Ryan Holiday
Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic. On 6 shows, 13 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorfounderhostoperator@ryanholiday ↗ryanholiday.net ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗Instagram ↗
Ryan Holiday is an author and former Director of Marketing at American Apparel who popularizes Stoic philosophy. He is best known for bestselling books including The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, as well as the Daily Stoic platform and podcast.
6shows
13appearances
169statements
18resolved
13supported
3contradicted
72%fully supported
125said about them ↓ Everything Ryan Holiday said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Holiday: Elon Musk is a genius who broke his own brain
“Well, Elon is one of the smartest people on the planet, right? It's like, to say that Elon Musk is not smart, which some people have started to say, it's like saying he's not rich. Like, it's just, it's a fact, you know? He is a genius in many, many ways. He i…”
Holiday: Media dislikes Trump the most while giving him the most publicity
“You know, like, look, there's no one the media dislikes more than Trump, and there is no one who has gotten more free publicity from said media than Trump, right?”
Holiday: Peter Thiel's obsessive drive leads to poor political bets
“The problem is if you're the kind of person who it's like, I'm going to spend 10 years chasing down this media outlet when everyone is telling me not to do that. You're also the kind of person who can get sucked into other things that I think are going to pay …”
Holiday: Shopify will become the biggest company in the world
“This is why I think Shopify is gonna be, like, the biggest company in the world, because they, like, let people do that.”
Holiday: Trump's effectiveness stems from enraging opponents rather than genius
“What Trump does is I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experienced dealing with, that It's almost lik…”
Holiday in 2016: Trump's campaign tactics will make him a horrible president
“What's made Donald Trump a great campaigner will ultimately make him a horrible president, and maybe even make it impossible for him to actually become president, because he is not actually aware of why what he's doing is working, right?”
Holiday argues decades of corporate conformity permanently destroys visionary leadership potential.
“The system is shaping you every day that you are in it. And you are internalizing its values and its personality and its identity. And the idea that, like, yeah, that you're gonna go along to get along for 40 years and then be a visionary, rule-breaking leader…”
Holiday: Elon Musk's ventures relied on massive government subsidies
“Elon Musk sees himself as this groundbreaking, you know, Precedent shattering entrepreneur. And another version to look at is this guy who took massive government subsidies at critical points that allowed him to do those things.”
Holiday: Trump's effectiveness relies on disorienting opponents rather than strategic genius
“What Trump does is I don't think it's so much a function of genius on his part, so much as a confluence of personality traits, so enrages his opponents and disorients them, and is so the opposite of what they have experienced dealing with, that it's almost lik…”
Ryan Holiday: Fox News programming exists to sell grifts to viewers
“There's an argument that Fox news basically exists for the sake of like reverse mortgages, gold coins. And other forms of grift. Like, if you watch Fox News, just the commercials, you get a sense of, like, Just how dumb the audience is to be perfectly honest.”
Holiday lied about his debut advance to expose media negligence
“It was, I think it was 200 with some incentives. Although when I announced it I announced that it had been sold for 500,000 dollars because I know, I knew people, nobody actually fact checks press releases. So yeah. So, so the whole point of the book was to pr…”
Holiday: Media mistreatment pushes figures into tribal contrarianism
“When you've been very mistreated by like, say the media or just like elite culture it's very hard for you to agree with those people, even when they're right. So you end up, going back to the contrarianism, you end up, like, going against things that ordinaril…”
Holiday: Every Retired Pro Athlete Regrets Not Enjoying Playing More
“There's not a single athlete That you've, you will ever talk to who's retired, who doesn't say something like, I wish I enjoyed playing more, because at some point it just goes away, and then at that point the winning and losing stops mattering, and all they t…”
Holiday argues ed-tech shortcuts fail because true learning requires difficult friction.
“I think sometimes we look for technological solutions to make things easy, and the whole point is some things are supposed to be hard. You know, it's supposed to be difficult, and it is in the difficult part that you're scratching it into the steel, and then i…”
Holiday: Historical Accuracy Matters Less Than Moral Lessons in Kids' Stories
“Whether they're true or not is much less important to me than whether they have some kind of moral lesson that sticks with them that, by the way, when they get into situations in life I can be like, this is like that thing that we learned about.”
