Change Your Relationship with Money with Steven Bartlett

Michelle and Craig sit down with entrepreneur and “Diary of a CEO” host Steven Bartlett to discuss what role money should play in your life, why it’s important to be transparent with your kids about your finances, and how Steven went from financial instability to a serial entrepreneur. They also answer a listener's question on how best to deal with financial anxiety and debt. Have a question you want answered? Write to us at imopod.com http://imopod.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've never actually said this before, but I, when I got my student loan, I took half of it and I bet it on a football game.

• 0:07Michelle Obama?

  You know, one of the things-

• 0:08Craig Robinson?

  What game?

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Honestly, it wasn't even a good game. It wasn't a good game. But it was just, it was, it was Stokes. I didn't even, I didn't even like the team.

• 0:23Michelle Obama?

  This episode of IMO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

• 0:29Craig Robinson?

  Hello.

• 0:29Michelle Obama?

  Hey there.

• 0:30Craig Robinson?

  How you doing?

• 0:31Michelle Obama?

  I'm, I'm, I'm great. We got a good one today.

• 0:33Craig Robinson?

  Oh, I cannot wait. I cannot wait.

• 0:36Michelle Obama?

  I'm very excited to talk to our, our guest. But to, to kick it off, we were gonna, because we're gonna be talking about finance. Finances, we're gonna be talking about how do you manage money? These economic times are really a little scary out there and I know a lot of people have questions. But we were talking before the show, just trying to think of how did we think about money? When we were growing up? And we talked a little bit about this in some of our other podcasts, but we, we've said that our, we grew up pretty, I would say we grew up poor.

• 1:19Craig Robinson?

  Right, but the, poor, but not knowing we were poor. That was a, that was a real testament to our parents because we didn't have disposable income and they were managing paycheck by paycheck, but we didn't know that. And when, when Steven gets out here, we should talk about the, how dad taught us the value of money. You know, because that was a, that was a real, a real great lesson, but.

• 1:50Michelle Obama?

  But our father worked as a, he was a city worker in, in, for the city of Chicago, worked in the water filtration plant, blue collar worker. He was the sole breadwinner because he and mom made a decision to, for her to stay home.

• 2:07Craig Robinson?

  Right.

• 2:07Michelle Obama?

  So that, you know, she'd be able- To be an involved and engaged parent in our school, which she was. She was very active in the PTA. So we sort of had that typical come out. We came home for lunch every day. So him being the sole breadwinner afforded her the luxury of being more engaged in our upbringing. But it meant that we were, you know.

• 2:32Craig Robinson?

  We had to sacrifice.

• 2:33Michelle Obama?

  We had to sacrifice a lot. And it just sacrificed just became a habit, you know, little things like, you know. Christmas was, you got three gifts.

• 2:43Craig Robinson?

  You got, you could ask for.

• 2:45Michelle Obama?

  You could ask for three things. And another thing Dad focused on was never stretching or using credit.

• 2:57Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, right. He, he paid his bills at the end of the month. No, he never carried balances on his credit cards. He never bought things on time. I mean, he never used the system.

• 3:09Michelle Obama?

  When you say bought things on time, what do you mean by that?

• 3:13Craig Robinson?

  So back in the day, you could buy things on layaway, similar to what you can do now. But it was called layaway. So you'd put $20 down on a hundred dollar couch. And then you'd pay $5 a month and you eventually you'd own that. He would, he thought that was, that was like quicksand. That was financial quicksand to him. And so he never did that. He never carried a balance on his credit cards. And, and I think the only time he actually went into debt was when it was time for us to go to college, when it's time for me to go to college. Because there was no way we were going to afford that. So you had to take out a loan that he couldn't pay back at the end of the month, but.

• 3:57Michelle Obama?

  So we got in the habit of not really asking for things because we didn't want to put our parents in a bad situation. But that meant that, for example, you almost didn't go to Princeton.

• 4:09Craig Robinson?

  I, I almost chose not to go because it wasn't a full scholarship to pay for everything.

• 4:16Michelle Obama?

  You had gotten a full scholarship to another school.

• 4:18Craig Robinson?

  To other schools and. And Princeton was, you know, you had to pay what you could afford. And they told me.

• 4:25Michelle Obama?

  Wouldn't it have been nice if we had gone to school when there was blind admissions?

• 4:30Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Michelle Obama?

  Financial admissions. I mean, you imagine our, our, our parents being working class people and that, that a school that rich requiring them to have a financial contribution to the point that they went into debt when a school like Princeton had such a huge endowment? That was, it's, it's amazing, but I don't want to digress.

• 4:52Craig Robinson?

  I know, let's not digress. But you know, this is, this would be a good time to bring, bring Stephen Bartlett out so that we can, we can, we can continue this conversation with him because his background was very much like ours. So Stephen Bartlett is an entrepreneur and one of the most influential voices in modern business and media. He's the host and creator behind the widely popular podcast, The Diary of a CEO. And what a great name for a podcast. I want to find out how he came up with that. He's the founder of a media investment company, Flight Story, a leading media and publishing company, and the Flight Story Fund, a global investment fund. Stephen, come on out, my friend.

• 5:37Michelle Obama?

  So good to have you.

