BONUS | Charles Duhigg's Reading List (From Ryan Holiday)

From the archives, Ryan takes Supercommunicators author Charles Duhigg to The Painted Porch after the podcast and shares a stack of book recommendations that still hold up today. 🎙️ Listen to Charles Duhigg's episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts🎥 Watch this episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfNVvV5F55o📚 Books Mentioned:Supercommunicators Ghost Town Living The Big Goodbye Ask The Dust The Son Path To Power Passage of Power Means of AscentMaster of the Senate Slow Productivity Range A Calendar of Wisdom 👉 Sign up for Ryan’s FREE monthly reading list newsletter: https://ryanholiday.net/the-reading-list/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  Here, I'll give you this one, by the way.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Oh, awesome.

• 0:17Ryan Holiday?

  This is the ghost town one.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 0:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Let's see if I can find this Chinatown.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  So this guy is actually living?

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he bought, he was my assistant.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Really?

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  He basically spent his life savings on this, like 300 acres above this lake, above the lake from Chinatown. They stole the water.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  Really cool. So he's like restoring all these old buildings and,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  you know, he goes down in the mines.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Really?

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Is that not dangerous to like?

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  He recorded the audiobook for this at 900 feet below ground.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Oh, my.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  For the thing.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's really cool. So he, he thought it was going to be this like whole resort thing. And then it became, it's like a YouTube channel. It's, it's just popular as a YouTube channel.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  That's really interesting.

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, so this is about Chinatown.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Oh, this is awesome.

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  You've got Robert Evans.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22Ryan Holiday?

  Roman Kowalski, you get Jack Nicholson. Like the, the directions you get to go off in studying Chinatown is pretty incredible.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Well, another thing is, again, because I was just watching it on the plane.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  It's like, there's things that they do that you can't do in, like, you don't understand what's going on for like the first 30 minutes.

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's kind of got a Raymond Chandler thing.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's basically like sells itself on attitude and like atmosphere.

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  It's also insane that you would like make a hit movie about like stealing water.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  There's a, like, the other one is like, to think like, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is about the.

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  The building of the 110 freeway, that's what that movie.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Is it really?

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  The movie is about them ripping out the streetcar to replace it with a highway.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did not remember that.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  So like great, really great things have like sort of sublimated to it like all others.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  That's really fun.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  My favorite, have you read Ask the Dust?

• 2:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  My favorite LA book of all time is the novel Ask the Dust. Because it's a really interesting story. So John Fonte was this sort of struggling writer. He lived in Bunker Hill. Like all the big buildings in LA used to be these sort of Victorian mansions, like San Francisco.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  That they tore down to build all those big buildings. Anyway, so he writes this beautiful novel and then the story is the year it comes out, his publisher publishes an unauthorized, unredacted edition of Mein Kampf.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  Because Hitler is like 33, so Hitler's this, it'd be like if you published Putin's book or whatever, but HMH, Accountant Mifflin, owned the copyright to Mein Kampf. They were Hitler's US publisher. And so they sued and bankrupted John Fonte's publisher. And so the book is lost to history until Bukowski discovers it in the Los Angeles Public Library.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  And Robert Town discovers it and he's the one, and he makes a movie of it like all these years later.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Oh, this is awesome.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  He probably picked up the same copy of this obscure book that no one read.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:40Ryan Holiday?

  My all time favorite writer, and it's a novel about a writer, it's incredible.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Oh, man, thank you. This is gonna be awesome. Can I ask you a question about, um, cause I noticed you guys have all the like LBJ stuff?

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  So do, do people, like because you're in Texas, do people wanna buy books about Texas? Is that like?

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, I've read a lot about Texas. I think Texas is fascinating and those are.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  Those are three of the, or what is it, four? How many are there? I think those are some of the greatest biographies ever written. I mean, it's just a master at work, but.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  But I noticed also the sun, like, there's like a.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  The sun is good. Philip, Philip came out. Uh, he lives in Austin. He's great.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so we have some good, we have like Texas-y books that are popular, but I kind of, I have, I sort of see like Texas, Mississippi, you know, with all that kind of stuff all together.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  This is really fun.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  So what was this before you guys?

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  This is like a Mexican restaurant?

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Really?

