Steven Bartlett's Recent LinkedIn Posts

I proposed to Melanie in Morocco. She said yes. Best moment of my life. Within hours, I was on a plane for four weeks across five continents. Cape Town. Europe. Middle East. New York. Miami. LA. Vegas. In the last week alone, I've been in five US cities, had meetings that could reshape my company's next decade, been in rooms I'd dreamed about. And somewhere between timezone three and meeting four, that familiar feeling crept in: guilt. Layered, compounding guilt about not calling Melanie enough, missing the gym for the 5th day running, being distracted in a podcast recording because my head was split between company drama and the conversation in front of me. How can you be hitting professional highs while feeling like you're failing everyone personally? I have ADHD with hyperfocus - when I lock into something, everything else stops existing. Melanie, the gym, my mum, eating. All on mute until someone unmutes it by being upset. So I researched guilt. Turns out it evolved as a tribal correction mechanism. You took too much food? Guilt nudged you to give some back. But crucially, your roles were few - parent, hunter, tribesman - and everyone lived in the same village. Walk across camp, fix the problem, guilt resolved. Now I have six roles across different cities and timezones. The guilt system designed for managing a village is trying to manage a life spread across thousands of miles. It fires constantly with no way to correct it. I call this the GUILT GAP - the distance between what people actually need from you versus what you think they need. I was torturing myself over not giving Melanie two hours of quality time nightly while travelling six countries. After an honest conversation, she said: "I just love knowing you're thinking about me even when you're not here." Turns out she wanted three minutes and a stupid dog photo. Not hours of presence. Professor John Gottman's research shows lasting relationships aren't about time spent together - they're about consistently responding to tiny "bids for connection." A photo. A voice note. Responding to the Instagram reel she forwards. I started calculating the "Enough Number" for each role in my life. What's the minimum attention each person / thing actually needs to feel valued? Melanie: 5-minute daily call plus scattered proof-of-thought moments Gym: 30 minutes, 4 days a week (not 7) Mum: One proper call per week Every single Enough Number was dramatically lower than what I'd been holding myself to. When the standard is 100% for everything (600% total), you do what humans do with impossible tasks - avoid them and fall well below. When you know the actual Enough Number, you hit it consistently. This week I called Melanie every single day. Seven days of guilt used to get me one distracted half-conversation per week. Less guilt. More presence. Actually better at everything! Can you relate?

🚨 WE ARE HIRING!!! AI job losses are all over the news, meanwhile we can’t hire fast enough (if you have these 3 skills)👇🏾 I don’t care if you have a university degree or how old or young you are. The most important thing is attitude… we ONLY want people you are deeply passionate about their thing, who are infectiously ambitious and who love to work hard! There are 3 key types of people I’m really focused on hiring at the moment: ✅ 1) Anyone who has deep expertise on a particular subject - you know it better than your peers! ✅ 2) Anyone who is building things with AI / AI agents - you’ve been using Claude Code, Clawbot and others to build things with AI! ✅ 3) Anyone who has incredible people skills - and wants to bring people together in the real world! Last time we did a LinkedIn post like this (last month) I emailed 920 of you that replied and we hired a lot of people from that post across Steven.com (www.steven.com). If this sounds like you - it’s really easy to get in touch with me, just answer these questions and if we’re aligned - i’ll email you within a few hours! Here are the questions: https://lnkd.in/eJWZjUVP Also... if you know someone really brilliant who might be looking for a new role - please do forward them this post OR tag them below - we might both thank you for it later 👊🏾

"WHAT'S YOUR HACK TO OVERCOME FEAR????... There is no hack. You just get really fricking scared over and over for so long and eventually it's not that scary anymore." - Alex Honnold on The Diary Of A CEO

