How Stoicism Became The World's Greatest Scam

Stoicism is changing. You know, I've been reading Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations." Wow! I listened to it in the sauna; it's really intense because you're thinking these are the writings—the direct writings—that we have from a guy who lived 2,000 years ago, who was running Rome. Stoicism. As someone who has covered and studied stoicism for years now, I've noticed something strange happening.

If it was just another celebrity trend, then it's whatever. But what's happening is much worse than that. This ancient philosophy, which was once a guide to living a good and fulfilled life, has been co-opted by the manosphere and turned into snake oil sold as the magic pill of fame, fortune, and everything in between.

Andrew, you need to be more misogynistic! This woman just spilled my coffee! [expletive] Bring some paper towels! We're doing a [expletive] podcast. Stoicism is not not feeling emotions; it's feeling the emotion and going, "Okay!" Stoicism. Stoicism. My question is why stoicism out of all the other philosophies out there? Why this one? In fact, why philosophy at all? Why do a bunch of macho men, who laugh in the face of intellectualism, cling to the most intellectual ideologies?

To find out how stoicism became this billion-dollar scam, we interviewed experts, took a stoicism course, and watched more AI-generated stoicism videos than I’d like to admit. What I found out is that the rabbit hole goes far deeper than you could ever imagine. For example, you see a woman getting [expletive], for example, and you are stoic. The purpose of "broism" isn't to educate, inspire, or enlighten but rather to trick and exploit impressionable viewers. Men are being conditioned to be weak and, you know, you're being told, "Yeah, it's good to be emotional." Young men should be emotional; they should show that.

If you want to become successful, masculine—if you want to make a lot of money, if you want to date or sleep with a lot of girls—being emotional is not going to help you at all. Be stoic. But the ultimate goal is making some very questionable characters famous and filthy rich.

The Matrix has attacked me. While on a voyage at sea in 300 BC, a wealthy trader called Zeno was shipwrecked along with all of his cargo. Instantly, this wealthy man lost all that he had. After losing everything, Zeno learned that we have very little control over what life throws at us. However, what we do have control over is how these things affect us.

He realized that although he couldn't control the weather or the sea, he could turn his loss into something positive by using his experience to teach others about how to overcome difficult situations. In doing so, he created the philosophy of stoicism. Stoicism grew quickly across all segments of Greek society and beyond, from Zeno, who many believe was a foreigner with roots in modern Lebanon, through thinkers like Epicurus, a former slave, and the first female stoic, all the way to Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor and a skilled and insightful writer whose personal diaries, known as "Meditations," have become an entry point to the philosophy for centuries of stoics up to the present day.

In the centuries following Marcus Aurelius's death, stoicism largely disappeared because of Christianity. As the Roman Empire made way for the Holy Roman Empire, everything in the Holy Gospel was treated as well gospel, and just about everything else was regarded as primitive pagan nonsense at best and, at worst, the express lane to hell. All of that changed in the mid-20th century, thanks largely to a handful of unrelated characters: a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a soldier.

But before we get to that, while working on this video, we dispatched four members of the Aperture team to explore the endless variety of stoic tools being shared and sold across the internet. Of course, all the classic stoic writings from Zeno through Marcus Aurelius have been in the public domain for thousands of years and are freely available with a quick Google search. Some of the other stuff, well, as you're about to see, that will cost you.

Okay, so for the next seven days, I’ll be learning everything I can about stoicism and trying to apply it to my life using only free resources. Alright, so this just came in. I received my stoicism game card: 50/50 prompt cards that, you know, contain pretty much a lot of insights and sayings from the great stoics.

Alright, for my stoic journey, I'm going to be talking to a stoic coach, but not just any coach. He's just some guy that I found on Fiverr for like 30 bucks, so I don't expect anything crazy. I'm not expecting much from this, but hey, he's selling a service, and I'm going to purchase it and immerse myself in some daily stoic practices.

I chose to go to the number one stoic superstore on the internet: Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic.com. I went ahead and selected a course called "Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger." Every day, beginning with today, I get an email, I get a video, and most importantly, I get an activity to do to try to manage and control anger. In keeping with the stoic tradition, my day one activity is something originated by Abraham Lincoln: something called burn letters.

You write down things that you carry around with you that make you angry over and over. You write them down, you fold it up, you set it on fire, and in doing so, you literally start to unburden yourself of these things that you know you’re carrying around for no reason. So, here we go with day one.

During the Vietnam War, U.S. Admiral James Stockdale survived seven unimaginable years as a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. He was shackled and tortured; his leg, injured during his initial crash landing in enemy territory, was cruelly and repeatedly re-broken. He was paraded around and humiliated for propaganda purposes. After his release, many asked him how he was able to survive such a gruesome experience. His answer became what is known today as the Stockdale Paradox: It goes something like this.

