The 10 best Diary of a CEO episodes

1. 1

   The protocol one

   Andrew Huberman: My Exact Routine To Optimize Brain & Body, I Do All Of These Every Day!

   Huberman starts by drawing the healthy cortisol curve on paper — sharp morning peak, long descent, low at night — and reframes the whole conversation around the shape rather than the level. The problem is a flattened curve, cortisol never rising enough early and staying too high late, which is what tracks with worse recovery and shorter lifespan. Ten daily protocols follow, each aimed at that curve.

   2h 16m · Read the summary →
2. 2

   The one that argues with a poster

   The Quitting Expert: Quit NOW Before AI Makes The Choice For You, This Is a Superpower! | Seth Godin

   Seth Godin takes apart the never-quit aphorism on the wall of every gym with the flattest possible observation: Jordan does not play professional basketball, baseball or golf any more, because humans age. His model for why people stay stuck is Buridan's donkey, halfway between two piles and starving. The skill is knowing what to quit, and he has closed more businesses than most listeners have opened.

   1h 53m · Read the summary →
3. 3

   The cycles one

   Ray Dalio: I Predicted The 2008 Crash, I Know What Comes Next

   Dalio agrees that AI is a bubble and then declines to make it the story: bubbles form whenever a genuinely revolutionary technology arrives, and the more consequential cycle is the one running through debt levels, internal political conflict and a shift in which country is on top. Five hundred years of it, arranged as a mechanism rather than a prediction.

   1h 30m · Read the summary →
4. 4

   The one about constraints, not diets

   Fat Loss Scientist: It’s Easy To Lose Weight, But Here’s Why You WON’T Do It! | Dr Andy Galpin

   Andy Galpin opens with 70 to 80 percent of clinical sleep apnoea going undiagnosed, and 90 to 95 percent in women, and uses it to set up the real subject: hidden constraints that stop motivated people getting anywhere. His objection to the standard cold-dark-quiet sleep advice is that the environment has changed faster than the biology — NASA satellite data on sky glow is in here — so the advice is necessary and nowhere near sufficient.

   2h 12m · Read the summary →
5. 5

   The operator one

   Uber CEO: At Uber, If You Don’t Perform, You’re Out! Uber Was Losing $3b A Year

   Dara Khosrowshahi took Uber from roughly $3 billion of annual losses to $9.8 billion of free cash flow, and the interesting half of the conversation is the mechanism he credits — radical transparency inside the company, and a performance bar he states without softening it. The Expedia years and the Allen & Company background give the answers a shape most founder interviews do not have.

   1h 43m · Read the summary →
6. 6

   The habits one, eight years on

   Discipline Expert: The Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026! James Clear

   James Clear on the part of *Atomic Habits* that got least attention: the claim is not that small actions compound, which everyone repeated, but that the systems and the environment do nearly all the work that people attribute to willpower. Long enough — over two hours — that he has to go past the book, which is the reason to pick this over the summary you have already read.

   2h 12m · Read the summary →
7. 7

   The one that is an actual argument

   Death of the Middle Class: Billionaire vs Entrepreneur DEBATE - Daniel Priestley v Nick Hanauer

   Nick Hanauer, an early Amazon investor turned critic of inequality, against Daniel Priestley, who runs an accelerator for small businesses. They agree on the diagnosis — Hanauer's number is the top 1% going from about 8.5% of national income in 1980 — and disagree completely on the cure, labour standards and redistribution against expanding ownership. Bartlett mostly gets out of the way.

   2h 32m · Read the summary →
8. 8

   The one for a long drive

   Neil deGrasse Tyson On Aliens, Simulation Theory, and What Happens Inside A Black Hole

   Tyson thinks intelligent life elsewhere is close to certain on size and age alone, and spends most of the episode on why our idea of what it would look like is contaminated by film. The black hole physics, the space geopolitics and the question of whether the scale of the universe should make you feel small are handled with the same unhurried patience.

   1h 49m · Read the summary →
9. 9

   The one with the best opening line

   Top Scientist REVEALS: We Invented Heaven, God Is A Human Invention! | Prof Brian Greene

   "I can't convince you that we're not in the Matrix. Why? We could be." Brian Greene lays out the simulation argument properly — if consciousness can run on a computer, simulated realities would vastly outnumber the physical one — and then puts it down, because it changes nothing about how he intends to live. That refusal to be impressed by his own argument is the episode.

   2h 11m · Read the summary →
10. 10

    The year-end one

    Chris Williamson: If You Don't Fix This Now, 2026 Is Already Over!

    Two podcast hosts auditing themselves out loud over the Christmas break, which sounds insufferable and is not. The usable part is the ordering: subtraction before addition, drop the low-value commitments first so there is capacity for one or two things that matter, with the reflective questions to run the audit yourself.

    2h 28m · Read the summary →

Frequently asked questions