Sentient vegetables are striding through an AI-generated – uncanny – valley, led by a young Steven Bartlett. They’re dishing out recycled podcast truisms about mindset and motivation. At some point, they burst into song.

This is not some heatwave-induced fever dream, or the sort of psychedelic experience that would be a better anti-drug deterrent than any government campaign. This is, apparently, an early concept for Bartlett’s new TV show for kids, set to be released later this summer on YouTube and Spotify.

Steven’s World is the entrepreneur’s latest venture, according to a new report in The Observer. The show will reportedly repackage lessons from interviews on Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast using an AI model fed by previous episodes, aiming to make those ideas more digestible for kids. Whether their parents can stomach it, though, might depend on their tolerance for one of the most divisive – and increasingly ubiquitous – figures in British pop culture.

If the Instagram comments are anything to go by, Bartlett’s latest strides into AI’s brave new world – he previously released a show called 100 CEOs, in which his AI clone narrates the life stories of various founders – are going down about as well as a glass of coagulated Huel. “Please never put all those words together ever again,” one user begged. “Can he just stop?” another asked.

Those appraisals, though, seem relatively tame compared to some of the critiques levelled at Bartlett and his podcast in recent months. “Right-wing manosphere cosplaying as liberals”, part of the “red pill pipeline” and “manosphere ideology with a ring light and a warm hug” are just a few of the scathing assessments that have been directed at Diary of a CEO, one of the most popular podcasts in the UK that has been streamed more than a billion times.

These certainly sit uneasily with Bartlett’s softly spoken, therapy speak-fluent and emotionally literate podcasting persona. He’s known as the guy who nods sympathetically as his tearful guests open up about their vulnerabilities; hardly a brash Joe Rogan sort. But for some, it is precisely this style that’s the issue. Could Diary of a CEO in fact “serve as a trojan horse for the manosphere”, as the YouTuber Therese Lee recently put it, lulling listeners and viewers into accepting potentially problematic ideas?

These widely divergent responses that Bartlett and his show have provoked certainly make him one of the most intriguing characters in our media landscape – whether you love him or loathe him. So how did Bartlett go from an earnest young businessman dishing out advice about daily habits to the more polarising, almost guru-like podcast bro that sits behind the microphone today?

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