The content argues that popular success advice, exemplified by podcasts like "Diary of a CEO," is fundamentally flawed, promoting a misleading narrative of controllable success driven by individual effort rather than acknowledging the significant role of luck and systemic factors. This narrative, it claims, is not only ineffective but actively detrimental, serving as a business model to monetize anxiety and perpetuate inequality.
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Hello, welcome to Barry's Economics.
Today, let me show you the sciencebacked
uncomfortable truth about why Diary of a
CEO might be the very thing standing
You know what's wild is that right now
we are living through the most
documented era of success advice in the
history of the human race. Every
morning, millions of people wake up,
plug in their earbuds, and mainline
interviews with the most successful
people on the planet. CEOs of huge
companies, Nobel Prize winning
scientists, authors, billionaires. We've
got plans, frameworks, morning routines,
and actionable insights literally coming
out of our ears. What if I told you that
the way you are chasing love and success
is the exact reason why you don't have
either of them? And yet, statistically,
we've never been less likely to achieve
upward mobility. In fact, we're pretty
much all less successful than our
parents were at our age. In fact, we
can't even afford a flat half the size
of theirs, and we're working our asses
off. On top of that, we've never been
more anxious and more burnt out. I don't
think that's a coincidence. Tales of
success on one side and lives of
relative failure on another. And the
answer lies, I think, at the core of the
success of podcasts like Diary of a CEO.
I have a secret to tell you, and this is
the second point of my diary this week.
It's a secret that I only found out and
started to deeply understand recently.
When I say recently, I mean the last 24
months. It's a secret that I really
started to understand honestly being
completely honest with you when I got
rich and when I got rich friends and
those rich friends pulled back a certain
curtain and allowed me to see behind it.
>> For those people that are unfamiliar,
Steven Barter's podcast, Diary of a CEO,
Diary of a Chief Executive Officer, has
50 million listeners. And on his
podcast, Steven interviews successful
people, chief executives from every walk
of life. chief executive, celebrities,
scientists, billionaires, gurus, and the
show claims to give you actionable
secrets, strategies, or frameworks, the
ones that you need to become successful
and live a better life. What a claim.
And like millions of other people, I've
watched it loads. I I would listen to it
on my commute at the gym. Yeah, I go to
the gym. um out on a walk cooking
dinner. Yeah, I eat. And the podcast
felt like a shortcut, like I was
learning directly from the source. But
when I looked into the podcast more
deeply, I found not only an industrial
scale distortion about how success
really works and how people really do
become successful, but also that the
podcast itself is actually doing the
exact opposite of what it promises to
do. Not only is it not helping you
succeed, I think it's actively stopping
you from succeeding. In fact, I go
further. I think stopping you from
succeeding is its actual business model.
Yeah, I said it. Steven Bartlett, come
at me. I'm ready for you. I go to the
gym and I eat. I'm ready for it.
Actually, I'm not ready for you at all.
Don't come for me. The first thing that
made me feel something was off was a
study that I read that was actually on
the very field of expertise, right? That
showed something really, how do I put
it? alarming. So a researcher named
Philip Tetllock at the University of
California, Berkeley, he spent 20 years
studying experts, like proper experts,
economists, political scientists, you
know, the kind of people that would go
on News Night and speak with tremendous
confidence about what's going to happen
next. He tracked 284 of them. And he
collected over 80,000 predictions and
measured their accuracy. And the result
was they barely beat random chance.
In fact, sometimes they did worse. Worse
than random chance. Yeah.
Congratulations. You've achieved
anti-nowledge. You're not just ignorant.
You are precisely wrong. But where it
got really interesting in particular for
the the kind of podcast that is dire of
a CEO is that the experts who were the
most confident, the ones who knew that
they were right, who spoke most
confidently, who had rules and
frameworks and formulas, well, those
experts, they were all actually the
worst, the least accurate, but they were
always the ones that were most likely to
be quoted in the media. And Tetlog
called these people hedgehogs. And there
was a better type of expert and he
called these foxes.
>> Well, there's an essay by Isaiah Berlin
that came out about 45 years ago in
which he draws on a fragment of Greek
poetry from 2500 years ago by the Greek
warrior poet Archilicus. Uh which is
roughly translated as the fox knows many
things but the hedgehog knows one big
thing. And he he defines the ideal type
hedgehog as uh an expert or a
professional or a thinker who relates
everything to a single central vision.