• 5:39Craig Robinson?

  Good to have you here, man. Oh, good to have you here.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  To learn more about Manchester.

• 5:46Michelle Obama?

  For Michelle, please, please, I know, I have to give permission to call me by my name. When he's calling me Meech, you can't be Mrs. Obama.

• 5:56Craig Robinson?

  We've called her Meech since she was a baby. Yes. It was Michelle. If you heard my mom say, Michelle, she was about to get into something that she shouldn't. You know, I used to live in Rush Home, Stephen.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Did you actually?

• 6:11Craig Robinson?

  When I lived, when I lived in Manchester, I lived in Rush Home and we played our game. I played professionally overseas in Manchester, England for the Manchester Giants.

• 6:20Michelle Obama?

  Basketball, not, not.

• 6:22Craig Robinson?

  Basketball, not football. But I lived in Rush Home and we played in Stockport.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. That's my area. It's my old stomping grounds.

• 6:30Craig Robinson?

  Love it. I'm, I'm looking forward to getting back there. Haven't been back there since I played, so.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Are you football fan?

• 6:35Craig Robinson?

  I am. So we, I lived right by Manchester City. So that's all I knew. I know. And you're a United fan, but.

• 6:42Michelle Obama?

  Oh, and Stephen just went dark.

• 6:45Craig Robinson?

  It's rivalry.

• 6:46Michelle Obama?

  It's like, oh, and he started to scratch over there. Like, oh, why did I ask that?

• 6:51Craig Robinson?

  It was going so nicely until.

• 6:53Michelle Obama?

  I know, I know.

• 6:55Craig Robinson?

  Oh, man.

• 6:56Michelle Obama?

  Well.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  It's a beautiful place.

• 7:00Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, it's terrific. Terrific.

• 7:02Michelle Obama?

  Well, it's great to have you here. Just excited to hear about all your success, the podcast, your, your books, your, your advice. And we need people like you at this time, you know, somebody so young who has such knowledge. But, you know, the thing that is, is really unusual, you know, probably not to us, is your background, your upbringing, you know, where you came from, how you, you know, how you wound up here. And I, we were, we're hoping to start with you telling us just something about you, how you grew up and how you came to be in this spot.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  First and foremost, thank you for having me. It's a real honor in so many ways. But to answer your question, I was born in Botswana in Africa, moved to the UK when we were very, very young. There's four of us, four siblings in my family. My mother's Nigerian, my dad is English. And this is important context because, you know, being of having two parents with two different ethnicities plays a role in shaping who, how you understand yourself. We moved to the southwest of the UK in a place called Plymouth, which was predominantly white. In fact, I didn't know another black family in the area. And it's interesting listening to your upbringing, where you had this healthy, stable, secure attachment to money. I think I very much had the opposite because in life, generally, we understand the value of things by the context in which we see them. So if you go to, you know, they've done the studies,

• 8:27Speaker 00

  if you go to a restaurant and there's three steaks on the menu, we use the expensive one and the cheapest one to make the decision that the middle one is the right one. And if you remove one option, we make a different decision. It's context that helps us to put value in perspective. And in the case of my life, I, we were the black family in a middle class area that ended up losing our money. Remaining in the middle class area, becoming the poorest family in the area and the black family in the area. So at a very young age, I internalized this belief that I was less than. And I believed, which I heard you talking about money a second ago, I believed that money was the antagonist in my life. So, you know, I always think that the things that invalidate us when we're younger end up being the things we seek validation from when we're older. And for me, money was one of those things. I had a unhealthy relationship with it because

• 9:11Speaker 00

  it was the reason why my parents were screaming. It was the reason why I had so much shame every day going to school. It was the reason why I didn't tell my friends where I lived, because if they saw my dilapidated house and the smashed windows and the high grass, it was already hard enough to fit in and that would just exacerbate the massive further. So that was my context.

• 9:28Michelle Obama?

  So why were things so unstable financially?

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so my dad had a had a good job and we'd moved into this this area and my mother got into business and she left school when she was extremely young in Nigeria, five, seven, 10 years old roughly. She didn't get an education. So when she, in Africa, business is, in my mother's village, is put out a stall and sell everything you have. Business in the UK was different. So she really, really struggled to adapt. She she hadn't learned to read or write. So that was an exacerbating factor. And all of that meant that the family money was invested into the businesses. The businesses failed, they failed, they failed, they failed, they failed. And that kind of took the the money out of our of our home.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And it was kind of a downward spiral from there until, you know, properties, we had our stuff repossessed at one point and it was a downward spiral from there. As I was listening to you talk backstage about your relationship with money and the lessons that your father taught you, I was thinking to myself, money is this other person in the room for our entire childhood. And we're developing, just like we're developing a relationship with people and other things, we're developing this really clear, explicit, emotional relationship with money. In the same way that we talk about attachment styles, we say, you're an anxious attachment style, or you're secure, or you're avoidant. In my in my household, I learned to be both anxious and avoidant with money. And you can see that in my me as an adult,

• 10:56Speaker 00

  avoiding bills, hiding bills, not looking at my banking app. Because as a young age, my relationship with money, which is also kind of a proxy for your relationship with yourself, was that this person, the second person in the room, which I'm going to call money. Isn't around enough and its absence is making me feel insecure. Yeah. And this is, and I always, this is a bit more sort of asoteric, but when you think about the concept of wealth and money, it isn't something that our prehistoric human brain knows anything about. We had tribes, we all, we didn't have wealth. It was what you could carry back then. We had food, we had love, we had tribe, we had status. That was a really important thing, but money.

