Why Smart People Make Stupid Money Decisions - Dave Ramsey

Let's talk about uh both of our favorite topics. Dr. John Deloney and it's his favorite topic. It is. Oh man, I um a star though. I mean, he has blown up. He He's brilliant. He's quick. Uh and he's helping a lot of people. We're real proud of him. I have no idea how I wasn't familiar with him until relatively recently. I guess the internet's a big place, right? And um but he's great. He's he came out to see me here in Austin. We immediately had that did we just become best friends moment. And uh yeah, he's he's phenomenal. His insights are great. He seems to have I'm going to put this he's got kind of a Ramsay uh signature to him in a way. Quite firm. Uh I would say uh sometimes bordering on scary. um uh moderately intimidating but also uh sort of warm and sort of feels like he's doing it like a a particularly brash uncle that needs to give you the sort of kick in the ass that you needed. Yeah. That loves you and uh but'll tell you the truth. And that that's what we all try to do around Ramsay and uh portray both of those things. A we love you and B that means we have to tell you the truth uh for your own good because we care about you and we want you to win. and continuing to do that u horrible thing that to yourself is silly. And so whatever it is, whether it's John or any of the rest of us, but John certainly has fallen into that fold. And he's he is brilliant. He's very articulate. I mean, I'm in the third meeting with him. And our uh we're talking about, you know, interviewing and talking about turning him into a Ramsey personality. And he's so quick on the draw. I went, "You can do this. All we got to do is put you on with a microphone and start answering questions." He didn't even know what it was. And I'm like, look, the I've done talk radio for 30 years. You you draw fire and reholster before the bullet hits him. I mean, it's quick. And so, uh, he he's really really good and he does care deeply. How do you describe what you do? Let's say that someone meets you and they're not familiar with you. You're at a cocktail party. You're you're at a gathering of some kind. Oh, David, tell me about what you do for work. How do you des how do you uh coalesce the uh myriad of different things that you've got going on? You know, I I these days I would just tell them, you know, I'm the CEO of Ramsey Solutions and we put on a bunch of podcasts and a bunch of curriculum and have a bunch of bestselling books and um you know, YouTube and all that stuff. And and I'm one of the people that does all that as well as be the CEO. So, it's kind of like that. But I mean it's it there's 1100 of us in a building and there's 500 people doing tech all day long. So uh and I've never written a line of code in my life. So that's freaking intimidating. But that that's all part of the picture. But I I don't you know uh I I don't I don't want to try to one up somebody to cocktail party. That's not But yeah, elevator pitch, if you will. That would be it, I guess. Yeah. Is that where you've imagined that you might end up when you just started doing little talk radio, coaching people, speeches in a bad suit as you said? Yeah. Um I uh uh you know I think I think what I did realize because I've been entrepreneurial my whole life and I I did see the size of the need and getting people out of debt is not exactly a niche market. I mean it's massive. We always laugh and say me and Jenny Craig got a big job, right? And so it's massive. It's everybody, right? And so I I saw the size of it. What I didn't know when I was, you know, 32 years old and uh opened the first little 800 foot office and so forth. I didn't have any idea how much work it was going to be and I didn't have any idea how much um I was going to have to learn. And uh of course the rate of change in the marketplace because in those days there wasn't internet um you know and so talk radio am talk radio and we were on FM talk radio when it first came out as well um and then on satellite on XM and Sirius when they launched those satellites as two separate companies originally and later combined. Uh but I mean so we're we're just dabbling in the front edges of whatever was going on in the marketplace and trying to get to all these people. But to to scale the thing, man, I look back 35 years, I I was really I had I had no idea how much work it was going to be and that I would need 1100 people in a building to do it. I I just thought, you know, there's a lot of people need help. I'll go help them. Do you think that people need to be ruthless to become successful? Is that true in your experience? I would have to define ruthless carefully if I did that. Um they have to be uh passionate. uh they have to be enthusiastic. Uh do they have to slit other people's throat to become successful? If that's ruthless, no, you don't. Uh a matter of fact, my experience is quite the contrary. The more people I help, uh even people that are in the same space we're in, um uh and you know, the more times I can assist somebody, a a young person in one of these content spaces spaces and they come around Ramsay and you know, we'll show them what to do, show them what we're doing. We don't have any trade secrets. This is how we do what we do, anything. and show them a technology or a piece of software we're using that they didn't know about. Anything I could do like that, I'm not worried about it cuz a rising tide raises all ships. I'm really not going to go out of business because somebody launches a uh somebody in their 20s or 30s launches a very successful YouTube financial whatever. And there's a bunch of them there. There's several really sharp people doing that stuff right now. You included, of course. And um so uh yeah, anything we can do to help. I don't have to cut their throat to win. Uh, but I do have to bring it. I've got to drive the ball hard into the end zone. It doesn't show up there by itself. So, that part of ruthless, yeah, I would go with, but not the taking down of others part. A positive some mindset is uh a good idea in business in your opinion? It's the only thing that works. Uh because you know I've um you know for instance we made a decision early in our career that other people in our space that we disagreed with um you know I could talk about the ideas all day long and not even mention the person. There is no reason. So, like the very first book I had come out, Financial Peace, it hit the New York Times and there was another little book uh that week or or that month that was coming along and it was this lady and I'd never heard of her. Nobody had ever heard of her, but she was she was running behind us and I'm kind of looking over my shoulder going, "I'm a brand new guy." And I got I got somebody chasing me from behind right here. And then all of a sudden, uh, Susie Orman goes on Oprah. And oh, she just exploded and she zoomed past us so much all we'd got was her dust. And, um, and Susie and I have both helped a lot of people. and uh she and I don't agree on a lot of things, but I I don't speak ill of her ever. Uh and I because I actually don't think ill of her too. But again, there's odds and ends within the financial spectrum we might disagree with, but there's no reason for me to trash Susie Orman in order to build myself up. That's just not necessary. So, we just decided, yeah, positive sum game is is the way to go. And you know what? It's worked out really well. I think people can tell. Uh, you know, it seems to me that anybody that's been in business for a sufficiently long time and hasn't realized that if you start to screw people over eventually it comes back to get you. I don't know whether it's karmic retribution. I don't know whether it's you're just rolling the dice uh interpersonally in the same way so many times that eventually somebody cotton on and it's the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. But people get what they deserve in business, I found. Yeah. And and sometimes it works out positively. I mean, I can think of two guys in the radio business that in the early days hated our show and just trashed us in the marketplace. They said, "We'll never put you on one of our radio stations. You're just awful and you're country fried and you it's not entertaining." And you know, they would just insult us. And we would go to these conventions and we would say, "Oh, so and so don't stay away from him. He's he's like angry about the whole thing. And u then you know they're they work for big corporations. They get fired and they're out there doing consulting and both of them ended up working for us uh before it was over. And so obviously they came around and didn't work for us while hating us. But uh but but you know over the years I wore them down is what it amounted to. And then when they were left vulnerable and we could use the influence that they had by helping us get on some other radio stations. Um, and they had actually had a true change of heart. Not cuz I gave him a check. Um, but it was fun. It was kind of fun. It was kind of looked back and went, "Wow, that worked out pretty well." Dave Ramsey killed me with kindness. Who would have thought it? Um, yeah. So one of the current trends or two of the current trends that I see that are very popular amongst some of my friends but a lot of the internet one is that uh college or university in the UK is a waste of time that any sort of formal education doesn't give you that much of an advantage that it's kind of a net negative. Uh and the second one being that given that you can work from anywhere remotely that most people can solo entrepreneur their way to some degree of independent ownership of what it is that they do. Uh that a 9 to5 is um is quite often dergated in in one form or another. What's your thoughts on the usefulness of formal education for people who are thinking, hey, I want to be successful. I want to feel secure. I want to be able to build a life that's good for me. And then what do you make of the uh 9 to5s if a suckers you should always go and work for yourself? Uh higher ed has made a mess of itself. It did two things that has completely damaged it to the point that the pendulum is swinging all the way over to where you're talking about. Used to be everyone needed a college degree. Now no one needs a college. It swung and part of that just higher ed's just been stupid. The two things that they did was um number one, they drove people deeply in debt that that could never get an ROI on that degree. Uh I mean the the the amount that they're charging and then uh and facilitating trillions of dollars of student loan debt now with an S. Trillions. Wow. Um you know, they just screwed people over by overcharging. The second thing that's kind of a subset of that or a sister to that is that they they presented people with ridiculous degree fields that absolutely have no chance of having any utilitarian value in the marketplace. So we always laugh and say you get a degree in left-handed puppetry and you go 200 grand in debt to do it. Well, both are useless. I mean, it's just silly or left, you know, German PA history, you know, what are you going to do with that? Be a barista? I mean, this is just