What to Do When the World Feels Relentless

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.One person, one vote still holds on election day. Chisom Udeze asks what happens on every other day. Billionaires rarely buy elections outright: Michael Bloomberg’s billion-dollar campaign won one contest, and Elon Musk’s 21 million dollars in a Wisconsin court race ended in defeat. What wealth buys instead is the field, the public square, and the policy that follows the vote, from nearly a fifth of all money in America’s 2024 federal elections to India’s secret electoral bonds and the billionaire owners of the platforms where public argument now happens. Chisom tests the question in the title against the evidence on global democratic decline, gives the critics of the oligarchy thesis their due, and closes on what it would take to make one person, one vote true on every day of the year. Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.Chisom of Overnight Wisdom and Ruthie of Zanta podcast discuss the money stories shaped by family, culture, and generations before us. Together, they explore financial wellness, inherited beliefs, shame, ambition, and how learning to talk about money can open up new choices. Your origin story can help you understand your relationship with money—but it doesn’t have to define your future.Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.We have never had more opinions. What we are losing, Chisom argues in this episode, which shares its title with her new book, is the ability to hold two or more true things at once. She shows how the platforms that carry most of what we know reward speed and certainty over understanding, drawing on a 2025 experiment with eight million users in which removing the ranking algorithm cut exposure to toxic content by 27 percent. Then she turns the argument on herself: a morning in her own office after the invasion of Ukraine, the clever reframe of developed and developing, and the way the place that raised us decides what we can see. She closes with the three questions at the centre of her work and four habits for the next time certainty arrives too fast. Hostile to Thinking is out now, and if you can, we’d be deeply grateful if you can pick up a copy for yourself and a loved one who can benefit from this kind of thinking.The success of a book depends on it being read, engaged, and recommended. And we hope you can support this book in anyway that you can. Chisom would also be thrilled to hear from and discuss with you about what you take from the book. https://www.chisomudeze.com/bookSupport the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.Toxic masculinity was coined by a men’s movement that wanted to protect an authentic masculinity from blame, and the word still treats violence as the corruption of something good rather than the output of something built. Chisom tests that assumption against the record: 840 million women who have experienced partner or sexual violence in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization, at rates that vary by region but sit at zero nowhere; 137 women and girls killed by a partner or family member every day in 2024, 60 percent of all female homicide victims against 11 percent of male victims; and, in England and Wales, a charge in only 2.6 percent of recorded rape offences. Chisom notes what the argument does not claim, that every act is a conscious decision, and about what it does explain, is the rate. The word toxic lets you look away from a design and call it an accident. This episode asks you to start seeing it as it is.--A note on two figures in this episode. The description of the home as the most dangerous place for a woman, follows the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, whose own 2018 study used that framing. The data behind it measures who kills women, partners and family members, rather than where the killing happens, and the most recent UN Women and UNODC report notes that data on location remains limited. The argument stands on the relationship figures: in 2024, 60 percent of women and girls killed worldwide were killed by a partner or family member, against 11 percent of male homicide victims. Second, the 49.1 percent conviction rate  for England and Wales covers all prosecutions the Crown Prosecution Service completed between July and September 2024, most of which ended in a guilty plea, not only cases that went to trial. The estimate of roughly one conviction for every seventy or eighty reported rapes combines figures from different periods, and should be read as an illustration of scale rather than a precise measure.Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.In 2015, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute asked the country to stop calling New Orleans resilient, because every time someone says a community is resilient, it means something else can be done to them. Chisom takes her refusal seriously. She traces resilience from the ecologist C. S. Holling’s 1973 description of systems that absorb disturbance to its present use as a demand on people, and shows why its being a common human capacity makes it so cheap to ask for. The episode follows that demand into the workplace, where a study of 46,336 UK workers found no evidence that resilience programmes improve wellbeing, into the lives of Black women, where parts of the expectation of strength carry a cost the body records, and into climate policy, where Global South countries are told to build resilience while receiving a twelfth to a fourteenth of what adaptation will cost. What institutions call resilience has a more accurate name, absorption, and nobody is obliged to supply it.Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.In today’s episode, Chisom turns to a word used to describe almost anything a woman does: choice. And to the lawyer who coined the term Choice Feminism in 2006 specifically as an indictment. Linda Hirshman’s target was the “alleged free choice” of affluent women leaving careers, her argument being that calling a decision feminist simply because a woman chose it makes the conditions producing that choice unquestionable. Twenty years on, the tradwife movement is choice feminism’s most polished production, and Chisom tests the word against three women rather than one.It opens with the woman the movement is built around: the content creator whose exit from paid work rests on a husband’s or partner’s income and on undisclosed platform earnings funding the fantasy of having left the economy altogether. It turns next to the woman the word cannot reach at all, drawing on the International Labour Organisation’s 64-country time-use analysis: women performing 76.2 per cent of the world’s unpaid care work, 16.4 billion hours a day, 4.1 times the male rate in Asia and the Pacific, a gender gap closing so slowly it would take 210 years to shut at the current pace. Set against Madagascar, Nigeria and Tanzania, where female labour force participation runs above 80 per cent, it names the woman doing paid work and unpaid care everyday, for whom opting out of either was never on offer. It closes on the woman barred from work entirely: Afghanistan’s female labour force participation sitting at roughly 5 per cent against a male rate of close to 70 per cent by the World Bank’s modelled estimate, employment bans stacked across the civil service, NGOs and small businesses, nearly 80 per cent of Afghan women aged 18 to 29 neither employed nor in school, and the United Nations’ own projected rises in child marriage, adolescent childbearing and maternal mortality tied directly to those restrictions.Chisom names her own position inside the argument: a life built on choices she made and can still remake. She closes where the episode closes: three women, one word, and only one of them was ever free to choose. Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

