Steven Bartlett plays the long game

When I interviewed Steven Bartlett for GQ in 2018, then the 25-year-old CEO of social media marketing agency Social Chain, he told me that the £13,000 he spent on a slide and ball pit for the company’s Manchester office was a bad business decision, “but it made more money than anything in Social Chain. All the press talked about it and customers said flocked.”

It doesn’t matter to Bartlett that the press hasn’t written about it particularly favorably, describing it as a gimmick and reflecting Social Chain’s “kindergarten vibe from a California startup.” This playful, artificial aesthetic, wrote the Guardian’s Simon Parkin when he visited the office, conveniently obscured the fact that Social Chain – which hijacked youth culture trends to make marketing campaigns go viral – was turning “human emotion into a salable commodity”.

More importantly, for Bartlett, the slide was a strategic element that, as he later said, showed the company was young, innovative and disruptive. He arguably put his PR hat back on when he hired Social Chain’s “happiness manager”, whom everyone wanted to interview, and, more recently, the diary of a CEO’s “failure manager”, tailored to the performativity of LinkedIn. Bartlett, who carefully presented himself as a college dropout turned self-made millionaire, always understood that you need an aesthetic and an origin story — and that any press is good press when you’re trying to go viral.

It’s a motto, I think he always defends it. Certainly, as Bartlett and his media empire have been lambasted in the press for everything from spreading fake news to manosphere ideology, the spectacle has only grown in size. In December 2025, he overtook Joe Rogan to become Spotify’s most listened to podcast in the UK, and second only to Rogan globally. Over the past six months, CEO Diary’s YouTube subscribers have grown from 13 million to more than 17 million.

This week I wrote an article about Bartlett for the i Paper’s Who Broke Britain reviewin which I argued that Diary of a CEO allows problematic and powerful public figures to launder their reputations and leverage good PR – most recently, Ivanka Trump. It seems to me that Bartlett, who has already partially moved to Los Angeles to increase his audience in the United States, has his father as his ultimate goal, which would allow him to “completely break America”, gain extraordinary influence and even, at least temporarily, disrupt Rogan.

Given the image rehabilitation he brought to Ivanka, as I wrote further in my column, I imagine a meeting with the president would also be nice, which is interesting considering the aggressive questions Bartlett asked Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson on the show in 2022 and 2024, back when Diary of a CEO looked like a very different beast. In the years since, the show has ironed out any of Bartlett’s personal politics to attract as wide and global an audience as possible, as well as to book the biggest and most powerful guests – all of whom serve not only the show’s growth, but also Bartlett’s obvious thirst for influence.

Jimmy Fallon said that each guest on A CEO’s Diary receives a hardback “photo book” after their episode is taped, filled with photos of pivotal moments, along with their key quotes and timestamps, which Bartlett says is part of his “invisible PR” strategy that focuses on “sweating the small stuff” for future profits. Steven Bartlett has always played the long game – and I imagine Trump would prefer his photo book.

Obsession, at the cinema
I often watch horror films as a perverse form of stress relief – there’s something incredibly cathartic about feeling controlled false fear in a safe space – but I’ve been booking to see this for plot purposes. About a love spell gone wrong and shot on a micro-budget of less than $1 million from director Curry Barker, 26, who cut his teeth making films for YouTube, it became an unexpected box office hit. Turns out it’s every bit as good as the hype: smart, funny, unsettling, and even provides a subtle satire of toxic male entitlement.

Cultural Debriefing: Why is Everyone Obsessed with Taste? Grazia
I was recently having a debate with an AI evangelist about whether AI could ever have “taste” – he argued that it was possible, since much of taste is performative and therefore learned. But as Otegha Uwagba writes in his piece for Graziathe recent rise of cultural “tastemakers” online and in celebrity culture may be a response to this threat. That said: “I can’t help but notice that everything has also started to look a bit…same? We’re all screenshotting, Instagramming, and saving the same things to our Pinterest boards, because we’re all getting our recommendations from the same influencers and celebrities.” I guess the AI ​​wouldn’t find it so difficult, then.

What happened to your face? New Yorkers
A fascinating look on our understanding of the human face across time, from society’s first mirror to the face as a data point and its emoji avatars, by the Telegraph’s literary editor Cal Revely-Calder. And also how the face has become homogenized: “Social networks need the face because they burn attention as fuel, and the face is where I go when I’m looking for you. But I can’t turn to these platforms. I find it all so unsatisfying: the reshaped faces, the curated lives, the naked monopolization of my gaze. Something uncertain, something human, has been drained like the blood of this world.” I wonder how you will feel reading this a decade from now, when the culture of “tweaking” has distorted the human face beyond recognition.

What if we didn’t really worry about Ariana Grande and Liz Plank
A powerful essay that, at least for me, accurately locates the trigger for much of the tense and controversial discourse around Ariana Grande’s weight loss: fear. Ozempic and today’s culture of aspirational thinness have caused many women, myself included, to panic that we might find ourselves in the psychological prison of an eating disorder. As Liz writes: “When people dismiss reactions to the return of extreme thinness as exaggerated, they often fail to understand that for many women, these images aren’t really about Ariana Grande. They look at her, but they remember themselves. They remember the version of themselves who spent hundreds, even thousands, of hours trying to become smaller.” I also talked about it in last week’s podcast episode with special guest Jackie Adedeji.

I thought dad might die. We had to talk, The Times
A magnificent moving part by Patrick Smith on the questions we so often put off asking our loved ones while they are still with us, and regret forever once they are gone. Try reading it on the tube without crying – then book an interview with your parents.

The Moment, streaming
I had heard such lukewarm things about Charli XCX’s Brat Summer mockumentary that I was waiting for it to stream to watch it. I can now report that it would not be worth the price of a cinema ticket, but is well worth the five euros I spent on AppleTV. With a surprisingly good cameo from Kylie Jenner and an excellent Jamie Demetriou as Charli’s useless manager, it’s a fun, unchallenging but quite revealing look at the fickle nature of fame, internet culture and the pressure to keep a viral moment going. As Charli wrote in her first Sub-stack post on Brat’s lifespan: “By the end of the process, I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to squeeze every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I’d already been sitting with for years before.” »