dumb. And so, uh, but higher ed presented that as a valid use of those dollars, a valid use of studying, a valid use of your brain cells to actually get a degree in something absolutely asinine. Um, and so that that that has caused people to throw the whole baby out with the bathwater and say, okay, well, an accounting degree is of no value. Well, that's dumb. Of course, an accounting degree is of value. it would you would learn how to do accounting, you know, and and there you therefore you could be a CPA. Hello, you know, and so that's, you know, if you want to get a law degree, if you're going to be a lawyer, you're going to, you know, I hope my doctor actually studies before he cuts me, you know, I mean, so this idea that all academia is needs to be thrown out and is is ludicrous is also ridiculous. So, you know, we just tell people buy get get a good buy on your education and study something useful. So, don't pay 10x what you need to do to get a marketing degree. Uh go to the you know, you're in Austin. Go to the University of Texas, right? Uh which is a great school. It's not that stinking expensive. if it's an instate school and it's probably 12 $14,000 a year tuition and uh or you can go over to some crazy thing that's got a brand name on it and pay 80 grand a year for basically the same degree. Well, that's dumb. Don't do that. And then and then study something that's useful. So I I'm big on education. Just on that point there, um I learned from Scott Galloway that students who leave their university in the top quintile I think uh get the best jobs regardless of which university they go to. So basically what you should be trying to do is track the university level. Also you should be thinking about how expensive is this going to be. But if you were a a a pretty smart kid, going to a university where you're going to be one of the smartest in the class is a really good idea. Going to a university where you're going to be 30th percentile, 40th percentile down, that actually is less predictive of you coming out and getting a better job. So, I thought that was a interesting twist. I I'll add to that and go the job you get when you're 22 coming out of undergrad is irrelevant. What matters is what happened 10 years later. Mhm. What where are you when you're 32? Now, the difference in two two students of where they are when they're 22 and 32, you start them at 22, they start the exact same career field, they come from the same university, and they end up in two dramatically different places. Translation, the degree didn't cause it, the individual did. The hustle, the perseverance, the scrainess, the grit, the I will not be denied. The the what we were talking about earlier, the you know, that version of ruthless that's not throat cutting. You know, I'm I'm going to put the freaking ball in the end zone. That's who you're the secret sauce, not your degree. Degrees don't make people successful. They put tools in the belts of people that were going to be successful anyway. So, I use my statistics class that I took 40 years ago. Almost every week in the, you know, running Ramsey, I actually look at, you know, the data coming in. I use the accounting that classes, the multiple accounting classes I took to get a business degree at the University of Tennessee. 40 years ago. I use it almost every week here. So, those are tools in my belt. Did those things cause Dave Ramsey? No. No, they didn't cause this. They're just something that was just a a a good saw, a good hammer to do the work with. And so, what we need to teach people is to uh how to scrap and how to have grit and how to get up, leave the cave, kill something, and drag it home. But then give them a good weapon to kill something and drag it home with. And that's what education's for. So where you go to school, there is not a single piece of data anywhere that says where you went to school is correlated with success. As a matter of fact, 76% of the CEOs of public of the top 500, the S&P 500 publicly traded companies are public school graduates. They didn't go to Harvard or Yale. 76%. So that has it's so it's got to do with, you know, again, the individual. So, we teach kids, hey, go be somebody and get you some tools, but don't go, "Oh, I've got a degree." You know, I had some guy come into my office a few years ago working for us. He's like, I got more degrees than a thermometer. And he's like, well, people pay out here. They pay 100 They pay $100,000 more than you're paying for this. And I'm like, dude, you work for a small business. We don't respect degrees. What we respect is effort and what we respect is results. And so, your raise here is effective when you are. What about the working for a business versus building your own? I've been working for myself my just about my whole life. So, I'm a huge um advocate of starting and running your own thing. I I love that. And I love that the um the this huge upheaval of uh uprising of entrepreneurism and start something and side hustle and all of that. um because of the ease of access into the marketplace with the digital tools we have now. But the 20somes, the Z's and the millennials, uh they're the most entrepreneurial generations I've ever seen. I'm a I'm a classic boomer, but I've got a ton of the Z's. I got probably 500, 600 of the Z's working on my team. And they are an incredible generation. Uh they're very entrepreneurial. They're very passionate. They're very missiondriven. They question everything, which is what it takes to win in business. Uh and and I just I they question, you know, why why do we do this? They don't just assume. Boomers just assume that somebody knew what they were doing. Uh Z doesn't assume that cuz they grew up with a magic wand in their hand. They could push a button and stuff showed up on their doorstep. So, they don't assume that anybody knows what they're doing, which is awesome. So, I'm big on that. But should everyone be in business for themselves? No. No. Well, I mean, I meet plenty of people that, you know, the way they're wired, the their their personality, the way they look at stuff, uh, you know, that they they'll do great. And you can get with an organization and be a part of an organization and be very entrepreneurial and and be a key part of that and bring all those same skills without being a soloreneur uh, with your iPhone in your mother's basement. You don't have to do that in order to be entrepreneurial and be successful. you can take those same passions and skills into the marketplace if you find the right organization. I like to think our building's full of them. Um cuz I don't really want people here that are just doing a jo. Do Gen Z and millennials face a uniquely different financial landscape than boomers or Gen X did. Uh they're much Z's are much more serious. Uh the ones that are I got to qualify that there's two Z's. There's no middle ground. There's two types. Awesome. I thought you might I thought you might bring this up. Yeah. Yeah. It's uh and so like taking calls on the Ramsey show. We get a Z on the air that they've got they they've studied all our stuff. They know our steps. They know exactly what to do and they're just calling in for some clarification on a nuance cuz they're already they're already on the bike riding, baby. I mean, they're going uh cuz they're very serious-minded, very focused, the ones that are, and uh they're going to have unbelievable wealth as a result because a they're starting early, and two, they've got this singular focus. Uh they're not distracted by everything shiny, where like boomers, you know, you think about uh you know, the movies in the 80s and stuff, greed is good, Gordon Gecko, and all that. You know, boomers were about acquisition and flash and the big car and the Rolex. Uh Z's don't give a crap. They want to get it done and they want to stack some cash and the ones that are on it and and so I I again they're very easy to teach uh because you're not having to light them on fire. They're already on fire. You just got to point them at something and and then pull the trigger, right? And and so it's a lot easier than lighting wet wood. And so I I love again I just I've got a huge respect for them. I enjoy working with them. And I like arguing with them because they they bring some they bring some good arguments and they because they question everything. Why you say that, Ramsay? Who you think you are? I don't care if 20 million people listen to you every day. I don't care. I want to know. I'm I'm 19 freaking years old and I'm going to question that you have any sense at all, Ramsey. And that that's fun and it makes good radio, too. You mentioned before uh some of the predictive traits that somebody coming out of university or a young adult would have. If you were to design a successful human, somebody that's going to go on to become wealthy, independent, be able to forge the sort of life, uh, from a financial perspective and from a sort of a commercial perspective that most people want to, what would be the traits that you would give them? What would be the sort of things that you would bless them with? Well, that's a beautiful question. I'd have to think on that for about a week. um off the cuff, which is probably not a great answer, but that's only only option we got here. Um I when I made my first fortune, I was I was a millionaire before I was uh 26 and then I lost everything in the next two and a half years. Uh that guy is no longer here. Uh that not I not only went broke, I was broken. And so the arrogant little twerp uh got the snotbeat out of him is what it amounts to. And so um I'm still very confident uh but I'm not I I was very me centered again Jaguars and Rolexes and so on. Uh and um and I didn't get joy from that even before I went broke. The joy I've gotten in the following 30 years serving others, helping others has far exceeded any acquisition of anything or any uh number on the net worth balance sheet. Um and so the first thing I would tell them to do is learn how to serve to be other centered instead of self-centered. There's greater joy in it. You're very attractive. The marketplace will eat it up and the money will come as a byproduct. But if you make money the target, it doesn't come as a byproduct. What does that look like structurally or tactically? How do you implement that? What I'm ask is think about if you go the mac take about a macro version of you going into a real fine dining establishment and you got my wife and I had a nice dinner the other night with an incredible service and the guy brought over the psalm and we picked out an incredible bottle of wine and he talked us through the the these James Beard chef's selection, right? and the whole thing, man. We left there. That guy was part of our family. He served us. We didn't learn about him or his kids. We didn't want to hear about his goals in life. Uh we didn't have a chat about whatever. We got food and wine and he took care of us. And we, you know what we did? We left a mammoth tip to say thank you. And my friend, Rabbi Daniel Aen says that when you serve your customers well, uh, they give you certificates of appreciation with president's faces on them. And, uh, Blanchard says that profit