So many of us can’t stop scrolling and most of us don’t understand why… To help understand why, I’m joined by two experts who break down exactly what short-form content is doing to our brains. Aditi Nerurkar, MD, MPH is a Harvard brain expert and stress specialist. She’s been on this show before, and her first episode helped over 3.5M of you! Jonathan Haidt is one of the world’s most respected social psychologists. He specialises in how tech and social media are affecting young minds, and his research has shaped policy in countries like France and Australia. We’ve built a world that constantly hijacks our attention, and we’re only just starting to see the cost. It’s about our minds and our memory and how far we’ve drifted from the conditions that keep us mentally well. Dr Aditi believes the neurological cost of constant stimulation and why rest is now a skill, whilst Jonathan lays out the evidence linking short-form content with rising anxiety and attention issues - especially in teenagers. So I wanted to know: - Why can’t we stop scrolling? - Is short-form content changing how we think? - What’s really behind the rise in teen mental health issues? - Can our brains ever go back to how they worked before? - What are the most urgent changes we need to make? Right now, I know I’m struggling with my relationship to my phone. After this conversation, I walked away with tools I can actually use, and it pushed me to confront my own habits. I’ve noticed how much harder it’s become to stay present. It’s affecting how I focus, and it’s affecting the way I listen to the people I care about. It’s made me think seriously about the kind of partner I want to be, and the kind of parent I will be one day. If I don’t make changes, I won’t be present. And that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

The most consequential thing in life isn't dying... it’s probably staying alive without living

I saw this visualisation last week and it genuinely changed how I think about where we are with AI... Each dot represents 3.2 million people. 2,500 dots for 8.1 billion humans. The colour shows the most advanced AI interaction that person has ever had. Look at all that grey. That's 6.8 billion people who have never used AI. Ever. In any form. The green strip at the bottom? 1.3 billion free chatbot users. The tiny yellow sliver? The 15-25 million who actually pay for it. And that single red dot you can barely see? That's the 2-5 million people using AI for coding and development. I spend too much time on Twitter convincing myself the whole world has lapped me with their AI knowledge....a new model drops every day. Someone automated their entire company overnight. A 19 year old shipped a startup from their bedroom... Then I show some simple AI tool to a mate from my small hometown and they react like I've just shown them fire for the first time. They had no idea any of this existed. And that's most people. Most people on earth have absolutely no idea what AI can do right now. They haven't tried it. They haven't seen it. They don't know that you can talk to a computer and have it reason, write, build, and think alongside you. The average person's understanding of AI is still "that thing that makes weird pictures" or "the robot that writes essays for students." They have no concept of agents, automations, coding assistants, or anything close to what's actually happening. 82% of American businesses still aren't using AI for anything. Only 4% have mature AI capabilities. 78% of executives say it's moving too fast for their teams to keep up. So when people ask me "how do I get into AI" or "how do I catch up" - the answer is almost laughably simple. Pay for one AI tool. Use it every day for a month. Read one book about it. Watch one long explainer video. That's enough to put you in the top 1% of AI knowledge on planet earth. You don't need a computer science degree. You don't need to understand transformer architecture. You just need to lean in and get your teams to lean in! We are so so so early!

For the 100th time, a CEO on stage in Miami this week asked me the question CEO's keep asking me..... "Steven, how do I tell my team they need to come back to the office and that we are ending remote work? Sarah already said she'll quit if we mandate it. Marcus threatened to go to a competitor. Emma's got her lawyer husband telling her this violates her contract. I can see exactly how this explodes." So I asked her "what happens if you don't bring them back?" "I honestly don't know. Maybe we keep growing, maybe our culture slowly dies, maybe innovation suffers, maybe nothing changes..." This is what I call: "OBVIOUS PAIN PARALYSIS." And it seems to kill more great companies than almost anything else. You can see Sarah's resignation letter clear as day. You can picture Marcus storming out. You can calculate exactly how much it'll cost to replace them. These feel like certainties because you can literally visualise them happening. But the slow death of your company culture? The innovation that never happens because no one's bouncing ideas off each other? Your best people gradually checking out because there's no energy anymore? That's all abstract future stuff your brain treats like "eh, maybe, maybe not." Truly great leaders know something that not-so-great leaders don't; just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not more likely to hurt you... The stuff that's hardest to measure / see is so often the thing that kills you I guess this is why some people don't leave toxic relationships....they can script the breakup conversation word for word - the tears, the logistics nightmare, the social awkwardness, they can't visualise as clearly how staying slowly destroys them over next decade. In the last 15 years of my career in business, it's become abundantly clear that most of the decisions we avoid aren't actually about choosing between good and bad outcomes.... they're about choosing between pain now or pain for the foreseeable future. The "Pain now" option - although the pain is more obvious and clear - usually has an end date - the alternative doesn't. Therefore, is seems wise to pick the pain that stops. "A person who procrastinates in their choosing will inevitably have their choice made for them by circumstance."