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  This was built in the eighteen hundreds. Uh, that was a, these are three buildings. These were built in the eighteen hundreds.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, they've been a billion different things. That was a barber shop most recently. These were vacant for several years. But like, so there was a, there was a bar here.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what this is. And then this is the kitchen of the restaurant.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  This is the kitchen of the restaurant.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  So did you guys do the runout yourself?

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sort of. Uh, we, I mean, obviously we, we did, we didn't do the construction ourselves.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Oh, this is awesome.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it was, uh, it was cool. And then, actually, there was a bar from the eighteen hundreds. Uh, like a Brunswick bar in that building. I'll send you over to it, but we moved it to the ghost town.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  So, cause it, that's when it dates to.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  We put it there. But, uh, yeah, we're just kinda, that tree, uh, fell down on my rash, so we moved it to the thing and then.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  This is really cool. And then how did you guys build thi- thi- this is amazing. I was noticing it in your studio. This is amazing.

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, uh, these are just a bunch of books and then some of, this one, you cut a lot of them, so it's not the full weight of the book.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Stacking on top of each other.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  It would be way too much, yeah.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  So we cut a good chunk of them, but they're, this, the fireplace is built, so they're, they're just, they're.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Just like, just like arranged around them and then glued in place?

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's what? Uh, it's two thousand books, four thousand screws, six gallons of glue. It weighs.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  That's so cool.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. We just wanted something that kind of makes a statement. And it's funny, people just come in.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  The first thing they want to do is take a picture in front of it.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  And so kind of, yeah, it's like, so if you, I think in the world of social media, you want something that you share about the thing that you did.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  We have two cats that run around too, and like that, they're probably like the second most. We just want like things, you know?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  That's super interesting.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Well, the thing that I like about it too is it's very, um, like unlike most Instagram things where it's like pink background, like it looks actually distinct.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, uh, it's been cool. And the fireplace doesn't work, so it, it.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Which probably is a good thing.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it's like sort of, you can't take it out and it doesn't work.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  We were gonna do, have you been to the last bookstore in downtown Los Angeles?

• 7:04Speaker 00

  No.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  They have this school and you walk up this flight of stairs and then it become like, it's a, they, they clearly just took like a metal bar and then drilled a hole in the books and slid it on there, but it, you walk through like a, what?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Like an arch?

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  Tunnel, yeah, because it's over the stairs. So we were gonna do something like that and then the fireplace sort of being there with.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Who have you been reading?

• 7:26Speaker 00

  You know, um, I want to read Cal Newport's new book. I haven't, I haven't gotten a copy of it yet. Oh, yeah?

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, where is it? Slow Productivity?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, is it good?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I don't know, just yet. It came out like two days ago.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Oh, did it? Yeah, okay.

• 7:38Ryan Holiday?

  He was here before, the week before it came out, I think, huh? No, he's great. Uh, yeah, you guys are both on the, at the New Yorker?

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He's, um, it's such a smart, like, it's such a smart way to come at productivity too.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, he's the best. Uh, his Deep Work book, I think, is incredible.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  There's Range, which you're talking about.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  He's great.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  What do you, what, so what's, what sells it surprising? Like, what's the thing?

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  What sells?

• 8:05Speaker 00

  That's, like, what, what are you surprised by?

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  Um, oh, that's a good question. I like to find like, oh, this, there's probably this. Uh, Tolstoy wrote a page a day book.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Really?

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it was like the last thing that he wrote. It's just a collection of his favorite quotes and like sort of meditations on them. And then it was suppressed by the Soviets after his death, mostly because it's very religious.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  And so it's been, it was totally forgotten until like the eighties or nineties.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  And do people buy this?

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  And it's probably, I loved it, so I started talking about it because I, obviously I've read it when I was doing The Daily Stoic, just like other books that's.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  And then, yeah, it's probably, there's a handful of books like that where like we're like the, one of the only places that's selling them.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  And so like the publisher's always running out, like.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  So, okay, so let me ask you, because I am very curious, because your books, like your books are based on so much research.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  As opposed, and I obviously do interviews, but not like the same way when you're doing.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't, most of the people in my books are dead.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so how do you structure like, like, how do you structure your time? Because I use the interview to basically.

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  Get me the material.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  To get my material, but also to help me know when I'm ready to start writing, because I start hearing the same thing from different people.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  I just, so I just, I'm usually, I have like a theme or a topic and then I'm reading about it and researching about it for a long time.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  And are you like keeping note cards or like what do you do?