is the applause your customers give you after you did a good show, not before. And so, um, profit comes when you serve. You can't beat money away if you love people in mass. And the more of them you love and the more of them you help with their lives and with their dreams, money will stack. You'll have a basement full of money. It's crazy. It just comes at you. You can't keep it away. And so, but I was the opposite in my early days. That's why I brought that up. I was going trying to get money. And the byproduct was I got none and I didn't get happiness either. And I didn't get joy and I wasn't fulfilled and I got some stuff. But if you get enough stuff, it's just stuff. and he with the most toys when he dies is dead, you know. So, I mean, it's just what is it? And so, this this existential crisis, if you will. And so, the serving of others would be the first thing and be other centered and let profit take care of itself. Uh, the second thing I would add if we're going to put ingredients into this individual is uh somehow I would install work ethic uh with seven doses of grit and perseverance. Um, so I uh you know I had one guy come in here and he said, "I'm burned out." And I said, "Dude, that's impossible. You were never on fire." And so I mean, you you just you it's just, you know, I want to work as little as I can possibly work and make as much as I can possibly make. That's not how it works. You you you you reap what you sew. If you put a little bit of corn in the ground, you get a little bit of corn. If you put a lot of corn in the ground, you get a lot of corn. It's a simple thing. And so when in doubt, get up and go do something. When you're scared, go do something. When you're mad, go do something. Uh when you're happy, go do something. Just be doing something. Be out there kicking it and moving it around, trying something new, falling on your face, failing forward. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get. And and there's no substitute for that. Well, I don't want to be a workaholic. I'm not suggesting you be a workaholic. When you get home, turn it all off. Be there with your spouse. Be there with your kid. pet the dog, that's fine. But while you're at work, work. People sit at the They sit at work and look at Facebook and they're not in the SEO business. I mean, you're just are playing some stupid game on their phone. What in the world? Do your work, man. I mean, work on your work. And so, um, you know, if you work in a carpentry crew and everybody else is swinging a hammer and you're sitting around checking your phone, somebody will throw something at you, you know? I mean, so act like that. Get after it. And so you got to have that that that uh pinchant for action and grit and perseverance that follows under the heading of work ethic. And so you know that and and then I would this next thing I would add is just where there is no vision the people perish. So start looking down the road. Where are we going? Where are we going with this? And start setting some short some long-term goals and then the short-term goals that cause those long-term goals to appear. And so in other words, if you said I want to lose weight, okay, great. I want to lose how much? Uh 30 lbs. When? 90 days. Okay, that's a long-term sort of goal. And you go, okay, so what are the short-term goals to do that? Well, there's exercise every day that includes aerobic movement. There's water intake and cut out the gluten and the sugar. It's not rocket science. You don't need Oprah to tell you how to do this. Everyone knows what to do. But now you've got to do the daily habits, the daily goals that cause the long-term goal to hit. If you want to make $100,000 a year, what is that? as $8,333 a month, how many things do you need to sell? What do you got to do to do that? And start breaking that down into daily activities that are going to take me to that annual income goal. If I want to make a million dollar a year, how many of these books do I need to sell? How many, you know, what have I got to do? And and you can you can break it out. It's simple sixth grade math. And then you break it down into a daily activity that creates that goal. So, this vision out to the future that drives the daily work ethic and gives you inspiration and hope that as I push this through, okay, man, we're ahead of schedule. We're ahead of schedule. We're ahead of my daily goal. In the last 10 days, I'm at 12day mark. Good. All right. Boom. We're on. And so, I can keep going. I may get there even faster than I thought. And you just keep laying it out that way. And goals are just when they're done right and they're yours and you own them and the math is put with them. They're very motivating. And it's it's vision with work clothes on. Yeah. I think the point on how hard people work, there is a unique category of hell where somebody complains about results that they didn't get from work that they didn't put in. Yeah. And I mean it's cause and effect. You're seeing cause and effect happen right in front of you. And there's not really anything that can be said there. You mentioned, you know, I guess you alluded during uh your first the first phase Ramsey 1.0. I guess uh pre- bankruptcy uh that was a getting the kicked out of you and then turning that around realizing oh wow I wasn't as smart as I thought this was difficult and then you also said that grit determination some kind of resilience is one of the traits that you would look to give to somebody. I think a lot of the time I'd be I'd be interested to know whether how much hope you had during that moment while you were during the real financial strife because in retrospect it's very easy to weave a narrative together of this is why I needed to learn this thing and look in the grand arc of my life I have come into land with much more insight and wisdom and I can see that for what it was this was somebody that was too flash that was overleveraged that was using debt in a way that wasn't efficient and I paid the price and this is how I've come out of it but In my experience, during that process, it doesn't feel like that at all. There's no grander purpose to this thing. You're just wallowing in uncertainty and fear and confusion and and and self-doubt and and criticism and pay. Um, so I just want to kind of get a sense. Let's say that somebody hopefully not bankruptcy for a million dollar tuned up to the an amount of a million dollars, but somebody's going through a bit of a rough time and you're like, look, this is a way to try and reframe that difficulty right now psychologically so that you can start to see things with a little bit more equinimity. And I wonder how much you were capable of doing that at the time and how much this is you uh retrospectively realizing that it was good for you. uh it ebbed and flowed at the time. And so the I I I distinctly remember standing in the shower sobbing with it so hot in my face I could barely stand there cuz I did not know what to do. I was so scared I couldn't breathe. And I have a a wife and a brand new baby and a toddler. And the poor woman thought she married Sir Galahad and turns out it was Goober. And I stand there feeling like a complete abject failure. our water and our electricity to our home with two babies got cut off. I mean, it was unbelievable. Uh, so yeah, it, like I said, it not I not only went broke, it broke me, but I I was so scared I couldn't breathe. And then I'd walk out in the sunshine and find some little deal, find some little thing, and go live the next day, little vitamin D, and go to church. And the pastor would be inspiring. I'd have some some a good moment in prayer where I felt like God was talking to me. You're going to be okay. Uh I distinctly remember uh we filed bankruptcy in August. I mean in September, September 23rd of 1988. I was 28 years old. Uh I'm 64 now. But I can remember like it start like it was this morning in August about 30 days before we filed. I I couldn't sleep and I got up at four o'clock in the morning and I was the kids are asleep. Sharon's asleep and I was sit sitting in my little recliner and I had some books stacked there that I was reading and I had a Bible sitting there and I was just crying. I was scared. And um I thought, "Okay, God, you're going to have to help me cuz I don't know how to do this." And um I randomly opened my Bible and it fell open and I just started looking down the page and there was uh Romans 5 and it says, "Rejoice in your tribulations." And I looked up at heaven and I said, "I don't think so." Wow. And uh because tri- tribulations create perseverance and perseverance character and character hope. And um so I I don't know how much closer you can get from hearing a message from God than something like that. That hasn't happened to me very often in my 40 years of being a Christian. But sometimes you get those chill bump experiences and you go, "Oh, that was my heavenly father going, "Uh, yeah, it's tough, but you're going somewhere with this. Hang on, kid. You're going to get there." And he put his arm around me and I got up and I went to work that day. 30 days later, I filed bankruptcy. So, I was at the bottom. I mean, that was the a, you know, the the end of the valley. Right there is where that was. But rejoice in your tribulations because tribulations produce perseverance and perseverance character and character hope. And hope is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And so I needed some hope and I needed to see that there was a that this was going somewhere to your point. And so again, it ebbed and float. So, you know, 20 minutes before that I'm a basket case. Right after that, I'm strengthened and ready to go for at least a little while longer. Right. And uh and that's happened to me throughout my life. Um, even running Ramsay, we'll have, you know, a massive success on something and then there's a a massive failure and I'm looking up going, "You've got to be kidding." You know, and so when does this get easy? And it doesn't. And so, um, I have a weird prayer life, but yeah, it's a very antagonistic relationship with God that you've got. It seems It seems passive aggressive sometimes. It seems very He's not He's not scared of me. I'm okay. But yeah, that's that that that's but I I I'm just a real dude and that's that's the way it was. And so whether it was a a spiritual thing like that or whether it was a friend coming alongside, I distinctly remember about 2 years after the bottom, we were starting to teach some of this stuff and there were three people that cared and you know that kind of stuff. And a buddy of mine, I was sitting with him uh at a bad one of those bad buffets like a Golden Corral type crap or something. And we went and he's like I was whining about how hard my life was and how bad it had been and how horrible the last four years have been and all this. And he's like, you know, you want some cheese with that wine, dude? Really? I mean, you just you you got enough lemons, you should probably make some lemonade. And he goes, you need to take these experiences and use them to help other people, and then you're probably going to get healed yourself in the process. And and that's kind of where it