I Listened to The Diary of a CEO for a Week. This Is What It Did to Me

There’s something unintentionally hilarious about The Diary of A CEO’s YouTube thumbnails. If you want to see how the modern attention economy works, have a look at them right now. The arrangement is always the same: the podcast’s host, Steven Bartlett, is on the right; the guest is on the left; and in the middle is a short, amped-up phrase to make you click. “AI Will Become A God By 2027!”; “It’s Simple To Lose Fat”; “Do Not Buy A House”; “We Have 4 Weeks Left.”The best bits are the cut-outs of Bartlett himself, which cycle through about half a dozen shots of him in various poses of rapt concentration. In a couple, he’s concentrating so hard he’s put his index finger to his lips. In another, he has all four fingers resting there, as if his guest has stunned him into chewing off his own nails.I wouldn’t usually have a reason to contemplate these pictures, but The Diary of a CEO is now too big to ignore, being the second-most-listened-to podcast on Spotify globally in 2025. JD Vance, Bruno Fernandes, Matthew McConaughey, Kamala Harris, and Kevin Hart are among the famous and powerful people Bartlett has sat down with between various scientists, self-help authors, and businesspeople.And DOAC is now closing in on the juggernaut of the format, The Joe Rogan Experience—at least on YouTube. Bartlett got twice as many views there as Rogan between March and June this year, according to the analytics site Social Blade, and his growing subscriber base (currently 19.1 million) is on track to overtake Rogan’s relatively stagnant 21.1 million.Millions, probably tens of millions, of people genuinely like Bartlett’s output. The last time he released demographic data on his audience, in 2023, the gender balance was almost perfectly even, but since then some of his episodes have had a whiff of the manosphere: one with podcaster and former Love Island star Chris Williamson, who partially blames the fertility crisis on some women having an “anti-family” attitude; another with the psychiatrist-turned-streamer Alok Kanojia, in which Bartlett asks if society should “put systems in place” to make sure single men meet partners. Is this pushing his audience towards inceldom? There was only one way to find out: spend a week DOAC-maxxing every opportunity I could.I started on YouTube, where as mentioned, Bartlett really leans into his visuals. The episodes, released twice a week, have introductory montages animating the choice quotes. Below them is a banner asking me to “Shop the The Diary Of A CEO store,” which includes something called the “The 1% Diary,” a Bartlett-approved notebook with motivational quotes and a box to write in your “1% boost” for the day. It’s $41, and covers a “90-day journey,” so you’d need to drop $164 for not quite a year’s supply.DOAC episodes are full of props, like the photos Bartlett slides across the table to his guests to elicit emotional anecdotes. When cancer researcher Thomas Seyfried appears as a guest, he waves around a brown envelope with “CONFIDENTIAL” written on it in cartoonishly large red letters, which contains an embargoed medical paper that’s pixelated when removed. This flair does not extend to Bartlett’s outfits, which seem to consist of an inexhaustible supply of black T-shirts.The most popular interviews are an eclectic bunch, and don’t include any really famous guests: an AI expert on AI-proof jobs; a self-help author on “how to seduce anyone, build confidence and become powerful;” a neuroscientist on how stress “gives you belly fat.” Also a geopolitical analyst predicting World War Three. But as per its name, DOAC started with a focus on business—so as I’m brushing my teeth one evening, I open Spotify and throw on the episode with hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio.It’s interesting, not so much because of the content, which mostly consists of an introductory lesson in investing, but because Bartlett is never quite sure whether to position himself at his listeners’ level or at Dalio’s. He asks Dalio to explain basic finance jargon like “leverage” for the benefit of a general audience, but can’t resist hinting at his own connections to investors and startup founders. He does restrain himself from mentioning he’s a judge on Dragons’ Den (the UK's version of Shark Tank, which he will be a guest on in this upcoming season), at least before Dalio’s boomerish AI hyping lulls me gently to sleep.Sometimes these attempted flexes go awry. “They call it a black swan event,” Bartlett says wisely when they’re discussing stock market bubbles popping. Do they? Black swan events are by definition surprises, and the one thing we know about bubbles is that they pop sooner or later. My favorite Bartlettism: when interviewing computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, at one point he asks, “You’re the founder of the term ‘AI