Steven Bartlett Built an Audience of Millions. What Does He Owe Them? | Fortune Daily

0:00Steven Bartlett started The Diary of a CEO alone, at home, in September 2017. Today, nearly a decade later, he helms the second biggest podcast on YouTube, with 20.6 million subscribers. And he's on track to overtake Joe Rogan in the near future. With a combined monthly listenership of over 100 million across all of Bartlett's platforms, He's now coming up on the one-year anniversary of his newest project, Stephen.com. But what responsibility comes with a platform of this enormous size? Today, I sit down with Bartlett to talk about how much money he actually makes from the diary of a CEO. We also talk about his new mission to help other creators build their own empires.

0:55and we discuss what he feels he owes his audience at a time when podcasts are becoming a main source of information. I'm Ellie Austin in New York and this is Fortune Daily.

1:14Stephen, hello, welcome to New York. Hello, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for joining us. Let's start with the business of Diary of a CEO because what a juggernaut it has become. So you started it in 2017. The show has evolved a lot since then. You have evolved a lot since then. For people who may not have come across it, which I imagine is a very few amount of people, given the fact that you now have 20 million subscribers, 20 million plus subscribers on YouTube. How would you describe the show now? Because it was originally a business podcast. It feels like a lot more than that. Yeah, it started with me just reading my diary.

1:45So there was no guests on the show. For the first couple of episodes, it's me at 2am in the morning, just passing through my diary and just basically making sense of what I'd written that week. And then at some stage, I start interviewing other people about their diaries. I found that to be more, I think, intellectually stimulating to learn about other people than just read my own diary. So it was really a selfish choice in that regard. And then as I started to go deeper into these people, I realized that within the diary, I mean, really from the essence of the show, the diary of a CEO wouldn't contain P &Ls and profit forecasts and those kinds of things.

2:19It is, if you're truly thinking about what's in the diary of a CEO, it is everything. In fact, it probably wouldn't be the business stuff. It would be the stuff about what's motivating them, their insecurities, their drives and all those things. So it exploded into this wide range of subjects from neuroscience to psychology to performance to sports. I want to talk about the numbers for a bit. So you made a really interesting episode in 2021 where you talked about having 55k worth of equipment at that point. That's what you said. You said you had eight people on your staff helping to make and promote the show.

2:51And you said that it was on track to make$1.2 million that year. With those relatively small investments, that's about 100K. That is 100K a month. How much money are you making from the show now? So how much money are we making from the show now? The forecast for this year is in the region of$60 million. and the forecast for our broader media company this year is in the region of about$90 million. That's all of our other creators. We now, at Stephen.com level, we have lots of different creators and then as we forecast into next year, that goes up to about$160 million from the holding company perspective.

3:29Where is that$60 million for the show specifically coming from? Talk me through the revenue streams because I think people are so interested in the deal structures that are kind of operating in the creator space these days. It's a wide range of things. And again, this goes to the point of diversification. So I run an investment fund. I have products that we sell, that we own and that we manufacture. We have brand partnerships. We have subscription revenue, memberships as well. So across several of our platforms, we do have a subscription offering. And we do events around the brand as well. And there are more that are available, but those are the sort of the main revenue drivers for most creative businesses.

4:08We're hearing more about creators now owning equity in a lot of the businesses that they are promoting. How has that system evolved since you started out? Yeah, you know, in my early career, I was building a business where we were booking hundreds and sometimes thousands of influencers. We used to call them back then per month. And the deals were like the industry used to look at creators like me as kind of billboards where you pay them to post something. And then we went into the second era of this where you started bringing them a little bit closer and they would become like creative director.

4:38we'd give them like a job but also just give them the fee then we went into the third sort of era of working with creators where they would get given like options or equity and all the previous rules applied they get paid and sometimes they get some sort of like title and we're moving into the like fourth era I think where creators are basically co-founding businesses with these brands and that's like the era we're in now I think the fifth era is when and we're starting to see this with people like Mr. Beast is when actually their companies, the creator engages in M &A and acts more like a Fortune 500 company.

