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The Diary Of A CEO

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Rick Rubin: The Only Skill That Matters Now Is The One Thing AI Can Never Steal!

Rick Rubin spends nearly three hours with Steven Bartlett arguing that the best art, and the best life choices, are indefensible: taken past the point where reason can justify them. He tells how a vibe coding meme became The Way of Code, how Def Jam's own president said 99 Problems would never be a single, how Jay-Z writes without writing, the depressive episode at 33 that burst him like a balloon, and the friend in a hospital bed he told was in the sweet spot. He lays out the four phases of creativity, the vacuum strategy behind Jay-Z's Ace of Spades, why AI has no point of view and the art lives in the prompt, and why The Creative Act has exactly 78 chapters.

CulturePhilosophyAISep 21, 2026

2:27:50

The Diary Of A CEO

The Man Who Calls BS On AI: They’re LYING About AI, 2027 Is When It All Breaks! | Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron, the writer behind Where's Your Ed At and the Better Offline podcast, spends two and a half hours arguing that generative AI is a financial con, and he argues it entirely in numbers. Microsoft's $34.33 billion of AI revenue against $115 billion of capex. A $200 subscription that lets you burn $14,000 of tokens. Nvidia's $215.9 billion of GPU sales supporting roughly $22 billion of outside revenue. Oracle's 7.1 gigawatts built for one Customer. Steven Bartlett pushes back on every claim with adoption data, hallucination benchmarks and The Innovator's Dilemma, and the argument is better for it.

AIBusinessCultureAug 27, 2026

1:56:40

The Diary Of A CEO

Archaeology Warning: They May Have Secretly Found Antarctica 300 Years Before Us! - Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock sits down with Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO and frames the whole conversation as something close to a last testament. He has a failing heart valve, major surgery in two weeks, and a hostile journalist about to publish, so he wants his own account on the record first. What follows is a three hour walk through the case he has built for more than thirty years: that there was a lost civilization roughly 20,000 years ago, advanced not in the industrial sense but in navigation, astronomy, and earth measurement, that it was all but erased by a global cataclysm around 12,800 years ago, and that...

ScienceCultureJun 11, 2026

1:19:28

The Diary Of A CEO

Oz Pearlman (Mentalist): This Small Mistake Makes People Dislike You! They Do This, They’re Lying!

Mentalist Oz Pearlman spends seventy nine minutes with Steven Bartlett performing three impossible effects and then taking each one apart into a habit anyone can use. He opens by killing his own billing (he cannot read minds, he reads people), then hands over the concrete material: approach a stranger at an angle so they see one eye rather than two, never ask a question that can be answered no, and read lies the way a polygraph does, by learning one person's truthful baseline over months and watching for the delta rather than hunting for a universal tell. The middle is a working system: write everything down the night you hear it (which is how he told a man his ATM PIN was still 6124 three years later), fast forward your dread twenty four hours to kill procrastination, split yourself in two so rejection lands on the performer instead of you, and fix names in five seconds with listen, repeat, reply, where step one is what he says ninety five percent of people get wrong. He is also unusually candid about the theatre, conceding he is tricking Bartlett into believing certain things matter more than others and that he runs several methods at once so a closed lane is never fatal. It ends with a photograph that has been sitting under Bartlett's mug since minute four, and the answer is Michelle Obama.

CultureBusinessCareerOct 23, 2025