• 11:31Craig Robinson?

  We shared, we shared.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  But money is this, is this alien thing to like the, the brain that we still have today. So it's actually just an emotional proxy for like how you feel about yourself and that early context of love, attachment, abundance. And I think if you see it as a person in the room and then you ask yourself the question, how did that person treat me going up, growing up? Did I have that secure attachment to it? Were they absent sometimes? Was there a longingness to, to be closer to them? Then it helps you to understand the relationship you have today.

• 12:00Craig Robinson?

  Well, this is a good opportunity to share some of this knowledge with our listeners. We've got a question.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Hi, Michelle and Craig. It feels like debt is just an endless abyss. I'm in my 40s now and I find myself still living paycheck to paycheck. What do wealthy people know that I don't? What did you do to educate your children on setting up for financial success in the kind of world we live in today? Thank you so much. April.

• 12:36Craig Robinson?

  Let's start by looking at the first part about debt, right? How do people end up in debt?

• 12:44Speaker 00

  For many, many reasons. The reason why I ended up in debt was because of my unhealthy relationship with money. Essentially, my spending is very, very simple. My spending was higher than my revenue, but I also didn't understand this thing called credit because nobody had told me. I didn't have financial literacy at all. When I was 18 years old and I started working in call centers and I got my own money, when I got my paycheck, I would go and buy a plasma screen TV, the biggest one I could possibly buy. And get this, I'd put the plasma TV up like that. I couldn't afford cable to actually, and then a week later. Because I couldn't pay my rent and I couldn't feed myself, I would sell the plasma TV.

• 13:25Michelle Obama?

  And that would be a cycle.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  This was a cycle.

• 13:27Michelle Obama?

  Wow.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  I had all kinds of really unhealthy, toxic relationships with this thing called money. This is, I've never actually said this before, but I, when I got my student loan, I took half of it and I bet it on a football game.

• 13:42Michelle Obama?

  You know, one of the things.

• 13:43Craig Robinson?

  What game?

• 13:44Michelle Obama?

  Okay.

• 13:44Craig Robinson?

  Hang on. What game?

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Honestly, it wasn't even a good game. It wasn't a good game, but it was just, it was, it was Stokes. I didn't even, I didn't even like the team, but it was, I was so, it goes back to what I said earlier. The thing that invalidates you when you're younger is the thing you end up seeking validation from when you're older. So the dopamine I could have got from winning would have filled some kind of hole in my insecurity.

• 14:06Michelle Obama?

  One of the things that I talked to, cause you know, I talked to a lot of young students, college bound students, students in school and, you know, and I saw this. I was an associate dean at the University of Chicago. I had the experience on my own. And what you know is like early debt starts right at that college age. Because, you know, not only do a lot of kids, kids of color, kids from working class backgrounds that have never had money. You go to school, you get that loan check that's supposed to go to paying for books and food and all those things. And because nobody's taught you how to use it, you, and you do not have a healthy relationship with it.

• 14:46Michelle Obama?

  We see over and over again, kids who do exactly what you did, or they do something even more magnanimous. They take the money and try to help their family by using it to pay an electric bill or to buy shoes for a kid. And time and time again, one of the most powerful things I tell young people is that they have to be wary of that. That, you know, that's going to be an instinct that they have when they get a large check. Is to use it. And then, you know, I try to remind them, if you don't have that money for books, they don't give you more money for books. You still owe the money and now you won't be able to get the books and you'll be in debt and you won't have. Anything to show for it.

• 15:31Michelle Obama?

  That I'm so glad to share that because that is that occurs among so many young people who are trying to figure out how to manage their money in college and to top it off, they're handed credit cards.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Oh my.

• 15:44Michelle Obama?

  You know, and I don't know if you went through that too at that.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:48Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  I had destroyed my credit rating by the time that I figured out what it was. No one told me.

• 15:53Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  What a credit score was, and I had four credit cards that I'd been given because when you're a student, they just want to give you these cards. I went out, I spent the money.

• 16:01Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And then someone explained to me that you have to pay it back.

• 16:04Michelle Obama?

  Oh. At at 25% interest. What's that?

• 16:08Speaker 00

  I had no money. I had no money and because I then dropped out of university, my parents didn't want to speak to me because that's complicated and I was the only child in my family that left university. So I'm hundreds of miles away from home. I have managed to achieve these two CCJs, which is a county court judgment where the court comes for you because you've not paid any debts back. I've dropped out of university. I'm shoplifting food to feed myself at this point. Can't call my parents and ask them for anything, not that they would be able to help me in that situation anyway. And I've destroyed this credit rating that apparently is really important and that nobody told me was critical. And that's the situation I found myself in at 18, 19 years old.

• 16:51Craig Robinson?

