There are some celebrities whose rise to fame is so quick, so all-engulfing that even the most ardent atheists may ask if a deal with the devil has been made. Steven “Diary of a CEO” Bartlett is one such person.
In a few short years, Bartlett has gone from an obscure business podcaster, to a major player in the upper echelons of British culture. After an apprenticeship running a number of digital businesses, Bartlett has gone full-time as a kind of junior Branson: accompanying Prince William on royal duties, scoring a brace in Soccer Aid, becoming a regular on Dragon’s Den, writing two books (including the astonishingly titled Happy Sexy Millionaire) and interviewing everyone from renowned trauma specialist Gabor Maté to Simon Cowell on his podcast.
Bartlett’s bland, pseudo-motivational style has won him millions of followers and views, and he’s undoubtedly cemented himself in the global content matrix. He is, at a push, more famous than a lot of his guests. But recently, his eye for a buck has pushed him a little too close to the wind. Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) decreed that his online “reviews” meal replacement brand Huel and health app Zoe could not be seen as impartial, due to his close links with both companies (Bartlett is an investor in Zoe and a director at Huel). As such, the adverts have been taken off social media in their current form.
So far, Bartlett has not provided a comment. Like a lot of business people, he appears to be a firm believer in the “keep your mouth shut and they’ll forget about it” school of public relations, and since the ASA judgement was released, he has released another glut of podcasts, including one with the ex-Cosa Nostra caporegime Michael Franzese and the red-pilled professor Bret Weinstein. He appears to be burying bad news in a mudslide of content and hoping that the internet’s collective attention disorder quickly forgets about it.
Bartlett has always been a man with a shark-like sense of forward momentum, and a certain lack of shame that can be extremely helpful in today’s world. (The revelation that he was once a godawful battle rapper by the name of “Lyricist” further cements the theory that he was born without a cringe detection system.) Talk about Bartlett and the word “grifter” follows him around like a long, existential shadow in the midday sun. Some have disputed his successes in the business world, pointing out that while some of his companies (such as the advertising agency Social Chain) have sold for a pretty penny, Bartlett has usually left them by the time they hit the market.
The path of his Diary of a CEO podcast is also a fascinating exercise in bluff. Ever since the first episode in 2017 (which was quite literally “the diary of a CEO”, a rambling monologue from Bartlett full of platitudinal Tony Robbins-isms) he has become a major player in the “space”. And while there is no doubt he can secure big names, there appears to be an element of homework-copying going on. How does this 31-year-old businessman from Plymouth get the ex-CIA agents, Harvard professors and notable neurologists to appear on his show, you ask? Well, because they’re on every other podcast.
Cross-reference Diary of a CEO against its biggest competitors (Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Danny Jones) and they share many of the same guests (the omnipresent Andrew Bustamante, Annie Jacobsen and the aforementioned Bret Weinstein). And Bartlett usually gets them last. His “exclusives”, such as his landing the footballer Ivan Toney – banned by the FA for eight months for gambling infractions – are usually just the start of a wider promotional campaign on behalf of the interviewee. And as much as he likes to present himself as some kind of “thought leader” he has reverted to something closer to a TV presenter, working the press junket circuit, presenting something like The One Show with promotions for Silicon Valley snake oil jammed into the middle of it.
Politically, Bartlett appears to veer towards the libertarian/online right, bringing the likes of Jordan Peterson on his show. But he’s never really presented much of his own politics, bar a few pleas to “support entrepreneurs” in the UK. While he loves to present himself as being controversial, as a disseminator of “alternative” voices and ideas, they have mostly already been tried and tested by everyone else in his genre. Instead, he plays it very safe. And even when he does try and push the boat out, such as the time he interviewed the film director Noel Clarke, he removed the podcast when the heat started to build after Clarke was accused of sexual misconduct multiple times (allegations Clarke denies). As with the Huel debacle, Bartlett never released a statement as to why he decided to interview Clarke. He just moved on while Clarke talks about Bartlett on cheaper, nastier podcasts such as Anything Goes with James English.
Like the mega-capitalists he admires, Bartlett is avoidant, opaque and prone to a bit of reputational overplaying. But unlike Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos, he is also now a stalwart of light entertainment – and together these two outlooks collide into a profile that sits rather uneasily, considering the establishment circles he moves in. On its own, Diary of a CEO is an ambiently listenable bit of content fluff, but Bartlett’s ambitions are clearly higher. Perhaps he will fade into obscurity and scandal, like so many other self-appointed “business geniuses”. But make no mistake, Bartlett is a man of the zeitgeist, one who’s vision and lexicon seems perfectly tailored for the age of LinkedIn nonsense and Instagram-hustling. He is the voice of a generation, but not necessarily the voice we’ll choose to remember in years to come.
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