Steven Bartlett

He's never spoken about this side of his life. Most people know Druski as one of the funniest people on the internet. His videos have been watched over a billion times, and more than 40 million people follow him. But it all started in Georgia, making funny skits on his phone. Those videos eventually went viral and eventually caught Drake’s attention. Since then, Druski has gone from making people laugh online to building his own production company, hosting major awards and working alongside people like Kevin Hart. But I wanted to know where the funny came from. Because when you go back far enough, you find a story I don’t think most people would expect. From a young age, Druski learnt to read the mood of a room incredibly quickly. When things became difficult at home, comedy became a way of changing the energy around him. As we spoke, I realised he was doing the same thing with me. He would notice tiny changes in my expression, stop mid-answer and ask what I was thinking. After nearly 700 conversations on this podcast, very few people have done that. It made me understand his comedy differently. We spoke about: - The message from Drake (@champagnepapi) that transformed his career. - What was really happening inside his childhood home? - Why his brother’s life went in a very different direction. - Having a gun pointed at his head and deciding to change. - Netflix and Amazon rejecting him but then came crawling back. - How comedy saved him from prison. There’s a moment in the conversation where I tell Druski that our dark sides are often connected to our light sides. I think his story is an extraordinary example of that. The awareness that helped him navigate difficult moments as a child became part of the thing that millions of people now find funny. Behind the person you see online is someone far more thoughtful, ambitious and complicated than I expected. This conversation changed the way I see Druski. Out now on all platforms ❤️👊🏾

He knows what your favourite artists don’t tell you. I’ve been waiting 8 years to sit down with the person who has spent his life quietly helping some of the greatest artists in the world make some of their greatest work. That person is Rick Rubin. Rick co-founded Def Jam at 21 and has gone on to work with people like Jay-Z, Kanye West, Adele, Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The reason I’ve wanted to speak to him for so long has much less to do with the names. Rick is a master of creativity and collaboration, and I wanted to understand how he sees things. How can someone sit in the room with that many extraordinary artists, across completely different generations and genres, and continue to be useful to them? What surprised me most about this conversation was how little Rick talks about success. He talks about paying attention. Listening to yourself. Being willing to make something other people might not understand. Protecting the part of you that was creative before the world started telling you what was good, bad, sensible or successful. We discussed things like: - Why Kanye’s fearlessness makes him such an interesting artist. - What he saw in Jay-Z’s process that he had never seen before. - Why Rick believes creativity is gradually being beaten out of us. - What does he notice that other people miss? - Why some of the best creative decisions make very little logical sense at the time. This was one of those conversations that went much deeper than I expected. Rick has spent decades thinking about creativity, taste, collaboration and what allows people to make their best work, and there’s a real depth to the way he understands all of it. Towards the end I asked Rick a very simple question: “What is your job?” His answer was, "Support people in making their beautiful things.” After waiting 8 years to have this conversation, that answer probably explains Rick better than any list of records, awards or famous names ever could. If you’ve ever wanted to understand how your favourite artists actually think and work, or how to protect more of your own creativity, I think you’ll take a lot from this conversation. Out now on all platforms ❤️👊🏾

I felt SO emotional after this pitch and I have loved getting to know Eugene Patterson ever since...what an honour it is to do this show! ❤️

214 million people saw this AI warning. So we called an emergency debate. The warning came from someone who had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI. Then a current Anthropic employee backed it publicly. It had spread so far beyond the tech world that a friend of mine who cuts hair and has never really cared about AI messaged me asking, “What the hell is going on?” I then realised a lot of people were probably asking the same question. The problem is, when you speak to people who have spent years studying AI, you get completely opposing answers. So I brought four of them around the same table. Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist who coined the term “AI safety” and has spent years studying whether increasingly intelligent systems can remain under human control. Nate Soares leads the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and has spent more than a decade working on AI alignment. He believes we are moving too quickly towards systems we don’t yet know how to reliably control. Ed Zitron thinks much of the AI conversation has become detached from what the technology can actually do today. He believes the industry is overhyping it while distracting us from financial, environmental and social consequences already happening. Andrew McAfee is an MIT researcher and economist who takes a very different view. He thinks we spend so much time talking about what could go wrong that we barely talk about what AI could make better. And that disagreement is what made this conversation so interesting to me. We discussed things like: - How do you control something that eventually becomes smarter than you? - Are the biggest warnings about AI based on evidence or assumptions? - What happens to work and human purpose if AI becomes better at more cognitive tasks? - Are we ignoring problems AI is already creating because we’re obsessed with hypothetical future ones? - Why have Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Geoffrey Hinton all warned us about AI? The question I kept coming back to was simple: What is actually true? Depending on who you listen to, AI is either one of the greatest opportunities humanity has ever created or something we’re racing towards without understanding the consequences. Both claims deserve to be challenged. There were moments in this debate where I genuinely found myself moving between the arguments. That’s the value of putting people who fundamentally disagree in the same room. I didn’t want four people telling me the same thing. I wanted each of them to explain where the other side was wrong. If you’ve watched the last few months of AI news wondering what you’re actually supposed to believe, this conversation is for you. Our emergency AI debate with Ed, Roman, Nate and Andrew is out now ❤️👊🏾

I felt SO emotional after this pitch and I have loved getting to know Eugene Patterson ever since...what an honour it is to do this show! ❤️