In Admiral Stockdale's experience, prisoners of war who held out hope that a release was always just around the corner eventually grew discouraged, gave up, and died. Stockdale believed he, along with his fellow survivors, were able to endure only because they didn't hold out hope for freedom; instead, they made peace with life, even in the most brutal and dehumanizing circumstances. Instead of waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, they embraced the darkness within it. Not surprisingly, throughout his ordeal, he took direct inspiration from history's most famous slave—Epictetus.

Stockdale, a medal of honor winner and later a vice presidential candidate, published a celebrated book entitled "Courage Under Fire"—testing Epictetus's doctrines in a laboratory of human behavior. Suddenly, James Stockdale became the most famous stoic in over a millennium. Meanwhile, stoicism was also enjoying a renaissance in the emerging world of psychotherapy.

This is Massimo Pigliucci, philosopher, biologist, and author of "How to Be a Stoic." The history of modern stoicism really started with the invention of cognitive behavioral therapy in the 1950s and early 60s. That's because the major people that started that approach to psychotherapy, like Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, were directly inspired by the ancient stoics, especially Marcus and Epictetus. There is a connection there, and that connection is important because cognitive behavioral therapy is arguably the best evidence-based psychotherapy available today.

In other words, it works. It also indirectly shows that stoic techniques work. Ellis went so far as to say that the best way to sum up the spirit of CBT was a quote from Admiral Stockdale's favorite philosopher, Epictetus: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them." Although giants in their field, neither Albert Ellis nor Aaron Beck were celebrity gurus by any stretch. If Instagram had existed back then, put together, they wouldn't have been as popular as a single picture of Dan Bilzerian's boat.

But thanks to them, seeds had been planted that would bear unexpected fruit 40 years later. The other thing that happened was there were already millions of people around the world who read the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius and read Seneca. This is Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and author of one of the most influential books on stoicism of all time, "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor." But they didn't hang out together. They didn't talk to each other. They didn't congregate in little groups.

This is Jules Evans, a historian and author of another influential book, "Philosophy for Life." And that changed in the 1990s with the development of the internet. The internet allowed this kind of diaspora of stoics around the world to form online communities, and that's how it developed into a movement in a way that it was never able to before. It was in this renaissance that Marcus Aurelius became a character in one of the most iconic movies of the last few decades, "Gladiator."

Russell Crowe is really into Marcus Aurelius, and he wanted to feature more of his philosophy in the movie, but Richard Harris depicts Marcus Aurelius in the first act of that movie. There are little tantalizing glimmers of stoic philosophy in it referenced, actually, and lots of people went out and read the "Meditations" after they saw that movie. As the Spaniard was seeking gladiatorial glory on the big screen, the internet age was coming into full bloom.

Silicon Valley—some sleepy San Francisco suburbs—suddenly became one of the epicenters of human civilization. Society-altering innovations like email, e-commerce, e-everything were emerging regularly. Vast sums of wealth were seemingly created overnight, and people were interested in what made this brave new tech world tick. The Silicon Valley life philosophy is embodied by a bunch of smart people who look at everything as a system or as a machine, including themselves.

For every problem in life, there is a life hack. Why read a book when you can listen to it double time? Why get a good night's sleep when you can chug a coffee, pass out for 20 minutes, and then get back to work after a refreshing and restorative nap? "Bucino" to the Silicon Valley mindset. Worrying about things like finding angel investors is a bug in the system that needlessly eats up processing power, and so to manage that, they turn to cognitive behavioral therapy—the ultimate brain hack—and its unexpected traveling companion: stoicism.

The phenomenon of Silicon Valley CEOs jumping on the bandwagon, in some ways, is sincere, but sometimes it's this kind of superficial thing of "stoicism is trendy," and "I want to be a part of that," or "I like stoicism because I saw this cool quote on the internet," which is perhaps completely fabricated and not something that an ancient stoic ever actually said. This stoic revival might have just been another here-today-gone-tomorrow Silicon Valley fad like hyperloops and juice machines that really just squeeze packets of juice for you, were it not for one of the major characters in our story: Ryan Holiday.

There are entrepreneurs who've done incredibly well just repackaging stoic maxims. When I brought out my book in 2012, my publisher said, "Why didn't you bring out a book of stoic maxims?" and I said, "That sounds boring!" What an idiot! I could have made lots of money doing that, and others did. Holiday found bestseller success with his stoicism self-help book "The Obstacle is the Way."

"The Obstacle is the Way" was published with help from Holiday's friend, Silicon Valley angel investor and celebrity lifestyle influencer Tim Ferriss. It's hard to imagine a more potent duo than Holiday and Ferriss for popularizing stoicism in the mainstream. Who knows how many thousands, even millions, of people have been exposed to stoicism because of these two? Credit where credit is due: "The Obstacle is the Way" is a solid starter kit that has launched many readers on a path to genuine stoicism.