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. Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.What do you do when the world feels relentless?In this episode, Chisom reflects on the exhaustion of living through overlapping crises, the limits of individual action, and the pressure to keep caring, speaking, building and responding even when your own capacity is running low.From Palestine and Congo to politics, work and the everyday ways power shapes reality, this episode asks a more sustainable question: what is actually yours to carry?A reflection on agency without self-blame, structural problems without paralysis, and how to stay engaged without allowing the world to consume you.Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions.Politics is much bigger than elections, parties and parliament. It shapes the rules, resources and conditions we live inside every day — often so deeply that we stop noticing they were ever decisions at all.In this episode of the Power series, Chisom  explores what political power actually is, how it differs from simply having political opinions, and why being affected by politics is not the same as having the power to change an outcome.The episode breaks down how to recognise when a personal frustration is really part of a wider structural pattern, how to identify who actually has the authority to change it, and why finding the right jurisdiction matters more than finding the easiest person to blame. It also looks at the difference between awareness and leverage, and how lived experience becomes politically consequential only when it is converted into something a decision-making system can act on.You will leave with a practical framework for looking upstream from the problems in your life: identifying the arrangement producing the outcome, finding the institution with the relevant authority, understanding what that institution depends on, and working out what would make change difficult to ignore.Because political power is not simply about what you believe.It is about whether those beliefs can become outcomes. Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/

We'd love to hear from you. Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions. Why do some voices become recognisable, trusted and consequential while equally talented people struggle to be heard?Becoming hard to ignore is not about becoming famous or accumulating hundreds of thousands of followers. Media power is relative. A small, highly relevant audience can create far more opportunity and influence than a large audience that never acts.In this episode of the Power series, Chisom Udeze explores five steps to building a powerful personal brand: becoming legible for something meaningful, building a body of proof, learning how distribution actually works, converting attention into consequence, and eventually using your platform to create opportunities and infrastructure for others.But personal branding does not happen on a level playing field. The episode also examines the systems that determine which voices receive institutional credibility, investment, distribution and cultural legitimacy; how race, gender, geography and other identities can shape the categories people are placed in; why excellent work can remain invisible; and why being published, featured or followed does not necessarily mean having power.You will learn how to think differently about your personal brand, identify the people whose attention actually matters to your goals, build density before scale, distinguish borrowed reach from infrastructure you control, and assess your media power through four measures: recognisability, credibility, reachability and optionality.Because the goal is not simply to become more visible.It is to become sufficiently clear, useful, credible and well distributed that the people relevant to what you are trying to accomplish cannot easily proceed as though you are not there. Support the show-----------------------------------✨ 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/id1804746544Social 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/