  This segment is brought to you by Progressive Insurance, where progress isn't just in the brand's name. It's what they stand for. You know, Meech, the hardest part that Kelly and I encountered when we got our first home was coming up with the down payment. And you know, we waited until we got every penny of it because we didn't want to take any chances.

• 17:14Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I, I, I hear that. Barack and I think we, we. Took it at the right pace. But still, saving for a down payment is a pretty exhaustive process. And it can be a limit to owning that first home.

• 17:32Craig Robinson?

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• 18:17Craig Robinson?

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• 18:36Craig Robinson?

  I want to hear, what was the point where you realized that this other person or this relationship with money, you had to change direction? Because at some point, you figured it out. And we were lucky enough that, you know, our father was so worried about debt that he, he just hammered it into us. And, and so I want you, while you're thinking of this question, I want to tell the story of how I learned the value of money. Because as Meech had talked, we went to a school, it wasn't, it was more working class than middle class. So we were, we didn't feel less than at all.

• 19:19Craig Robinson?

  We felt like it's just stuff you can't get when you're in this position.

• 19:26Craig Robinson?

  But because we had lunch every day, people came to our house and ate lunch with us at, from school, we would get the occasional pizza on Friday for good report cards.

• 19:43Craig Robinson?

  One of my friends said, hey Craig, are you rich? And he hit me with that and I was like, well, I've got food to eat. We get pizza every now and then. We go to the drive-in movie once in a while. Maybe I am rich. I went home and I said to dad, hey dad, are we rich? And he said, do you think we're rich? And I went through the whole thing. I was like, well, maybe we are. He said, uh, let's talk about this tomorrow. I'm getting paid. He got his paycheck the next day, went and cashed it, the whole thing, and laid it out on the bed.

• 20:26Craig Robinson?

  And it had, you know, who knows what it was, but let's, let's call it $500. And he laid it out in twenties, tens, fives and ones. And I walked in there and I said, oh, we are rich. And he was like, wait a minute, wait a minute now. He said,

• 20:48Craig Robinson?

  you have to pay some bills. And I was like, oh yeah, okay. And he said, the first thing you do, he took $20. He said, you pay yourself. You put this in your savings account. And I was like, oh, okay. And then he said, and rent is this. And he took some money out. And he said, now we've got a nice car. Got to pay for that.

• 21:11Craig Robinson?

  And it went down. And he went down the, all the bills till he got to, maybe there was $30 left. And I was like, yeah, baby, we are, we got $30. I'm getting like, we're getting a quarter for our allowance. So $30 seems like a lot. And then he was like, ah, not, no, we have pizza on Friday every now and then. And he took some out. And he got to the point where it was like $10 left. And he said, this gotta last me the whole two weeks till I get paid again. And it was a blessing is all I can say because I realized that so you can have

• 21:54Craig Robinson?

  a job and you can have money, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're rich, number one. And number two, the most important thing he said was pay yourself first. And I have been doing that ever since, and I don't know if, if, if Misha's been doing it, but I always take a little bit and put it away. And it was, it was the best thing that he could do for us, which gave us that secure relationship you're talking about. And I hadn't heard it put that way, but I, I, I've always been secure in, in, and even, even when I, you know, graduated from school and I'm working in, in finance myself and

• 22:38Craig Robinson?

  I'm making more money than I ever needed, I'm still leery of not overspending.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Interesting. Well, I wish all parents did that because I, I was thinking about what's actually going on there and he, what he did is he pulled back the curtain on how the, the system works. He gave you like certainty through information on how this thing called money operates. The opposite approach is what I experienced, which is total uncertainty and there's nothing humans hate more than uncertainty. I, money was this person in my life that was stood behind the curtain, wreaking havoc. I didn't know who he was or who she was or what she was doing, but I could see the consequences of her and I didn't have a relationship with her. Your dad pulled back the curtain and gave you a direct relationship with money as if you think of it, of it like a person and showed you how they operate, how they think and what they do.

• 23:28Craig Robinson?

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  And that, that kills the uncertainty. So you can be at peace with this thing. Whereas I, I didn't know, I could just see the downstream consequences in my everyday life. I could see the argument. I could see the stress.

• 23:40Michelle Obama?

  Stephen, when did you start rightsizing your relationship with money and how, how did you do it?

