On Thursday 22 October, Steven Bartlett released his interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It runs 110 minutes, was recorded on 16 October in the show's studio, and had 2.5 million views on YouTube in its first nineteen hours. The title reads "President Zelenskyy: It's Time To Tell You The Truth About This War! I Found 500 Bodies!", which is classic Bartlett. Yet it is also the most personal long interview a sitting head of state at war has ever given, and a showcase of what a podcast can do that no other medium can.
What is new about it
Zelenskyy does give long interviews. In January 2025 he gave Lex Fridman more than three hours, the longest interview of his career, which now has 7.5 million views on YouTube. But Fridman led a debate about history and geopolitics, and Zelenskyy answered as a president. Television gives him ten minutes, and print edits him to suit the moment.
Bartlett starts differently. The episode's second chapter is called “How Is Zelensky Really Doing?” Zelenskyy says: “I'll be honest, I don't sleep.” And he adds whose pain is greater: “My pain is not even 10% of the parents' pain.” Then he talks about his childhood in Soviet Kryvyi Rih, about family members murdered by the Nazis and about playing a president on television before he became one. Only then does the war come, and even that is told as personal experience: where he was on the morning of 24 February, what he told his wife and children (“The war has started. I love you. I'll call you”), when it dawned on him that something terrible had happened (“I just realized that something happened, something terrible”). When the conversation reaches Bucha comes the line that Ukrainian news sites quoted the same day: “What if a mass grave containing 500 tortured people were found today in the United States or Britain? God forbid, how do you forgive that?” It is followed by “I had never wanted to kill a single human being” and the admission that he wanted revenge. After Bucha come the chapters “How the War Has Changed Him”, "Being a Father During the War" and "His Mum's Daily Phone Calls". Maps, weapons and diplomacy get the last twenty minutes between them.
As far as I know, nobody has published an interview this long and at the same time this personal with a head of state whose country is at war. Bartlett gave Zelenskyy what he gives every guest. Space, attention and questions that are not about the country but about him. “You've made the decision you're going to stay. Were you scared?” Zelenskyy replies that it was not about fear but about focus: “It's not about fear, it's about being laser focused on what needs to be done right now.” He added one more thing that makes the interview honest. He let Zelenskyy speak Ukrainian.
Watching the video, I was struck by how his lip movements don't quite match the sound. It looked like a glitch, and for a while I thought they had simply cleaned up his English to make it easier to understand. But no. During the recording, both of them had a live translation feed in their earpieces. According to Lily Taurau, who leads brand partnerships in Bartlett's company, it was Bartlett's decision, so that Zelenskyy could tell his story in his own words and in his own language.
Zelenskyy speaks Ukrainian, and the English voice on YouTube was created with translation tools. “We've used translation tools so you can watch and listen completely in English,” Taurau wrote on LinkedIn. It all came together fast. According to Taurau, the interview was confirmed just 72 hours before it was recorded, and it was the show's first ever interview with a sitting president. Executive producer Winnie Dunbar Nelson, the driving force behind the episode, puts it this way: “we have to listen to each other to change the world for the better.”
Hope marketing
Let's call it hope marketing, without irony. Zelenskyy has been doing it since February 2022, when he recorded a video on a street in Kyiv so people could see he had stayed. The product is not Ukraine, it is a man who doesn't sleep, whose mum calls him every day and who admits he wanted revenge. The buyer is an audience that stopped reading about the war after four years and that no news format has given a reason to come back. The hope on sale here is not hope of victory. It is hope that it can be endured.
The rest is format. A podcast interview has no deadline and no running time, and the guest does not have to win, only to last. Bartlett opens by asking how his guest is doing, and lets the silence sit. The result is a text that Ukrainian media read as testimony about Bucha, Russian media as tears and sleeplessness, and Western commentators as "the rawest interview" and a portrait of a man "running on fumes".
For the show, it is also proof that it can do more than business and health. After the release, Bartlett wrote: “Maybe the most important interview I've ever done.” The Diary of a CEO has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube, in Podscribe\'s ranking it came first in downloads and views per episode in both March and July 2026, with 4.44 million against 4.39 million for Crime Junkie in July, and Spotify ranked it second among the world's most-listened podcasts of 2025. Its audience is young, global and mostly doesn't read the news. For them, this is the first long encounter with a man they know from the news as a name.
Which awards it could aim for
The Golden Globes have had a Best Podcast category since this year, but The Diary of a CEO stands no chance there. The list of eligible shows is compiled under the awards' rules by the data company Luminate, and this year's list, published on 5 October, does not include Bartlett's show, with entries closing on 30 October. That race will be between Joe Rogan, Call Her Daddy, The Daily and SmartLess.
Three routes are more realistic. The Ambies, the awards of the US Podcast Academy, have a new Episode of the Year category for 2027, open to individual episodes released in 2026, with the late entry window running until 6 November. The Webby Awards have a Best Host category and categories for interview shows, and entries for 2027 are already open, with a first deadline of 30 October. And the British Podcast Awards, Bartlett's home turf, take entries in the spring. So far, the show's highest honour came at the iHeartPodcast Awards 2025, with Best International Podcast.
But awards won't be the measure. The measure will be how many people choose to watch 110 minutes of an interview with the president of a country at war, without anyone making them. After its first day, the count stood at 2.9 million views.
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