safety’?” Words aren’t companies, Stevie.I leap to DOAC’s other pillar: wellness. The show has previously been criticized for platforming, and not challenging, fringe medical views. Early last year it started fact-checking episodes with a medical doctor; “DOAC community notes” occasionally pop up on screen to correct, clarify or offer context to what guests are saying. But misinformation only makes an impact if listeners actually pay attention to it—and given most episodes are more than 90 minutes long and sometimes run for two and a half hours, I’m not convinced this is always the case. For all its hyper-clicky thumbnails and opening montages, DOAC also exploits our desire for infinite, ambient content we can sort-of-consume while going about our days. It works for viral TikTok clips, and for background noise.Bartlett’s husky vocal fry has an ASMR quality to it; he has a habit of repeating back what his guest has just said, like a slightly confused hypnotist. Is he hypnotizing me? I can’t help but be a little entranced on a drowsy commute into work, while listening to an episode on how vitamins affect sleep. Though it’s bookended by the key points, the rest of it is rambling. It’s less of an interrogation than Bartlett periodically prompting his guest to keep talking.But for emotional matters, Bartlett sits up in his chair and gets his scalpel out. It’s something of a meme how often guests cry on DOAC, to the point where there’s literally a TikTok discover page called “Steven Bartlett Making Guests Cry” —mostly about bereavements, but also Jordan Peterson tearing up about the music of Hank Williams.Bartlett begins his assault on Vice President J.D. Vance’s tear ducts by sliding him some of those family photos. He locks onto the vice president’s mom. “What would she think of you today? What would you say to her? Have you ever grieved [her] loss?” Vance wells up. “The emotion’s still right on the surface for you,” Bartlett says, as if his last half-dozen questions haven’t been bulldozing their way through Vance’s outward composure. At another point, Vance is talking about his chaotic early relationship with his now wife, which Bartlett says is “clearly an avoidant attachment style.” “100%,” Vance replies—this trad Cath, anti-woke warrior is now lapping up psychology speak.That’s prime SB, greasing all his guests, however varied, into a DOAC-shaped box, so consumers can get the product they know and love week after week. “I meet so many different people, and one of the things I’ve come to learn is [to] try and meet everybody as I experience them,” he says to Vance at one point. Though Bartlett doesn’t particularly challenge his guests, he steers episodes so we always end up getting a lot of him in them—a lot of emotion, speculation, sensationalism and meandering.I end my DOAC journey in the most appropriate way I can think of: listening to an episode titled “Top Scientist REVEALS: We Invented Heaven, God Is A Human Invention!” at 1.5x speed. Near the end of the two hours, theoretical physicist Brian Greene has just about finished running us through the eventual heat death of the universe when Bartlett asks him if there’s any aspect of his work that might be relevant to his listeners’ day-to-day lives. There isn’t—he’s a theoretical physicist.But after a week of sustaining myself on a heavy diet of Steven Bartlett, I’ve started to absorb the malign philosophy that seems to hang in the background of his interviews: that all knowledge, however niche, should be valued on whether it can make you more fulfilled and successful. And some of the knowledge is quite niche. It’s been suggested that I shouldn’t buy a house, but maybe Bitcoin instead; that I should spend more time outdoors in the sun (fair enough) and consider applying a bit less sunscreen when I do (hmmm); that a keto diet could help cancer treatments like chemotherapy (what?); that “they” (who are they?) are lying to me about AI, and about UFOs; and that according to an “ex-Google officer” I only have three years left “before it hits.” What is “it?” Correct! It’s AI taking your job, unless you listen to this 122-minute podcast.I feel simultaneously more amped up and twitchy, given all the essential views and theories DOAC is pitching to me, but also less focused—more smooth-brained—given how long and rambling the episodes are. I don’t feel particularly “radicalized,” really; in relation to AI and wellness, politics is just a fraction of Bartlett’s output, of which anything that could be called vaguely manosphere-y is a further fraction.And what I definitely don’t feel is optimized. But the content itself isn’t optimized. It isn’t cool-headed and concise, but as brash and bottomless as the internet at large. DOAC might say success is about discipline, but its own success comes from the very modern tactic of simply flooding the zone.A version of this story originally appeared in British GQ.