I am familiar with, you know, Ryan's work, and I know Ryan, and I've read "The Obstacle is the Way," and I thought it was quite basic! But that's its strength! I mean, he pitches it at a certain level, at a certain sweet spot, which really carries. I don't know what percentage of his millions of followers go from his work to buying Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" or Epictetus's "Discourses." I would think it would be very high. I mean, I wish I was as good at marketing as him.

The issue is that "The Obstacle is the Way" also launched an empire in which a bunch of millennia-old wisdom was now somehow for sale. That and a bunch of shiny and, some might say, tacky stoicism swag. Does he sell plastic skulls? I'm not sure.

One thing I found interesting was that, before becoming a full-time promoter of stoicism, Holiday's previous jobs had all involved helping big corporations sell stuff. His previous book was called "Growth Hacker Marketing," and the one before that, "Trust Me, I’m Lying." Look, our job is to do anything that grows the business, and Holiday did indeed grow his business, opening up shop through his website DailyStoic.com.

Honestly, at times, it's hard to tell how much of Holiday's drive comes from a sincere desire to share stoicism with the world and how much is just a world-class salesman making a book. There is a distinction to be made there between, you know, sort of selling in general and selling and merchandising. I think merchandising is a particular type of selling.

It's selling of things that you don’t actually need for the exclusive purpose of making money. To buy a medallion that has a bone and, you know, a skull that says "Momento Mori," you know, "Remember you have to die," that's not useful to anybody; that's just a way to make money. Business at Daily Stoic is definitely booming. Ryan Holiday's net worth is estimated at between $5 and $10 million, and with that growth-hacker mentality, that number's only going to keep rising.

Holiday professes a sincere devotion to stoicism going back to his college days, and we don’t doubt that he’s telling the truth. But scrolling through the store at DailyStoic.com, one can't help but wonder what would Zeno think? Influencers and other online entrepreneurs took notice, not only of Holiday's success but also of how his brand was infiltrating the professional sports world. Copies of "The Obstacle is the Way" became as common in U.S. pro locker rooms as sneakers and ice packs.

If you're, for instance, a member of a competitive sports team, sure, what people call life hacks are going to be useful. Yes, they are! But that's not stoicism. Those are just techniques. Then you get these entrepreneurs who are millionaires and billionaires, and that's massive high social proof saying stoicism is fantastic, and so that spreads out. People say, "Well, if this NFL quarterback is using it, that sounds good to me!"

So, men look to very successful men and say, "What makes them great?" Is there anything that I could take on board? Gwyneth Paltrow hired a kind of interior designer or something to advise her on what books to have on her bookshelf—not to read, but which ones to have in her living room—and they recommended stoicism because it's trending. So, that's how trendy stoicism has suddenly become.

Even the mainstream media was getting in on the act. More and more people were coming to the same conclusion: if stoicism was good enough for pro athletes, Bill Gates, and even Hollywood actors like Michael Douglas, maybe it was the missing cheat code separating regular guys from achieving everything they wanted in life. So, we have a lot of authors now, podcasters, and YouTubers, and so on and so forth, who tell you things like, "Oh, you want to succeed at sports? Embrace stoicism!" "You want to become rich? Embrace stoicism!"

Oh, you want to be successful? Embrace stoicism! The stoics would be stunned by all of this because all of those things I just mentioned—success, money, fame, and so on and so forth—are classified by the ancient stoics as indifferent, meaning that they do not make a difference—literally— to the only thing that matters, which is your character. As awareness of stoicism grew, it became even more watered down, turned into a bunch of maxims and life hacks to fix whatever life problem you had.

The so-called life hacks are techniques that are useful in order to practice stoicism, to incorporate stoicism as a way of life. Okay, but that's all they are: they are crutches, in a sense. They are useful techniques that allow you to stay on track, but the important thing is the track, not the technique. I mean, life hacks—an odd phrase, isn’t it? It's not really one that the stoics would use. "Other stoic life hacks."

It's very accessible; it's very DIY, and that makes it kind of attractive in the age of the internet. Somewhere along the way, the true message of this ancient Greek philosophy got drowned in the sea of life hacks. When it washed up on the other side, it was a mutant offspring—something so far removed from its origins that if Marcus Aurelius was alive today, he wouldn't even recognize it. Stoicism became heroism.

Do I remember when the manosphere started to become a thing? In all honesty, I was kind of Johnny-come-lately. Every other people were saying, "Are you concerned about stoicism being hijacked by people in the manosphere that are distorting it?" My initial reaction was, "What are you talking about? I have no idea. I've never seen that." You know, and I was surrounded by people that are interested in stoicism.

I organized and spoke at many conferences. You know, I thought I had my finger on the pulse of how stoicism was being appreciated, but I didn't know about the red pill movement and the manosphere until much later, really. Although I guess in retrospect, I'd seen traces of it. I'd seen books earlier and articles by people who portrayed stoicism in a way that seemed quite odd to me.

