Rishi Sunak is only politician I’d interview, Diary of a CEO podcast host says

Since 2017, he has been recording his podcast and admits that he now faces “increasing pressure” to host controversial guests on the influential platform.

It comes as he revealed that his show reached the milestone of reaching Spotify’s Global Top Ten charts for the first time this year, ranking as the ninth biggest podcast on the streaming service.

He was the only British podcaster to appear on the list, which also includes podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, Andrew Huberman’s The Huberman Lab and On Purpose With Jay Shetty.

“It was unimaginable to me,” Bartlett said of the achievement. “I’ll never understand it because we’re all having conversations in my fake kitchen and people are listening, and I don’t entirely know why people are listening, if I’m honest.”

Moon shot

At the beginning of the year, he personally launched an internal goal for himself and his podcast team to achieve a much more global reach for Diary of a CEO. He codenamed the mission “Moonshot” to channel U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s successful challenge in the early 1960s to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Bartlett said: “[Moonshot] I was just making sure our team knew that we’re irrelevant around the world.

“In the grand scheme of things, we are reaching such a small number of people that there are between seven and eight billion people on Earth. “We are reaching between 40 and 50 million a month.”

However, these latest figures mark years of consistent work and growth at The Diary of a CEO, which in 2023 saw 152 percent follower growth and 94 percent streaming growth on Spotify.

It also remains Apple’s number one show and most watched show this year, as well as YouTube’s number one most subscribed podcast with four million subscribers.

He said: “That boggles the mind. “I mean, there are only 60 million people in the UK, so it’s a big number, but… you need a target to aim for.”

in-flight entertainment

He credits his podcast being on the in-flight entertainment channels of 11 different airlines with helping him break into “new territories,” as well as some “explosive” guests, who went viral on social media.

Its two most-streamed episodes this year include those with broadcaster Davina McCall and epidemiologist and author Tim Spector.

Past guests also include world-renowned clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, comedian Jimmy Carr and actor Seth Rogan.

When asked how he chooses who gets the airtime, Bartlett said: “I want to sit in a room for four hours talking about something with them is the framework, and it’s really reliable.

“We never think about how many followers someone has or how famous they are… you don’t see that all the people we reject have more followers than the people we accept.”