So you could be a Marxist hedgehog or
you could be a libertarian hedgehog. The
important thing is that you approach
history, you approach current events in
a deductive frame of mind. You have
certain first principles and you try as
hard as you can to absorb as many
different facts into the framework of
those first principles. The ideal type
foxes Berlin defined this way. He said
they pursue many ends often unrelated
and even contradictory. They entertain
ideas that are centrifugal rather than
centripal without seeking to fit them
into or exclude them from any one all
embracing inner vision. Foxes are
skeptical of big theories. And
interestingly, the foxes who did the
best in my forecasting exercises were
the least enthusiastic about
participating. And they were the most
diffident about their ability to
forecast because they really do see
history as in in in substantial measure
as quite as quite unpredictable. Whereas
the hedgehogs were more enthusiastic
about it. They they tend to be more
enthusiastic about extending their
favorite theories into new domains and
they tend to be more confident in their
ability to predict. Now this is some
some some data which I'll just go over
very quickly. Foxes don't make good
podcast. They don't make good media
interview. They say things like, "It
depends and there are multiple factors
and well, we can't know for sure." So,
they're asked to come on a podcast. They
just say, "Well, no, I I couldn't really
simplify it. Sorry." But hedgehogs
hedgehogs line up for the podcast and
say, "I've got a formula. It's going to
explain everything. Here's my formula
for success. How to sleep better, how to
live better, how to do everything
better." And it's great TV. It's great
podcast because there's an implication
that there is a formula and that's great
isn't it? If there's a formula I can
follow the formula and I too can be
successful. I can follow the 33 laws of
business and life which is by the way
literally the title of Steven Barter's
book. Really amazing. I'm going to take
those steps. Did they go to the gym? Did
they eat? Yes. I'm already ahead of the
game. Tetlock's research showed
something further that even experts who
succeeded and had been successful before
are actually terrible at predicting
what's going to work in the future. I
wonder why that would be. Well, it's
because complex systems don't have
formulas. Who would have thought it? In
fact, the formula is absolutely a
retrospective illusion. It's people
looking back on their path and
connecting dots that only make sense in
hindsight but were never the plan to
start with. But those experts, those
soothsayers, they're the only people
we're listening to, the hedgehogs. We're
listening to confident people because
listening to confident people is just
great, isn't it? It's so persuasive. You
know, like we're all just exhausted by
the chaos and the uncertainty of the
world. And those people, oh, they sound
like they know what they're talking
about. There's an answer out there. I
mean, I haven't cracked it, but there is
an answer out there. Oh, thank Christ.
Our media is absolutely overrun with
hedgehogs, right? The everywhere. But by
definition, if you're confident enough
to go on a podcast, that's not the type
of expert that we want to be listening
to. And that problem that Tetler pointed
out is magnified by something called the
Crudder Dunning effect, which you might
actually have heard of because it's
relatively famous. In 1999, MIT
psychologists David Dunning and Justin
Krueger, what a great last name,
Krueger, discovered something. I'm Barry
Krueger, I'm here to destroy, discovered
something that should probably, I think,
be taught in schools, which is the less
you know about something,
the more confident you are that you
understand it.
I'll let that sit.
So they ran a series of experiments
where they tested people on logical
reasoning and grammar and then they
asked those people to estimate how well
they'd done. And the results showed
clearly that the worst performers
massively overestimated their abilities,
often believing that they were way above
average. Meanwhile, the actually good
people, the experts slightly
underestimated themselves. The reason
incompetence doesn't just make you bad
at something. It makes you too bad, too
incompetent to recognize that you're bad
at that thing. Just because you have a
qualification doesn't make you
competent, but it can make you even more
confident, even more deaf to learning
new ideas. As people truly learned more
and more about a subject and actually
became more competent, their confidence
dropped because they started to see how
much they didn't know. Because real
expertise breeds humility, whereas
ignorance breeds confidence, which
explains why the loudest voices in any
room are often the least well-informed
and why Dire of a CEO only books
confident founders instead of thoughtful
experts. But even now, right, I can kind
of hear you saying, "But Barry, the
people on Dire of a CEO, they've already
been successful, right? So they are
experts, but it's been proven, right? So
that study isn't really relevant for
them. They've made it and that's
intuitive and it feels true until you
discover that actual success is almost
100% random. In 2006, sociologist Duncan
Watts at Columbia University managed to
prove just that fact. and he ran one of
the most revealing experiments on
success I've ever heard of. So, he
created an artificial music market
called Music Lab.
