The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 35 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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: 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: BookScan excludes sales from author-owned bookstores
“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”
Holiday: Business books confer more elite recognition than huge YouTube followings
“The interesting thing about books is that they sort of punch above their weight culturally. It's like the opera or something. Right. And so like you could be very famous on YouTube and your average billionaire might not know who you are, but if you write like …”
Holiday: Numerical sales goals place an unnecessary ceiling on creative success
“I don't have goals. Like, why would he, why would you even put a ceiling on it? Like what you should just try to sell as many copies as it's capable of selling.”
Holiday: Publicly disclosing deal numbers has no benefits and creates targets
“Telling people how much money I made from it. It makes you a target makes you weird. You know, it could somehow be seen as selling out or something. But then the other part I thought, I don't want people, this is an idea that's going to take me four plus years…”
Holiday: Most Nonfiction Authors Make More Money From Speaking Than Books
“Most nonfiction authors make more money from speaking than from books.”
Holiday: In Publishing, Almost All Money Comes from Long-Term Catalog IP
“Almost all the money is in the catalog in owning the intellectual property over the long term, but you can't do that if you are dependent, like you get paid as an author every six months.”
Holiday: Retail is the least important revenue stream for his bookstore property
“So opening the bookstore that like, that making money from selling books might be the third or fourth, like least important revenue stream or use of the property, like the office being number one The space to film and make stuff like content being number two, …”
Holiday: Discipline Is Destiny will sell over 40,000 copies in week one
“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.”
Ryan Holiday reveals he has sold five million copies of his books
“My books, I've sold five million copies.”
Holiday: Advance for 'The Obstacle Is The Way' was $75,000
“My advance on The Obstacle Is The Way was 75,000 dollars.”
Holiday: 'The Obstacle Is the Way' took 5 to 6 years to hit 1M copies
“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…”
Holiday: My entire media brand and bookstore operate with under 15 employees
“I'm saying that I probably have 10 employees, maybe, maybe 11 or 12, but less than 15.”
Holiday: Publishers Cap Subscription Book Discounts at 50%
“At the very, very best, you're gonna be able to get those books at 50% off from the publisher.”
Holiday: Prefers Book Newsletter Over Subscription Club Due to Margins
“I just prefer to like, look, if you want to buy the book from my bookstore, I make a little bit of money doing that. If you buy it from Amazon, I get the commission, but I'd much rather just have that list in that audience than try to monetize a book club itse…”
Holiday: Cerro Gordo lost money rapidly before Brent Underwood moved there
“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…”
Holiday: Daily Stoic Podcast Crossed 100 Million Downloads
“Like I think we crossed a hundred million downloads.”
Holiday: Daily Stoic sells tens of thousands of coins annually
“I don't want to say exactly how many, but like tens of thousands it's a lot of them”
Ryan Holiday: All Daily Stoic products are manufactured in the US
“I could get them done. We were talking about margins. They would be much cheaper for me to make them in, in large books, like from China. But we haven't done that. We've always used this original place. I wanted to do made in USA, but then, and then as it happ…”
Holiday's debut book took ten years to earn out its publisher advance
“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 …”
Holiday: 'The Obstacle Is the Way' Advance Was Only $75,000
“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.”
Holiday personally writes all Daily Dad and Daily Stoic emails
“I write them all. I write Daily Dad and Daily Stoic.”