Hasan Minhaj
Hasan sits down with Stoicism expert Ryan Holiday to discuss his new book, Wisdom Takes Work, why men are drawn to Stoicism, and if it’s possible to change your parents (it’s not).
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Co-Creator & Executive Producer: Hasan Minhaj
Co-Creator & Executive Producer: Prashanth Venkataramanujam
Executive Producer/Director: Tyler Babin
Executive Producer/Showrunner: Scott Vrooman
Producer: Kayla Feng
Producer/ Writer’s Assistant: Annie Fick
Cinematographer: Austin Morales
Editor: Tyler Babin
Assistant Editor: Zae Jordan
Talent Coordinator: Tanya Somanader
Executive Assistant: Samuel Piland
0:00 Cold Open / Opening Monologue
2:22 Ads
3:26 Who said it??? with Ryan Holiday
4:47 Why stoicism?
8:29 Stoicism through history
10:28 Broicism vs. Stoicism
14:01 Philosopher kings
16:02 Feeling everything
18:19 Critiquing stoicism
22:39 Ads
25:41 Discussing “Trust Me, I’m Lying”
27:50 Fallacious confirmation bias
31:03 Updating the forward for a third time
34:37 The profiteer’s grip on the news
38:47 Disintegration
41:50 Asking your father not to vote for Donald J. Trump
44:15 Do you have an audience or does the audience have you?
47:32 Who is practicing stoicism in the best possible way?
50:54 Discussing “Wisdom Takes Work”
52:40 Passing stoicism on to understand paradox
54:55 Material compensation
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THE SHOW:
Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know is a long-form interview podcast hosted by two-time Peabody Award-winning comedian Hasan Minhaj. The show features in-depth conversations with politicians and public figures, as well as occasional interviews with celebrities. Rather than sticking to standard talking points, Minhaj aims to ask deeper, more probing questions that reveal personal perspectives and challenge conventional narratives. The tone is direct and curious, and focused on uncovering what guests really think beyond rehearsed answers.
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Source
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My initial response to the video title was “because they don’t understand Stoicism”.
I’m glad to see from the teaser excerpt that it looks like that’s where this discussion is going.
I learned about Stoicim proper aged 30+. Zeno of Kition, the first Stoic philosopher was born about 5km away from were i live…
Something about “we invented agency” doesn’t sit right
" all the dead bodies on Everest were highly motivated people so maybe just calm down"😂
I feel as if Stoicism has taken the same course as Objectivism in that it gave the rich and powerful a philosophical and moral justification for being greedy.
Stoicism is a philosophy of the privileged.
Poor Marcus Aurelius putting up with the burdens of imperium and constant demands on his time….
In a palace surrounded by slaves. He convinces himself he has to suck it up. Well done.
This doesn’t work so well for the slave in the silver mine in Hispania.
It’s basically “know your place pleb”
Hassan, Psychopaths are all around us. The issue is they are able to find a vehicle to express their pathology best in the organs of the Republican party.
Consider the GOPs willingness to drop 40 million Americans off their health insurance or killing one million Americans during COVID. These psychopaths are running rampant in the Republican party where expressions of their pathology are appreciated.
This was very awesome
Why are grifters obsessed with stoicism?
I’ve respected your work because you’ve never been afraid to talk about uncomfortable truths. That’s why your silence on certain humanitarian crises feels disappointing. Your voice matters. I hope you use it consistently for all people, not selectively.
Please talk about IRAN MASSACRE
We cannot allow stoicism to be hijacked by these loonies .
Great interview
Stoicism was always popular with the Roman elites and political leaders. It had a thread of simply playing your role as well as possible and find beauty in that. Part of the reason it lost out to early Christianity is because the among other reasons, slaves are less likely to just want to play their role in society well. Not a surprise tech bros, finance bros, and trash men are getting into it in droves
Ryan’s head looks comically large with the camera angle. What happened?
Ok but here are some ACTUAL quotes by Marcus Aurelius.
"As an antidote to unkindness, we were given kindness."
"Remember that the opposite of anger is not passivity, but reason and calm strength."
"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart."
"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."
"All men are made one for another: either then teach them better or bear with them."
How could you read any of that as an invitation to be a sociopath?
They identify as stoics to get the little people to live 'stoicly' and accept all the crappy changes that the tech bros are forcing on society.
Really excellent conversation. Wonderfule education on Stoicism. And you touched upon so many issues. Thank you so much for it. Ryan's and Hasan`s work is both very much appreciated.
Interesting conversation
this dude sucks, any competent liberal arts professor would mog him to oblivion
ok, so I`m 13 min into the video and I just have to ask, is anyone else seeing how this guy is hanging on to the chair as if he was going to fall to the ceiling? And the way he's grabbing it.,,,,,
My old humanities professor wrote a book on aretê when he was 85. So not all 85 year olds are decrepit and passive.
Ryan's letter to his dad is basically what I posted without knowing about his. I was taught to be all of these things but you excuse the behavior by our most prominent representative. Did you really believe in that or is it just a means to an end? Is the integrity that I was taught just a naive method to take advantage of the people who are being earnest and honest?