It was around the time that my book "Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations" came out, which was in 2012. I got contacted and invited to be on a podcast to talk about stoicism, and I looked into the podcast, and it was a white supremacist Southern Secessionist podcast. One of the podcast hosts was actually one of the organizers of the Charlottesville white supremacy march. I was astounded! I was like, "How did these people get into stoicism?"

Broism, in its simplest terms, is stoicism that has been hijacked and manipulated to fit the narrative of the manosphere and red pill community. It's stoicism for the bros. For the uninitiated, some quick background on the quote-unquote manosphere—a term, by the way, coined by a former porn star known as Ian Ironwood. The manosphere is synonymous with the red pill mentality borrowed from the Matrix movies—a mentality notably disavowed by the people who actually made the Matrix.

Conceived as a backlash against the general perception that feminism had gone out of control and that girls were no longer going wild in the way that real men could get behind, the manosphere, as the name implies, became a catchall term for a network of male-centric online communities. Everything from alpha males and pickup artists to involuntary celibates (a.k.a. incels) to the alt-right, the far right, and beyond, for reasons we’ll do our best to explain.

So, broism is now running rampant in the manosphere, causing a surprisingly contagious philosophical brain flu. Just listen to Taylor’s call with a supposed stoic leader. Alright, so it's been about four days since I purchased this stoic course on Fiverr, but so far I'm getting ghosted, and I paid like 50 bucks for it.

So, yeah, so after nearly a week, my stoic coach decided to finally respond: “You’re [expletive], Miss Johanna. For example, there is no reason to be [expletive]. Why are you telling me this? People are calling me [expletive]. Yeah, but you are [expletive].” And I'm going to ask you another thing, Miss Johanna—do you want to continue to be fat or no? No? Okay, can you take control of your diet? Hey, it’s hot—it’s—yeah, but can you actually do it?

For example, you see a woman getting raped, and you are a stoic—like you can pass through and [expletive] if you want because that's your choice. Although the rest of our crew didn’t experience the same terrible lectures, you can tell that you really can’t buy stoic teachings.

This is my day three check-in! I’m doing the Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic.com “Taming Your Temper: Daily Guide to Controlling Your Anger.” Every day I get something to read, I get a video to watch, and I get a physical activity that I’m supposed to do. Yesterday, day two, the instruction was to look in a mirror and make angry faces. Personally, I would say my experience looking in the mirror, mean-mugging, felt more silly than anything.

Today on day three, the instruction was, drawing on the life lessons of the Adam Sandler movie "Happy Gilmore," was to learn to find your happy space. I would say I was expecting at this point something a little bit more substantial from stoic content, but it’s only day three. We got four more days to go.

It’s currently day three, and after watching the videos on the first day, I started reading the classics. I've been reading "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, and it's honestly such an eye-opener. The best part about it is that the book is in the public domain; you don’t have to spend a penny to buy it! There are also writings from Epicurus, Seneca, and even Zeno, so you can learn directly from the founding fathers of stoicism without paying for any course or anything at all.

Alright, so it’s been three days now, and I made it a little routine for myself. Every day I'm picking a card, reading the quote (they're mostly from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca), which I have to say has been a very interesting way to just, you know, take 10 minutes a day. It doesn’t take too much of your time, and it’s still a good way to change your perspective a little bit.

So, let’s continue. If we had to define broism in its pillars, so to speak, yeah, I would agree that one of them is certainly the acknowledgment that we only control our intentions and the actions that we initiate—not the outcomes. That is, in fact, consistent with stoicism. That's real stoicism.

That’s what says right at the beginning of his manual for a good life. And that actually is a very healthy way of thinking about things. That's also the basis of certain versions of cognitive behavioral therapy. Rational emotive behavioral therapy, for instance, studied by Albert Ellis, which is a type of CBT, starts out precisely with that kind of acknowledgment.

So, that's fine! But the second thing that the bros seem to believe is that they need to suppress emotions—that they cannot afford to be seen as weak. That is not stoicism; that is a distortion of stoicism. Too many men are being conditioned to accept weakness.

You know, some of my stoic writings are used, or misused, in the manosphere, by this—the bro, the red pill stoics—and I’ve seen that, and it's like, you cringe and you say, “Oh, I guess I should explain myself better the next time.” Unlike genuine stoicism, broism is rarely presented as a process for becoming your best self.

Like a get-rich-quick scheme or a workout routine promising instant abs, broism is all about results. Once unleashed in the manosphere, broism became a one-size-fits-all answer to all questions of the alpha male variety. But like everything that becomes trendy, now what you’ll find is more people becoming interested in stoicism because they’ve read articles or listened to podcasts than because they’ve actually read the stoics.

With that, there’s a risk of dilution, as many of the articles contain AI-generated content, fake quotes, and things like that. You’re definitely now entering a phase where you get a lot of people becoming attracted to stoicism but getting a really inaccurate representation of what the stoics said.

