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Overnight Wisdom
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/
Episodes
72 episodes
Meritocracy is a Trap
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 t...
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What to Do When the World Feels Relentless
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 e...
Want to Get What You Want? Build Political Power
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 seri...
5 Steps to Becoming Hard to Ignore
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 po...
The Six Stages of Financial Power: Where Are You?
You can earn a lot of money and still have very little financial power.You can own a home and still be financially trapped. You can have a good salary and still be unable to leave a bad job. You can have access to credit and still be on...
You Think You Have Power. Do You?
What if most of what we call power is not actually power at all?We often confuse power with confidence, charisma, visibility, status, access, representation, influence, or simply having a seat at the table. But none of those things nece...
Leadership is Political | Part 4: Stop Surviving. Start Building Power.
What happens when we become exceptionally good at naming harm, but remain largely powerless to stop it?In this episode, Chisom moves the conversation beyond resilience, recovery, and even systems change, towards something we often seem ...
Leadership is Political | Part 3: The White Man Archetype
In this episode, Chisom looks at the archetype most workplaces are designed for. The same behaviour, ambition, directness, dissent, refusal to conform, is coded differently depending on who performs it. One person’s vision is another person’s a...
Leadership is Political | Part 2: The Values Gap
Most organisations have values. Most of those values do not survive contact with pressure. When budgets tighten, when the market shifts, when someone powerful is challenged, the stated commitments to inclusion, openness, and psychological...
Leadership is Political | Part 1: What People Recover From
People carry the cost of poor leadership long after the work is done: self-doubt, burnout, diminished confidence, the slow work of rebuilding trust in their own judgment. We call it personal struggle. It is not. It is the uncounted cost o...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 12: The Accurate Name
In Chapter 12, the final episode of this part of the series, Chisom returns to Chapter 1 and settles the word. She traces white supremacy to a defeated colonist of Saint-Domingue who in 1802 called it an axiom while the enslaved were beating Fr...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 11: Your Reckoning With The Machine
In Chapter 11 of the series, Chisom turns the diagnosis onto the reader and refuses the question they arrive with. “What can I do to fix this?” is a trap, because its only honest answer is that you cannot, and the despair is what the str...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 10: The Colonial Hangover
In Chapter 10 of the series, Chisom turns to coloniality, the empire that stayed behind after the empire left, the quietest form of the machine and the one that leaves no graves because it no longer needs them. Colonialism was the occupation, t...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 9: The Border & The Last Clause of Colonialism
In Episode 9 of the series, Chisom turns to the border, and to the passport as the last clause of the colonial contract. It opens on a boat that left Sfax for Lampedusa in January 2026, on the twin girls about a year old who died of cold within...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 8: The Invention of Race
In Chapter 8 of the series, Chisom turns to the secular machinery that took over the work, science, and the lie it was used to build, the invention of race. The claim is that power took the authority of science and manufactured race, to give an...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 7: Christianity Was a Weapon of Conquest
In Chapter 7 of the series, Chisom turns to the institution that blessed all of it, the church. The claim is that Christianity was not incidental to white terrorism but its moral machinery and a material instrument of conquest, the appar...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 6: Slavery Never Ended
In Chapter 6 of the series, Chisom turns to the Black American experience itself and argues that it is not a closed chapter of history but the longest-running case of white terrorism on earth. The claim is that slavery in America never en...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 5: The Compound in Black Womanhood
In Chapter 5 of the series, Chisom turns to what the operating system does when it compounds. The claim is that compounding is multiplicative, not additive: when rac!sm meets patriarchy meets ant!-Blackness, the result is not the sum of three h...
One Year In — A Reflection on Lessons Learned from Hosting Overnight Wisdom Podcast.
One year of Overnight Wisdom. Whew!On May 28th, 2026, my podcast turned one. One year of conversations, solo reflections, tech issues, learning in public, and occasionally wondering why I added one more thing to my already full l...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 4: Racism as the Operating System.
In episode 4 of the series, Chisom turns to the operating system that white terrorism built: racism. The chapter opens with the precise distinction between racial prejudice and racism: prejudice is what individuals carry, racism is what happens...
On Our Shared Humanity, Leadership, & System’s Change — Logan McClure Davda, CEO of TED
In this episode of Overnight Wisdom, Chisom sits down with Logan McClure Davda, CEO of TED, for a layered conversation on leadership, systems change, joy, motherhood, power, and what it means to remain human while building ...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 3: The Settler Structure
In Chapter 3 of the series, Chisom turns to the present tense. Settler colonialism is not a phase that European empires went through and emerged from. It is a structure that continues to operate, on every populated continent, in 2026. The chapt...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 2: From Bodies to Borders.
In Part 2 of a series, Chisom traces the long history of white terrorism in Africa as one continuous story rather than a list of incidents. Twelve and a half million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866. ...
Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 1: Language Change
In Part 1 of a series, Chisom challenges the term “white supremacy” and proposes a language change: it is white terrorism. She traces the term to its 1824 origins, maps the papal bulls that gave genocide divine authority between 1452 and 1493, ...
Designing for Survival: Business, Babies, and What Keeps Us Human with Lexi Montee Busch
This is a conversation about what it means to build something that meets people at one of the most vulnerable thresholds of life.In this episode, I sit down with Lexi Montée of Happiest Baby for a layered conversation on parenting, lead...