"when people are in cults…"
It's always Roman stoicism too, like you never see them quote Zeno.
These dudes are dumb. Looking for how to be a man from a time no longer existing. Learn to be a man for your time and era. that's not Stoic enough? 😂
it's funny because compassion is actually a central aspect of Stoicism, all of these people are reading it selectively.
CRUSHED that quiz
Is stoicism (which is cool) used as an excuse here to be pro-genocide?
Trust Me I'm lying, I read it back in 2014 and it's been a guide for my modern media intake, its heartbreaking to hear that it's become a road map for terrible people, but it has helped, it helped me! I shutter to think who I would be without it
Recently found your YouTube channel and have been catching up on the material. In this chat you made a comment that grandparents (of which age I'm at now) are mostly stoic because they've lost their strength not to be. I can tell you our family has always been pretty fiercely progressive as long as I've been alive, and my Mother, 91 years old,makes a sign, pulls on her pussy hat, and gets out on the street for every No Kings day, and every other opportunity she has. That may or may not be an example of your point not on mark, but thought I'd throw it out there.
I was avoiding Ryan Holiday because his accessible-looking book covers made me think he was part of the whole "broicism" trend. Now I'm honor-bound to check him out.
Never heard of this Ryan Holiday before (62 year old guy here); very interesting dude. Enjoyed the conversation.
I was watching love is blind and a dude was saying how into Stoicism he is and made me cringe. Now I know why!
They care about it because in misunderstanding what it even is, they think they can package it as a product (excuse) to feed the wider public like “move fast and break things”, and that we’ll just accept it. Stoicism absolutely does not talk about people laying down and taking abuse from power structures, or being indifferent emotionless robots, by the way.
You know how some christians are constantly looking for bible verses to justify their shitty political beliefs? Broicism is that but for right wing atheist tech bros. If you're doing shitty things, people are telling you they're shitty, and deep down you know they're shitty, it becomes really hard to view yourself as a good person. That's cognitive dissonance – people will work super hard to get rid of it. It is a lot more convenient to just unsubscribe from broader society's notions of morality and adopt a new philosophy that places you on the moral high ground than it is to stop the self-serving, shitty behavior.
Ever wonder why that one massive surveillance company has a philosophy PhD as its CEO? It's literally for this reason. They know that their services are so morally reprehensible that they need someone to sell an entirely new philosophy to their clients. They say, "youre not greedy oligarchs or aspiring authoritarians, you're actually looking out for your customers and citizens." They know people want their product; that CEO is there to sell a worldview in which their product is morally justified.
The distinction between the philosophy and Ryan Holiday needs to be made. If you're posting about stoicism you are not posting about yourself. But if you decide to merge the two, now turning activist turns the philosophy into activism also, which I do not believe stoicism to be. It may enable your personal activism, but the philosophy itself is far from radical or even progressive, let alone policing. It's mind your own business. Stay strong. Focus on your calling, with a clear distinction between the philosophy and your calling.
If you really believe Gandhi invented non violent activism .. read the big fat book by Graeber and Wengrow, "the dawn of everything" .. history of humans is large and diverse
Like all things tech bro, it's surely a complete aberration that would draw the ire – and a slap across the face – from Aurelius. Oh, and let's be honest. The current crop are a shell of their predecessors, money-grubbing creeps who couldn't care less about innovation but just want to stuff their own pockets then rationalize it with bastardized crap like this.
Why did the Stoics do better than Epicureans under the emperors? One emperor was even famously a stoic. Marcus Aurelius.
I remember doing a deep dive into stoicism in college when I was writing a paper on Marcus Aurelius. I read the meditations, the letters of Cornelius Fronto, Epictetus, etc. I still made a habit of reading the meditations for years anytime a new translation came out. This was decades ago, and it has been interesting to watch Stoicism, which I don't subscribe to but I find historically interesting, morph online into a quick and easy philosophy for men. I think there are aspects of it that can be helpful, but it is a very complete system of thought and it isn't just about the handful of Marcus Aurelius quotes people pass around online (it also doesn't fit neatly into the boxes of modern political ideologies either)
6:53 “we don’t have a coming of age in our culture” bro you were Confirmed, that’s coming of age, you pick a name for yourself based on the saint you want to emulate in your life. It’s essentially the Catholic Bat Mitzvah. How is that not exactly what you wanted?
Gandhi didn't invent the idea of non-violent social change… Maybe he introduced it to the West (not really), but certainly in India he was drawing on thinking and doing that spans thousands of years.
At the mention of Ye, he said anti-Semitism. Oh now I know he's full of sh1t
Are they? The boys and girls destroying our world are stoic? The shallow guys are going to stoicism?
You should differentiate between broicism and stoicism. I like stoicism. Not a tech bro though.
A completely unsubstantive observation:
Ryan Holiday looks like a young, slick Lurch
Gareth bale has become smart after retirement 😂