This is the unpredictability of how culture evolves, and memes evolve in unpredictable directions. Someone wrote a book about using stoic techniques to win a poker championship. You know, there was a stoic dating app!

Let’s take money. So, stoicism, in that sense, with the dollar sign, or the Silicon Valley spin, is a distortion because it replaces the actual stoic value, which is your character, your judgment, with things that the stoics themselves were very clear in saying they don’t matter. Broism invariably presents overly simple solutions to complicated questions.

One of the perks of broism is that it can be easily twisted into just about anything an opportunistic influencer wants it to be. It’s an example of the Barnum effect, a psychological phenomenon in which vague, general audience statements appear to be tailored to a specific individual when, in reality, they apply to a wide range of people. It’s like horoscopes, fortune tellers, psychics—in other words, charlatans who make a living preying on people's fears and insecurities by telling them vague nonsense masquerading as knowledgeable insights.

What prompted us to make this video in the first place is that we saw a resurgence in the popularity of our stoicism video. When I first made the video, it did really well, don’t get me wrong, but in the past year or two it’s gotten way more popular than I could have thought. In fact, right now it’s the most popular video on the channel with over 11 million views.

The problem is that the more popular the video got, the more comments you started to see from people who seem to know more about broism than stoicism—people who wanted to learn how to get rich the stoic way, how to get over a breakup the stoic way, how to turn off their emotions the stoic way. If you’re watching this and you had those questions, I want you to know I’m not judging you at all for that. I’ve had these questions myself, especially when I was younger.

The sad reality of today’s world is that there are many young men who don’t have a steady adult male role model in their lives. So, when male influencers, who have the money, the women, the power, and the luxury these young boys dream of, it’s easy to see why they get drawn to them. The message of broism is also very attractive to these young boys; the promise that you can will yourself to become completely self-reliant, powerful, and wealthy is obviously appealing because young men are often quite vulnerable and insecure about their masculinity.

So, they tend to look towards things that they think can fill that gap in their life, and if they think being tough and having a stiff upper lip is symbolic of masculinity, then that’s something they can become quite attached to as a philosophy of life, and they associate it, rightly or wrongly, with stoicism and guys like Marcus Aurelius.

Men are not into therapy culture, but they’re very into stoicism, and stoicism is basically therapy with gladiator metaphors. The stoic ethos is quite tough love. If you read Epictetus, it’s quite tough love. I think that appeals to men.

Jules Evans believes the modern world has unwittingly created an opening for broism to move in. I think Western culture has moved to a different kind of model, which is, “Blame your environment.” If you’re feeling bad, blame your environment, blame your economy, blame the actions of other people, blame systemic injustice of some form or other.

In other words, you are right to be miserable. That’s kind of a very caricatured version of a certain type of left-wing argument. If you make an extreme version of that argument, you are going to leave a real opening for people on the right to just put forward this very basic idea and win followers. The very basic idea being: “Stop blaming other people. Stop behaving like a victim. Stop complaining all the time—that's weakness.”

In fairness, we do live in challenging times. People are looking for answers, and they don’t have much faith in institutions like the church or government to catch them if they fall. There’s a growing sense that it’s every man for himself. Some have argued that as organized religion has faded, people are looking elsewhere for a new rule book to guide them.

Just like the Bible, broism can be whatever you want it to be. It’s been widely noted that many people who believe in the divine authority of the Bible have never actually read the Bible. In the same way, many devotees of broism are too busy scrolling through their phone to actually go read classic stoic texts.

That means manosphere influencers can claim whatever they say has roots in genuine stoicism, and the odds are none of their followers will call BS. Although one does have to wonder: If stoicism, as it’s packaged and sold in the manosphere, isn’t actual stoicism, why even bother calling it that?

I think there has always been an audience for a certain kind of male self-help, which is maybe less geared towards healing and relationships and more geared towards success and being a man of power—being a great man. That kind of genre I think has always looked for older traditional sources of advice, whether that's, you know, samurai or whatever.

There is a widespread problem of this, this kind—not only certain communities embrace anti-intellectualism and embrace certain values that are, should we say, quite questionable at least, but they want to use cultural references, which is kind of ironic considering that these communities tend to be anti-intellectual. But they feel the need to have some kind of pedigree that justifies their position. Once a tradition has established itself as respectable for whatever reasons, once it has become popular enough that people recognize it and say, “Oh yeah, Marcus Aurelius—oh yeah, this guy or that guy,” then inevitably somebody tries to co-opt it.

So if it’s not the actual genuine content of the philosophy, what is it about the brand of stoicism that makes it so sellable in the manosphere? For starters, I think we can agree that the word just sounds kind of cool in common parlance. Being stoic means the strong, silent type.

Needless to say, this image plays well to would-be alpha males. The problem is that being stoic and stoicism are two very different things. There is a difference between what we sometimes call capital "S" stoicism and little "s" stoicism.