• 23:47Speaker 00

  There's a few things that sprung to mind when you asked the question. The first is at eighteen years old, when I dropped out of university, my friend had given me this diary and I'm alone in this room in a place called Moss Side slash Rush Holm in Manchester. And I write in the first page of my diary, my goals before I'm twenty five years old. Number one, I'm gonna buy a Range Rover Sport, right? Bear in mind, I'm stealing Chicago town pizzas to feed myself at this point. Number two, I'm gonna be a multimillionaire. Number three, I'm gonna get a six pack. And number four, I'm gonna get a girlfriend. That was my entire orientation in life. And I thought if I achieved these four things, I would achieve happiness. And again, if we look at this list, seeing the insecurity of my mother's and father's relationship, that's why probably number four was there. I was always the smallest of my siblings. I was always a small kid growing up as well. I had a bit of a growth spurt.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I couldn't drive, all of my rich white friends could drive. I was the youngest in my year, roughly. So I got my driving license, I would be eligible for a driving license latest if I could even afford one. So I'm always in the back of my friend's car. And of course, the issue of money. So my list was a list of my own insecurities. And then I spent the next five years making sure that by the age of twenty five, I ticked off everything on the list. And I did. And upon the day when I bought the Range Rover as my first car, and I had a girlfriend, and I had worked on my body and all these things, I felt a tremendous sense of anticlimax because someone had lied to me. And the person that had lied to me was myself and my own insecurity. So sometimes in life, it's not a popular answer, but you have to have your BS fail you for you to realise that it's BS at all.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  And sometimes our own self story is so strong and our insecurities are so strong that it's not until we confront them by accomplishing the thing it told us to confront that we realise that it was lying to us the whole time. And at that point, I could reorientate my life towards something else. And I could say, what actually matters? What I found really interesting about her question was, my brain has this orientation that I've learnt over time, which is to focus on the other part of debt and wealth, which is wealth creation, which is how can I improve my financial situation by first increasing my, my income? And the second part of that is reducing my overheads. And I wanna say this because I don't think enough people are talking about it. And I think this is a great platform to talk about it. The world in front of us is changing extremely quickly at the moment.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  This thing called artificial intelligence, I think is gonna have a profound impact on So many industries, so many lives in so many ways. I spend so much of my time obsessing about this. It also presents us with this generational opportunity to build a new type of wealth and to build wealth. And that opportunity will be captured as it was across history from the Industrial Revolution to the dot com boom by those that focus on filling that first bucket at this moment in time. And that bucket is of knowledge and skills. And my, the other sort of really important point of context in my life is my parents weren't around. So my mother was running a restaurant, which went from afternoon till

• 26:42Speaker 00

  two, three AM in the morning. My dad would leave his job, but when I was about 10 years old and he would just go straight to her restaurant, help her clean up and everything. So by about 10, when I woke up, they weren't there. When I went to bed, they weren't there. If you imagine the context there, you've got a kid that's desperate for stuff to fit in, then you've got this void of independence. And in that void of independence, the kid runs experiments. He starts selling things. He starts trying to make a website so he can sell Japanese clothes to the UK market and fails at that. He, he finds things in the house and goes and sells them on the playground. And then he gets the full feedback loop of getting money in his hands and going, oh, now I can buy things. I, I got the, the feedback because there was this void of independence. It built this wealth of evidence in my head. And I think confidence, self belief, and really any belief is a question

• 27:27Speaker 00

  of what stack of irrefutable evidence is greatest in your mind. And for me, my parents, I think somewhat accidentally taught me that you can have an idea and then you, there's nothing between you and the execution and realization of that idea. This was this parasitic, like life-changing realization I was given at 14 years old. You can have an idea and then you can make the idea a reality. I didn't, I'm not good at maths. Yeah. I can't, I still can't spell, was never particularly good in school. But this one macro tailwind of this thing they call self belief, which came from this void of independence and the ability for me to fail, means that you persevere in the face of not having money

• 28:11Speaker 00

  or not having a degree to the point that you get feedback and feed. Back becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes your power in life.

• 28:18Michelle Obama?

  Unless there are some deep inequities in your life and your community. Because when I hear you talk, Stephen, I I I hear the story of every other black and brown kid in the United States of America in inner cities.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:33Michelle Obama?

  You know, they are you in so many ways, you know, not connecting with school in any major way. Whip smart, you know, hungry, capable, probably living in a lot of dysfunction. Unparented in many ways. And what do they do? They do exactly what you you did. But they're doing it with illegal substantives and gangs, but they're trying to. They're trying to do the same thing, acquire, use their knowledge, acquire it. But they're doing it in a way that puts them in jail and changes the trajectory of their lives forever. But you're the exact same kid.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  It crossed my mind.

• 29:15Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  It crosses your mind.

• 29:17Michelle Obama?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  And I I now fully understand how people end up making those kinds of decisions. Because when you feel the the pain in your stomach of not eating for a couple of days and you can't see a clear path out of the situation you're in.

• 29:33Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  You weigh up your options.

• 29:35Michelle Obama?

  Yep.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  And if you have a clear understanding of consequence, like I did, thank God.

• 29:40Michelle Obama?

  Thank God, yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  You make a different set of decisions, but I have complete empathy and understanding for how one ends up choosing another path, especially if they don't have role models around them. And they, which is a form of consequence.

• 29:51Michelle Obama?

  Yeah. And I I wish we were having those kind of conversations. I wish, you know, not to make this political, but as people think about criminal justice and what young kids are doing to survive and what motivates them. They are so deeply penalized for because they're in a different socioeconomic and life structure. But they're they're challenged by the same things. They're trying to work their way out because they don't have schools that speak to them. They don't have parents that can help guide them. They are as capable and able as as you are. But their chances are now completely wiped out because they're felons, they're convicts. They, you know, they they don't get a second chance.

• 30:36Michelle Obama?

  They don't have the opportunity to turn that intellect into power in so many ways. And I I just want. Our, our audience here to be thinking about that as we think about, you know, uh, you know, rehabilitation and how we work with young, young men in particular. Because we're losing a lot of them, but so many of them are you, which means that they could be you with a little extra attention and help and understanding and compassion.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  It also makes me realize as you speak how important the safety nets were that I didn't even realize were there. And in the UK, we have an NHS, we have a healthcare system.

