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: Media and algorithms effectively govern America by shaping public opinion
“Technology, different words is true then, or true now, but he was basically saying that, look, America is a company, is a country governed by public opinion, so what governs public opinion governs a country, and so these algorithms, the mediums that we use, so…”
Holiday: Society's virtue collapse stems from abandoning moral narratives
“The means by which society has been communicating these timeless ideas. Of course it's by example, but it's also by narrative and myth and the art that you have up in your house, the stories you tell them, the movies you watch, you know, the people you support…”
Holiday: Cultural mess stems from tearing down classical ideas without replacement
“I think you can trace a little bit of the mess that we're in now to the tearing down of those ideas and the failure to replace it with something else.”
Holiday: Brown University students campaigned to remove Marcus Aurelius statue
“There's actually a protest at Brown University the last couple years. They wanted to pull down, there's a stat, an equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on campus,”
Holiday: Bestseller lists do not meaningfully drive direct book sales
“There is, I think people tell themselves a story about how being on the list helps them sell more copies. But as someone who buys a lot of books and talks to a lot of people who buy a lot of books, I have never once heard of someone buying a book because they …”
Holiday: Releasing a book in paperback is a multimillion-dollar decision
“The distinction, the decision to put your book in paperback is actually a multimillion dollar decision for authors. And most authors have never even thought about this. So for instance, on a hardcover book the standard publishing contract and pretty much every…”
Holiday: Rigid, Grand Visions Lead to Disaster More Often Than Success
“All of these things start small and they build there when the person has this vision That they can clearly articulate that they know to be like that. To me, that leads to disaster more often than the prophecy comes true.”
Holiday: Achieving financial success makes you more risk averse, not courageous
“Well, you think that being successful will make you more courageous because you are more secure, but it actually, the rational response to having a lot is to become more risk averse because you know how hard it was to get it.”
Holiday: The Math Favors Traditional Book Publishing 90% of the Time
“90% of the time, you know, the math tends to go towards traditional publishing in my experience.”
Holiday: Elite performance with a normal life is harder than obsessive dedication
“Being really great at what you do and somehow managing to be, like, a somewhat normal person to me is actually, like, a rarer thing to do than to just be great at what you, like, I think if anyone decided to be, like, Tom Brady's Tom Brady, but there's a cost …”
Holiday: Self-prescribing psychotropics to heal trauma risks irreversible brain damage
“I don't think you should fuck with your brain the way some of these people are fucking with their brains, and I think it's gonna, I think we're starting to see some of the ramifications of it with some of the stuff we're talking about here, but I think this is…”
Holiday: Creative professions overly tolerate spotty output unlike sports or trading
“Maybe it's because writing is a creative profession that people don't treat, like professional sports or, you know, trading or anything where it's just sort of excuse, like, because people think it's hard and they don't understand how it works. They're just a …”
Holiday: Delaying decisions costs more than making the wrong choice
“Whatever the margin of error would be between one decision or the other is far smaller than whatever the opportunity costs of not having it done. And moved on to the next thing are.”
Holiday: Idealists fail because preoccupation with ideals clashes with reality
“I think the problem with a lot of idealistic people, particularly people who are interested in social change or social justice, is that they're, This preoccupation with how they want things to be puts them at odds with how they are and actually makes it much l…”
Holiday issued a fake press release doubling his book advance to $500,000
“And then the first thing I did was I took that, and I put out a press release that said I'd sold it for a half a million dollars, because I wanted to illustrate how, like, people just trust whatever is in a press release.”
Holiday: Steve Jobs deserved to be fired from Apple in 1985
“So you look at someone like Steve Jobs, like, look, he was fired by Apple, and he deserved to be fired. He was horrible. If you were John Scully. You would have fired Steve Jobs. Because he wasn't delivering on sales, and he was unmanageable, and he was destro…”
Holiday strongly disagreed with Dov Charney's actions as American Apparel collapsed
“I read that book about Seneca around the time that American Apparel was collapsing, and Dov Charney, who's the CEO, sort of went through, you know, did some things I very much disagree with”
Manual transcription creates a vital physical ritual for processing research notes
“The idea of just quickly being able to copy and paste stuff is antithetical to what I'm doing and why, like, it's the ritual that's important, and the act of taking it longhand is very important. Obviously, if it's like a, you know, huge paragraph, I'm gonna t…”
Writing non-fiction without a discrete target and outline is highly dangerous
“What you don't do, what I think is the most dangerous thing for writers to do, is to just, and maybe it works when you're writing fiction, I don't know, but sitting down and just writing. Like, you can't hit a target that you didn't aim for.”
Consultants should charge for strategic thinking instead of pitching for free
“People think, like, the execution is the hard part, but to me, the thinking is the hard part, so I'm not going to think for free and then get paid to execute. I would rather get paid to think and then maybe get paid a little bit more to execute, or if you want…”
Holiday: Ancient Stoicism was repetitive practice for crisis, not abstract theory
“We tend to think of philosophy as, like, theoretical and abstract and very high-minded, but for the ancients, it was this kind of thing that you practiced and you went over, over, and over again so that, like, in big moments, like, when you have a big life dec…”
Holiday instructs his assistant to keep commitments off his calendar.
“Their job is to keep things out of the calendar, not put things in the calendar. Like the calendar should have large amounts of white space in my opinion.”
Holiday: Sacrificing Present Well-Being for Uncontrollable Future Payoffs Is Dangerous
“The idea that the shit now Is worth enduring because it will be amazing later is a dangerous thing to fool with, right? Not just because you might not get later but because you don't actually control whether later happens. And I, by that, I don't mean you coul…”
Ryan Holiday: Successful people never feel like they have truly arrived
“If you talk to successful people, nobody ever gets, and I don't mean that they're never successful. I just mean nobody feels like they arrived, that they finally got, you know, more out of it than they put into it. That never happens.”
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 → |