Don't Compare Your Podcast to "Diary of a CEO". Here's why

Let's talk about Diary of a CEO Podcasting

Insights.

I want to talk about it because Diary of a CEO and the

whole genre of glossy titan

interviewing, formula peddling, mega

podcast it represents is doing

something genuinely damaging to indie podcasters

right out in the open. No attempt to hide it whatsoever,

possibly even to you. And the really interesting part

here, the part that should probably keep you awake at night

or at least mildly inconvenience your afternoon,

is that it doesn't need to be malicious to be harmful.

The damage isn't by accident. It's actually the business model.

Let me explain Podcasting

Insights.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until people actually start to

listen. People like Stephen Bartlett, Hala

Taha and Alex Hormozi are goons.

They're not evil goons. They're probably not even stupid

goons. They're perceived to be

successful goons who have figured out that the most profitable thing you

can sell someone is isn't a solution. It's

that feeling that a solution is just around the

corner from you. But don't take my word for it. Let me

give you some actual research. Because

Neal thinks they're goons doesn't quite cut it as an

intellectual foundation. Even I'm aware of that.

Let me tell you about Phil Rosenzweig. Phil is a business school

professor who spent years studying something very specific,

and that was how we decide why successful companies

succeeded. What he found and then documented in a book

called the Halo Effect is almost offensively

straightforward once you've heard it. When a company's doing

well, we look at its leadership and we call it

visionary. You know, the culture, the dynamic,

the strategy all bold, but then

the same company hits the skids. Same leadership,

but now suddenly described as arrogant. Same culture

now siloed and resistant to change. Same

strategy is now reckless. And I could

name particularly wet brand

that this could definitely apply to. I

wonder what brand leader I might be referring to.

(Showbiz wink.) See, nothing's actually changed there.

It's just the outcome is different. And we worked backwards from

the outcome and constructed a story that made it feel

inevitable. Sound familiar? Well, it should,

because that's the entire editorial model of Diary of a CEO

CEO. Guest comes in, sits down. Guest

was successful. That is the rule. Guest explains

why. Brain then assembles a coherent narrative from

what was actually a chaotic contingent.

Luck riddled mess. We all nod along and

take notes. Steven Bartlett then charges

advertisers a fortune to podcast the whole thing to an

alleged millions of people. I say alleged

because the data I've seen suggest it's still only in the hundreds of

thousands range. Anyway, that's a debate for another episode.

I think I may have even already published that one, by the way, a

couple of years ago. If you want to peruse the library of past episodes

back onto the point, let's talk about Nassim

Taleb's Fooled by randomness now, if you haven't read,

has a concept he calls the Silent graveyard.

And I think about this basically every time I see another

success porn podcast dropping into the business chart

or being praised in my LinkedIn feed by some

wannabe influencer. Bruh. Here's the idea.

You look out of the world and you see winners.

Founders who built things, podcasters who grew audiences.

People who posted their frameworks and their 10 step

systems and their morning routines

and made it all the way to the point where they get to explain their

morning routine on someone else's podcast. Yay.

What you don't see as part of that whole parading

of success is the graveyard. The

equally talented, equally hardworking, equally routine

having ass. People who tried the same things, moved

the same levers, and failed anyway. They're getting

up at 5am but they're not seeing

stars. They're not on podcasts. They're not

being booked on keynote stages. They're not selling you

their 33 laws of attraction. They're just

gone. And the graveyard is silent.

Hence the name. So when Diary of a CEO books another

guest to explain exactly how they got to where they are, and you're

not getting a representative sample of what those strategies actually

produce, you're getting a cherry picked survivor

insisting the cherry picking didn't even happen. They

earned their place, God darn it. And it gets better

or worse, depending on your disposition around this whole thing.

In 2006, researchers Matthew Salganik

and Duncan Watts at Columbia ran an

experiment that should frankly be shown to every podcaster

before they're allowed to download a single

episode of a success advice

show. They built an artificial music market.

14,000 participants, 48 songs, all

by unknown bands. Participants could listen and

download whatever they liked. Now, one group made their

choices with absolutely no information about what anyone else had

downloaded. Completely independent judgment.

Kind of like the opposite of a Swifty. The other

groups could see the download counts within their group.

Now let me point out that if quality were the main

driver of success here, the same songs would

rise to the top across every single group

consistently. Because they're

objectively the best tracks. I mean, quality wins,

right? Wrong

embarrassingly wrong. The same song could

be number one in one group and number 40 in

another. Identical track, completely the same.