• 31:18Michelle Obama?

  And we are eliminating them here in this country sadly.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Which is just inconceivable to me.

• 31:23Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  It's like, growing up in the UK, it's inconceivable that I could get sick and it could cost me money or make me bankrupt because I got sick. And if you think about my story, there were so many safety nets. I had a house with parents that I could have ran back to. That creates a psychological safety that I could retreat backwards. We also have benefits in the UK. And I remember the day where I printed off the, we call it job seekers allowance forms, which would have given me some money. I never submitted them, but I was at a point where I'm weighing up my options here. And then the, the safety net of our healthcare, which is I, I, I did know that I was playing on a solid foundation. And that allows you to take those risks.

• 31:59Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  You know?

• 32:08Craig Robinson?

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• 32:53Craig Robinson?

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• 33:06Speaker 00

  The second thing I was thinking about is something I like, the question said, what do wealthy people know that I don't know? They know something about sweating the small stuff and the compounding returns you get from that. The richest investor in the world, I think he's the fourth richest person on earth called Warren Buffett, says that compounding returns is the eighth wonder of the world. Now, compounding returns are essentially what happens when you have an obsessive focus on small, marginal improvements in our money, in our finances, in our savings, and how that then starts to build over time. The reason why it's eighth wonder of the world is it's slow, then it's fast. If I think about how my podcast grew, for the first three years, no one's listening, and then it's incredibly fast.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  When I think about how my investments and my net worth grew, it was slow and incredibly fast. When you think about something like your teeth, if you don't brush your teeth today, fine. No one's really gonna know. If you don't brush your teeth every day this week, you're probably still gonna get away with it. But if you don't brush your teeth for five years straight, you're in a dental chair and they're ripping the molars out of your mouth. The same applies for your skin, your hair, your relationships with others and your relationship with money. This idea of out obsessing others on the small stuff is for me, is much of the game of both business, life, money, relationships. And we have like two phrases in my company that are the most popular. The first is failure, which I talked about, and the second is one percent.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  It's, you know, you can stand at the foot of Mount Everest and look up and you'll be daunted and anxious and intimidated. So you'll bury your head in the sand or you can say to yourself, how do I move this one pebble in front of me? And actually, when I, when I studied how great things are built, how people become wealthy like Warren Buffett, it's not by making some gargantuan, intelligent financial decision that changed their life. Great businesses aren't built by some great stroke of innovation. You feel like you are going somewhere and that is a motivating force. So all, and the last point I'll add to this is in business, in life and in our finances, when we set about to accomplish great things, to climb the Mount Everest, we experience that cognitive dissonance, that psychological discomfort, which- Often forces us into a form of paralysis.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  But if we break it down into what is the small thing? What is the one percent? Not only is that, does that feel achievable, which starts that momentum? But that one percent really, really, really matters. It's ultimately why someone like Warren Buffett was able to be so successful outside of his, his other forms of privilege was because he started investing at 11, his pocket money, 11 years old. And now by the age of 80, that compounding graph, which is slow, then it's fast, has compounded in its favor. The problem is, we don't think the small things matter.

• 35:48Craig Robinson?

  And in addition to, sorry, Meech, but in addition to not knowing that the small things matter, even if we are fortunate enough to have Stephen Bartlett sit here and tell us how to do it.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:01Craig Robinson?

  We don't have the patience in this day and age of instant gratification of getting to the one month mark, let alone the three year mark, right? How do we work at getting people to understand you gotta give it time?

• 36:19Speaker 00

  I, I, I give them examples from their own life. But this is why I always talk about people's teeth.

• 36:25Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, the teeth, that was a good one. That, that hit me. That, I mean, I felt that, didn't you?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  When did it happen? So if we talk about the, the example I gave of five year tooth decay.

• 36:35Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  When did it happen? It happened today. It happened today with a decision, and this is always the case with small things, that is both easy to do and also easy not to do. In fact, every small decision in our lives, saving a dollar or not saving a dollar, brushing our teeth or not brushing our teeth, the problem with the small decisions is they are easy to do and easy not to do. So it almost has to become a, a somewhat religious belief in the power of compounding returns. But when you say like, what is the one percent gain that I can make today? And can I make that again tomorrow? And how does that look when we zoom out on a graph over the course of five or 10 years? It is profoundly pivotal.

• 37:10Michelle Obama?

  What does that look like for an 18 year old? You know, does, in, in practically speaking, is an 18 year old going to college, coming out with debt? What is the, what are some of the first steps of, of thinking or action that they need to take to be, to begin to feel that compounding feeling? What, what mistakes are young people making that, where they, where they're not on that path?

