Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000063 · Podcasts → Long-form interview shows · 2017-2024
The Diary of a CEO
British entrepreneur's interview podcast that topped global charts
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“Britain's answer to Joe Rogan. In December 2025 it overtook him on Spotify in the UK.”
Why Noah said no
Steven Bartlett's interview show became the UK's biggest podcast and got criticised for letting guests like Aseem Malhotra make health claims unchallenged. That's the Joe Rogan Experience's story, already in the Ark, and the cluster is full with Call Her Daddy and Serial.
- Rejected
- 25 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 20.6 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_CEO
What it is
The Diary of a CEO is a long-form interview podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett that launched on Spotify and YouTube in 2017. Bartlett interviews entrepreneurs, celebrities and politicians, and the show became the UK's most downloaded podcast by 2022 and reached the top 5 globally on Spotify by 2024.
Why it’s internet culture
It shows how podcast audiences grew large enough to rival traditional media, and how a single creator could build a massive platform by platforming guests and their ideas without always challenging them, which became a flashpoint when the show aired medical misinformation without consistent pushback from the host.
Steven Bartlett's interview podcast became the UK's biggest by filming hour-long chats for YouTube and cutting them into clips, and it drew the same criticism as other giant shows for letting guests make health claims unchallenged.
What Noah read
The Diary of a CEO is a podcast hosted and produced by British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett. The first episode was released on September 29, 2017. The first interview for the podcast was with fellow CEO Mark Stringer, and Bartlett has since gone on to interview an array of guests. The Diary of a CEO is one of the world's most popular podcasts, regularly receiving millions of views per episode, and topping podcast charts, ranking No. 5 in the Spotify list of most popular podcasts globally in 2024. Format The first episode of The Diary of a CEO was released in 2017 and was presented as the first chapter of Bartlett's diary in which he discussed what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Bartlett continued to discuss his own experience for the first five episodes. The first episode in which Bartlett interviewed a guest was the sixth episode, with Mark Stringer, a CEO for a web and design based agency AHOY. Since then, episodes of the podcast commonly follow the format of interviews with celebrities, businessmen and businesswomen, entrepreneurs, actors and politicians. The podcast is recorded for audio format but is also filmed and uploaded to YouTube. In August 2021, Bartlett …
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Steven Bartlett's interview show became the UK's biggest podcast and got criticised for letting guests like Aseem Malhotra make health claims unchallenged. That's the Joe Rogan Experience's story, already in the Ark, and the cluster is full with Call Her Daddy and Serial.”