5:10I'm an investor in Jimmy's company. And when you look at how that company is built, it resembles a Fortune 500 holding company. It has a C-suite that all come from like, you know, often come from publicly listed companies. They are doing active. They just bought a bank. This is the, for me, is the like last era that we're heading towards within this creator economy where you're no longer an influencer. You're no longer an equity partner or a creative director. you are a owner or co-founder. What's the impact of all of this on the consumer or the viewer? How can the consumer know that what they are being advertised on a certain platform by a creator is legit and the creator truly feels about it as they say they do?

5:47There's kind of like two models you can adopt if you're a podcaster or a creator like me. I guess there's a third, but I think there's really, there's two because they sit on different ends of the spectrum. The first is you You get an offer from some of these big partners who've been buying podcasts. You probably know the names. And when you look at those offers... And you've turned a lot of them down. I have. We're going to come on to that. So I know what those offers look like. Yeah. And the offers look like this. You say yes to this big number today. And then you put 12 adverts in your podcast.

6:15And you have very little say about what those 12 adverts are. One of the central reasons why I turned down such an offer is because that is four times more ads than I have to put in now. and actually I think the most sort of authentic thing to do as it relates to my audience is to do fewer things but things that really really matter to me I'd say 70 % of the partners I work with in my podcast are partners that I personally reached out to the founder and I think that for me when I think about like integrity with audience and your audience knowing whether this is just something you're paid to talk about or whether this is something that is actually central to your life I think that is a better route to take over the long time.

6:51I guess in a way you're an exception to the rule at this point because you have created such an enormous following that you have discretion over which deals you can accept what would your advice be to a creator who's starting out and maybe doesn't have that degree of influence and choice my whole thing is try and play as long as you possibly can and that's an incredibly privileged thing to say in the position i'm in but at any stage you're in you have to try and take a long-term view both for audience for commercials and everything else um when we talked about the deal a second ago that i was offered it would also mean that I would have to come off YouTube.

7:22And so these are the types of deals. You're making a sacrifice on commercial if you work with the fragmentation vultures, as I call them, or you're making a sacrifice on commercial or owning the relationship with the audience, which I think is more mission critical than anything we'll probably talk about today. This idea of having a direct relationship. Sovereignty in a world where algorithms that are now powered by AI are increasingly going to make the decision, if you listen to Mark Zuckerberg's recent earnings call, as to who sees your stuff. If you want to build a durable business in this creator economy, you have to prioritize sovereignty.

7:52You're renting your audience at the moment. Do you have to be a bit clickbaity at the same time in the way you title episodes or clips to really capture that attention? I think there's always a balance between the idea of accuracy and being compelling with the packaging. And so our dance has always been make sure we quote our guests accurately and we don't put words in their mouth. but also like we of course try and package our content so that it's so that most people watch it and it's always been a dance between the two forces I think. I saw one that said why your penis may shrink forever or something like that recently but there's a variety.

8:25From us? From you but there's a variety across the board and then there's a lot of other stuff as well. I want to stay on this subject of I will say there are a lot of other thumbnails up there as well. No I actually do remember the episode. You remember you meant the episode. I want to stay on the subject of integrity with audiences. So the BBC did an investigation into Diary of a CEO in 2024, and it was specifically looking at health-focused episodes. So some people have alleged that there's been a strategic shift from business content to health-focused content. I'm sure you have a take on that, and I want to hear it.

8:58And statements that some health-focused guests were making around whether, for example, a keto diet could treat cancer, whether gluten can cause autism. Your company called this investigation a misleading partial narrative tell me now you've had time to reflect on it what you believe was left out of that investigation yeah so i think it's interesting because you grow as a podcaster and then you don't have the same sort of i guess infrastructure as say mainstream media has but you start having the same amount of reach and influence so you there's a responsibility that you you have to make a decision about like and the thing for me has always been am i serving my audience in the best possible way and i was it's funny one of those quotes you just referenced comes from a doctor that is by many considered to be one of the leading doctors and PhD researchers in the field.