woahhhhhh....The Diary Of A CEO just hit 15 million strong on YouTube 😵‍💫 one word explains how this happened... This month the team broke every previous viewership record we had. They hit 4 million subscribers on Spotify, 15 million subscribers on YouTube, almost 22 million subscribers overall across all platforms, and if you ask me, so much of it comes down to one simple thing - they really, really CARE. Extreme care is an easy thing to aspire to but an impossibly hard thing to do, 24/7 for years and years and years. The levels of care across the now almost 120+ people that work in our team is like nothing I've ever seen before. They care about the scent in the room when a guest walks in. The CO2 levels. The temperature. Every single pixel of the trailer. The social strategy. They'll call a guest for several hours to coach them before they come on the show. They care about things most people would call petty, pointless and pathetic. And when you zoom out, that care compounds. It compounds into moments that make someone stop scrolling at 1am. It compounds into an episode that changes how someone sees their business, marriage, health, life and more... I started this show in my bedroom several years ago with a $100 microphone, Garageband and no clue what I was doing... (still today, If you call me an "interviewer" i get a deeper imposter shudder deep in my core...) had I not been able to surround myself with a group of people that CARE this much, I'd probably still be in my bedroom with Garageband and that $100 mic 😅 The fact that I now get to work alongside people who care this much - about every detail, about every viewer, about every single second of what we make - is the greatest privilege of my professional life and it's so so f*cking rare Thank you to every single one of you on the team. And thank you to every single person who watches, listens, and shares - we don't take a moment of it for granted ❤️ some amazing / crazy conversations on the way (including the CEO of Uber today).. buckle up!!!

Your limiting beliefs about what’s possible for you are not facts... their just stories you’ve told yourself so many times you forgot you made them up 😅

Bible sales in the United States just hit a 21 year high... So why are more people turning back to religion? To help answer that question, today I’m joined by Christian apologist Wesley Huff. Wesley is a historian who studies the historical reliability of the Bible and the evidence surrounding the life of Jesus. Much of his work focuses on ancient manuscripts and the historical case for Christianity. He spends his time debating sceptics and asking a simple question - what does the historical record actually say? I wanted to speak to Wesley because these are questions I’ve personally wrestled with for years. I grew up in a Christian household. When I was about eighteen, I was pulled into the new atheist movement after reading people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Since then, I’ve found myself in a different place. Curious and still asking a lot of questions. I wanted to know: - Is the Bible historically reliable? - What evidence do historians actually use when evaluating ancient texts? - Did Jesus exist as a real historical figure? - What is the historical case for the resurrection? - And can science and religious belief exist side by side? During the conversation, I told him that I have a huge amount of respect for both him and his faith. When someone’s beliefs produce the kind of character and life he demonstrates, that becomes a powerful form of evidence in itself. The goal here isn’t to land on a final answer but to explore the questions properly. I’ve learned that the most important thing in conversations like this is staying open-minded. None of us have all the answers, but asking the questions honestly is where real discovery begins.

