Sentient vegetables are striding through an AI-generated – uncanny – valley, led by a young Steven Bartlett. They’re dishing out recycled podcast truisms about mindset and motivation. At some point, they burst into song.

This is not some heatwave-induced fever dream, or the sort of psychedelic experience that would be a better anti-drug deterrent than any government campaign. This is, apparently, an early concept for Bartlett’s new TV show for kids, set to be released later this summer on YouTube and Spotify.

Steven’s World is the entrepreneur’s latest venture, according to a new report in The Observer. The show will reportedly repackage lessons from interviews on Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast using an AI model fed by previous episodes, aiming to make those ideas more digestible for kids. Whether their parents can stomach it, though, might depend on their tolerance for one of the most divisive – and increasingly ubiquitous – figures in British pop culture.

If the Instagram comments are anything to go by, Bartlett’s latest strides into AI’s brave new world – he previously released a show called 100 CEOs, in which his AI clone narrates the life stories of various founders – are going down about as well as a glass of coagulated Huel. “Please never put all those words together ever again,” one user begged. “Can he just stop?” another asked.

Those appraisals, though, seem relatively tame compared to some of the critiques levelled at Bartlett and his podcast in recent months. “Right-wing manosphere cosplaying as liberals”, part of the “red pill pipeline” and “manosphere ideology with a ring light and a warm hug” are just a few of the scathing assessments that have been directed at Diary of a CEO, one of the most popular podcasts in the UK that has been streamed more than a billion times.

These certainly sit uneasily with Bartlett’s softly spoken, therapy speak-fluent and emotionally literate podcasting persona. He’s known as the guy who nods sympathetically as his tearful guests open up about their vulnerabilities; hardly a brash Joe Rogan sort. But for some, it is precisely this style that’s the issue. Could Diary of a CEO in fact “serve as a trojan horse for the manosphere”, as the YouTuber Therese Lee recently put it, lulling listeners and viewers into accepting potentially problematic ideas?

These widely divergent responses that Bartlett and his show have provoked certainly make him one of the most intriguing characters in our media landscape – whether you love him or loathe him. So how did Bartlett go from an earnest young businessman dishing out advice about daily habits to the more polarising, almost guru-like podcast bro that sits behind the microphone today?

If you are somehow unfamiliar with Bartlett’s rise and rise, here’s a reminder. The 33-year-old, who grew up as “one of the only Black people in an all-white, middle-class area of Plymouth”, as he would later put it to The Guardian, dropped out of a business degree at Manchester Metropolitan University after attending just one lecture, deciding it wasn’t his thing.

He went on to co-found the social media marketing agency Social Chain. By the time he was 26, Forbes magazine valued his net worth at £71m; two years later, he became the youngest Dragon to join the BBC show Dragons’ Den as an investor. His latest venture, the creator media company steven.com, was valued at £320m in late 2025. By just about every possible metric, he is wildly successful.

In 2017, he launched the Diary of a CEO podcast from his bedroom as a hobby. That side hustle has since snowballed into a multimillion-pound success story. At first, Bartlett focused on topics well inside his entrepreneurial wheelhouse: building a business, productivity, time management, and self-belief.

Production values got higher, and Bartlett’s guests became more famous – and, in some cases, more provocative. The episode titles became shoutier. And the interviews started to venture into the world of health and wellness. Bartlett and his show were hit by the odd controversy, from the storm in the iced matcha latte cup variety – like when influencer Molly-Mae Hague stirred outrage by claiming that “we all have the same 24 hours in a day” – to the more serious.

In August 2024, Facebook adverts in which Bartlett endorsed meal replacement drink Huel and wellness programme Zoe were banned. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received complaints that Bartlett’s commercial interest in the companies wasn’t clear enough (at the time, he was a director at the former and an investor in the latter, though he stepped down from Huel’s board in 2025). The watchdog ruled that the ads were misleading.

But this didn’t seem to dent the show’s popularity, or indeed Bartlett’s. Its profile seemed to grow on the other side of the Atlantic, too, with US politicians Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom among the interviewees.

But a conversation with former Love Island contestant Chris Williamson, the host of the podcast Modern Wisdom, seemed to mark a sea change when it was released towards the end of last year. It should have just been a classic case of blokes with microphones trading productivity advice, designed to be clipped into short-form videos with vaguely alarmist titles.

But instead, the pair’s conversation about declining birth rate, framed in a way that appeared to shame and blame women, sparked a major backlash. At one point, Williamson started to zero in on so-called “anti-family” sentiment among modern women – and alarm bells started going off for some listeners.

To build his case, Williamson brought up a TikTok influencer known as The Girl With The List, real name Abigail Porter, who has collated 350 reasons not to have children on her social media accounts, mixing serious and more tongue-in-cheek arguments in favour of a child-free life. “By the sound of things, it’s a really good idea that she’s not a mother,” Williamson opined.