went. But again, there there was days where I didn't know what to do. And then there were days I felt fortified, lifted up by a friend or by a a spiritual encounter or by whatever. And so it was an eb and flow. But did I look in the moment and look out 20 years and go, "Oh, God's going to use this for my good." No, not even close. No. You railed and you were mad and you were sad and Yeah. I think it's just I have this sense that we have a skewed perspective of the trajectory of people coming back from rock bottom or from pullbacks that they've had in life and errors and failures. Uh because most people see those stories portrayed through movies and the Rocky montage is three and a half minutes, right? But in reality it can be five or 10 years. Yeah. Exactly. And you're looking around going, "What the is going like how is this? This is this is not this isn't the way it's supposed to be. I didn't sign up for this story." Correct. And the self-belief of the protagonist rarely waivers. Sure, they're going to meet some heroes journey challenges. There's going to be little the bad guy comes out before the fight's available to ready to start and wrecks his ankle or whatever it is. His coach gets put into a a coma and he needs to be able to do the the competition without him or whatever it might be. But the self-belief never waivers. And I think in my experience, uh that's not the way that personal growth and that life trajectory goes at all. that no you are going to swim in a lot of self-doubt and uncertainty and there's not even the promise of any glory at the end and that makes the whole thing feel scary because you go maybe I'm just applying all of this effort and I'm going to end up at an even more broken place in the future and you know that that false narrative that uh that that you just bounce back you know that thing like I remember when I came out with the first book I was being interviewed I don't know some today show or something like that and the guy goes, "So, you lost everything in your 20s and now you're teaching people financial peace. How did you bounce back?" And I I remember it just hit me like that was stupid. And I said, "Dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce. It's more of a splat and he just looked at me just like that wasn't the answer that fit the narative you're talking about." Yeah. And so the the thing I would say though is if if someone's watching you and I right now talk about this and they go, "Yeah, I'm in the soup." Um people do react two different ways to being in the soup. We all have the uh the fear and then the momentary courage or the momentary hope followed by u you know another another injury followed by another betrayal followed by a momentary we all have that. Then the choice you have to make, the individual has to make while we're in that. And I made that choice semiconsciously was you can choose. All right, I'm going to quit. I'm going to adopt the victim language and I'm just going to sit down cuz I quit. And those are the people that never recover from their divorce. They never recover from their business loss. Uh or you can say, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so lost. I don't know what to do. But I do know I'm going to take the next step. The next step. I'm going to take the ne I'm going to do the next right thing that's in front of me and the next right thing that's in front of me. And it might even not be the right thing, but I'm going to do the next thing. And and sitting is not an option. I'm going to keep walking. So, keep walking if you're in this. And the old country song, you know, if you're going through hell, keep going. And um and so, but I I meet people that uh and they call on the show. was like a lady called the other day and she's talking about her divorce like it happened 20 minutes ago and I'm like how long ago were you divorced? 40 years. I'm like honey you're still living emotionally back in that thing. The language she was using was fresh. And and she's still sitting there mad at him and he's gone and gotten two other wives since then. I mean, you know, right? And move on. And so, um, but that it's real easy to quit in that. And it's not a quitter thing. It's um it's just this natural reaction. I'm I'm going to get up one more time, even though I don't feel like it, and walk out into the sun, get a little vitamin D, get a little prayer, meet with my buddy, and let him make fun of me, and then I'm going to get after it again. And I'm just one more time. One more time. Right. Yeah. I I remember toward the end of my 20s and I was really trying to sort of work out some of the predictors for when I felt better and when I felt worse, when I was when I was in the soup, as you would say. And uh I remember I wrote it, action is the antidote to anxiety that you really don't fear the future when you're moving yourself toward it. Um and it's a vicious spiral because the very thing that's hardest to do when you are struggling is precisely the thing that would make you feel better, right? You your motivation is at its lowest. You don't want to get out of bed. You don't want to go to work. You don't want to think of a new idea. You don't want to apply effort to something or pick up the bar or not eat the comfort food or whatever it is. stick to your routine. Uh so, but then when you start to roll that boulder a little bit, it accumulates an awful lot of momentum, which is exactly how you see people get unbelievable outcomes. How like this seems super human. How does this how does this person get so much done in a day? How are they so successful? How are they so balanced? All the rest of it. So, well, they are on the positive side of the same momentum that is currently kicking your ass. Exactly. Yeah. We developed a little theorem around here to talk to our team about this uh called the momentum theorem. Focused intensity over time multiplied by God equals unstoppable momentum. And one of the things we talk about in the little book I did on it was just this idea that when you have negative momentum, you are better than you look. When you have positive momentum, you are not as good as you look. That's great. That's really, you know, and so uh so don't believe the lie either way. And so you know you if you got positive momentum you are harvesting crops that were planted yesterday not this morning that they were planted a year ago put them in the ground and today I'm getting this fruit and everybody thinks I'm a genius but it was actually a year ago I was a genius and or you got you got crops going in the ground there's nothing coming out of the ground yet and you're planting you're planting you're planting nobody can see you nobody knows you're there you uh but you're a lot better than you look cuz wait till the rain and the sun comes. There's going to be a crop in the spring and suddenly you're going to be that genius. So, you know that that's how that stuff works. I I remember talking about going through this stuff. Uh this idea of walking, continuing to walk that you brought up. I love that. We were snow skiing the other day in Telluride and I'm a mediocre snow skier for a 65-year-old dude, right? Uh but I like to go down the hill and go fast. I enjoy it. So, you know, go. And so, I'm skiing with my uh kids. They're like 40 and 30 years old and they they haul butt. I mean, they go and so the old man's trying to keep up and he's huffing and puffing. So, we jumped off a lift. We were running cruiser blues, you know, good and double blues, that kind of stuff. We had a black every now and then, but they were cruisers. They were grooming groomies. So, we jumped off it and there's this one run on tellide that when you get to the top of it on black, it's a it's a it's a groomed black and it's unbelievably steep. You can see downtown Telleluride and it looks like you're going to fall into Main Street when you fall. I mean, it's right there. It looks like a toy box and there's nothing between you and Main Street. It's just air. It's that steep. It's an unbelievable. And I pulled up on top of that thing and I looked at one of the kids, you know, these 30-year-olds. I'm like, uh, they went, "That's steep." And I went, "Yeah." And if I stand here about three more heartbeats, I'm going to walk back because I'm getting really scared. So, I got to go or the fear is going to take me over. And I thought, you know what? That's what I've done half my life. You got to go or the fear is going to take me over. I Because if I stood there, I my heart rate was going. This was just the other day. I was scared, you know? It's like I was scared, but I thought, you know what? If I can I can do this stupid thing. I can ski it. I know I can ski it. But I if I stand here and think about it, I it's going to the the fear is going to kill me. There's a I I want to give it a better term than cultivated stupidity. Uh conscious ignorance maybe you could say or tactical ignorance around things that yeah a lot of the time there is um there is a period where you're supposed to plan where you're supposed to reflect and ruminate and and and sort of think about stuff but that can be a trap as well. And I think that a lot of people who like to listen to shows like yours and like mine, uh, they'll be thinking about their thoughts, they'll be thinking about themselves, they'll be strategizing. Um, but there is just a there is absolutely a time for straight action without having to ruminate too much. Yeah, you can get paralysis of the analysis. Yeah. What are some of the biggest psychological errors that people make when it comes to thinking about wealth and business building? What are the the traps that people fall into? Uh, you know, one of the ones I've been working on a lot with our Entree Leadership clients, which we coach about 10,000 small businesses, you know, under the brand Entre Leadership that this book is in, as a matter of fact, it's in that same brand. And the uh and then of course we work with uh people on the financial side. And so I've been in, you know, I did the book Millionaire, uh, Baby Steps Millionaires, and the number one again, teaching people, you know, here's what these millionaires look like. We did a huge study on millionaires. Here's what they really look like. And so in both of those cases, I'm spending time with the wealthy or I'm spending time with a successful small business person. In either case, I'm uh appalled at how much damage the uh antisuccess movement has done to their psyche. I'm appalled that they've actually too many of them. They're they're very successful on almost every front, but when I look at them and say, "You haven't done anything wrong. You did everything right is why you're successful. You are not a moral repbate for becoming wealthy or becoming successful. Quite the opposite. I'm proud of you. You have done good stuff, my son, my daughter. And I'm amazed at somebody that's got a $5 million net worth and I look at them and say that and their body language changes. Their shoulders go back. their head comes up because this communist negative uh anti-wealth anti-success stuff that is floating around has had an impact on them and and impacted their spirit. the hope stealers, I call