So when you hear somebody saying, “Oh, that person is being really stoic,” usually they don’t mean he’s following the philosophy of stoicism. What they mean is, “Oh, he’s putting on a stiff upper lip,” is not reacting to the situation. He’s trying to control his emotions; he’s trying to tough it out, basically. That is a psychological attitude which turns out there is now fairly good empirical evidence is actually damaging. It’s not a good thing; it’s bad for your mental health if you try to be stoic.

With a little "s," stoicism with a capital "S," on the other hand, is the philosophy. Although the term stoicism is often misused and misinterpreted, the basic principles of capital "S" stoicism are fairly easy to grasp—at least compared to other philosophies. Ancient stoicism lends itself to easy-to-remember and highly marketable catchphrases. The phrase "Momento Mori," a reminder of man's mortality, literally meaning "Remember you must die," appears to be one of Ryan Holiday's bestselling medallions.

But still, why has stoicism succeeded where other formerly trending philosophies, like, say, Buddhism, have not? It can’t just be because people think Roman centurions look awesome—"300" was a sick movie, can it? So why are people in the manosphere drawn to Roman stuff?

Like, it’s like that trend recently about how often do men think about the Roman Empire—like kind of trope. Is there something about it? Yeah! Like, gosh, I mean, Rome was a militaristic society. It permeated Roman culture and symbolism. It was autocratic. I think if you're going to exploit adolescent boys—which is something people have done throughout history—the go-to way of doing that is to accuse them of being unmanly and drive that message home to them, and then offer to solve it for them.

And then, you know, you’re going to refer to autocratic societies and strong leaders or despots. Perhaps broism outshines Eastern philosophies because Buddhism and the like have been tainted by associations with 1960s counterculture and its modern offshoot: the touchy-feely New Age movement.

It's further been suggested that the chauvinism that taints so much of the red pill and alt-right movements is also at play, positioning themselves in opposition to a caricature of woke liberals bowing to the exotic superiority of Eastern wisdom. Western chauvinists insist that the great forces which have civilized and elevated man uniformly originated in the West. Perhaps that has helped drive the rise of broism.

Donald Robertson disagrees. "In my own case, I immersed myself in reading Asian philosophy when I was a young guy—read like the Tao Te Ching, all that kind of stuff, right? And I loved it! But then when I found stoicism, I connected with it in a different way. I don’t think because I idealized Western chauvinistic values, but because I had a kind of what I would describe as a déjà vu experience. I thought some of this stuff seems kind of familiar to me—I’ve heard some of these concepts in our own culture."

Other observers are more skeptical. You can see that there's also kind of traditionalist school or kind of camp who say like, "We should go back to, you know, Western civilization is the best. We should teach like the greats. We should teach the stoics in high school and in universities," and so on.

That kind of chauvinism—even you see kind of stoicism being taken up by white supremacists. It definitely doesn’t hinder broism's appeal that one of the leading names in stoicism is Marcus Aurelius. If you're going to absorb the life lessons of an ancient philosopher, might as well think like a Roman emperor, right?

If I'd written a book about how to think like a Roman slave, and it was about Epictetus, maybe we can test this one day, but I don't think anyone would have read it—or you wouldn't—I don't think it would have sold many copies. I think a lot of people picked up "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor" because they thought Roman emperors seem manly and powerful.

In reality, Marcus Aurelius was a skilled military and political leader. But between running an empire and writing his "Meditations," he probably didn’t have as much time to hit the gym as it sometimes appears in the manosphere. In thumbnails for videos touting the virtues of broism, Marcus Aurelius often appears to be on some heavy-duty steroids. And come to think of it, the beard looks suspiciously modern too!

Yeah, maybe I'm guilty of a kind of bait and switch strategy here, like, but [expletive!] unapologetically, right? So, we kind of lure them in because they want to be like a Roman Emperor—a powerful, autocratic figure—and then when they get there, they realize it's different at the top. In fact, Marcus Aurelius wasn’t particularly autocratic. He saw through the illusions of power.

You know, and actually, I think that’s a very compelling strategy. Clearly, whoever's in charge of the algorithms on YouTube and social media knows this stuff sells! Click on a bunch of broism links for a couple of days—say, because you’re researching a documentary on the subject—and in our experience, your suggestions feed will be dead for weeks!

And it's not an accident! The powers that be at YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok know it, and they’re all feeding on it. So, what exactly does broism get wrong about stoicism? For starters, calling stoicism a Greek philosophy might get you some funny looks in Greece.

Well, there's kind of interesting trivia about the early history of lots of things, but probably one of the main ones is you sometimes occasionally will hear people criticizing stoicism as being a philosophy of dead rich white dudes or something like that, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Certainly, Marcus Aurelius is a dead rich white dude. He was the last famous stoic.

The founder of stoicism was not even Greek; he was Phoenician! So, the Greeks saw him as a foreign immigrant. Stoicism was seen as an immigrant philosophy. I believe, for a beginning, and as for the whole stiff upper lip, strong silent type thing, it is not the case that the ancient stoics don’t talk about their emotions.