One YouTube viewer described the conversation as “deeply misogynistic and patriarchal”; although they could “respect the good this podcast brought over time”, this erstwhile fan now felt that “allowing this type of narrative makes it a hard ‘no’ for me and [it] should be for everyone who respects women”.

Bartlett didn’t echo Williamson’s opinions. But he didn’t exactly challenge his guest, either. As an interviewer, many assumed he had a duty to the listener to do so. With a near-total lack of self-awareness, the men, both in their mid-thirties, went on to talk about why neither of them has yet had children. They’d been focusing on their work, growing as people, living their lives, they said; that women might feel the same didn’t seem to cross their minds. This conversation only makes Bartlett’s latest pivot into children’s entertainment feel all the more ironic.

The discussion seemed to catalyse a Diary of a CEO reappraisal. Why has Bartlett tended to feature comparatively few female guests, some listeners asked? And why the slow pivot from straightforward business and productivity advice to more nebulous, ideological topics?

Earlier this year, a spokesperson for Diary of a CEO told The Independent that the show is “a long-form, conversational podcast designed to explore the perspectives and experiences of its guests in their own words. Inviting a guest is an act of inquiry, not endorsement. Steven Bartlett does not adopt the opinions of his guests, nor is the format intended to pass judgement on personal viewpoints. To suggest that a host is responsible for every view expressed by a guest is a fundamental misunderstanding of the long-form interview format”.

And in response to social media claims that the show may platform right-wing or “manosphere”-adjacent ideas, the spokesperson said that the podcast “features guests from across the entire political and cultural spectrum. In recent months alone, guests have included Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and a yet-to-be-published conversation with Zohran Mamdani. The podcast’s archive is a matter of public record and disproves this claim instantly”.

Another segment from one of Bartlett’s past episodes came under fresh scrutiny too – a 2025 sitdown with Alok Kanojia, aka “Dr K”, a psychiatrist whose work focuses on video game addiction. In the interview, Kanojia describes the phenomenon of young men not being able to find partners to have children with as a “mass extinction event”.

Bartlett later chimes in with a discussion point that could have been plucked from The Handmaid’s Tale, which he puts to Kanojia a few times, in a few different ways. “Does society have a responsibility to intervene in some way, to course correct that?” he asks. “Should we put systems in place to make sure those men meet partners?”

It wasn’t clear what “systems” he was alluding to, but the mere mention felt pretty dystopian, even for women listeners who are probably used to being made scapegoats for male loneliness. Inevitably, it provoked yet more backlash. In a viral TikTok posted by Shabaz Ali at the start of this year, the content creator quipped that the podcast should be renamed “Therapy for Men, sponsored by Women Ruin Society”.

When your show draws millions of listeners every day, don’t you owe it to them to think twice about the voices and sentiments you might be platforming?

Ali’s video made headlines when celebrities popped up in his comment section. “He’s so disappointing in many ways,” former Strictly Come Dancing star Oti Mabuse wrote. “I used to love it so much.” Radio 1 breakfast show host Greg James didn’t mince his words, either. “It’s been hurtling towards this dangerous s***e for ages,” he commented. “What’s everyone’s favourite episode? Mine is the one where an ‘expert’ claimed autism could be reversed through diet. Oh, and the one that said Covid was an engineered weapon. Neither claim was challenged. Great stuff.”

James was alluding to another Diary of a CEO scandal. In 2024, an investigation by the BBC World Service’s Global Disinformation Unit accused Bartlett’s show of “amplifying harmful health misinformation”. Researchers analysed 23 health-related episodes of the podcast, finding 15 of them to contain an average of 14 harmful claims that “went against extensive scientific evidence”.

Among these episodes was an interview with Aseem Malhotra, a doctor who has since become the medical adviser to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement, in which Bartlett’s guest described the Covid vaccine as “a net negative for society”. Another discussion with Dr Thomas Seyfried, who advocates for cancer patients adopting ketogenic diets, saw Seyfried describe modern cancer treatments as akin to “medieval cures”.

These views, the BBC report argued, “receive little challenge”. At the time, Flight Studio, Bartlett’s podcast production company, said that Diary of a CEO “offers guests freedom of expression and believes that progress, growth and learning comes from hearing a range of voices, not just those Steven and the DOAC team necessarily agree with”.

But with millions of listeners every day, there comes a responsibility over what voices and sentiments you might be platforming. The comedian and Guilty Feminist podcaster Deborah Frances-White, who appeared on a Diary of a CEO round table discussion about feminism last summer, put it bluntly. “Well-known podcasters”, she siad, “have to consider how they’re changing the world. It’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘how’.” Yet this medium is not currently regulated in the same way as more traditional media platforms; Ofcom, for instance, only regulates podcasts produced by the BBC.

Will controversy take the shine off the Diary of a CEO juggernaut, or does it simply win Bartlett new fans? As Bartlett will be well aware, in our attention economy, being talked about means more clicks, more streams, more listeners. Outrage can prove very lucrative indeed. And his new venture seems to prove that it really is Steven’s World – we’re just living in it.