Holiday: Pursuing an enduring posthumous legacy has zero value
“I think a lot of people, they spend all this time trying to create this, not just success now, but this monument that endures for all time, as if that's of value. Like, it isn't. It's not only something you don't control, even if it was guaranteed. It doesn't …”
Holiday: Podcasting breeds sloppy thinking due to non-adversarial formats
“Podcasting as a medium is very enticing for, like, sloppy thinking also, because it's not like being grilled by a journalist, you know, for the most part, like, it's mostly non-adversarial, and same with most public speaking, like, you were invited, they want …”
Holiday: Singular domain excellence creates inherent psychological imbalance
“There is something inherently unbalanced about Excellence in a singular domain, because you are focusing all of your energy on one thing. There's something dysmorphic about like the athlete's physique. And that's probably just the physical manifestation of als…”
Holiday: Externally imposed discipline is not a true virtue
“So the discipline of an army sergeant is obviously important, but I don't think that's a virtue because it's being imposed on you.”
Holiday: Cold plunge health claims are largely nonsense
“I'm pretty skeptical at this point of like all of those claims, because I've seen what nonsense like these same communities will propagate.”
Holiday: Cancel culture pushes disgraced public figures into radicalized caricatures
“And what would happen today is that this person would be basically shoved by one half of society, and then perversely, like, embraced by another darker side of society that Doesn't like those people, right? And you would see him get radicalized and fight again…”
Ryan Holiday: Virtue signaling is preferable to cruelty and vice signaling
“But if I had to choose, you know, like people are today are like, oh, it's all this virtue signaling, you know, it's like certainly better than the alternative, you know, totally. I'm not sure this sort of like this, the cruelty is the point vice signaling is …”
Holiday: AI cannot match good writers but outperforms poor writers
“I haven't seen it do anything that even a pretty good writer can do, but it can do things a lot better than people who are bad at writing.”
Holiday: AI Will Eliminate Average Workers but Boost Elite Leverage and Pay
“These technologies aren't eliminating They're going to be eliminating large chunks of the people who are able to do that thing. But the people who could do that thing at an elite or an excellent level will probably it's leverage will be better at it and be mor…”
The other half of the tape: Ryan Holiday's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 117 times in 37 episodes across the shows. 8 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sam Parr 33Shaan Puri 23Nathan Latka 18Nathan Berry 10Les Snead 8Jake Ducey 6Robert Greene 3Landon Ray 3
Statements about Ryan Holiday, by other people (8)
Shaan Puri: Ryan Holiday sold $20 million of a single stoicism coin
“Like there's one skew, and I'm gonna sell, and I think he sold like twenty million dollars of this one skew. Over the years.”
Puri: People Pursuing Mindfulness and Stoicism Are Usually Still Seeking Calmness
“Usually when I find people who are gravitating towards things like meditation and stoicism and you know, micro dosing psychedelics, they feel like they're still on the search for that calmness. He felt like he found the calmness, and that was kind of the disti…”
Parr: Peter Thiel employed lawyers for a decade waiting to sue Gawker
“Peter Thiel basically employed this Three lawyers, big shot lawyers, and they're, and basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed, and this is a great book by Ryan holiday. I forget what it's called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forg…”
Puri: Ryan Holiday is the biggest customer of a major US mint
“And he also said that he works with some mint in the United States. And I guess it's one of the old famous coin mints. And he, I think he was like their biggest customer also. Like he's like, they're minting more of his momentum worry coin than they are anythi…”
Physical coins cost $1 to produce and retail for $25.
“And a coin is a great product to sell because it costs 25 bucks to sell. It costs like a dollar to make. It ships for whatever, a stamp, two stamps. So however much that is, 80 cents. There's no returns. There's no sizes. It's just like the easiest thing ever …”
Ryan Holiday makes more from Daily Stoic merch than book sales.