In fact, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum said to me, no one talks about their emotions more than the Stoics. In ancient philosophy, it's all they talk about! No philosophy makes it into the mainstream without getting watered down and distorted in the process, and let’s not even get started on religion.

But nowadays, some online alpha male influencers have drunk so much Kool-Aid that they've convinced themselves that they’re the actual experts. I've been told—and some of my colleagues have been told—several times by red pill so-called stoics that we don’t know what we’re talking about when it comes to the interpretation of the stoic texts, as opposed to people who just read one translation in English of that book, and they think that they understood it.

It’s a very interesting phenomenon, psychologically and sociologically in and of itself, the differences between stoicism and broism. Let’s start here: to the stoics, both ancient and modern, like Admiral Stockdale, obstacles were just that—obstacles. Life was full of them, and to think that you could will reality to change was setting yourself up for failure and unhappiness.

You needed to accept the inevitable and train yourself accordingly. In more modern parlance, you needed to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. But to Ryan Holiday, to quote the title of his book: "The Obstacle Is the Way." The way to what?" In the world of broism, pretty much anything you think will make you happy.

This leads us to probably one of the most dangerous elements of broism: the bros have a third pillar that seems to be recurring in their writings or their discussions. Every time that I spent some time in those quarters, there is a profound degree of sexism bordering on misogyny (and I don't use the word misogyny lightly!).

So, these are frankly weird people who are into hyper-masculinity and tend to be seriously on the sexist, misogynist side of things. One can make an argument that the ancient stoics talk in a way that we would consider sexist. Seneca and Epictetus, from time to time, say things like, “Don’t behave like a woman! Don’t be womanly!”

That sort of stuff, right? And, you know, sure. Those were people who lived 2,000 years ago—they were a result of their own society, and we cringe today when we read that kind of stuff.

How did stoicism ever get so far off the rails? On what basis does broism justify rampant sexism, or even worse? The best explanation the manosphere can offer mostly comes down to a bad translation. When you ask them, “Where the hell did you get that?” Usually the answer is, “Oh well, the word virtue, remember I said that stoicism is a virtue ethics. Virtues are character traits—right? Things like generosity, courage, and so on and so forth.

And these people, the bros, the red pill stoics, you say, "Well, the word virtue in Latin is ‘vir,’ and ‘vir’ also meant men!” So, you know, again, manly men. And this is baffling because ‘areté’ itself was actually a translation by the Romans of the original Greek. ‘Areté’ is genderless; it doesn’t have anything to do with genders! It just means excellence.

What does broism get right? Not much, really! The goal of stoicism and of life in general is eudaimonia. There’s no direct translation for eudaimonia in English, but the closest equivalent might be, well-being—basically, an extended and consistent state of peace and acceptance with both the ups and downs in life.

The goal of broism is almost the complete opposite of that: it’s the idea that you need a steady stream of success and external validation to feel good about where you stack up in the pecking order. The big issue isn’t just that broism gives stoicism a bad name; it’s that by misrepresenting what the philosophy actually is, the exact people who could really use stoicism are being baited and switched and fed dangerous nonsense instead.

Donald Robertson says if you squint, you can see a sliver of hope in the spread of broism. "One thing I’d say about social media is, you know, people say dumb things not entirely seriously; sometimes it makes it seem—sometimes I think that these views are more prevalent than they actually are. Like, I get, I’m optimistic. I give people a little bit more credit than the internet."

I think of stoicism in a way as like a Trojan horse: people are attracted to it because they’re looking for something that makes them even more manly than they are already or even tougher than they are already, you know? But inside, what they find is a bunch of tools and concepts that resemble those found in modern cognitive behavioral therapy.

Once you discover broism and then seek to learn more—like all the new visitors in the comment sections of our stoicism videos—hi, by the way, you start on a journey that, with any luck, can lead you to actual stoicism. And if you think this might apply to you, then we’re happy to have you because you’re the reason we made this video.

If you’ve only encountered stoicism as practiced in the manosphere, the truth may surprise you. And speaking of using stoicism in our lives, let’s check in with our team one last time and see how the rest of their week as practicing stoics panned out.

Alright! I just got out of my call with the stoic coach, and like, I think when we think of broism and what stoicism has become, I think this dude is a pretty good representative of it in a way. Just the examples he used were bizarre—like it was always violence against you, violence against women. As someone who doesn’t have a ton of knowledge in it, this kind of made me want to stay away because I’m like, if this is the community, potentially if this is the people running courses, then why would I want to do this?

Yeah, I think overall, that call was just not successful! And I had to pay like 30 bucks for it, so not that fun!

Alright, so this is day seven. Today we had a check-in with the team last week, and I was very curious to hear from my colleague’s experience with this online course. I decided to book it for myself as well. I have to say, I'm super curious to see whether or not he's going to adapt his talking points!

