Transcription
Hello, welcome to Barry's Economics. Today, let me show you the science-backed uncomfortable truth about why Diary of a CEO might be the very thing standing between you and actual success.
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 Bartlett'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 executives, 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 Tetlock 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-knowledge. 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 Diary 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 Tetlock 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 Archilochus. 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 centripetal, 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 substantial measure, as quite, 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 data which I'll just go over very quickly. Foxes don't make good podcasts. They don't make good media interviews. 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 Bartlett'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? They're 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 Tetlock pointed out is magnified by something called the Dunning-Kruger 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 Diary 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 Diary 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 was 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, people realized, was relevant to, to marketing and to, uh, you know, to all kinds of social behavior. So one group only had their own judgment, but others had some knowledge, some information about what some other people 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 is 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 Gazzaniga, found clearly in research that I'm not going to go into detail here, but you can look it up. I'll put it in the notes, that in an 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 Luftwaffe. 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 Bartlett 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 with 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 Luftwaffe. 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 80-hour 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 80-hour 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 math 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 successful 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 diary20." 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. Plucky, rough around the edges, authentic. And then these guys get so big, they're reading mattress ad copy in the middle of their rant about corporate media. We've got this weird pretense where the guy is railing against the establishment, pivots seamlessly into his NordVPN ad read. And Bartlett may be the perfect example of this because the grift is so blatant. Quick word on Huel. One day in the office many years ago, a guy walked past called Michael, and he was wearing a Huel 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 Huel, 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 Huel and Zoe, featuring entrepreneur and BBC Dragon Steven Bartlett. I had so many lightbulb 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 Huel and an investor in Zoe. 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 running 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.
Taking the Zoe 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 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're 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, MoonPay 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. 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 at 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, it's 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 Huel. 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'd 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 grift20 for 20% off your first shattered illusion. And now a word from our sponsor with the adverb break. Thanks for watching. Respect, tolerance, a new car, a night out with the laps, a big small phone, be headphones, the Higgs Boson, fiberglass, vacillate, big a. It's great education.