Yeah, Music Lab. Cool. He wasn't a
marketing expert. And he recruited over
14,000 participants and gave them access
to 48 songs, all by unknown bands. And
our participants could download, listen,
and rate the songs. But here's the
nuance. He randomly divided participants
into nine groups. Group one with a
control. They were independent. They
only saw the song names. They listened
to the tracks independently without any
idea of what other people thought and
they rated them. But the other seven
groups were socially influenced groups.
within each of their groups, they could
see how many times each song had been
downloaded by the other people in that
particular group.
>> He wanted to know how information, you
know, who was interacting with, how
people were interacting with each other,
what kind of things they were talking
about, and how that impacted their
behavior. Uh, and he was interested in
in in politics. He was interested in,
you know, uh, voting behavior. But very
soon this question uh people realized
was was relevant to to marketing and to
uh you know to all kinds of social behavior.
behavior.
>> So one group only had their own judgment
but others had some knowledge some
information about what some other people liked.
liked.
So if success and quality were the same
thing, you'd expect the same great
tracks, the same bangers to be top time
and time again, right?
wrong. The exact opposite happened. For
example, one song ranked 26th in the
independent group, middle of the pack.
But in one other group, it was number
one. In another group, it was number 40.
Same song, totally different outcome.
What's found that success requires both
skill and luck. Sure, quality creates a
floor and a ceiling. You've got to be
able to make music, make good music. But
within that range,
pure randomness. The randomness of what
letter the title began with or who
downloaded it first or whether it was
named after something that happened to
be on the news that day. But of course,
none of these groups knew anything other
than their top song, their banger. This
one is the best because from inside
success, luck becomes invisible. And
when you tell your story in a podcast,
you genuinely think that it's because of
your skill. Because that's the story
that makes sense to you. That's the
story that feels true to you. The story
your idiot brain created because he
can't see the luck. And it is in the
brain. Even neurobiologists, researchers
like Michael Gazinger found clearly in
research that I'm not going to go into
in detail here, but you can look it up.
I'll put it in the notes that in a
absolute 100% documentable on MRI way,
the conscious mind is not the decision
maker. It's the storyteller. Or as one
of his researchers put it perfectly, the
conscious rational brain actually isn't
the Oval Office. It's not making the
decisions. The conscious brain is the
press office issuing explanations for
actions that we've actually already
taken, frantically drafting press
release after press release, trying to
make it all sound intentional. Oh, uh,
why why did we launch uh cryptocurrency
for hamsters? Well, as you can see, this
is part of our wider strategic vision to
bring fiat currency
destruction to the hamster world. Or to
put it another way, we don't know why we
do things, but we try to make sense of
things by telling ourselves a story
about it. And that's absolutely
critical, right, for this type of
podcast about success or progress or
anyone talking about excellence. Because
when a billionaire sits down to explain
their success, they are not giving you
the actual causal chain of events.
They're giving you the rationalization
that their gray matter press office has
created to make sense of it for
themselves. I worked hard. I took risks
and I succeeded. But the actual process
is luck hit at the right moment. Initial
advantage compounded and my brain
retroactively constructed a meritocratic
narrative. And the reason why I'm
talking about experts and success in
detail is that you'd really expect a
podcast about expertise, productivity,
and success to be across all of this.
Isn't this the exact thing that you'd
expect the podcast to talk about? Well,
yeah, if of course it were as concerned
about success as you'd expect it to be.
But it doesn't because it isn't.
Firstly, it interviews only the most
successful people. And I know that makes
me sound insane. Well, it's a podcast
about success. Wouldn't you interview
the most successful people? Let me tell
you about Abraham Wald. So, during the
Second World War, bomber planes were
coming back from missions with bullet
holes all over them. And the top brass
said, "Right, let's put armor where the
bullet holes are. Let's reinforce these
planes." And Wald said, "No, no, no. Put
the armor where the bullet holes
aren't." The planes you're looking at,
they're the survivors. They're the
planes that made it home. But the planes
that got hit in those other areas, those
planes don't get to land and give a TED
talk about the five things I did right
to stay up in the air against the
Lofwaffer. That's just survivorship
bias. And it's the entire business model
of Diary of a CEO and any podcast
interviewing the great and the good.