Also because I'm a woman, so I’m going to be paying attention to that and see if my experience is any different from my colleague's, and we’ll see.

So I just finished my call with the stoic course. Overall, very simplistic! Nothing—no deep learning, no real human connection, like going deep into the subject! Nothing controversial! Contrary to my colleague, like he didn’t go into anything completely outrageous whatsoever, so he definitely, I think, adapted to his public—which was me in that case!

Yeah, just mixed feelings. I would not say that was a waste of my time, but I don't think it can provide any useful tips or life advice to people. There are so many other resources that are actually much more interesting than that; but it was worth trying.

This is day seven, my final check-in. I’ve completed the "Taming Your Temper" course from Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic, and overall I would say I wasn't expecting a ton from this course. But I'm a big believer that you can find some words of wisdom just about anywhere.

But look: obviously, Ryan Holiday knows that if people want to rigorously study real stoicism, there are better places to do that than his website. That’s not who he’s pitching this at, and I’m sure he’d be the first to tell you if you have a real anger issue, it’s going to take more than a 7-day email course to fix your problems.

But all in all, this felt like something if you were going to set up a program for school children to learn some basic stoic life lessons this would be a good course for little kids more than grown-ups. I think I wasn’t expecting a ton, but all in all, I would have to say I was somewhat underwhelmed in general by my experience with the "Taming Your Temper" Daily Stoic course, especially considering it costs 50 bucks to get all these emails.

Okay, so it’s the last day of the challenge, and I honestly can say I’ve learned so, so much. Everything you need to know about stoicism is available to learn for free. I’ve learned so much, and there’s still so much more that I haven’t even touched. We’ll be leaving links to the best free stoic resources in the description down below!

In conclusion, the contrast between the original stoics and the manosphere influencers claiming to be stoics is pretty striking! Really! The difference is night and day! The goal is to become a better person—a better person is defined as somebody who actually cares, gives a crap about other people, and does something about it, as opposed to just talking about it.

And it emphasizes the idea that our character is more important—ultimately, in terms of the meaning of life and our quality of life—than external goods like wealth and reputation. You know, the founder of stoicism rejected the followers who urged him to give the movement he started his name. He wanted to focus on the ideas, not himself, and he rejected the pursuit of personal glory as poison for the soul.

Although no doubt flattered to be acknowledged by a powerful man, Zeno is said to have declined an imperial invitation to visit Antigonus, the Greek general who succeeded Alexander the Great. It was said that Zeno avoided large social gatherings, preferring quiet study, and that he disliked verbose and elaborate speeches.

Although he had known the pleasures of life as a wealthy merchant, Zeno refused to make money from teaching philosophy and instead lived a spare and ascetic life. So, what would Zeno think if he could see the world today? What would his advice be for people who wanted to follow his virtuous path?

They might surprise many of the people who invoke the name of the philosophy Zeno founded in their pursuit of fame and profit! Unlike many in the manosphere, he would reject far-right nationalism. After all, stoicism coined the word cosmopolitan, which literally means citizen of the world.

Stoicism is about cosmopolitanism; it's about considering every other human being on the planet as literally your sister and your brother. We’re all part of one cosmic city—the cosmopolis! We’re all cosmopolitans; therefore, we should treat people, whatever culture they’re in, you know, fairly and justly as a brother or sister.

He would fight inequality in all forms. The one thing that Zeno and early stoics, in particular, thought was toxic was this idea of becoming alienated from our fellow brothers and sisters in the human race. So, racism, sexism, you know, all these kinds of prejudices and isms really fly in the face of the fundamental goal of stoicism, which is achieving a sense of harmony and unity among mankind.

And what of the manosphere itself? What do you think? What is the goal of stoicism? A hint is that it probably doesn’t have anything to do with girls in bikinis. To put it more simply, it’s to achieve your innate potential as a rational, self-aware, thinking being!

Zeno arrived at the principles of stoicism when a disaster outside of his control forced him to make sense of life in a new and deeper way. He was able to do so—not by rebuilding his lost wealth and recapturing his former glory, but by developing a philosophy that would allow him to be satisfied with nothing!

In the same spirit, Marcus Aurelius, during his lifetime the wealthiest man on Earth, gladly parted with a substantial portion of his fortune to aid his fellow Roman citizens, saying: “The only wealth that you will keep forever is the wealth that you’ve given away.”

Other recent real-life figures provide shining examples of the value of true stoicism amidst the worst life could ever throw at us. Not just Admiral James Stockdale, but also fellow prisoner of war turned senator John McCain, and Holocaust survivor turned author, Primo Levi.

These worthy examples of stoicism didn’t seek glory, fame, or wealth; they simply did the hard work of surviving life at its worst and coming out the other side permanently stronger. That is the way of the stoics!

And always remember: be wary of anyone who is too eager to tell you the way you should live! For, in the words of Zeno himself: "We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say."