A toolkit for not f*cking up your relationship when you're absolutely obsessed with your work... I was diagnosed with ADHD. One of the things that comes with the specific type that the doctor said i have is "hyperfocus" - which sounds like a superpower but is actually just your brain picking one thing and deleting everything else from existence. When I'm locked into work, my fiancée Melanie, the gym, my mum, food - all of it just vanishes. I don't even notice until someone is upset or I haven't eaten in 18 hours. I proposed to Melanie recently (she said yes, thank god) and then I immediately disappeared onto planes for a month. So I've spent the last few weeks trying to figure out how to be obsessed with my work without destroying everything else in my life. Here's what I've got so far. All of it backed by actual research, most of it embarrassingly simple...

what a ride! had a beautiful, emotional & reflective call with Huel’s founder Julian Hearn this morning as the news broke! This company changed my life in so many ways… as a customer, an investor, a board member and as a partner. And it serves as a great reminder that successful category defining companies can come out the UK AND can come outside of London! This company beat all the odds - a great British success story! ❤️👊🏾 So happy for all the team!

Imagine that you could tell when someone is manipulating you? To help teach you how to do that, I’m joined today by Chase Hughes, a behavioural expert who’s trained military and intelligence agencies, and his last appearance on this show has been watched over 5 million times. Chase has spent years studying human behaviour at a level most people never see. His work focuses on how influence actually works and how trust is built, and how easily both can be used against you. That’s a big part of why I wanted him back. The first time he came on this show, the response was huge. I had messages from people all over the world saying it completely changed how they see relationships and even themselves. What Chase does is take something that feels invisible and make it visible. The signals people give off and the ways we’re influenced without realising it. In this episode, we cover: - How do people test your boundaries without you noticing? - What makes someone easier to influence than others? - How do interrogators get people to reveal more than they intend to? - Why do some conversations leave you feeling off without knowing why? - What are the early signs that someone is trying to control the interaction? There are moments in this conversation where I start to realise how much of what we do happens automatically. And how easy it is for someone who understands that to influence the outcome. If you want to better understand influence and how human behaviour actually works, this episode is worth your time.

What does it take to climb a 3,000-foot wall with no rope? Today, you’ll find out… Alex Honnold has built his life around doing what most people would never even attempt, and he’s still asking what’s possible. For those who don’t know Alex, he is the most famous free solo climber in the world and millions already know him through the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan - a 3,000-foot vertical wall, without ropes or safety gear. I didn’t just want to talk about climbing - I wanted to understand what it really takes to control fear and build the kind of confidence that holds up under pressure. Alex’s life looks extreme from the outside, but his drive comes from wanting to be fully present and see what’s possible when you stop avoiding discomfort. So, I wanted to know: - How does someone master fear without becoming reckless? - What does it take to prepare for a life-or-death climb? - Can risk bring more clarity than safety? - What changed for Alex after having a child? - What’s the cost of playing it safe? After hearing Alex speak about free soloing over 100 mountains, it’s clear he sees fear in a way no one else does. That challenged me, because I realised how often fear, not lack of ability, is what holds most of us back. Not fear of dying, but fear of failing, looking stupid, or even just trying. We don’t need to be superhuman, but it’s important to be doing hard things again and again until they’re no longer unfamiliar.

What if feeling calm and in control starts with your first bite of the day? Jessie Inchauspé has built her career around that idea - The idea that your glucose levels shape far more than you think… Many of you will recognise Jessie from the show, as this is the third time we’ve had her on. But for those of you who don’t know her, Jessie is a biochemist whose work has reshaped how many people view cravings and sugar. This time, we go much deeper than just “avoid sugar.” She walked me through how your fasting glucose is one of the most important numbers to know, and why muscle is one of your greatest metabolic assets. Small habits like moving after a meal or changing the order of your food can dramatically change your energy. When we started talking about pregnancy and stress, the conversation shifted. It stopped being about hacks and started being about responsibility. About the idea that what’s happening in your body today could shape someone else’s life tomorrow. I wanted to know: - How can you reduce cravings without relying on willpower? - What should you actually look for on an ingredients label? - Can muscle mass protect you against diabetes? - How does stress impact your glucose levels? - Do “healthy” foods sometimes act like dessert in disguise? - What happens in your body when you snack constantly? We can all understand the science behind sugar, but when that voice kicks in at 10pm and tells you to eat the cookie anyway, knowledge doesn’t always equal control. I’ve been that person who eats the thing, then ten minutes later regrets it because I know it’s going to mess up my sleep and the next day. And what Jessie helped me see is that a lot of that battle isn’t about willpower, but more so it’s about what’s happening upstream in your body. If you want to feel steadier and more focused throughout your day, this episode is for you.

