Stephen Bartlett
speaker
413 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Stephen Bartlett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You can use them all the time and they're super cheap. And if you have to replace them, you can, but you can use them for like hundreds of exercises. And I was like, great, I'll do that. And then I was like, okay. So I was thinking about this kind of square footage for my, for my facility. They're like, dude, you don't need all that. You can cut that in half.
And I was like, okay, we'll cut that in half. And I was like, I'm willing to pay two bucks a foot. And they were like, no, never go over 150. And I was like, okay, never go over 150. And so like in a matter of a day, I got to take like all of the knowledge of all of these guys, of the mistakes that they'd all made with their gyms. And I started my first gym just on their backs.
And so how much was that worth to me? Years. And so for me, I have always been willing to pay in whatever currency was required to get knowledge that I don't know.
Yes. It didn't exist then. YouTube wasn't even a thing. Instagram had just come out. Like for context, for everybody who's listening to this, I think about this equation a lot. And I actually had some video of somebody shitting on me for this, but I'm going to say it anyways, because there's the 20% that I'm going to say it.
I'm not going to dilute myself. So I saw a salesman say this at a conference, and he wrote a million dollars on a whiteboard. And he called up a lady in the audience, and he said, how much do you make? And she said, $50,000 a year. So he wrote $50,000 underneath a million, and he subtracted it. And it said $950,000. He said, it costs you $950,000 every single year.
You don't know how to make a million dollars a year. And so the question is, what is the value of that skill? And the answer is the difference. And so the troll who responded to this originally was like, well, you can keep going. What about $100 million a year or a billion dollars a year? And I was like, yes, yes.
If you had the skill of making a billion dollars a year, then the difference between 50,000 and a billion is the delta of the value of that skill. And it's really not one skill. It's many skills that ladder up to when combined together to create that kind of value.
But I remember that being like seared into my memory, which is like, whatever I want to have, the delta between where I'm at and where that thing is, is what basically what I'm willing to sacrifice in order to learn what I need to learn to get there.
And I think that if people appraised that delta, not by the money in their wallet or the time that they currently have, but how much they would be making or how much time they would have and how much that's worth to them, then I think far more people would be willing to invest in their education. And it's such a taboo word because people hate the word education. It's like, oh, it's like work.
But you want to be an entrepreneur, you got to learn. There's so much stuff to learn.
This is widely known in the education space, but not as much in the content world. But there are two types of education. There is procedural and there is declarative. So declarative knowledge is knowing about something. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. So a simple example would be, okay, I understand how private equity works. You could talk about it.
You can explain how, okay, they take some debt and then they have this arbitrage and they get this enterprise value multiple, whatever. But you've never done a deal. And until you've done a deal, you will not have procedural knowledge of knowing how to actually do a deal. And so you can read 100 books on sales, but you will learn more about actually selling from your first 100 sales calls.
Yes. And so the idea, in my opinion, for most people is that if you want to rapidly learn, you want to rapidly do those 100 repetitions as fast as you can so that you can suck 100 times in a row and find the 10 that sucked the least and then say, how do I suck least on the next 100? And you keep doing that. So many times until eventually you suck so little that you're actually good. Hard work.
Yes. And I think, you know, this is actually really interesting because it ladders up to, because there's two types of creators. You've got entertainers and you have educators. At least that's how I separate it. The point of entertainment is to maintain the attention of the audience. That is it. So the point of an entertainer is to literally just keep people watching.
The point of an educator is to change someone's behavior. And so if you, uh, If you want content to do well in either of these buckets, fundamentally, at least in the education space, you're selling time. So education... is I spent all this time doing this thing to learn these four things that I can give to you so that you don't have to spend this time learning it.
And so education is actually, if said differently, what you do is you buy time. So when you buy, it's the only thing, it's the only way to actually buy time today. So if you want to basically time warp into your future, you have to buy education so that you can buy all of the life experiences from all these people and then not pay for it in your life. You pay for it with...
less time by consuming what they have or some money or some combination of those things. And fundamentally, we usually pay with the currency that we value least. And so, interestingly, a rich person values their time more than their money, and so they're willing to pay with money to get time back.
A poor person will also pay for their time and drive around to 10 different gas stations to find the one thing that's 10 cents cheaper or drive to 10 different grocery stores to use whatever coupons. They're valuing their time over their money in that instance. And so...
Back to the educator, if you want to be certain or have confidence in any endeavor, you have to do so much volume of activity that it would be unreasonable that you would suck. And if you were to write out the equation of like, okay, how many public speeches would I need to give for it to be unreasonable that I would suck? Is it 10? Is it 100? Is it 1,000?
Write the number that you're like, there's no way that I would suck after this many. And then all of your effort gets really narrowed, commitment, elimination of alternatives, focus, turn down quality and quantity of other things, to just doing that.
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