The Ledger, every show

“This is why I think Shopify is gonna be, like, the biggest company in the world, because they, like, let people do that.”

“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?”

“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…”

“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…”

“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,”

“Well, just like social media is bots talking to bots, like A lot of our life is going to be like AI talking to AI.”

“What, like, 70, 60% of young people could not join the military if they wanted to because they're so out of shape.”

“And so a lot of the things that I was talking about in that book are now part of the sort of like cyber warfare playbook or the media manipulation playbook.”

“Even like, even some of the famous lines, like, give me liberty or give me death. I regret I have but one life to lose my country. Those are lines from the play.”

“The Wall Street Journal or BookScan, which is owned by Nielsen, just flat out told me they just don't include sales from stores owned by the author anymore”

“Most nonfiction authors make more money from speaking than from books.”

“Yeah, I've written four books in four years. Like, it's not, not having Unsearchable has not held me back in any way that I can currently tell.”

“The Daily Stoic email goes out to a million people every day.”

“It sold more copies every year for like 10 years in a row.”

“It didn't hit a bestseller list until 2019.”

“We'll go into twenty-twenty-six with easily a million people getting it every day.”

“Apparently they, some of Elon Musk's friends staged a Alcoholics Anonymous style intervention when he was considering dumping all his money into SpaceX.”

“When Elon Musk was planning what became SpaceX, his friends held a literal AA style intervention that said, you cannot start a rocket company. This is the worst idea. You will lose all your money.”

“You're not allowed to call a meeting unless you've written a memo about what's going to be discussed at the meeting. And multiple people have to edit that memo before you could sit down and do it.”

“You know, which is, you know, sold a million and a half, two million, on the verge of two million copies.”

“Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus's philosophy teacher, is like, He gives a speech on, he says, should women be taught philosophy? He says, is virtue the same in men and in women? And he makes this argument, you know, in Rome around the first century that virtue…”

“Look, the Daily Stoic email goes out to over a half a million people every day. That is the, without a doubt, the largest collection Of people interested in stoic philosophy to ever have been assembled at one time in human history, right?”

“We'll probably come in a bit above 40,000 copies the first week. I would venture to guess could be higher if they keep trending this way.”

“I know it crossed the 100,000 copies mark within the first year, because there was a bonus attached to it. So it took, you know, 12 months to sell a 100,000 copies, but it probably took an additional four to five years before it crossed the one million copy ma…”

“At the very, very best, you're gonna be able to get those books at 50% off from the publisher.”

“Brent's idea was buy this place, find, build a hotel on the site and make it some sort of like luxury resort thing that, that, that they failed to do for like two years, maybe even three years. He had no intention of living up there. It was losing money hand o…”

“Like I think we crossed a hundred million downloads.”

“It will probably earn out its advance By this summer, which will be the 10th anniversary of it, like, by the, I'm, it's looking like the royalty statement I will get in July of 20, 22, which will be the 10 year anniversary of the book. It will finally go from …”

“I got 75,000 dollars for the obstacle is the way which is sold, you know, many, many times more copies than trust me, I'm lying.”

“Tony Robbins called me and wanted me to work on his book for, like, double the amount, and that book has sold, like, a million copies since.”

“I mean, on the famous Bin Laden raid, they had an extra helicopter because they planned that one might crash, right?”

“So he wrote it, he thought it was his greatest book, this thing called Calendar of Wisdom, and then you know, the Russian Revolution happens, like, almost right after his death, and so it's banned. And it's not really rediscovered until the late eighties.”

“We have a couple of stories of Mark's realest crying, but we don't have any stories of him losing his temper.”

“To give Mark credit though, Mark doesn't hit the lottery. I mean, Mark was an online copywriter and marketer and had a platform for a decade before he writes a book, right?”

“The reason Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus are also the most famous is because their works survive the most completely. So all you really get from the other people are fragments anyway.”