9:43When you sit with a doctor who's a leading PhD researcher in the field, and then you sit with another doctor a week later who's a leading PhD researcher in the same field, and they disagree, what does a podcaster like me do about that? There hasn't been historically a script for that. So over a year ago now, we did something which I don't think any podcaster has ever done, is we contracted a full-time medical PhD to fact check every episode. Every episode around health? Around health. Every episode around health. To remove anything that was uncontextable, what we mean by that is we can't provide context on it by an on-screen pop-up or with our research notes in the description below.

10:17To put on-screen pop-ups on the screen to clarify things. So sometimes guests will say 720 when they mean 71. So things like that pop up on the screen now on the show and say, this guest meant blah, blah, blah. We call this community notes. as an attempt to try and bring some of that rigour that we admire so much in traditional journalism into a medium that has really never established a blueprint for rigour. No, and it's not covered by the regulatory bodies that traditional media is, for instance, like Ofcom in the UK or whatever it might be. And one of the exciting things that I've noticed is some of my peers in this space are not doing the same.

10:50And I think because we don't record live, that's something that is a possibility within the medium. One question on that is what if I'm listening to the show? I can't see the community notes, presumably. So how do you tailor them for audio only? So if there was anything in the audio experience that was flagged by our contracted member of staff, it would have been removed anyway. So community notes really act as a deeper context and like clarifying minor discrepancy. So I remember one particular guest got a stat a little bit wrong and that stat went viral because obviously it didn't make sense.

11:31And so that kind of thing would now be removed from our show. So if a doctor, for example, made a statement that there wasn't scientific backing for, would that be removed from the audio version of the show at this point? It depends on the nature of the statement. And it depends how they framed it. If they framed it as a definitive based on meta-analyses, that would be removed. But if they're hypothesizing about something that they're seeing in early research, then that's a different decision. You've obviously never framed yourself as a journalist. I'm interested in, as someone who also sits across some people and interview people, what do you see your role as when you're talking to someone?

12:01I mean, one thing that people criticise of podcasters in general is that they don't push back enough. Do you see your role as pushing back at times, or is it more to facilitate long-form conversation? Yeah, I'm definitely not a journalist. And this is not something that I've ever thought of myself as. And you can imagine the journey I went on from putting a sock over my$100 microphone and plugging it into my laptop and speaking to this crazy ride that I've been on over the last seven years. There was never an intention from my part to be a journalist. It was really like me pursuing my curiosity.

12:34And so as it relates to my style of interviewing, it's still very much pursuing my curiosity. And that means that for me, I can sit down with Kamala Harris and ask her the questions that I want to know from Kamala Harris. and then I can sit with J.D. Vance and ask him the questions that I want to know from a J.D. Vance. And I think sometimes there is a temptation to become someone else because when I sit down with Kamala Harris, of course there's going to be 10 ,000 comments that say, why didn't you ask her about this or you should have hit her with this or you should have. And then when I sit down with J.D.

13:04Vance, it's the same. So if you're not anchored to like your own curiosity, you're going to be a plastic bag in the wind. And that, again, violates the idea of long termism. So I think if you look at my interview style, what you'll definitely see is consistency over the long term. So that's kind of what matters to me. I've listened to the show for a long time. As I was saying to you before we came in, I struggled with one episode in particular last year, which was when you and Chris Williamson were talking about declining birth rates. And you were saying how you listed a number of reasons, improved contraception.

13:35But Chris in particular settled on the fact of what he called an anti-family sentiment in women. I'm a woman of that age where my friends and I are constantly talking about whether or not we're going to have kids and why. And there was a flippancy to Chris's comments in particular saying, oh, it's because women don't want to have kids because they won't be able to go out to brunch or wear high heels. When it's a lot deeper than that, that I know kind of struck a quite frustrated chord with a lot of women. And it was referenced online. Do you do you when you look at an episode like that and its reaction, can you understand what's going on?