them, has stolen a lot of these people's pride, their hope. Uh, and uh, and I I've started getting quite frankly pretty angry about uh, these people that are spreading this negative thing about successful people because I got to tell you, man, I know a lot of billionaires, not just millionaires. And the percentage of wealthy people that are bad people is lower than the percentage of the population. Now there is bad people among them. But they did not get there by doing something wrong. By and large they got there by doing more right than anybody else did. They served more chicken. They served more pizza. They served more business help. They served more something than you did. Shut up. you know, and uh man, but they it's amazing to me to sit with a guy who's got a 15 or $20 million net worth and a guy like me from a redneck, a hillbilly can look at him and go, "Dude, I'm proud of you. You did good." And he goes, "You know, I did." But nobody says that to him. Everybody says, "You're a dog. You're an idiot. You're a crook. You must have done something wrong." the Eat the Rich and all this stupid 1enters and Operation Wall Street's language and all that garbage that's out there and it's having an impact on success is now getting a bad name, you know, and it didn't used to have a bad name in America. Yeah. Where do you think that's come from? Uh communist college professors. Okay. Uh but if that's surely those communist college professors were were they in tenure when the people that you're speaking to were going through college. Yeah. Yeah. They've always been there. I mean honestly truthfully there's very little pe there's very few people that believe that communism is a better system than capitalism unless they're on a college campus. You can't find them. You can't even find them in communist countries that think it's better than capitalism. The more there's nothing more capitalistic than a good communist. Right. uh honestly. And so uh but this idea of equal wealth for unequal effort and call that fair. That's not fair. Guy works 60 hours, he should make more money. Guy works six hours. That's not fair. You make the same money and you work. That's not fair. My kids used to say growing up, "Well, Dad, that's not fair." I'm like, "Fair is where the Tilta Whirl and the cotton candy is, kid. You know, you want some fair, go get some." Yeah, I I'm very grateful that where I'm from, the northeast of the UK, it's spit and sawdust, blue collar stuff. There was no airs and graces. And in some ways for the British people that are listening and the Australians and maybe some of the Canadians and maybe the working-class Americans as well, uh that has some pains um because if you try and stray from the beaten path a lot of the time that's locked down on that's not exactly supported. You don't you're kind of in a role model desert a lot of the time. There's not people. I was having dinner with some Aussies and they said tall poppy syndrome. Correct. And uh I said, "Well, that's not an Aussie thing. That's an Aristotle thing, but okay." Yeah. Still, it's a little older. It's a little older than Australia is. Yeah. Yeah. But still, it's, you know, that poppy that you can't stick your head up. You must be cut down. Yes. And in envy and jealousy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um I I really didn't like that. But one of the things that it gave me was uh people like the sort of person I didn't want to be like and avoiding pitfalls are almost as important as expediting successes. So, okay, I don't want his relationship with his wife. I don't want the way that he drinks his problems away. I don't want the fact that he seems to be using gambling as his get out of jail free card for all of the problems that he's got, etc., etc., etc. And uh it's not working. your your your your ideal your value set is not working the fruit is not there and you look at that and go okay I don't want to do that correct but uh one of the things that it does give you is no hes or graces or expectations no sense of um entitlement precisely correct precisely correct there's no there's zero entitlement what myth of martyrdom are you going to have you weren't promised anything and I think uh I wonder whether the anti-walth health movement in America is kind of like a bastard love child of the American dream from the '60s that if you give people blue sky vision, white picket fence, this is the sort of world that you can get. It doesn't really matter where you started, you can ascend into the middle class and maybe even above, that's a big hope. And if you get to the stage where the world doesn't deliver the thing to you that you expected or that you hoped, uh even if by pretty much all metrics, Gen Z and millennials financially, even adjusted for inflation, are in a a pretty good spot, intergenerational competition theory, they compare themselves to where their parents were at their same age, their ability to access things like housing and their uh level of comparison across the internet. Even if they are wealthy, they don't feel that wealthy comparatively. And that means, well, maybe there's something wrong with the world. Maybe this is unfair in some sort of way. Maybe the system is broken. Maybe work actually isn't the the solution to these problems. Maybe I shouldn't be resilient. Maybe the system is the issue as opposed to the meritocracy or my efforts that I've put in or the way that I've approached things. Yeah, the I get the uh disenfranchised feeling. I I understand that. been there myself. Uh we were just talking about that. But the um you know, the mean old banks took Dave down, right? The mean old IRS took Dave down. The president changed the tax law and it affected the real estate business in the 80s big time. Shut down the entire SNL industry because of that. And so I was a victim. I was a victim. I was a victim of all these things. And uh and yet I was the one signed up for the trip. I No one made me sign those documents. No one made me sign those mortgages. No one made me do any of it. It was it was an act of my free stupid will. And so I had to kind of get through that. So if you're going to stand and scream at the machine, 40 years later, where are you? You're still standing there screaming at the machine and you've had 40 years of a substandard life. So it just doesn't work for me. It's it's impractical to me. The philosophy that philosophy is uh I'm going to be a victim. I'm going to scream about this. I deserve better. The the the system is broken. You can yell about all that if you want, but you're not controlling any of the controllables. Your only option to have a higher quality life is to control the controllables. And uh are are there is there racism? Yes. Is there sexism? Yes. Uh are people uh less likely to believe a guy that is bald than a guy who has a great head of hair? Yes. Uh there's baldism. And so uh there there's all kinds of things that can hold you back that are unfair. But I can't fix that since I choose not to have a hairpiece. I can't fix that. So I've get to do it anyway. I can stand and yell about how unfair it is that people that, you know, the people in the radio business thought because I was broadcasting from Nashville, I must not be wearing shoes and being a double wide because they had ignorant stereotypes of southern hillbillies, right? And they because they'd watched the Beverly Hillbillies when they were a child and thought that was real. And so, you know, ignorance ignorance is what all uh prejudice is based in. And and so are are those things real? Did I get did I get uh as I grew a 640 station network, did I get unfairly characterized as not being smart because I had a southern accent? Oh, like every day. And I can yell about that, but I don't think I'm going to change the stereotype of some Yankee in Cleveland, Ohio. The only thing I can do is go, you know, outlast him and then he ends up working for me later. Getting on to the principles of business, how do you come to think about people building a business that they're going to love? Um, what we started figuring out as we looked at our history and the things that we had been through was that there was actually a cadence. There was actually a rhythm to it and there was some leveling up as we went along. And we start trying to quantify how that happened and and what h and what the levels were. And then we started looking at, okay, it's not just uh gerine to the Ramsay story, the Ramsay solutions growing from a guard table in my living room to a $300 million operation today. So it's not just Germaine to that, but if I'm talking to a heat and air guy that's got 40 trucks out there and he's got a successful heating and air business, which is a lot, we talk to that guy every day. Or I'm talking to a veterinarian that's got, you know, 30 employees in a huge um large and small animal operation doing very well financially or a dentist. And these are our small business people that we're coaching all the time. What what are they see? You know, what are we seeing as we walk with them over a decade? Uh uh what what is holding them back? Where are they? And so we started identifying and trying to put words to the the framework that we were seeing naturally. Um and it was a struggle. We wanted to do that because we had the experience with the total money makeover book uh which is like 12 million copies sold now that the baby steps that we teach the seven baby steps the the fact that we gave someone a clear path caused them to take action cuz they could see that it was if I do this then I'm going to do this then I'm going to do this then I'm going to do this. It gave them the next thing to do and then they would take action versus sitting and getting as we said earlier paralysis of the analysis. So, a clear path gives people hope. If I know if I know what what roads I'm taking to get to Florida, I can step down on the accelerator because I've got a plan and I've got and I'm going to go there and I'm going to take that exit and then I'm going to turn there and I've got a plan to get to Florida from where I am right now. And so, I can go I can go I can go but if I don't know where I'm going, it's a little hard to be enthusiastic about it. So, um that's what we that's what started this whole thing. And then we built what we called the entree leadership system which is just the clear path for small businesses. The first piece of it that the book is based on is the five stages of a of a business. A small business in particular. Again, we work with 98% of our customers are 200 and fewer team members. So these are the quintessential small businesses. 