“The Diary of a CEO,” the interview podcast hosted by British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, now has more YouTube subscribers than any other show on YouTube’s U.S. Top 100 podcast chart, with 21.3 million to “The Joe Rogan Experience’s” 21.2 million, according to a November 2 announcement from FlightStory, the Steven.com division that produces the show.

FlightStory said it compared YouTube’s public subscriber counts for every show on the chart at 13:40 GMT on November 1. YouTube rounds those counts to three significant figures, so the gap between the two channels is about 100,000 on the displayed numbers. Bartlett credited translation for much of the reach. “Strategically, translating every episode of the show into more than 20+ languages has been an incredible unlock and allows us to reach the rest of the world,” Bartlett said in the release.

The subscriber comparison is FlightStory’s own analysis. YouTube’s weekly podcast chart, which launched in May 2025, ranks shows by watch time and counts only playlists that creators designate as podcasts, excluding playlists made up only of clips or Shorts, according to YouTube’s announcement of the chart.

Non-English Audio Tracks Drove 23% of Views

FlightStory said 260.8 million of 1.12 billion YouTube views from January 1 to October 31 (23.3%) came on audio tracks in languages other than English, led by Spanish, Russian, German, Portuguese and French, citing YouTube Studio’s audio-track breakdown. The release gives a separate channel total of 1.03 billion views, including Shorts, for January 1 to October 30, up from 399 million for the first ten months of 2025. FlightStory did not explain the 87 million view gap between the two totals.

The channel published 87 full-length video episodes in that period, according to FlightStory. Its subscriber count rose from about 14.2 million on December 29, 2025, based on an Internet Archive capture, to 21.3 million, an increase of roughly 50%. When Bartlett launched the $400 million OBSN creator venture with Authentic Brands Group in September, Steven.com put the show at over 19 million subscribers.

The October 22 episode with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shows how the translation operation works. FlightStory said the conversation was recorded in Ukrainian with two human interpreters, then made available in more than 20 languages using AI voice technology. It passed 7 million views in 10 days, according to the company. Multilingual audio is spreading across YouTube: NI has covered startups such as DittoDub, which runs AI dubbing for Erling Haaland’s multilingual channel.

Other Rankings Measure Different Things

FlightStory pointed to outside rankings as supporting evidence. Podscribe ranked the show first by estimated average downloads and views per episode in March 2026 (about 3.3 million) and July 2026 (about 4.4 million), a measure that covers an episode’s first 60 days across audio and YouTube. In July, Crime Junkie led Podscribe’s audio reach ranking and MeidasTouch led total monthly downloads and views. On Spotify, the show placed second globally in Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped, where Rogan’s show held the top spot.

Rogan remains the category’s top earner. Forbes ranked Rogan the highest-paid podcaster of 2026 at an estimated $82 million, citing more than 80 million monthly downloads and views across roughly 15 episodes.

The growth comes as the show says it is tightening its editorial process. Executive producer Hans Sahni told Business Insider in a report published October 30 that the team had raised its accuracy standards after a 2024 BBC investigation found the show had shared harmful health misinformation. Sahni said an independent Ph.D. researcher had fact-checked 71 episodes, about 13% of the 540 long-form interviews in the show’s YouTube catalog, and that the team was exploring fact-checks of older episodes.

FlightStory has not said how corrections and on-screen notes carry over to the dubbed audio tracks, or how much of the show’s subscriber growth came from non-English viewers.