We delete about 20 episodes of The Diary Of A CEO every year. It's the worst and maybe most important part of my job... A guest flies in. My team has spent weeks preparing. The guest has cleared their entire day, given us hours of their time... And then the conversation happens and it's just not good enough. When this happens, I assume it was my fault. I miscalculated something in the research or didn't get what I wanted from the guest. Calling the guest and letting them know is hard. You wasted the guest's time, my team's work, money and sometimes a relationship... As the host AND the leader of the team AND the person who approves every guest, I realise I am squarely responsible. BUT. Last week a data scientist (who we were interviewing for a role) emailed my team. They'd been running numbers on our show vs other podcasts of our size and found a STRANGE finding... Most shows they studied have wild variance. A famous guest spikes the numbers. An unknown guest craters them. The audience is cherry-picking episodes based on who's in the chair. They said our data looked different - the episodes cluster tightly together. The audience shows up consistently almost regardless of the guest... We've spent five years deleting bad episodes and talking internally about "Invisible Trust" - that when someone sees a guest they've never heard of and clicks anyway because it says Diary Of A CEO, they're trusting us with their time... The promise we've made internally is that we will fight really really really hard to protect this (ask our guest booking team - honestly one of the hardest jobs in the company). We said this for years with absolutely no way to measure it....so seeing it in the data was one of the most validating moments we've had. I believe this is a powerful lesson for all brands... Invisible trust quietly compounds when an audience learns you won't waste their time. You can't see it building. But you will see it in the data after years of choosing the painful option... The narrative working against it are CONSTANT and VERY TEMPTING: "Book this guest because they're famous" "Book this guest for the optics." "Land them and we'll get access to a bigger name later." "We've got an empty slot - just get someone in." Every one of those sentences - from voices outside our team - feels like it makes sense.. but notice none of them mention the listener who gives you two hours of their attention. We have never buckled under that pressure and we never will. The 20± episodes we throw away each year cost us time, money, relationships, even growth, but keeping them would cost us something worth more over the long term. Something invisible. I think everyone reading this has their own version of the 20 deleted episodes. The product you shipped because the quarter needed it. The hire you made because the seat was empty. The thing you put your name on that you knew, in your gut, wasn't great. Protect your invisible trust at all costs!

“What makes us fall in love is not the person that’s perfect… it’s the person that accepts OUR imperfections…” ❤️  Simon Sinek