The only difference was who happened to download it first.

Early momentum created its own pull. And this

translates to business. The rich get richer,

not because they're better, but because they got a random early

advantage and everyone else follows.

So the next time you're trying to reverse engineer why a

podcast got big, whether it's their interview

technique, their niche, their consistency,

their launch strategy, just remember

you might be studying the podcast equivalent of which

show someone clicked on first on a random Tuesday

afternoon. Luck. Timing.

Chance. Yes, quality's in the formula,

but so is chance. Now here's the part of

this that gets really fun. Even the people giving

you that misleading information probably aren't lying.

Not consciously, anyway. Daniel

Kahneman, a Nobel laureate,

look up thinking fast and slow because this

identified what he called the narrative fallacy. The

human brain cannot tolerate randomness.

It needs a because it needs a

story. It needs the chaos to

have been planned all along. So

a founder navigates several near death experiences,

catches a lucky break at exactly the right moment,

and builds something remarkable. Then they sit down on a

podcast and explain it. And they will

explain it fully, confidently, with

the three things they always come back to and the mindset shift

that changed everything. Their brain has spent the

intervening years constructing a story that makes the whole

messy, random, timing, dependent journey feel deliberate

and teachable. And at this point, they genuinely

probably believe it. They're not lying, they're just human.

The problem is that you're on the other end of a story that

feels like a strategy but is actually a

retrospective hallucination, and you're furiously

taking notes and planning change around this

furiously acquired notation. Basically, your

brain is doing the thing that you moan at AI for

doing, needing to get to an outcome, having

no idea, but going by very comfortable

and predictable text solutions to fill the

gaps. And while we're on the subject of honesty, and I'm only going to say

this once before moving on to a much more interesting ground,

let's talk about the UK advertising watchdog who has had to

ban Stephen Bartlett's content more than once

for neglecting to mention he had commercial stakes in

the product he was warmly endorsing on his own show.

The show supposedly built on no filter,

authenticity and straight talk. The irony

there is so structurally dense,

I'm genuinely surprised his studio

ceiling hasn't caved in on him and ruined the

perfectly manufactured temperatured air that

he pumps in the faces of the many gurus he

parades on his clickbait infected disease of

a show. But look, let's not just pick on Bartlett.

There's also High performance podcast Jake Humphrey and

Damian Hughes earnestly extracting peak performance

insights from people who were already going to peak

regardless, like interviewing a lottery winner about

their number picking strategy. And there's Young and Profiting,

where Hala Taha has built an engagement pod leveraging

networking empire, dressed up as a podcast

and then made that. The advice be

more like me, use engagement pods, network

more, have me on your show. It

is a beautiful closed loop if you can stomach it, which

I struggle with. All of them are in the business of

monetizing that gap between what they promise and what

they can actually deliver. And that gap has to remain.

If it ever closed, you'd have exactly what you needed,

you'd never need them, and you'd leave. And they

can't have that. So let's talk about what this is actually

doing to you as an indie podcaster. And I want you to sit with this

for a moment rather than just nodding,

shrugging your shoulders and then moving on, because

that's the easy next step. When you

consume enough of this content, you start measuring your show against a

benchmark that was built mostly by luck, timing,

money, and in many cases connections that existed

before that microphone was ever even switched on.

Your show doesn't meet that benchmark unless you are

independently wealthy and are doing your show as a hobby.

Fair enough. Great. You might well have that benchmark, but

most people are not in that situation. Most things don't

meet that benchmark, let alone podcasts. I mean, nothing real does.

That's what makes it such a durable benchmark.

So you kind of feel like you're failing. That anxiety

creeps in. And this is the genius move. Dark as

it is, the very content making you feel like a

failure is also sort of selling you

the solution. A course framework, a book,

use code, diary 20 use code yap 15.

There's always a code, there's always another purchase. You

never quite crack it, but you also never quite stop trying

to. That's not a side effect. That is the literal product.

A podcast that genuinely fixed your problems would be 10

episodes long. You'd finish it, you'd feel sorted,

you'd go and make your own show and you'd never come back.

And nobody is building a business around that. The business is

built around you staying anxious, staying subscribed, staying

one framework away. I'm trying to avoid that

with this show, but there is a psychological

inevitability around me being unable to avoid that.

