, the happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. Mark's really is classic. If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable. Santa, okay.

We suffer more in imaginations than reality. Giving up is harder than trying. That sounds like Kanye.

Kanye West, our work has never done.

Kanye. Kanye, correct. The fate's guide, the willing and drag the unwilling. Ooh, Clint East. If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly,

but the good indoors. Who's Sony's Rufus? Oh, my God. I am a Nazi. Uh, ooh.

It's just really, really think about this one. Yeah, that sounds like Kanye. Kanye West.

“Why did stoicism speak to you at a particular period of time in your life?”

I think it spoke to me for the reason it speaks to a lot of young men, which is, you know, how to live a good life, but also an interesting life of how to deal with setbacks and how to be resilient, how to sort of take these feelings and this energy inside you and direct it properly. That's not what they talk about in school.

And it's not even really what they talk about in church anymore, right? And so stoicism or ancient philosophy as a framework for living as a way to design your life, I think that it was addressing a big hole in my upbringing. And I think that's historically what was happening in your life that you didn't get from dad, coaches, the church, cousins, teachers, and more, so both me and Ryan were

north out kids. So what was not happening at Granite Bay that needed to be filled here? Because by the way, dad didn't hug me, that part of the algorithm, that's cat-nip to me. Yeah, yeah.

And I wouldn't say my dad never hugged me, but like, I wasn't getting that sort of guidance

about like, this is how to be a man, this is how to be a person, this is like, this is what we do, this is what we don't do. There's just kind of this assumption that you'll like, you'll pick it up as you go. You know, there isn't, there isn't like a tradition, there's no, you know, like, there's no sort of, this is the coming of age thing, this is what we do when, you know, you

turn 13 in our culture, right there, there wasn't any of that. And so I think, I'm sure, I did. I grew up Catholic until we moved across town. See the mass, you have church was too far away, okay, but then where are you baptizing all that stuff?

I'm a confirmed Catholic, so I do think stoicism resonated in a way because the teachings of stoicism and Catholicism are pretty, they share the same cardinal virtues, like cardinal comes from the Latin Cardos, which means pivotal. And so courage, discipline, justice, wisdom, those are the virtues that Zeno lays down in the four century BC that also, you know, are inscribed in every Catholicism.

And what was it about specifically those teachings that resonated with you more than say, Old Testament, New Testament, that stuff, because a lot of the stuff predates the Bible.

“I mean, what I think is interesting about the stoics and a lot of loss is they're making”

a rational argument. They're not saying, "Hey, do this or don't do this or you'll end up in hell." I think fundamentally stoicism is saying, like, don't do this because your life will

Like, to not be in control of yourself to, like, you mentioned from Masonis Rufus, he says, you know, if you do something easy in the pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure goes by quickly, but the shame enters, and then he says, "But if you do something hard and pursue to something good, the labor passes quickly, but the good enders."

“That is, I think, that overlaps with the sort of Christian teachings, but nowhere are”

they saying, like, "Also God will be mad at you," you know, like, "Also you will rot in hell."

Well, they're trying to do is, are you saying basically, it grapples with physical reality

on Earth, as we see it, feel it, and experience it? Yeah, I think it's making a relatively rational argument, a logical argument for why some things are good and some things are bad. I don't know. I think it's so popular right now with Titans of Industry, you'll hear the Bill Clinton

loves meditations. He'll read it every year. He revisits it. That's not new. I mean, first off, stoicism was popular in the ancient world with the quote unquote elites,

right? This is what you would send your son or daughter, my son is Rufus, writes this fascinating essay, you know, 2000 years ago about how the question is, "Should women be top philosophy?"

And then the other essay is, like, "Is Virtue the same in a man as an a woman?"

And it's our way. Is he writing New York Times Oppets? Yes. Hot ticks. But he's saying, "Yeah, ultimately, like Virtue is Virtue, it doesn't know gender."

So like, the stoics are grappling with sadly some of the same things we're still grappling with today. But the argument then was like, "This is what you want to teach young people, so they can grow up to be." Not just good people, but contributors and leaders in society.

“So I think it sort of relevance with those people today shouldn't surprise us.”

I think it's more interesting that your sort of regular folks are interested in it. And that probably says something about what a train wreck the world is. Right?

Thisism is not resurgent and popular because everything's amazing and going super well.

Right? Perhaps a guide book or a handbook to the craziness that people are experiencing in their data lived. Yeah, like Kato's in the fall of the Roman Republic, Mark's realises in the decline in fall of the Roman Empire.