14:06Of course. OK. Yeah. Well, first of all, that's good to know. Yeah, of course. It's something I thought about a lot. So how do you, I mean, in future, how do you think about it? Would you bring a woman into the conversation? Would you have pushed back? Like I sometimes leave interviews thinking, damn, I could have responded to that better. I wonder if you reflect like that. Yeah, it's in the context of an interview like that, when you're sat down to talk, the brief is to discuss, I think, New Year's resolutions. I think that's what we were sat down to talk about. and as I as I as you know the episode came out I think a little while past and then there was a clip that went viral from the interview you do you get so much feedback all the time um that you reflect on like the nuance that wasn't provided in certain comments and this is one of the this is one of the great I think um privileges I've had as an interviewer is I've I've come to learn the importance of nuance and especially in a culture of like clipping things it is incredibly important that you always push you always push both your guests but also yourself as an interviewer to try and get that nuance out of the subjects.

15:04Again, because this goes back to the point of responsibility. 170 million people will listen this month. And that's like a real responsibility that I want to make sure we're stepping into. And I always want to make sure that we're like serving those people for whatever reason they came in the best possible way. And we do that by like being more accurate and by caring more about the nuance of things. Do you know what? It's funny because we have this conversation on the show and then when the episode comes out, there's like another conversation that takes place which is the audience then relaying back to me um their lived experience and it because it really has helped me sort of develop and form a better view of the world and different people's experiences and then does it change how you approach subsequent conversations of course yeah i mean we've had we've had i think probably delivered more views for um around women's health issues than any definitely host-led male podcast I think, in the world.

15:58And that in part has come from, in the early days of the show, women reaching out to me, about 56 % of our audience on audio are women, saying that they felt underserved when we sat with neuroscientists and they're talking about studies that were done on men. So that's why we've hosted, I think, probably the three biggest debates on women's health issues on the show. Because again, I had no idea as a man that the majority of the studies on - All done on men, largely. Yeah. And there was this fundamental, horrific assumption in science that women were just smaller versions of men, which was inaccurate and had led to that misconception.

16:30So it's this constant learning process. And it's one that I'm incredibly grateful for. Very, very final question on this. Some people have said there's less women guests on the show these days than there have been historically. What does your data show on that? And also another kind of claim that people make all the time about male podcasters is that by platforming people like Jordan Peterson, they're taking Manosphere ideas and turning them mainstream. I want your response to that. And that we're moving on. Yeah, it's interesting because I don't spend a lot of time thinking about hitting any particular demographic or geographic or any particular numbers as it relates to those things.

17:13I think about having conversations that I really want to have. And that has always been my driving force. And to be honest, it always will be. I don't think my audience are going to stick around or take value from my show. if I start overthinking too much, like who am I pleasing by the guest selections that I make? But, you know, I guess that's an ongoing conversation. You said you want to be doing Diary of a CEO in 50 years. What does that look like? What is the show in 50 years? I have no idea. The show started with me in my bedroom at 2 a.m. with a sock over my mic. And then it was me interviewing business people.

17:47Then it traversed into lots of subjects. I spend a lot of time talking about technology now because that's the thing front of mind for me and AI. and I don't know, I'm going to become a dad, I guess, probably next year. So I bet you'll see loads of me sat there with parent psychologists and with more bags under my eyes asking them what the fact is going on. It will evolve and change as I evolve and change. So it's hard to forecast what I'm going to be talking about or how I'm going to be doing it, I guess. And that's cool. I like that. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Appreciate it.

18:17Thank you. We talked to Stephen Bartlett about a lot of different subjects And you've seen much of that just now, but later this week, we'll be releasing the full interview and subscribe to Fortune Daily's YouTube channel to make sure you don't miss it when it drops.

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20:03It's expected to come online about 2029. For more on this story, visit fortune.com. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin. Please let us know what you thought of today's interview with Stephen Bartlett. You can let us know in the comments. Remember that you can also find the show on Apple and Spotify podcast platforms. We'll see you tomorrow. Hang on. Hey. That good? Do I need to smile more when I say that kind of thing?