54% of the gross domestic product in America today is created by that group. Over half of the economy in America is small business. They are literally mathematically the backbone of the economy. And and so what are they going through? Well, the first stage, as we talked about it early in the conversation, is the treadmill operator, the soloreneur, and I'm just going to set up a table. I'm going to turn on a computer. I'm going to do whatever. I'm going to swing a hammer. Uh I'm going to turn a wrench. I don't whatever it is you're going to do. And but the treadmill operator is when you first get started. It's exciting cuz you're you're you're jazzed up. You're living the dream. uh and you're working your butt off and it's starting to work and it makes you smile and I'm not working for the man. I got control of my destiny. It's just a blast, but you are running your legs off because you are the sole producer of revenue and you're the sole producer of the product. And so you not only got to make the widget and deliver it, but then you got to collect the money for making the widget and delivering it. And if you don't come to work one day, nothing happens. If you don't come to work for a week cuz you're on vacation, revenue goes down because no one else is producing revenue. you're on a treadmill. At this stage, I would come home from work and flop down on the couch and my wife would go, "What'd you do today?" And I have no idea, but I did a lot of it and uh I'm exhausted. And so just run, run, run, run, run. I was working 16-hour days, man, getting this thing off the ground. And um and she had two little kids at home, and this is three, four years after going broke. And so now she's a single mom, basically. But we're we're going to get financial peace by God. We're going to get this going. And so, uh, you know, how do you level up out of that? Well, you by time management, for one thing, you got to start working on your business, not just in your business. So, you got to time block some of your weeks out, some of your hours out of the week, and go, I've got to take care of accounting. I've got to take care of some SEO. I've got to take care of stuff that's not just directly related to production of revenue and collection of revenue. And uh, and this is also when you hire your first people, so that you've got someone else to lift the bales with you. you're not the only one lifting the bales. And so you get you get your first person, your second person in there, that kind of thing. So you're building delegation, you're starting to build time management, and that levels you up. And then you go up to Pathfinder, we call it. And Pathfinder, you know, typically the Pathfinder's got eight or 10 people, something like that. And everybody's working their butt off and they're going in about n it's like hering cats. They're going about 92 directions, nail trying to nail jello- to a tree. We're all working hard. We're all having fun. It's great adventure. We're tired together. Uh there's not a lot of uh planning. There's not a lot of uh role clarity. The communication is driveby communication. We just would say, "Hey man, I'm heading out the door. Go get something." And you know, we just we're just moving. And and but you start making a little money and the whole thing's not on your back. And you can start leveling up out of that by starting to put mission and vision in place. Starting to get some role clarity. Look, this is your job. You got to get that done before you work on this other thing. We got to really start to have key result areas, some KPIs. You start measuring some things. Uh and then you'll level up and you'll go to Trailblazer. Trailblazer is fun. It's the middle one. Uh and uh this is when you actually think you're going to make it. You know, we're getting there. And uh we actually think we're going to bust through this thing and there's a lot happening. Uh but there's almost no planning. A lot of it is thank god it's Friday. Oh god, it's Monday. you know, and you're just go go go go go again. But you don't have good systems. You don't have good processes. At this stage at Ramsey, we were killing so many trees cuz we had stuff on paper. We had 73 spreadsheets trying to time together to create a P&L. The accounting system sucked. And this is Dave freaking Ramsay. And the accounting system sucked. I can't believe it, you know? But it was like cuz we had all these different business units and they were all kind of running their own thing and then we're trying to get them all talk to the mother ship and and it was it was awful. It was very disorganized, very chaotic. And so you start really putting in place something entrepreneurs hate, which is some governance. And you say, "All right, this is the process. We're all going to adhere to that because otherwise we're going to kill each other." Uh, this is the system, and we're going to do away with the other systems. You can't have 73 types of software. This is the one we're using. And and people get mad and they, "Oh, you're becoming corporate America now." No, I'm just trying to keep from going crazy. And you know, and so you know, and you just keep doing that stuff and then you'll level up and hit the most, the best one of all, which is peak performer. This is the best of the five. Peak performer, man. You got a welloiled machine. You're bailing cash. You are making profit like you never thought you'd make in your life. Things are working. You start to look good. People start to want to interview you because you're so smart. You are uh, you know, people, you're able to attract talent cuz this thing's shiny. It's working. the systems, the processes. We got good strategic thought. When I was at the Trailblazer stage, I couldn't spell strategic. Everything was tactical. But I I hired some MBAs accidentally because I was trying to get some talent on the team. And I don't have an NBA. But these guys, 100% of the NBA programs teach strategic thought. And so these guys started tell showing me the importance of getting above the problem, seeing a 30,000 foot view. Quit running into the wall, Dave. If you turn right then turn left, you can walk around it and burn less calories. But you got to get above it to see the way around the wall. And so it's slow down a little bit, get above it and and develop a good map to Florida, right? And and so uh I always laugh and say these wonderful people stop taught me strategic thought and I taught them how to work. So um then we move, you know, so then you get up in this peak performer. There's only one negative thing about peak performer is uh you can start to believe you're great and slow down and uh quit iterating and quit breaking it before it's broken. And those are huge mistakes. And so the trick at peak performers, shock the monkey, baby. I mean, get the get the cattle prod out. Just turn the turn the fruit basket over. Just have emergency meetings. Mess with people. Mess with the thing. So we we cannot rest here. We're not as good as we look. what we were saying earlier, we got big time momentum, but we're not as good as we look. And we're not going to fall for this lack of humility, this hubris that Jim Collins talks about and how the mighty fall. This is where they fall. And they get hubris in the peak performer. And if you can just stay dialed up there, a lot of companies spend, you know, two decades in the peak performer stage, never move out of it, and just bail money. The last stage then is the stage Ramseay's at, which is the legacy stage. And that's where you start to think about, okay, how's this go on generationally? What happens at the end of the founders's life or the end of the founders's career? How are we going to exit? Are we selling out? Are we bringing in joint venture capital? Are we going to do an IPO? Are we going to hand this to the next generation of family? Uh what are we doing? And you got to start planning and and working on a good 15 years succession plan. It takes a good 15 years to build a solid and execute a good solid succession plan. People that do it in 15 days fail because you just toss the keys out as you grab your chest and fall back into the grave. And so um that that doesn't work because the customers don't know what's going on. The vendors don't know what's going on. The team doesn't know what's going on. And the old man that started it is now 80 and there seems to be no plan. So it's hard to attract and keep talent. Who wants to work for that? Because when he dies it's going to fold up like a Walmart tent. And so, you know, we don't want to do this. And so, we started working on ours 16 years ago at Ramsey and uh we're deep into it and it's troubling emotionally, but it's it's the noble and the right and the wise thing to do at the at the legacy stage. So, those are the five stages in a in a quick rundown machine gun style. And that's what the book's about. And then there's six drivers that run you through those things. We talked about one of them a lot, the personal driver. My the problem with my business is the guy in my mirror. the solution to my business is the guy in my mirror. That's the first of the six drivers. And so that's the framework that becomes the clear path that gives you hope if you're running something that I can level up at each one of these things and it's going to get a little easier and then something else is going to get a little harder cuz it's at scale. Now, what are your principles and process for finding and hiring good staff? It seems like that's very important to move people beyond each level and something that probably a lot of soloreneurs get stuck on. It's the number one pain point in small businesses is hiring and keeping and firing. Hiring and and keeping talent and and firing. Uh because small business people love their people, their family. Uh you you by the nature of the fact that it is a small business. I know them. They're not a a social security number that I can cut to get stock price up. This is somebody I sit and have lunch with. I know their dog's name. I know their kids' name, you know, and so this is a a process to lead these folks in that kind of a setting and to hire them and attract them. Uh so what what you've got to do is you're continually looking for not only people that have talent uh and uh uh but people that are on fire for what you're doing and we call them crusaders at our place and that that align with your core values. It's more important that they align with your core values and that they're enthusiastic than it is that they have talent. Because if you bring in a talented player onto a football team and he disrupts the locker room, he takes more from the team than he adds. He could be a Hall of Famer and still hurt the the team more than he helps the team on the field. Uh because, you know, nobody wants to block for the guy. He's a butt, you know, and and that's what happens in a business as well. So, we made the mistake in business like we did with education of saying, "Oh, if you have a piece of paper, that's all you're that's your qualification. You know, you've got the talent, you got the certification, you've got the degree, who cares if you're a jerk? Who cares if you sleep around on your wife? Who cares if you're uh doing cocaine? As long as you do your job and you got the degree, then then that's all we care about." And that's a huge mistake. You cannot build a a uh a quality culture, a productive culture, a safe place for people to work with those kinds of people in the room that you know, every time we let crazy in our building accidentally, we find out what door they use and we put a lock on it cuz crazy will shut the fl freaking place down. You burn all your calories dealing with their drama instead of getting your work done. And