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Physical, I use like four by six note cards.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I used to.

• 9:39Ryan Holiday?

  I have a table upstairs and they're all laid out, like I've just started, I'm doing a series now on the cardinal virtues, like courage.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  Justice comes up next and then I just started wisdom. So that's why I have the chapter on question.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  Question. So I wrote something down that you said about like, we were talking about like questions that get an answer that's not prepared.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Thing for, I was like, oh, that's great. So I'll write that down in a note card. That'll go in the tab of question things and as I put together that chapter, it'll go in there probably.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  But like wisdom is so amorphous, like how do you?

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that, so, so like I wanted to write a book about humility. That was what ego was, but then I found out ego is the way in, like what is the thing that makes it not amorphous?

• 10:20Speaker 00

  So. Right.

• 10:21Ryan Holiday?

  So the actual virtue for the Stoics is temperance, which they illustrated with a person watering down their wine. Well, that's a super boring.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:30Ryan Holiday?

  Idea. You can't write a book about temperance. No one would read that. Like even moderation, no one would read a book about.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:35Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Because most of what people want is the extreme. They want to be extremely successful, extremely rich, extremely powerful. Like, you know, it's like you could, selling a book on body positivity is gonna be really tough.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:47Ryan Holiday?

  Because like, people actually want to be jacked.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  Even though they need to be.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  They want to be skinny and they want to be jacked. And they want to believe that if I give you the answer, like you can do it without.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta figure out what, what is the thing that's ma- no one wants to read a book about a thing that they're not.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  Inclined to do, you know? So, so, I made that book about self-discipline, which is a, a rendering of temperance. And self-control. So, so, I, for me, it's all about, yeah, what is, what, and I'm still figuring it out because I haven't written the book.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  What is the thing that makes that accessible and interesting and then also like compelling to share and.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  That's super interesting because I think for me, the, I do the same thing, but it's this, I have to find the story.

• 11:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Like until I know what this, the anchor story is, the narrative, that I can't actually figure out how to structure the chapter.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  So for me, it's what's the theme? Like in this case, like I'm not, I didn't decide, I decided to do a book on the cardinal virtue, or a series on the cardinal virtue.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:50Ryan Holiday?

  I don't pick the virtues. What's, what's, do I think is the most compelling about it? And then it's not, what's the story? I have to go like, who are the characters and what are the main stories? So like, the discipline book, Lou Gehrig's, the physical manifestation of discipline. Queen Elizabeth is the like sort of temperament or emotional.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:09Ryan Holiday?

  Then the last one I talk about, Marcus Aurelius, who has unlimited power and, you know, uh, it's sort of fusing the physical and the.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  Temperamental discipline together.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:21Ryan Holiday?

  So I, for me, it's first, what's the thing? Then like, who are the, who are the guys?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Right. That's super interesting.

• 12:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. It's the best.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:30Ryan Holiday?

  But solving the puzzle part is fun and then finishing is fun. It's the middle part.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And it's literally like the middle part of the middle where you're just like, you feel like you're like turning the crank every single day and you're like, am I getting closer like?

• 12:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like if you work on it enough and then you're like, oh, wait, when I put it all together, it's decent.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:50Ryan Holiday?

  Like, uh, yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  So which stage are you at right now? Are you at the?

• 12:54Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, uh, so the justice one, like I'm just, I'll get galleys like next.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:58Ryan Holiday?

  So that's like done, done, which is hard. It's hard to be done, done on one thing and then like deep in the shit on another thing. Like I'm, I'm like, the intro's half written, the first chapter's half, I'm doing, I'm like, all the easy parts.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  And then I have like, I'll just have to go all, I'm mostly just like, just trying to find a little traction here, a little traction here.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  I totally, I have this, basically a trick. So what I'll do is I'll, um, once I do all my reporting and I put everything on note cards.

• 13:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Then I'll just sit down and I'll write my editor a letter explaining what this, how this chapter is going to work. And the letter is like four or 5,000 words long.

• 13:37Ryan Holiday?

  I read a lot. It's sort of my job. You can't write without reading. For almost 15 years now, once a month, I send out an email with my favorite book recommendations for that month. Books that I've been reading, books that I've been going through, books that changed my life, that inspired me, that I can connect to what's happening in the world. And you can sign up right now at ryanholiday.net/readinglist.