One thing Steven Bartlett will not be doing if The Diary of a CEO becomes the world’s most subscribed podcast on YouTube this year is celebrating with a glass of wine or two.
The British podcaster, who fronts the show that is closing in on the top-ranked The Joe Rogan Experience, caused an internet furore this summer after a clip was circulated of him complaining that even two or three glasses were enough to ruin the next few days.
For his critics, this was a moment to pile on Bartlett, whose podcasts have featured guests pushing some of the more fringe ideas in the cult of aspirational wellness and self-optimisation.
But Bartlett seems as relaxed as one would imagine the author of a book entitled Happy Sexy Millionaire to be, despite the roasting he took from friends and the mockery he draws from waiters bearing down with wine lists. “You’d be shocked to see how little time I spend on the internet,” he says.
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The popularity of such content has helped make The Diary of a CEO the second-biggest podcast on YouTube, with 19.5 million subscribers and combined listens and views per month that regularly exceed 100 million. If its current growth continues, it is on track to overtake the US influencer Joe Rogan’s 21.1 million YouTube subscribers this year.
But Bartlett’s aspirations are fixed on a longer and more ambitious goal: building the world’s leading creator media company. “What you’re seeing now [are] the foundations of what I believe will be the definitive company in this industry over the next 50 years,” he says.
He is in talks for a fresh fundraising, which he says will exceed the $425 million (€368 million) valuation established for his holding company, Steven.com, in a round last year, which left him owning more than 90 per cent. “I’ve designed the business ... so that I can maintain ownership and board control for the next 50 years. Because, essentially, this is my last dance.”
For a youthful-looking 34-year-old, it feels like Bartlett has been in the online world a long time – he started working on his first online business idea when he was 18. Since then he has ridden out questions over the value of a business after it merged with a German company in 2019, and complaints about how he has promoted products he invests in. His podcast has prompted concerns from health experts about whether he takes enough responsibility for the more questionable claims made by guests on topics such as Covid and cancer and has faced some criticism for giving a platform to more niche parts of the online community, such as guests who have been associated with the manosphere.
Bartlett does not claim to be a journalist and says the podcast has become better at fact-checking and now appends notes to clarify or correct wrong claims on screen. “This is new ground, frankly, as a podcaster, because there isn’t necessarily a blueprint here of how you increase rigour within the medium. But hopefully, we’ll help to create one.”
He says he is working with an AI company that will further analyse transcripts for accuracy and provide on-screen context. “Packaging things in a way that will deliver reach while also making sure that they are as accurate as they can be.”
His London office feels like an encapsulation of the Bartlett brand: sleek and modern, and centred around a two-storey metal rocket ship as befits a social media start-up in trendy Shoreditch.
There is plenty of natural light to help cortisol levels – a wellness hack much loved by some of his guests – while air quality in his studio is optimised for alertness. Supplement drinks such as Cadence (“to elevate daily discipline, performance and recovery”) are in the fridge alongside Perfect Ted matcha lattes. Both count Bartlett – one of the “dragons” in the BBC’s hit show Dragons’ Den – among their investors.
The office is the hub for the Delaware-incorporated Steven Holdings, which Bartlett aims to build into a one-stop shop for other creators, spanning production, technology, representation, events and brand work.
“We see that when creators get to a certain size ... they are pulled to have a book agent, and a publisher, and a content team, and a tour provider,” he says. “[We have it] all in-house.”
He is working with popular creators including Davina McCall and Paul C Brunson and Bartlett says more big names are imminent. His Flightcast platform hosts about 435 podcasts.
“Central to our platform are technology and data, and helping creators ... pull their audiences into owned environments [such as their own events and deals], not rented environments [on social media platforms],” says Bartlett.
Businesses within the holding group have been consistently profitable and are growing strongly, according to the company, but no overall numbers are made public. More than 80 per cent of revenue comes from The Diary of a CEO, but Bartlett wants this percentage to fall quickly as other parts grow.
On Monday, he will announce the latest move in this strategy – a joint venture with US group Authentic Brands which will work with creators to build media companies and brands.
Bartlett dropped out of university in Manchester to focus on business, and credits Social Chain, the social media marketing company he launched in 2014, with teaching him about platforms and algorithms that determine whether content lives or dies online. Even now, he gives a heartfelt plea for listeners to subscribe at the start of his shows. His team edits and tests formats relentlessly to eke out as many viewers and followers as possible.
“I didn’t know the rules of podcasting at all ... [but] because I had a background in the commercialisation of media ... and because I had spent a long time in social media, that naivety with a little bit of experience in adjacent things created a different type of more vertically integrated business.”
Even he seems taken aback by the growth of his show in a fiercely competitive market. “I think I’m the most surprised. I started on my kitchen table in London not that long ago. I had many dreams in my life, and podcaster was never one. But here we are.”
Despite The Diary of a CEO’s top ranking in US and UK business podcast charts, there is still a large cohort of businesspeople who would struggle to say what it does. Its content has evolved beyond business to feature lifestyle and wellbeing tips. But among discussions about aliens and AI threats, Bartlett also attracts big names such as Michelle Obama, JD Vance, Kamala Harris and Jürgen Klopp.
Bartlett characterises his audience as “strivers” who “want to have their mind expanded”.
He sees the podcast – whose episodes tend to run long and often feature him doing little more than looking quizzical – as giving people the space to open up. He points to a recent interview with WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, who discussed childhood trauma. “There are periods where I didn’t interrupt him for 15 minutes. That’s my style of interviewing.”
Creators have not historically had “the same rigour and experience and training as a lot of real journalists”, he concedes. “This is something that, as my platform’s grown, I’ve thought more and more about.”
Bartlett admits he has timed his ventures well but also puts his business’s growth down to an obsession with detail and experimentation – the 1 per cent marginal gains, as he calls them, that add up to something bigger. Even studio CO2 levels are monitored to stay below 1,000 parts per million, which is when, he says, “your cognitive performance will change ... your ability to answer questions or ask them will shift”.
The optimised life extolled in his studio crosses over to his portfolio of investments, which include Zoe, a health-testing company, and Huel supplements. This has led to trouble at times with the advertising regulator. In 2024, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) found a Huel advertisement featuring Bartlett misleading because it did not disclose he was a director. The ASA also upheld a complaint about a Zoe ad carrying Bartlett’s endorsement that omitted to say he was an investor.
“I think we’ve done a really good job over the last couple of years making sure that whenever there’s a commercial relationship with particular brands, we declare it, and we have a really great editorial process now,” he says. “If I mention Whoop [the fitness tracker] ... the team will either remove that or they’ll ask me to do a pickup, just saying that I’m an investor.”
Bartlett is certainly an enthusiastic endorser of fitness and wellbeing products, although he admits to being most influenced by whoever he last had on the podcast. Referring to advice shared on a recent episode by a neuroscientist, he says: “I got out of bed today ... and I was like, right, where’s the pint of water?”
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