Steven Barlay interviews the planes that
made it home. And we study them like
they're the Rosetta Stone of success.
Like we map their habits. Like, okay, so
in order to avoid the German bullets,
you have to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and do
cold plunges. Okay, that's the secret,
is it? Oh, that's No, the secret is that
the bullet hole was in the wing. His
morning routine has got nothing to do
whether he got shot down or not. In
fact, he could wake up at noon and bathe
in warm piss and he'd still be
successful because he got lucky with
timing, connections maybe, and the fact
that his dad knew somebody in the
Luftwaffer. We never interview never
interviewed the thousands of people that
also woke up at 5:00 a.m., did the cold
plunges, read the books, did 80hour work
weeks, and failed anyway. They don't get
podcast deals because we're asking the
wrong people how to do it. Because if
Diary of a CEO actually cared about
success, they'd really tell you about
the lessons learned. About 25% of
businesses fail in their first year, 40%
after 3 years, and half of businesses
fail after 5 years. A real diary of a
CEO would interview them in particular
because that's statistically a real
diary of a CEO. Day 47, I've been
working 80our work weeks. did everything
right, but I lost everything because the
market shifted. But those episodes, they
don't exist. Mostly because they don't
sell athletic rings. So, what's really
happening is you're listening to lucky
people that can't see their own luck,
who are telling confident stories that
gaslight you and themselves into
thinking it's mostly not about luck. And
they're all giving you formulas that
don't work. Anyone giving you formulas
outside of actual maths is actually
doing fortunetelling for people who need
to feed their kids. And all of this
would be absolutely neutral if it wasn't
for the money involved. 5 years ago or
more, podcasting used to be scrappy and
peppy and small. These days, because of
big business, they need to keep you
hooked. In fact, the whole big podcast
industry now has gotten eaten alive by
the profit model. Step one, create an
anxiety or exploit an anxiety. There's a
lack in your life. You're not
successfully enough. You're not healthy
enough. You're not optimized enough.
That is advertising 101. Step two,
promise the solution. This guy is
optimized enough. Listen to him. You
need this new thing to be able to
compete and stay relevant. Buy this
book. Use code diary 20. Step three,
deliver partial satisfaction. You need
to feel inspired and motivated. You're
gonna change. This is it. Yes, this is
it. Ah, it didn't quite work.
Maybe uh maybe that's I didn't listen to
it enough actually. No, sorry. That's on
me. Yeah, if I get up half an hour
earlier or maybe that other supplement,
Alpha Brain, sounds good. There's got to
be a reason I'm not more successful.
Damn it. Damn me. Step four, repeat
until burnout or bankruptcy. And it's
also so weird because podcasting
originally sold itself on authenticity
and independence. Pluckucky, rough
around the edges, authentic. And then
these guys get so big they're reading
mattress ad copy in the middle of their
ran about corporate media. We've got
this weird pretense where the guy is
railing against the establishment pivots
seamlessly into his NordVPN ad reap. And
Barlas may be the perfect example of
this because the grift is so blatant.
Quick word on Hule. One day in the
office many years ago, a guy walked past
called Michael and he was wearing a Hule
t-shirt and I was really compelled by
the logo. I just thought from a a design
aesthetic point of view, it was really
interesting. And he said, "There's this
brand called Hule and they make food
that is nutritionally complete and very
very convenient and has the planet in
mind." And from that day onwards, I
completely got it.
>> The UK advertising watchdog has banned
his ads multiple times for the same
thing. If an influencer has a commercial
relationship with a brand, do they have
to declare it in their ads? This week,
the Advertising Standards Authority
banned two ads for Hugh and Zoe,
featuring entrepreneur and BBC dragon
>> I had so many light bulb moments with my
relationship with Zoe. The first was I
didn't even realize that what Zoe did
was a possibility. The ads included a
testimonial from Steven Bartlett, but
failed to mention he was a director in
Hule and an investor in Zoey. And for
that reason, the ads were misleading.