“Ryan Holiday wrote a book on stoicism. He's written six or seven now at this point, but he has this other property. It's a daily newsletter called the Daily Stoic, where they sell coins and merch and advertisements. He has told me that that has made more money…”
Nathan Berry co-invested with Ryan Holiday to buy Cerro Gordo ghost town
“And I had known Brent Underwood from, cause he has an agency with Ryan and they run the website daily stoic together, which is a ConvertKit customer. And so I'd known him somewhat, you know but Ryan was the one that kind of pulled me in and it was just this th…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
My First Million 58
Top Founders 40
the Knowledge Project 17
BigDeal 2
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 28 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
- 5 Genius Business Tactics Turning Broke Authors Into Millionaires
- Q&A: Gut punches, favorite guests, plus advice for life
- Charlie Hoehn: Write Something People Want to Read
- How This Ex-Navy SEAL Turned A Book Into A $1M+ Empire | Jack Carr Interview
- FBI Hostage Negotiator: These Conversation Tactics Will Make You Rich | Chris Voss
- Harvard Professor: THIS is the Secret to Human Wealth & Happiness | Arthur Brooks
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 29 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
- Is The Rock Going to Make $1B+ From Tequila? + Placebo Water, STR Update, and More
- Les Snead: Building a Super Bowl Champion
- This Guy Went From $0 to Billionaire By Starting A Toy Factory In China (#372)
- The 2022 Milly Awards (#401)
- How he hit $1m Revenue His First Year Building Leasing API's for Real Estate Industry on back of $1.75m Agency
- 9 Business Ideas To Profit From The 2022 A.I. Gold Rush (Using Dall-E & GPT3) (#376)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 23 mentions in 7 episodes 3 per episode
- ConvertKit Raising at $196m Valuation?
- ConvertKit's Shocking Growth to $25m Revenue, Power of Creator Economy
- This Year's Best Twitter Accounts to Follow
- How to Make Millions by Unbundling Etsy | My First Million #207
- How Course Businesses Work & How Irish Pubs as a Service is Making Millions | My First Million #183
- How an Astrology App Makes $10m+ & Why a Boxing Announcer is Worth $400m | My First Million #182
- Unbundling Disney, Why CNN is Just Like the WWE, YouTube Creator Camps, and More
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 3 mentions in 1 episode
2017 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 647: Tai Lopez Owns 50% of $89/mo MentorBox.com, 800 Units, $80k In Initial Test for Self Help Box with CEO Alex Mehr
- 646: He Coined Term "Growth Hacking" After DropBox, EventBrite, LogMeIn Work, Now Launching Book "Hacking Growth" with Sean Ellis
- 774: CreativeLive's Chase Jarvis: If Linkedin Offered You $200m Do You Take It?
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 20 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- EP 310: You Won't Believe How Many Books This 24 Year Old Has Sold
- EP 417: 26 yo goes from nothing to $1M with big partnership with Sweeney David
- This is How Much Revenue Ontraport Does with Landon Ray
- EP 475: VayStays Helps 150,000+ Quickly Plan Vacations, $5M In TTM Transaction Volume with CEO Chris Brusznicki
- He's Sold The Most CutCo Knives Ever, EP 308: John Ruhlin
- EP 332: This Agency Went form $30k to $1.3M in Annual Revenue with 14 Employees
- EP 330: She Cranks $1 EPC 3x Per Day with 25,000 List in Dating Niche
- He's Taken No Funding, Doing $2,600,000 Per Year With SaaS Business Webinar Ninja, EP 252: Omar Zenhom
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2016 →
2015 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ryan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic | 4 | 71 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic | 2 | 35 | 60% 3/5 | full record on My First Million → |
| BIGDEALLEDGER | Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic | 1 | 25 | 100% 2/2 | full record on BigDeal → |
 AMERICAN OPTIMISTLEDGER | Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic | 3 | 22 | 60% 3/5 | full record on American Optimist → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic | 2 | 9 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Masters of Scale → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & Host, The Daily Stoic | 1 | 7 | — | full record on Top Founders → |