The founder and host of the hit show, 31, said that he would discuss shared interests such as business, leadership and mental health with Rishi Sunak.

Speaking to the Telegraph about his podcast, Steven Bartlett said: “There’s an increasing demand to speak to politicians and that’s something I typically turn down.

“There’s a few exceptions, so the Prime Minister – I’d speak to the Prime Minister – but outside of that I have no interest in speaking to anybody else.”

He explained that speaking to a politician was just not “something I feel well placed to do” and insisted that someone with media training was the “antithesis of what we do”.

Last year, he famously interviewed former health secretary Matt Hancock about his highly publicised affair with aide Gina Coladangelo that led to his resignation.

Promoting the episode on his social media, Bartlett wrote that the interview was “the first time in the history of The Diary of a CEO that things got a little heated between me and a guest”, but said that Mr Hancock answered “all of the tough questions”.

Before starting his podcast, Bartlett co-founded a social media marketing company, Social Chain, in 2014. He achieved multi-millionaire status by the age of 25.

The university dropout later became the youngest ever investor on Dragons’ Den in 2021, a post he left after filming two series.

Since 2017, he has recorded his podcast, admitting that he is now facing “increasing pressure” to host controversial guests on the influential platform.

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

He was the only British podcaster to appear on the list, which also features podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, The Huberman Lab by Andrew Huberman 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 just having conversations in my fake kitchen and people are listening, and I don’t entirely know why people are listening if I’m honest.”

Moonshot

At the beginning of the year, he personally launched an internal goal for him and his podcast team to achieve a far more global reach for The Diary of a CEO. He codenamed the mission “Moonshot” to channel US president John F Kennedy’s successful challenge at the beginning of the 1960s to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

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

“In the grand scheme of things, we’re reaching such a small amount of people, there’s seven to eight billion people on Earth. We’re reaching 40-50 million a month.”

The latter figures, however, mark years of consistent work and growth on The Diary of a CEO, which in 2023 has seen a follower growth of 152 per cent and streaming growth of 94 per cent on Spotify.

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

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

Inflight entertainment

He credits his podcast being on the inflight entertainment channels of 11 different airlines with helping him break into “new territories”, as well as a few “bombshell” guests, which went viral on social media.

His two most streamed episodes this year include the ones with broadcaster Davina McCall and the epidemiologist and author Tim Spector.

Former guests have also included world-renowned clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, comedian Jimmy Carr and actor Seth Rogan.

Asked about how he chooses who gets the airtime, Bartlett said: “Do 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 all the people that we turn down who have more followers than the people we accept.”

“It’s purely led by curiosity, and it has to be,” he insisted, explaining that the guest choice is strictly limited to him and his guest booker.

Faced with a world of increasing accusations of fake news and media bias, Bartlett explained that he tries to avoid covering controversial issues.

“There’s so much pressure” to cover these topics, he said, such as current affairs and political hot potatoes, but explained that it’s why the guest selection process “does not involve anyone else’s opinion, it can’t”.

He said his team, which includes a research team of four and a full-time head of investigative research, makes sure he “represents the issues we talk about in a responsible way”.

They brief him on which points could be potentially contentious with certain guests. This allows him to “throw rebuttals back at them, like a journalist typically would” while recording the episode.

He said that the team has sent out special hampers to those with the highest listening minutes on Spotify, adding that he feels a sense of responsibility to continue delivering for those fans.

“There’s various shades of responsibility: one of the shades we feel at the moment is just to keep doing it because we need the people that really rely on it,” Bartlett added.