This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Alright, suckers, I’ve had enough of journalism. There isn’t enough money in it for a hustler like me. I need to be stacking paper — and I mean banknotes rather than freelance submissions.

Yes, I’m going to become a businessman. I’m going to become a CEO! And where better to learn how to become a successful entrepreneur than Steven Bartlett’s smash hit podcast The Diary of a CEO?

Mr Bartlett, 31, co-founded companies such as Social Chain and thirdweb, and launched The Diary of a CEO in 2017. Here, he interviews scientists, celebrities, businesspeople, philosophers and pretty much anyone with a name and a story.

Bartlett has a soothing laid-back manner. He barely interviews his guests so much as assists them down the path of their thoughts. In a culture where discourse is often hostile — and often pointlessly so — the appeal of this is obvious.

His gentle manner is also effective in getting his guests to open up. Whether he is talking to nutritionists, psychologists or Thierry Henry, he puts his guests at ease. If he was a police officer, he’d be the good cop.

What doesn’t put me at ease is the marketing. Despite Barlett’s own mellow style, the podcasts are promoted with pure sensationalism. If the pop philosopher Alain de Botton appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience the title would introduce him as Alain de Botton. On The Diary of a CEO, on the other hand, he is amusingly introduced as “the Love Expert”. (Can you graduate in love nowadays?)

More commonly, Bartlett’s titles try to freak us out. “You’re Being Manipulated!” “They’re Lying To You!” “More War Is Coming!” Sometimes we are being manipulated, sometimes people are lying, and war might well be on the horizon, but what’s grating is that every podcast has to be presented as an unmissable event. The title “If Your Poo Looks Like This Go To A Doctor” did at least make me laugh.

One of Bartlett’s favourite subjects is stress. What causes stress? What can we do to deal with stress? What is stress anyway? Well, his podcast seems like a major source of stress. Even relatively minor lifestyle choices such as drinking coffee are hyper-analysed, from different directions, and in near-apocalyptic terms (“How Caffeine is Killing You” is one of his thumbnails). 

This seems hugely unhelpful. How can you focus on building a successful company, for example, if you’re feeling neurotic about your morning drink?

To be fair, Diary of a CEO isn’t always like this. An episode on sex, for example, engages in myth-busting in more reassuring terms rather than raising the idea that orgasms cause Alzheimer’s disease or whatever. 

But there is enough problematising of the everyday that regular listeners must have limited mental energy for their hopes and dreams. “There’s always a cost,” Bartlett muses in an interview with the factually-challenged author Johann Hari. True enough. But not everything has a cost that matters.

Bartlett wants his podcast to provide an “unfiltered journey” into the minds of the experts and personalities that he interviews. Perhaps sometimes a filter would be useful. Bartlett’s guests throw out authoritative-sounding claims which should strike one as dubious and he nods along rather than questioning them.

To pick a random example, the nutrition commentator Max Lugavere is discussing the importance of consuming animal products and the dangers of vegetarianism. “The UK biobank study found that … the more animal products that were consumed, the lower the risk of Alzheimer’s,” he announces. Interesting. 

I looked up the “UK biobank study” and found that the more processed meat that was consumed, the higher the risk of dementia, and the more unprocessed red meat the lower the risk. 

To be fair, I’m sure that Mr Lugavere recommends unprocessed meat rather than chicken nuggets. But that’s still a different finding from “animal products”.

You can be sceptical without being combative, but Bartlett seems too invested in presenting his guests as the most impressive people in the world to push back on their claims. 

“Someone that didn’t qualify in terms of getting a medical degree or whatever,” he says to Lugavere, “would have to be driven by a deep, sincere sense of curiosity and mission.” 

Just moments before, Bartlett had referenced Lugavere’s New York Times best-selling books. Making money off something doesn’t mean you aren’t sincerely curious about it. But it does mean that you don’t have to be.

Bartlett’s impoverished sense of scepticism hit the news recently when, in his role as a judge on Dragon’s Den, he backed a woman selling “gold-plated ear seeds” which she had claimed had “helped to heal” her M.E. 

The episode was soon withdrawn by the BBC after a backlash over its pseudoscientific claims. Alas, we probably won’t get an episode of The Diary of a CEO announcing, “The Hidden Secret Cure For ME!”

There are worse ways of spending time than listening to an episode of The Diary of a CEO when Bartlett’s guest is especially interesting. But I can’t imagine the podcast giving people the tools they need to be successful — in business or in life. 

With its dramatic presentation and unchallenged arguments, it seems dangerously liable to foster neuroticism and credulity — which, of course, makes it far more suitable for journalists than for CEOs.