Author and bookstore owner Ryan Holiday explains why sales from his physical bookstore do not count toward bestseller lists like The Wall Street Journal.
Opinion
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 …”
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2027
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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 …”