Overnight Wisdom
Overnight Wisdom
Podcast Description
This show explores the deeper, often unspoken truths about the human experience, tackling topics like bravery, vulnerability, success, growth, personal development and more. It’s a space where we can have honest conversations about the societal expectations that shape us.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The show focuses on themes of bravery, vulnerability, growth, and personal development, with episodes exploring the impact of personal loss on artistic vision and storytelling through imagery, highlighting guests like Ghanaian photographer Michael Aboya who discusses how grief shaped his work.
Overnight Wisdom is a show where Chisom Udeze, award-winning Economist, business leader and entrepreneur, engages in deep and reflective conversations, either as solo episodes, or with occasional guests, leaders, artists, & change-makers from around the world. The show explores leadership, business growth, societal challenges, purpose, power, identity, resilience and the lifelong practice of returning to oneself. These are the defining forces that shape how we lead, work and live.
Each episode uncovers pressing global topics, and/or worldview and philosophy that guide us. The conversations move between topics that matter for our individual and collective wellbeing.
This is not a show about performance. It is a space for clarity. You will hear personal stories, research-based insights, lived wisdom and practical strategies for leading with courage, building with intention and choosing a meaningful life, whatever that may mean to you.
Thanks for being here.
New solo episodes drop every Wednesday, with occasional guest conversations released on Sundays
Host: Chisom Udeze
Economist | Leadership Strategist | Multi-Founder
Creator of the Three Clarities Framework (Identity, Context, Power)
Founder: Chiije, Diversify, Diversify Summit, Diversify Consult, HerSpace and HerTech
Connect: chisomudeze.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/chisomudeze/
We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.
In this episode, Chisom turns to the word meritocracy, and to the man who coined it in 1958 specifically to warn against it. Michael Young’s satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy, predicted exactly the trap the word now sets, a society that tells the people on top their position needed no explanation beyond their own virtue. He spent his life watching the warning turned into an excuse.
This episode tests the word against the record. It traces Jeff Bezos’s 1.1 percent true tax rate against 127 billion dollars in wealth growth. It follows executive pay moving from 21 times a typical worker’s wages in 1965 to 325 times in 2025, a gap traced to board capture rather than market pricing. It walks through Harvard’s litigation data, legacy applicants admitted at nearly six times the rate of everyone else. And it sits with Raj Chetty’s finding that a child’s odds of out-earning their parents have fallen from nine in ten to a coin flip in two generations.
The word Meritocracy promises effort is rewarded. The record says otherwise.
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✨ On Overnight Wisdom, new solo episodes drop every Wednesday, with occasional guest and solo conversations released on Sundays.
Connect with Chisom:
✨ Patreon: https://patreon.com/Chisomebi
✨ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chisom.ebi/
✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chisomudeze/
Streaming Options:
✨ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Chisom-Udeze
✨ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5pD7OuPqWKDsd5ymoo7lSz
✨ Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/overnight-wisdom/id1804746544
Social Media Handles for Podcast:
✨ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/overnight.wisdom/
✨ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@overnight.wisdom
✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/overnightwisdom/
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