That's the whole con, isn't it? The
audience thinks that they're getting an
independent recommendation from a guy
that we trust, but what they're actually
getting is a board member run an
infomercial for his own portfolio. I
mean, he may as well just be an
advertising agency, right? And that's
why I recommend Broken Mug, Barry's
Economics Broken Mug, which helps you
see through the cracks in your own
psychology to identify who's controlling
the narrative you're living by. I
definitely don't own any equity in this
company. I just love this mug independently.
independently.
>> Taking the Zoey test was the first time
I got to understand what the gut
microbiome was. And once you see it, you
can't unsee it.
>> But all of that stuff is all over these
podcasts. Hey, are you feeling anxious,
burned out? Download BetterHelp. And
while you're at it, buy my book about
why you're so anxious. Because these
podcasts, they don't solve your anxiety.
They monetize it. In fact, they need you
to stay anxious so that you keep
listening. So that you keep believing
that you're one morning routine away
from cracking the code.
And here's where it ties into something
much bigger. Because we've replaced
collective structures, unions, social
safety nets, and progressive taxation,
which are all ways to take luck and the
structural inequality and redistribute
it with individual optimization.
You can't afford rent? Should have had a
better morning routine. Can't find a
job? You should have better. You burnt
out? Should have had better boundaries,
Day 249. I've been waking up
at 5:00 a.m. every day doing cold
plunges, and I'm absolutely burnt out.
lost my marriage and realized too late
that hustle culture is a con.
>> I'd like to share with you that uh when
I need more Bitcoin, Moon Pay is always
the first app that I open because it
doesn't force you to buy a whole coin
and it's super easy to use. Trade responsibly.
responsibly.
But I love your energy about like that
like Yeah. Like how do we stay hopeful?
Right. The system is broken, but we've
only been sold the story that we are
broken. And we've been sold this story
by people who have benefited by
circumstance, luck, and wind of their
back. Who tell the story again and again
like it's written on their soul. I did
all of this. I created all of this. And
it's only the people at the top that
benefit enormously from this narrative
because it means they don't have to pay
more taxes. They don't have to support
redistribution. And they can go on
podcast after podcast after podcast and
tell you luck doesn't exist. is all
mindset and that you can be just like
them if you wanted it enough and bought
their book. It's literally the American
dream in a khole. All of the already
successful people on these podcasts
think this is all motivating. But to
anyone without the financial privilege,
it's gaslighting. We have a school
system that manufactures people for a
set of skills that are not particularly
valuable anymore. And we also get them
in debt for those skills. um when people
sidestep that uh and say, "Okay, I'm not
going to get into university debt. I'm
just going to go off and actually figure
out how the world works." There's
actually loads of opportunities.
>> Okay, so I guess we've sorted it then.
All of our viewers need to do is go and
buy Dan's book, become an entrepreneur,
and become a millionaire. It's that
easy. Why weren't you guys doing it to
begin with? They're idiots. The viewers
are idiots. They should be just being
more entrepreneurial. It's as simple as
that. More entrepreneurial. Start a
business. Listen, I come from East
London, okay? My friends can't feed
their kids. Okay? And if it was as
simple as going out and being an
entrepreneur, I can bet you they would
do it. I can bet you they would do it.
Let us I'm sick of multi-millionaires
telling kids who can't afford to turn
the heating on, you just need to be more
entrepreneurial. It's sick, Dan. It's
sick. Tell them the truth. Okay, we your
older generation, we took the
opportunities and now it is almost
impossible to get out of poverty. And
don't just don't just stand at them,
wave, you know, your millions of pounds
in front of them and say, if you were
entrepreneurial like me, you could do
it. you could have it because it's sick
because they can't they can't feed their
kids down. They can't turn the heating
on. Don't tell them to be more
entrepreneurial. Fix the system that
drives more and more and more of them
into poverty every generation. I find it
very strange that you think it would be
easier to fix the entire global economic
system than to start a business and fix
your own personal economics. Diary of a
CEO on podcasts like it are selling you
control when success is almost entirely
outside of your control because in real
life there's no formula and some people
get lucky and then they write books
about how it was a plan all along. If
there was a podcast that actually helped
you be successful, it' probably be about
10 episodes long. It'll pass on what you
need and bosch done. You'd not need to
listen anymore.
But there's no money in that.
cuz you don't come back. You're off
being productive and successful. Turn it
off. Go outside. Do literally anything
other than being farmed for profit. But
whatever you do, do
buy one of these Barry's Economics
broken cups. Use the code grift 20 for
And now a word from our sponsor with the
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