Zeno is there when the sort of world created by Alexander the Great is falling apart. So it's popular again in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolutions, you know, the Americans of a war, it's popular when shit feels like it's coming apart. So stoicism from what I understand is not a partisan philosophy, but it most recently has been hijacked by different partisan groups and I want to talk to you about that because

you're someone who is tried to research stoicism, dare I say stoically. You know, like, "Hey, let me be cool common collected and write about what these men were teaching." You're a big reason why stoicism became so popular, but there's also been a huge rise of what I call brosism.

Yes. The manosphere loves this shit. If you just go to Twitter right now and you type in any of these names from the quiz, "Oh my God, the accounts that are reposting them." You know, I don't know if there are people that I would want to be like per se.

Which is weird because when I went to my publisher in 2012 and I was like, "Hey, I want to write about this obscure school of ancient philosophy." Yeah. They were not like, "Oh, that'll crush it with dudes." Like, this is all an interesting turn of events for you.

For me, too. I mean, I mean, I, I understood and thought it could be popular, but I didn't think that it would be this enormous. You didn't think nerdy tech titans wouldn't read this stuff and be like, "I could be jarred, but learn 300."

There is something about that idea of like, I mean, the Roman Empire for most dudes is the Roman Empire. But Ryan, now it's Michael Jordan, last shot. Marcus really is quote, Kobe Bryant final game, Marcus really is quote, "Like, this is now a cottage industry."

But it's something you talk about in the new book and I'd love to ask you, what is the main difference between stoicism and broicism in your opinion? There seems to be this tendency to look at the cardinal virtues of stoicism, which are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, and be like, "I don't have the bother with the third one, right?"

Like, "I like courage, that's cool, I like self-discipline, I like moderation, I like resilience." And then obviously, you know, reading and learning and being smart, that's all cool. But you're telling me that I have to ascribe to a certain list of ethics that I have to give a shit about other human beings, I don't, I don't like that.

And I get it. I mean, my primary and initial interest in stoicism is like, "What can it do for me?" Like, "How can it make me better stronger, faster, smarter?" I get it.

“That's when you're in 19, that's what's going to be interesting to you.”

But like, the thing Marcus really talks about most in meditations, like the phrase that

emotions or, you know, being super productive, he uses the Greek phrase he's writing and

Greek, but the phrase for the common good, which he refers to 80 times in meditations. So it was inherently a philosophy about our obligations and our responsibility to and with other people. And so, brosism to me is stoicism when you remove any of the moral elements.

“So it's this recipe for being a better sociopath and in some cases, I think, being a better”

psychopath. And that's, you know, whatever, whatever Pete Higgseff thinks stoicism is, is not what I'm sure.

I don't know if you've seen Bobby Kennedy Jr., he was banging out.

Pull-ups with Mr. Duffy, just like, hey, this is how we're going to fix infrastructure in this country. Sure. This is how we make people healthy again. Sure.

And you're being out 20 pull-ups right now. Yes.

“And there's a lot of people that go, you know, what Marcus really is, was a dictator, though?”

Sure. At night he writes in his journal, waste no more time, arguing about what a good man should be. Be one. But the next morning, he's just out here butchering people.

And I'm sure denying them basic human rights and/or democratic rights. This is where, you know, studying the past requires putting under sort of big boy pants. You know, there's a Jeffersonian element to us. Sure. Like, all men are created equal as a beautiful sentence that he didn't fully believe.

But we can take it literally and we can sort of try to get a little bit closer to it. Like, there is a passage in the beginning of meditations for Marcus Rus, thanks one of his friends for introducing them to stoicism. And he says, you know, he's like for introducing me to Hellvideous and Cassius and all these different stoics.

And he says, because the stoics conceived of, you know, a world of equal rights and personal liberty where rulers respect the rights of their subjects. And he's describing a beautiful world, which the Roman Empire was not remotely like. But that idea, again, it's Jeffersonian in another way, that is the world that inspires the founders two thousand years later to take a big step towards getting to the ideals

of the Roman Republic and the sort of classical virtue. So there's certainly not perfect. And we could list the innumerable flaws of the of the stoics. And I have no problem. I have no problem holding Seneca both up as an inspiring heroic figure and a tragic

“disgusting hypocrite, and I think that's perfectly acceptable to do.”

Hey, it's Ryan, thank you for listening to The Daily Stoke podcast. I just wanted to say, we so appreciate it. We love serving you.

It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in a couple

years. We've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it.

This isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.