Britain’s Elite Has Turned on Steven Bartlett: Why Now?
And What Ricky Gervais Gets Right About The UK vs The US
“Americans applaud ambition,” wrote Ricky Gervais. “They openly reward success. Brits are more comfortable with life’s losers. We like to bring authority down a peg or two. Just for the hell of it.”
Gervais’ words, written back in 2011, offer a prophetic lens through which to understand what’s currently happening to the UK’s most successful podcaster. As social media commentators and mainstream press outlets clamber over one another to bring Steven Bartlett down “a peg or two”, the irony is hard to miss:
In recent weeks, the very media institutions that have been thoroughly usurped by his Diary of a CEO podcast have begun scrutinising his output with renewed enthusiasm.
First came a conversation with Chris Williamson, perhaps Britain’s second-most successful podcaster, in which Chris appeared to reject the arguments of a social-media influencer explaining why she didn’t want children.
What might have been read as a discussion about falling birth rates, or even a cultural debate about family and meaning as we approach catastrophic population decline, was instead framed as a misogynistic attack on women’s choices.
Then, a clip “went viral for all the wrong reasons”, according to the press, after Bartlett raised a question about the male loneliness epidemic:
“We’re going to have a lot of men who are disillusioned that become incels, find themselves in pockets of the internet, are resentful. All those kinds of things. Should society intervene to course correct that, put systems in place to make sure that those men meet partners?”
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If you’re thinking that both of these moments sound surprisingly tame, particularly in an internet ecosystem currently dominated by a Mexican Nazi and his Sieg-Heiling cronies, you’d be right.
Yet the barrage continues.
Alongside criticism of Bartlett’s sponsorship management, tabloids and celebrities alike now appear eager to pile on. Headlines declare that “stars including Sara Cox and Ulrika Jonsson turn on Bartlett”, as though vapid celebrity culture has excommunicated him for asking reasonable questions you’d likely hear in any British household.
But Bartlett hasn’t changed.
Remember, he interviewed Jordan Peterson before the mainstream considered him acceptable. My friend Konstantin Kisin was also a guest a while back - and has just appeared a second time today.
So why has the press turned so vehemently against him now? And what’s actually going on here?
I have a theory.
But first…
Steven Bartlett is the closest thing Britain has to Joe Rogan.
The comparison isn’t about temperament or ideology. Bartlett is careful, measured and non-confrontational, an unmistakably English counterpart to an American who hunts his own stags and commentates on MMA fights.
But in terms of cultural reach and status, the comparison holds.
Both men dominate their national podcast landscapes by such a margin that they are effectively unrivalled. To put this in perspective, my own YouTube show Heretics is among the more successful in the UK, with long-form episodes typically hitting between 200,000 and 600,000 views in their first month. The excellent Triggernometry does even better, regularly approaching a million views per episode.
Bartlett, however, operates in a different stratosphere. His interviews routinely pull in between one and four million views, and often far more. As with “going on Rogan”, “going on Bartlett” now means something iconic. Beyond book sales or follower boosts, an appearance confers status.
So Why Now?
It’s hard not to notice that