Anthropic just dropped a research report that really really made me PAUSE…. Anthropic is the company behind Claude, one of the most advanced AI assistants. Founded by former OpenAI researchers, they’re part of the big three in generative AI alongside OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google (Gemini). What makes this study different is that they used real data from millions of Claude conversations to measure what AI is actually being used for in professional settings, not theoretical assessments. The chart shows something pretty staggering - we’re nowhere near AI’s potential to automate work. Blue area = what AI could theoretically handle Red area = what’s actually happening We’re at maybe 5~ of where this technology could be deployed already. The report says computer programmers are only 75% “covered” by current usage. Customer service hits 70%. Most jobs are barely touched. The report suggests the highest “AI-exposed” workers aren’t minimum wage jobs - they’re disproportionately older, more educated, higher-paid, and female. They’re knowledge workers whose tasks involve writing and analysis. Hiring of 22-25 year olds into AI-exposed jobs has dropped 14% since ChatGPT launched. Meanwhile, 30% of workers have zero AI exposure. Cooks, bartenders, mechanics, construction workers might be the most automation-resistant. I believe that the humans who thrive won’t compete with AI at routine tasks - they’ll focus on what becomes more valuable as intelligence gets commoditised… things like emotional intelligence, working alongside AI / managing AI agents and real world skills…. MY THOUGHTS 💭 There are several ways to interpret this data, but the interpretation that excites me most is that AI might be the first technology in human history that actually makes us more human… They’ve all promised to and they’ve all delivered the exact opposite. What’s remarkable about truly intelligent AI is that it’s so capable that it no longer needs us to be anything other than what we are… We don’t need to learn to code in its language - it’s learned ours! We don’t need to structure our thoughts like databases - it can understand our tangents, our contradictions, our entirely human messy way of thinking in stories and emotions and half-formed ideas! For the first time, we’ve built technology sophisticated enough that we can remain completely, messily, irrationally human while working with it… and we can focus on the things that only we can do like building relationships, creating in the real world and paying attention to each other. It’s kinda like we’ve created artificial minds so advanced that they’ve finally given us permission to stop being artificial ourselves.. ❤️ So maybe this is what the future looks like… not us merging with the machines, but machines becoming so capable that humans can finally, fully, be human again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​… 🤷🏽‍♂️

The same pressure that breaks one person builds another. The different is the story they tell themselves...

What do you do when everything you’ve built is taken from you as a child? Dara Khosrowshahi was 9 when his family fled Iran… Today, he’s the CEO of Uber. For those who don’t know him, Dara is one of the most influential tech leaders. He led Uber through one of the biggest cultural and financial turnarounds in Silicon Valley, transforming it from a company in crisis to one with stability and growth. I didn’t want to sit down with Dara to talk about quarterly earnings or strategy decks, but rather understand how someone rebuilds their life when their foundation gets ripped away. Dara brought me through how he reshaped Uber’s culture and why honesty became his greatest asset as a leader. One of the most practical takeaways was Dara’s “direct channels” framework - a system he uses to get unfiltered feedback from deep inside the company. He meets regularly with engineers and teams far removed from the boardroom, because they’re the ones who see what’s really happening. It’s how he avoids echo chambers and keeps his decisions rooted in reality, and it’s something any business owner can apply. I asked Dara: - How do you lead through crisis without losing trust? - What does radical honesty actually look like in a billion-dollar company? - How do you rebuild culture after public failure? - What does success mean when you’ve already lost everything once? - Why does Dara still feel like he has something to prove? At one point, Dara breaks down when speaking about his father - a man he spent his life trying to make proud, but never really got the chance to show. I’ve seen this pattern before. Men raised to hold everything in, only learning later how to open up. It’s a pressure so many leaders carry but never show. Even after researching Dara’s story for days, sitting across from him left me with more respect than I expected. He’s one of the few leaders I’ve met who’s been tested at every level, as an investor, a CFO, a CEO - and still leads with honesty at his core. Let me know your thoughts after watching this conversation.

How much control do we actually have over how we age?? David Sinclair has spent decades studying the biology of ageing, and what actually drives it at a cellular level. David is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the leading researchers in the field of ageing. His work focuses on why our bodies decline over time and what influences that process. He’s not talking about extreme interventions or unrealistic outcomes, but he’s focused on what the science actually says, and what we can influence today. A lot of what we believe about ageing feels fixed. That it’s just time passing and that decline is inevitable. But David challenges that by explaining what’s happening underneath it all. I wanted to know: - What is actually happening inside our cells as we age? - How early do the drivers of ageing begin? - What role does lifestyle play in how we age over time? - How does diet impact long-term health at a cellular level? - What habits have the biggest influence on how we age? There are points in this conversation where I’m trying to understand what is actually within our control, and what isn’t, because a lot of this space is filled with strong claims, and what David does is bring it back to what the science can actually support. If you want to better understand what’s really influencing how you age, and what is actually within your control, this episode is worth your time.