💥 ANNOUNCEMENT: Today we (Steven.comSteven.com) and Authentic Brands Group announced a new joint venture built to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in creators! Several years ago I bought a $100 microphone from the Apple Store, plugged it into my laptop and started talking. I recorded the first episode of The Diary Of A CEO that day, alone in my bedroom in Manchester… I could never have imagined how much that decision would change my life. That podcast became a media company, and has now expanded beyond me. We now serve more than 500 creators across our platform and technology. We employ almost 200 people at Steven.com and we're building the definitive company in the creator economy - the one the highest-potential creators choose as their partner as they scale. And today, all these years later, I stood on stage in New York with Jamie Salter, the founder of Authentic Brands Group - a company that operates in more than 150 countries and does about $40 billion a year in retail sales - to announce we were going into business together. Our new joint venture “OBSN” (Obsession) brings together everything we know about building a creator business; audience growth, data, content and commercialising digital media with what Authentic knows about retail, product, licensing, IP and global distribution, so a creator has the optimal partner to help them scale their global business. This deal has taken us the best part of a year to finalise, and it wouldn’t have happened without the relentless work of so many of my colleagues at Steven.com and our partners Authentic Brands Group 👏🏾 Finally….thank god I hit “publish” all those years ago… even though I was worried I might embarrass myself… Maybe it’s time you hit publish too! ❤️👊🏾

💥 ANNOUNCEMENT: Today we (Steven.comSteven.com) and Authentic Brands Group announced a new joint venture built to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in creators! Several years ago I bought a $100 microphone from the Apple Store, plugged it into my laptop and started talking. I recorded the first episode of The Diary Of A CEO that day, alone in my bedroom in Manchester… I could never have imagined how much that decision would change my life. That podcast became a media company, and has now expanded beyond me. We now serve more than 500 creators across our platform and technology. We employ almost 200 people at Steven.com and we're building the definitive company in the creator economy - the one the highest-potential creators choose as their partner as they scale. And today, all these years later, I stood on stage in New York with Jamie Salter, the founder of Authentic Brands Group - a company that operates in more than 150 countries and does about $40 billion a year in retail sales - to announce we were going into business together. Our new joint venture “OBSN” (Obsession) brings together everything we know about building a creator business; audience growth, data, content and commercialising digital media with what Authentic knows about retail, product, licensing, IP and global distribution, so a creator has the optimal partner to help them scale their global business. This deal has taken us the best part of a year to finalise, and it wouldn’t have happened without the relentless work of so many of my colleagues at Steven.com and our partners Authentic Brands Group 👏🏾 Finally….thank god I hit “publish” all those years ago… even though I was worried I might embarrass myself… Maybe it’s time you hit publish too! ❤️👊🏾

“The world is collapsing.” That was Professor Jiang Xueqin’s response when I asked him what was front of mind for him right now. Professor Jiang predicted the last global shifts before many people saw them coming. Now he’s back making new predictions about what happens next. After our first conversation reached 16 million views, I wanted to speak with Jiang again to really understand why he believes the world is entering such an uncertain period and what he thinks we should be paying attention to next. Professor Jiang is a Yale-educated geopolitics expert who studies history, power and human behaviour to understand how the events of today could shape the future In this conversation, we discussed things like: - Why he believes the current global order is changing. - How the US dollar became the foundation of the modern economy. - Why wars, technology and economics are more connected than most people realise. - His predictions for America, China, AI and the future of global power. - How history can help us understand where the world may be heading.
 Jiang doesn’t just look at individual events - he looks at the bigger systems behind them and asks what happens when those systems start to change. The longer I spoke to Jiang, the more I realised that the world doesn’t change by accident. It changes because of decisions, incentives and human behaviour. Understanding those forces might be the key to understanding what happens next... Out now on all platforms ❤️👊🏾

Only 3 in 10 Americans socialise on a daily basis. So how good are we ACTUALLY at talking to each other anymore? Vanessa Van Edwards believes we’re living through a “connection crisis”, where conversations are becoming harder, more awkward and less satisfying, while more of our interactions are moving away from real face-to-face conversation. Vanessa is a behavioural researcher, international bestselling author and instructor at Harvard University whose work studies how people communicate, connect and understand each other. And she said something to me early in this conversation that really stayed with me: people who invest in conversation skills now are creating “career insurance”. She has spent years studying why some conversations seem effortless, why others die within minutes and what the best conversationalists are doing differently. We discussed things like: - Why “how are you?” and “what do you do?” can lead to dead-end conversations. - The 3 levels of conversation and how to move from small talk into real connection. - How awkward silence is one of our biggest conversational fears. - The questions that reveal someone’s values, motivations and personality. - 5 self-narratives that can influence how someone behaves at work and in relationships. - Why becoming better at conversation could become increasingly valuable as AI changes how we communicate. I’ve now had hundreds of conversations for this show and something Vanessa made me think about is that the best conversationalists are constantly paying attention to the person in front of them. They aren’t blindly working through the things they want to say. They’re watching, listening and adjusting. That sounds obvious until you start noticing how rarely people actually do it… Vanessa has a way of breaking human connection down into things you can actually practise, which is probably why every time we speak I leave noticing things about my own behaviour that I hadn’t noticed before. If you want to become better at talking to people, building relationships and having conversations people actually remember, I really recommend watching this one. Out now on all platforms ❤️👊🏾