• 37:40Speaker 00

  So, you know, as an 18 year old, your knowledge of course is going to matter. So I would read. Ten pages of a book a week. And a place to start there. And that will compound. The books will get increasingly more difficult and increasingly more challenging as you get off to the races. And you'll feel accomplished. You'll have that progress principle. You'll feel like you are making progress. On skills, this is quite an interesting one because the thing that ends up making an 18 year old valuable in the economy and in the working market. And this is kind of paradoxical, isn't if they go and get common skills. Crazy thing about life is it doesn't necessarily reward you for common skills. It rewards you for having a rare and complementary skill stack. So when we think about an entrepreneur, we think they have the skill of entrepreneurship.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  No, they have 10 underlying skills which made them successful at entrepreneurship. And actually in life, the people that become number one in an industry aren't necessarily the best at any individual underlying skill. But they have the right set of rare and complementary skills. If you're training to be a lawyer at this moment, instead of tripling down on law, what I would highly advise you to do at that age is to think about the rare and complementary skill that this industry is going to value over the next 10 years. I would recommend that you go and do one semester or one course on large language models and artificial intelligence. Because the lawyer that has that isn't paid the same as the lawyer that that's even 10% better at law. They are paid hundreds of percent more in terms of value if they have rare and complementary.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  The best football player in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo, that played at Manchester United, as you'll know, he's not the best at any individual skill. He's not the best runner, not the best penalty taker, not the best. I'd go on and on and on. He's the best player in the world. The reason for that is he has the right set of rare and complementary skills that aren't often found in one person. So again, going back to this point of skills, I would tell April

• 39:34Speaker 00

  to think about the rare skill that's going to be complementary that her industry values and start compounding there. Um. Number three was uh net uh network.

• 39:44Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  So this is every conversation you have. You don't realize at eighteen years old that every conversation is a seed you're planting. That may blossom in the next five, ten, twenty, thirty years. I had a conversation in a queue as a fourteen year old with a guy. And at eighteen, his dad hit me up four years later, having not spoken to me and was the first investor in my company. It was a conversation I had in a line. Every conversation is a seed that will blossom. So I would tell her, which is quite uncommon for young people these days, to get out and speak to people face to face and be polite on every interaction because you never know when those seeds blossom later. And fourth is is your resources, which comes back to what we're saying about saving. You know, learning for a more secure relationship with with your money. And the fifth is your reputation, which is simply just how you treat people.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  All of those things will compound over the next five, ten, fifteen years of your life, and they will be slow. And then they will be fast. In the same way that I met that kid at fourteen years old, Jay. And then all of a sudden, I'm at his father's mansion in London and his father is saying to me, we want to give you your first, you know, ten thousand dollars for your business. It's slow, then it's fast.

• 40:51Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Those that focus on what they can give and what they have to offer end up getting what they want. But those that focus on what they want never give enough to get what they want.

• 41:03Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  And so it's this reframing, and this is why I start with these five buckets, because they orientate you to becoming a valuable person in the world. And I believe that the downstream consequence of you building up your own personal value, which is your own knowledge, your own skills, your own relationships, is wealth. So that the orientation needs to be an internal locus of control. What can I control? And how can I make the the world reciprocate with value, which is what we end up calling wealth? And it's a it's a slow approach, but in life, the slow way is the only way.

• 41:33Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  And and every fast way that they try and sell you on some course or some ad is is is actually the extremely fast way because there's no such thing. So.

• 41:42Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Patience.

• 41:43Craig Robinson?

  Let's let's back up, though, because what I found really impactful in this discussion was when you said

• 41:54Craig Robinson?

  you've always had a tough relationship with money. And it didn't change until you changed how you felt. About yourself.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:06Craig Robinson?

  And so if April or anybody out there is in your shoes and they have already developed a poor relationship with money, how did you go about changing yourself? I would love to hear the strategy behind that because I think our listeners could, they could really benefit from that advice.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Nearly every trauma, small T trauma that I overcame in my life actually came from writing.

• 42:37Craig Robinson?

  Okay.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Because writing is this remarkable thing where you you put down how you acted, your behavior, how you feel onto a piece of paper, and it gives you this almost third person view from thirty thousand feet as to the patterns and cycles in your life. So when I think about my avoidance in romantic relationships, it wasn't until I started writing about it that I understood myself. And I deeply believe that self-awareness is is one of the other powerful approaches to overcoming some of these things because you can read as many books as you like, but you will never learn a thing until you start learning about yourself.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  And I don't think most people have a practice for this kind of sort of self-awareness. For me, for mine was writing. Funnily enough, at the age of, I'm going to say nineteen, twenty years old, I made a commitment. Every single day I would write a tweet and I would post it. And I thought it was a, you know, looking back on it, it was probably the single most important thing that helped me to develop my sort of personal wisdom, my self-awareness, my articulation.

• 43:37Michelle Obama?

  I I think about it in terms of, you know, sort of a simpler concept of we have to practice the behaviors that we we want to, how we want to live out our lives. We have to practice who we want to be every every day in in these small little incremental ways that, you know, if we we want to be fearless, then we have to take those small little, you know. Fearless steps, you know, something as insignificant as if you're shy, you've got to, you know, walk across the room and introduce yourself to somebody. You have to just push back that initial discomfort and fear and just do the little thing.

• 44:22Craig Robinson?

  So, so this is, this is a perfect time because you're talking incremental and you're talking incremental. But let's come up with a few takeaways that we can give April here. So if she's not taking notes, she can, she can come away with something.

• 44:38Michelle Obama?

