IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
Change Your Relationship with Money with Steven Bartlett
Wed, 04 Jun 2025
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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What personal financial experience did Steven Bartlett share?
I've never actually said this before, but when I got my student loan, I took half of it and I bet it on a football game.
You know, one of the things... What game? What game? Honestly, it wasn't even a good game.
It wasn't a good game. But it was just, it was Stokes. I didn't even like the team.
This episode of IMO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Progressive Insurance. Hello. Hey there. How you doing? I'm great. We got a good one today. Oh, I cannot wait. I cannot wait. I'm very excited to talk to our guest. But to kick it off, we're going to be talking about finance. Finances. We're going to 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've said that we grew up pretty, I would say we grew up poor.
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, and, When Stephen gets out here, we should talk about how dad taught us the value of money, you know, because that was a real great lesson.
But our father worked as a, he was a city worker 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 for her to stay home.
Right.
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, 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,
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Chapter 2: How did growing up shape your relationship with money?
Yeah, so my dad had a good job and we'd moved into this area. And my mother got into business. And she left school when she was extremely young in Nigeria. Five, seven, ten years old, roughly. She didn't get an education. So when she... And 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 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 money out of our home 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 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.
Mm-hmm.
In my household, I learned to be both anxious and avoidant with money. And you can see that in me as an adult, 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, this second person in the room, which I'm going to call money...
isn't around enough and its absence is making me feel insecure. And this is a bit more sort of esoteric, 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 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. And money.
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Chapter 3: What lessons about money did Steven's father teach?
And I think confidence, self-belief, and really any belief is a question 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 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 or not having a degree to the point that you get feedback. And feedback becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes your power in life.
Unless there are some deep inequities in your life, in your community, because when I hear you talk, Stephen, I hear the story of every other black and brown kid in the United States of America in inner cities. Yeah. You know, they are you in so many ways, you know, not connecting with school anymore.
in any major way, whip smart, hungry, capable, probably living in a lot of dysfunction, unparented in many ways. And what do they do? They do exactly what you did. But they're doing it with illegal substances and gangs. But they're trying to do the same thing, 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.
It crossed my mind.
Yeah, yeah.
It crosses your mind. And I now fully understand how people end up making those kinds of decisions. Because when you feel 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. You weigh up your options. And if you have a clear understanding of consequence, like I did, thank God. Thank God, yeah.
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