Obviously, it's in my interest that you continue to keep listening to

get more insights so you can get more success. But I have no

control over that because as I've already explained, there's a big

element of chance. All I can do is give you the

insights that I know to help you make your

own luck. So what do you do instead? I guess the

point of this is I want you to stop benchmarking yourself against

shows that live in a completely different economic universe.

Diary of a CEO is not a podcast in the way

that your show is. A podcast. Kind of like a

superyacht is technically a boat. It

floats on water. That doesn't mean studying it will help

you get more from your kayak, which also floats on water.

Get suspicious of certainty. I've said it before. The

podcasting advice space is swimming in people with systems

and steps and formulas delivered in a tone that

suggests nuance has never once troubled them.

Real expertise tends to produce humility,

not frameworks. Just ask Rosenzweig.

Ask Taleb. Look at the Music Lab data.

The advisor who says it depends on your specific show and your

specific audience. They're almost certainly more useful to you than

the one who says, do these five things and enjoy success immediately.

One of those is great content. The other one is actually

helpful, and they're rarely the same thing.

And stop mistaking a survivor's story for a

strategy. Make the show that you can make.

Make it useful, make it interesting, make it consistent.

Except that above a quality floor, a meaningful chunk of

what happens next is completely outside your control.

And that is true for everyone, including the people on the

podcasts swearing blind that it isn't.

There's a famous saying, and I can't remember who it's by,

but I do love to quote it when this sort of topic comes up.

The planes that didn't make it back didn't get to tell you

where the bullets hit them. Keep that in mind

every time someone tells you they've cracked the code.

Okay, enough of that plane-crashing nonsense. Quick one for you. Let me tell you about

Huel.

This one's from Andrea. She's writing in from Southport. She asks

neil, I've been told I need to have a trailer episode before I launch my

podcast. Is that actually necessary or is it one of those things

that the best practice people insist on

but doesn't really make a difference? Andrea, I really appreciate

the skepticism there. It's going to serve you well in this industry. The short

answer? No, you don't need a trailer Longer Answer well, it depends

what job you think a trailer will do for you and whether it's actually doing

that job for your specific show. The argument for trailers

is that they give potential listeners something to evaluate before committing to a

full episode, which is fine in theory. The problem is that most

podcast trailers are, to be completely blunt about it, bloody

dreadful. There's 60 seconds of someone explaining

their show is going to be really interesting and helpful, which

has been recorded in a slightly nervous voice set to music that sounds

like a LinkedIn ad. And that trailer isn't converting anyone, it's just

sitting there in your feet. If you can make a trailer that genuinely

represents what your show sounds and feels like

and give someone an accurate sense of whether it is for them, then yeah, it's

got value. If you're going to record yourself saying hi, I'm

Andrea and on this show we're going to be talking about X, Y and Z,

so stay tuned over some royalty free piano.

Honestly, you might as well just launch with your first proper episode.

But bear in mind one of the really helpful parts of publishing a trailer is

that you've got some content to publish for Apple Podcasts so that the

feed is ready to go on the first day of release. The

alternative is that you'll release your show and half your audience can't

find it in Apple podcasts yet, because sometimes they do take a while to

accept a submission. But still, your best advert

for your podcast, if it's new, is a great episode,

so start with that. Thanks for writing in, Andrea.

Podcasting Insights — Quick Tip

all right, experiment time. This one so simple it's

almost annoying. Go and listen back to your three most

downloaded episodes. Not to cringe at yourself. Save that for a different

day when you've got nowhere to be. Just listen with one question

in mind. What did I do in these episodes

that I don't do consistently? Find the moments where

you stopped performing and then just talk to your audience where you

made a point and let it breathe instead of immediately explaining it again

in slightly different words, where you trusted your

listener to keep up with you. That's probably your show at its best.

That's the version of you that your audience actually showed up for.

The fastest route to a better podcast isn't a new microphone or a different

plugin or a course with the discount code attached. It's

finding exactly what you're already doing right and doing more of it

deliberately. So listen back, find your best moments

and steal from yourself shamelessly. So I want to quickly

say if anything, today landed with you. If you're sitting there thinking, I've

been measuring my show against something that was never real and I genuinely don't know

what good looks like for what I'm actually trying to make, that's exactly the

conversation I'd love to have with you. Head to Podmastery Co

and click on the link where it says, get your

podcasting challenge solved. Tell me what's going on. We'll have

a real conversation about it. We'll get your problem solved there. And then

that's Podmastery Co. Thanks for listening. I'm

Neil Velio. Go make your show and good luck on

your continuing journey towards Podmastery

podcasting

insights.