  Before we do that, one thing I do, I would love Stephen to address before we dive in is the, the, the current economic sort of instability that we're facing. Because that, April's question is sort of, how do I do this? But today it's also, how do I do this now? I mean, you know, you, you saw Brexit happen in your country. And, you know, what we're seeing happening today could impact all of what the advice that we're giving. Because, you know, if there are tariffs, if there are layoffs, if there are, you know,

• 45:21Michelle Obama?

  if the economy is fundamentally changing, or maybe it, it doesn't change the advice that you give. But I, I want, wanted Stephen to sort of talk a little bit about what he sees happening here in the United States as compared to what you've seen at Brexit and, and what folks need to be thinking about, or how, how we need to be thinking differently about securing some kind of financial stability or just surviving in this climate.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  There's so many things that come to mind. I think when the economy is uncertain, I think is the word that I'd use it, both in the UK and in, in other markets around the world, because we are in a global economy. I, I do think, I think you have to do a bit of a pre-mortem. And what this means in terms of finances is you have to play out the scenario now that your income, your job, your financial situation was at risk and you have to plan. A pre-mortem is something we often do in business where we imagine the business has failed. And then from today, we ask ourselves why it failed and what we should have done today to sort of preempt or anticipate that moment. So this is why having a bit of a rainy day fund is highly advisable if you're able to build that up. And in certain markets, start thinking a little bit about your spending.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  But the most important thing, and my unwavering bias is always to try and advise people on wealth creation in these moments as well. Because that is the life raft, that is optimism, and that is longevity. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier about how to make yourself valuable in an economy that is shifting quickly and is uncertain. And the great thing about the internet now is we don't need the mentors that we once used because in the palm of our hands, we have the entirety of the world's information if we know it's there, we know the value of it. And we have the sort of proclivity or we have the mindset to lean in and to mess around. And that is the game, just mess around, learn, use your weekends on YouTube, learning stuff, self-educate. In that regard, education and information has been democratized.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  But we don't necessarily act like it has been. So that would be my overarching message for April.

• 47:27Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, that is, that is a unique perspective. And it starts with believing that you can do it because this is all at everyone has these tools at their fingertips, but if they don't believe that they deserve to be at that table or can be at that table, then they won't explore it.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Amen. So I'd tell, I'd say to April to understand what her limiting beliefs are through journaling. And then to run an experiment of stepping over a couple of them and doing it anyway. And it's remarkable how that will just compound your life in the most unbelievable direction.

• 48:03Michelle Obama?

  Because everybody's trying to get rich quick and fast and do it with the least friction possible. There isn't a level of patience because people are trying to get stuff. And you learned at 23. You know, and I learned later in life and Craig it later in life. It isn't the stuff that makes you happy. It is, it is, I just, you know, it's, it's hard to say this with a straight face without people saying, well, great, you know, you lived in the White House, you, you know, you own this, you're wealthy people now. But I'm going back to, you know, the lessons that our father knew. I mean, this was the other advantage of being raised by our parents is like my father as a working class,

• 48:48Michelle Obama?

  black man on the South Side of Chicago, knew that money was not the thing that would bring joy to our lives. We have to raise kids who understand that you have to build a life where you give more than you take in order to get anything in life. And I just want to emphasize that to April and, and everyone else listening. You know, the real work is with self and then finding purpose that is bigger than self. And when good things come from that, and if those things look like financial gains, great. But the work will still bring the happiness that you think the, the, the money will bring.

• 49:32Craig Robinson?

  Good.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Amen.

• 49:34Craig Robinson?

  Good.

• 49:35Michelle Obama?

  Are kids in your future?

• 49:36Speaker 00

  I hope so.

• 49:37Craig Robinson?

  Here we go.

• 49:39Michelle Obama?

  Oh, I gotta, I gotta know.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  As you're returning, you don't have. No, we start, we're trying now. So yeah, we're trying to have kids. I hope to have many kids. I hope to have four children, but you know, one would be amazing.

• 49:51Michelle Obama?

  How would you start off their sort of better relationship with money? What would you do differently?

• 49:58Speaker 00

  I would, I would do exactly what your, your father did, which was I would invite money into the room and I'd, I'd sit them down at the table and I'd explain to my children exactly where money comes from, what it does in the world. And then also some of the great things that you said, Michelle, where you talked about actually what matters more than that. This idea of being a valuable person and cultivating worth and value in yourself so you can pour it out for other people.

• 50:27Craig Robinson?

  There's some good takeaways there.

• 50:29Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Craig Robinson?

  There's some good takeaways there for April, so. Steven, we cannot thank you enough for being here. You are, I'm sure you hear this all the time. You're wise beyond your years, clearly. But you have a tremendous way of communicating points to folks like me and make me feel like I'm learning something with every word that comes out of your mouth. And that is truly a treat for, for us.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, by the way. It's such an incredible honor.

• 51:02Michelle Obama?

  For taking the time. I'm just so impressed with you and just grateful that your voice is out there. I think you're, you're gonna help some folks in a major way beyond, you know, what you create and what you build. You're gonna change some lives. So just keep on keeping on.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Thank you, and thank you for changing mine.

• 51:27Craig Robinson?

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• 51:42Craig Robinson?

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