it's like, God, I wish I just had didn't have team members. I wish I had just me. It'd be a lot easier. Well, yeah, cuz sometimes I feel like I'm running a beauty parlor, you know? It's just ridiculous. And so, but that's how small business people feel about it and how I have felt at times. So, we just became um uh militant about not letting the wrong people in the building. Uh yeah, you got to have talent, but that's secondary to you've got to be aligned. You got to be ready to go. And that's why I've got the quality of Jenzers that I have. That's why, you know, I told you I got five or six hundred of them that are in their Gen Z and they're fabulous. They'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol. And don't you mess with Ramsay cuz they're part of Ramsay. They'll take you down. How do you assess? How do you find, assess, and motivate people to have that level of passion and buy in? Uh, I don't motivate them. Uh, you can't motivate people. Uh, I I I I hire motivated people. And so do you need to incentivize them appropriately? Yeah. The and it's not necessarily money, it's culture. Uh give them a place to work that's real. Give them something to work on that is changing people's lives, that does have meaning. Give them a the ability to participate in meaning in uh that kind of stuff and plug into that and they'll tell you. They'll tell you upfront. That's the other thing about Gen Z. They're just they're and millennials too. They're just brutally honest. They're like, you know, I'm just looking for a job. M uh you don't fit in here. We don't have anybody works at J O. Everybody here is on the team to put the ball in the end zone. Man, this is like a passionate thing and you you're going to stand out like a sore thumb if you're mailing it in around here. Does the importance of building culture in that sort of a way lend a advantage to businesses like yours that have a single spot where everybody works? I don't know whether you have anyone that does work remotely. I imagine there must be some contractors somewhere that have to contribute to tech stuff and and servers and things, but I imagine that that level of motivation, that level of culture building, that level of buy in is significantly harder if you've got a team that's distributed around the world and never sees each other. I I would suspect it is. I've never run anything like that. I don't know, but I think your your observation is probably correct. Uh it's one of the many reasons that we work at work. Uh we don't have any team members that are on our payroll that work anywhere except in this building. Um and there's 1100 of them. Uh but the uh uh we do have some contractors and vendors of different kinds. Obviously they don't work for me. Uh they work for themselves somewhere. I don't know where they work. It's not my job to keep up with them. But the people inside the building because then we create this um you know so much is transferred with body language and tone. so much so much quality of communication is. And so when I'm sitting in a meeting, we can have a really constructive argument, a good fight about a bad idea or a good idea now a and not uh not kill the players. It's two it's two guys in the huddle going, "No, don't run the ball over there. That that they've been catching us every day over there. Let's go let's go up the B let's go in the B hole and instead of the A- hole." And so, you know, you're just arguing about the play being called, not the competency or not the dignity or not the quality of the player. That's not what we don't fix that in the huddle. But we get in the room, we do everything so collaborative and and we have a healthy level of conflict continuously around here. And uh the longer you've been here and the longer higher in leadership you are, the more uh dramatic some of that conflict is to where to to where a an outsider visiting that room might be really confused as to what they were observing. Uh that they not they might not understand how much trust and love and respect is actually in that room that allows you to talk like that. But uh it I mean we we we get at it. But that's it's all an act of love because we're all trying to get the same thing done. And you can argue with me and go, "Dave, that's a stupid idea." Just like I can tell you that same thing and go, "But I'm not going to call you stupid. That's different than saying a stupid idea." And navigating that through a Slack channel as opposed to person face to face. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Uh talking about money problems, you know, we we've touched tactically on a lot of different things today. Do you think that uh money problems are existential problems in disguise? Is there something deeper going on that it's an outgrowth of something uh that somebody's self-image, some spiritual issue that they've got going on, some existential problem, or is it all does it all just come down to tactics? No, it's 100% what you're talking about. You're exactly right. Uh there was a guy on Christian radio when I first started named Larry Briquette. He's since passed away, but he used to say, uh, money problems are not the problem. They're the symptom. There's something else going on. They they're the symptom of some extreme thing going on or some minor thing going on. Could it be greed? That's a, you know, that's that's the problem. And then that's going to lead you to do what I did, build a house of cards, and it'll fall in on you. Uh, could it be uh immaturity? Could it be uh I'm trying to prop up a self-image? Uh could it be a cocaine addiction? Um, you know, we've had the, uh, honor of walking with a whole lot of people into their sobriety over the years in a lot of different kinds of addictions, and 100% of addicts have have financial trouble eventually. Uh, 100%. There's no exception. And so, I just a matter of time it shows up in the money always. And so, um, uh, but that that's the extreme, right? But the, you know, the money problems could be from a marriage problem that they're not. So, the symptom is not really the fact that that we can't get along and so we're doing revenge spending with our spouse or we're hiding stuff, financial infidelity, and we got six credit cards my husband doesn't know about or my wife doesn't know about. Uh, that kind of stuff. All of that is symptomatic of a broken relationship. It's not the problem, it's the symptom. And so we all that's that's one of the reasons the Ramsay show uh over all these 35 years from talk radio to podcast to YouTube now has been so popular. It's so compelling to watch and listen to it because you're not really getting the financial question. You're really getting these people's lives which are compelling. I mean it it's like watching a sometimes like watching a train wreck, you know, and sometimes it's like watching a victory a victory dance. They just won the Super Bowl. the debt-free scream, right? And so all of this is a personal visceral victory. And so that's what's compelling about the show. It's not that we showed somebody how to do a Roth IRA. It's personal growth masquerading as a way to make wealth. It's somebody changing changing their life. It's just that finance is their particular current bug. For some other person, it might be their body weight. For some other person, it might be their marital status. For some other person, it might be their friendship circle or the place that they live or whatever. And this is the vehicle for personal growth. Dysfunctional family origin. You family, you know, origin where they grew up. They just grew up in a toxic situation raised by wolves and they don't know how to do it. And so, um, hey, I understand. And, uh, you know, I grew up in this neighborhood, it gave me that mindset up. I grew up in that neighborhood, it gave me that mindset. And so, uh, you know, all of that is in the in the gumbo and you stir it and you stir it and you put the spices in and, uh, and you keep stirring and you can make some good gumbo, but it takes a minute to get there. Dave, your analogies are the stuff of legend. Nailing jello to a tree. It's like a Walmart tent that needs folding up. I just look as a Brit we just do not have this level of color when it comes to the the the analogies that we use. Um you've mentioned I've heard you mentioned before money is 80% behavior and 20% sort of head knowledge. Why then is it so hard for people to change their financial behavior even when they know what to do? If money is mostly behavior as opposed to knowledge, why do smart people go broke? And why do people change struggle to change if they've got the tactics in front of them? I as soon as they believe that it's going to work, they change. And as soon as they believe deeply, they change dramatically and scare all of their parents. Is that hope? Believe as in I can do this thing as opposed to believe in the strategy. I think if I plant this corn this way, I've never done it before. I'm actually going to get corn. So, I'm going to plant the corn. You know, I think if I Okay, the debt snowball. I'm going to list my debts smallest to largest, pay minimum payments on everything but the little one. Attack the little one. It's not mathematically correct. Well, actually, technically is. I'll tell you in a minute. But the uh but but it's not. You know, we're pay What about the highest interest rate? Shouldn't we pay that off first? No, you need a win. So, you believe. You need to get the locus of control straight. You need to get a sense of agency, a sense of I can control the controllables. I am actually driving this bus. I am not a victim of the culture. I can actually control and I can actually pay this stupid car. You pay off a little $500 credit card. You go, "Okay, that's one down. Maybe let's try it again." And then you pay off a $1,500 and then boom, you knock out a $3,500 uh motorcycle payment. And then you you know, and and then as the the more they more the proof is in there, the more they get fired up, the deeper they sacrifice, the faster they go. And we all do that. And probability of completion there is much higher than the probability of completion of paying off the highest interest rate first because it might take three years before you get a win. Uh and so when you factor in probability of completion, the debt snowball is mathematically superior to doing it the other way. But nobody puts in probability of completion in the mix. Psychologically superior, right? And people actually do it. They don't do the other one. That's the difference. Look, I I've had a number of conversations. Uh Richard Dawkins was one of the people that I had this this conversation with, and I tried to explain to him why uh trying to force people either out of faith or into uh whatever worldview it is that he wanted um through raw what he would consider rationality is fundamentally uncompelling. Because what you're telling people to do is to deny the thing that's most real to them, which is story, narrative, persona, uh, uh, legend, archetype, and rely on the thing which is most unreal to them, which is statistic, probability. It's I I I that we have no sense of that. And I think that you have I really appreciate the first I I learned about your debt snowball. Um, you're right. mathematically uh in raw spreadsheet terms mathematically sub-optimal uh but as soon as you fold the complexity of a human and our motivation system into it makes way more sense and it and again probability of completion. So, uh, as a result, and so that that's what it is. That's why the seven baby steps, that's why the clear path, that's why we went back to that same motivation on the business outline we just did was we're still trying to show, okay, I'm a treadmill operator now. When I'd level up on my time management, I get my first team member, I get to move to the next level. Oh, this is working. This is working. I'm going to I'm going to work a system. I I see a believable system and I'm going to plug into it. Uh if you go to the gym and you you you run for two hours on a treadmill and uh a and you change your diet and eat sawdust and uh crappy food, crappy tasting food because it's healthy or whatever uh and then you gain weight, you will quit. You would only do those punishing activities if they unless you're a massochist. You would only do punishing activities in in order to win. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but it yields a harvest of righteousness. Yeah. Things are going to be hard, but you can do hard things the hard way or hard things the easy way. And uh trying Deloney says, "Choose your hard." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He does. He does among many other things. Uh what about people who sort of self- sabotage their wealth once they achieve it? You know, somebody's finally reached something approximating escape velocity and stuff's comfortable. What have you found from all of the people that you've spoken to, your studies? Wh why do people end up tumbling back down? Most of the time it's because they believe wealth is morally reprehensible. It's a cognitive dissonance to engage in something you believe to be wrong. It's not sustainable. Uh you won't humans won't continually enga engage in things over a long period of time in things they morally believe to be wrong. um even if it's quote unquote profitable. And so if you have bought into the wealth is evil or the wealthy are bad people or crooks or whatever and then you become one uh how do I how do I handle this dissonance in my brain, this disconnect in my brain. Well, I have to self-sabotage is what ends up happening. And so, uh, and and they'll even do stuff like, uh, you know, sometimes I'll I'll see wealthy people, uh, and we all know the names that say, uh, well, I'm not leaving my children any wealth. Well, that's what that says is that I did something wrong and I wouldn't do that to my kids. Wealth is evil, so why would I put it with my children? And that's usually where that comes from. It's the same thing. It falls in that same bucket. And so um uh I guess there could be other psychological things we'd have to ask Deloney or somebody with a PhD in counseling. But but in my mind, you know, pop psychology, there's probably a a sense of I'm not worthy. That might be a secondary reason of I don't feel like I earned this because everyone has a sense of a turtle and a fence post when you get there. If you see a turtle in a fence post, we know two things. One is it's a curious sight and two is he didn't get there by himself. And so, uh, you you have that sense of I didn't get here by myself and I must, you know, and so I I owe some kind of debt to society and, uh, because I'm not personally confident or worthy. Now, if you get there with a healthy self-image, you say, "I had a lot of help. I had some good folks help me. I got a few breaks. I had God blessing me. Uh, I I'm not completely responsible, but I'm also partially responsible because I'm actually the one that did this stuff. And so, you don't take a 100% credit, but you don't try to cast off and take no credit. That's a good healthy mental state when you get there. And those people don't self-sabotage. But if you feel like you did something wrong or you feel like um like uh uh I owe a debt back to society because society gave this to me. I didn't do anything. I'm unworthy of this. Then you have to somehow disband the thing. Isn't it interesting? We went from greed is good to wealth is bad in some circles. What a what what an arc. Um what do you think about how social media distorts our understanding of wealth and success and what we should have by a certain age. It's a serious problem. Um the uh in the old days there was a book out called Affluenza and they could track the amount of television you watched. In other words, the advertisements that you consumed. Uh the more tele more hours of television you watch, the more credit card debt you had, the more overspending you did. Uh today you can take that with an exponential factor into social media. Much more powerful. Yeah, it's much more powerful. It's much more uh uh the the influencer role uh so to speak is more is not as commercial. It's not as in-your-face. It's much more subtle and the influence that it has of people putting their highlight reels of their life on Instagram. No one puts crappy stuff about their life on Instagram, right? Uh we always, you know, real children don't look like those kids. I mean, really, seriously. I mean, where did you get those stepper children and those my children were never that clean all at once. How did you pull that off? You know, you're looking at these pictures going, "Who are these people?" And uh I mean, no one ever says, "Oh, my husband just got me a 1994 Honda Accord and we're debtree. # blessed." You know, no one does that, right? And so, um uh but but so it's all this highlight reel. It's not real. And it's interesting to me the word that we use for it is it's virtual. which literally means not real. And yet we treat it in our psyche as if it's real. And so then we get this idea that, oh well, because of Chip and Joanna, everyone can fix a house up. No, honey, you'll hurt your hand with that hammer. Not everybody can fix a house up. That's You're going to cut your finger off that saw. Do not do that. And so not everyone needs to be touching these power tools. And so, but it's it's it's a facade. I mean, it's not real. It's like walking through a Hollywood set and you walk through the front door of a house and there's nothing back there. Uh, it's not real. And and uh that's the problem with it is it's pedalling a lie. And and then you your psyche knows that. Your intellect knows that, but your psyche buys it anyway. And then based on that, I hit um uh you know, put stuff in the cart and hit submit. going back to some of the trends that we've seen both on social media and also I think uh some of the anti-wealth or money negative perspectives of sort of the modern world the classic middle management position that takes up a big chunk of people who are helping you know some medium-sized business the average American working an average job uh do you think that that middle management position the average one now earn earns enough is the cost of living crisis a spending crisis or an earning crisis. Um it's probably both that but the solution is to understand the when people look at that uh and frame something up the way we're talking about there it it's a it's not an accurate portrayal of life because all we're doing is taking a snapshot in the moment and if you had taken a snapshot of me right before I filed bankruptcy right after I filed bankruptcy I mean and and said okay we're going to analyze the economy based on the macroeconomy, based on where Dave sits right now. I mean, he's a college graduate. He's a father of two. He's 28 years old. And uh look at where he is. Uh that snapshot was would give you zero hope. But snapshots aren't how life works. Life is a film strip. It's a series of snapshots strung together. And the next frame something's different. Better or worse, the next frame something's different, better or worse, the next frame. And so the film keeps running. And so that guy in middle management is not there uh for 40 years. He didn't get there and stay exactly in that place and never move. That that average American doesn't stay there. They they move around. I mean the average person now has 14 positions before they retire. So he's not going to be there. We know that. And um and here's the thing. I I'll run some numbers sometimes. I'll say, "Okay, if you saved 15% of your household income and you had an average household income of $70,000 and you rent it out and and you did that for um uh 14, 15, 20 years, whatever, you'd have $7 million in your 401k." Okay? You just run the compound interest out on the average household income, saving 15% of their income. It's easily north of $5 million. And I'm like, but that is based on the fact that over that 15 years, the guy never got a raise. So he started at average and for 15 years never got a raise, which by definition is a loser. How do you start at average and not go up at all? You know, I mean that by definition, so this is not how humans work. They go down, they go up, they go down, they go up, and but there's an overall trajectory of up. Very few Americans end their career making less than they made at the beginning of their career. Maybe you take a 35 or a 40-year career path and you go, "Okay, in and out of jobs, in and out of careers, maybe change complete directions, but at the end at the at the apex of my life, when I'm at my maximum earning potential, am I making less than I did when I was 22 years old and I just got out of school?" No. Almost zero. You can't find them. I mean, now you could have the exception be a medical problem. You could have all these other things, but I'm talking about just in general terms, that's a fairly easy set of assumptions. So, bottom line is if you're in your 20s and houses are too expensive because interest rates are 6% and your wages haven't kept up with what the boomer curve was, which are all accurate mathematical statements, you'll be okay. Cuz when you're 30, it's going to be different. It's going to be different. Rates will be up or they'll be down. House prices will be up. Your income's going to change. And I don't know what the average income's going to change, but your income's going to change 100%. Your income's going to change. And can you outpace can you personally outpace the uh fact that wages haven't kept up? Well, I did and you did. So, uh, and John Deloney did and other people do and we do it all the time. So, go do that. That's your thing. Are you familiar with a guy called Gary Stevenson? It's Gary's Economics on YouTube. I'm I'm sorry. I'm I don't keep up with things the way I should. I might not have I'm gonna uh I'm gonna send it over once we're done. I would love for you to have a look at at this guy, British guy. He was a trader uh I want to say for Goldman. I can't remember where he was, but he was one of the one of the top traders for a while at Goldman. um and is now campaigning from a very aggressive left-leaning perspective in the UK for uh super high taxes on high net worth individuals. Uh and he's talking he's talking like 20 million to 50 million and above. He's particularly trying to target billionaires uh non-domi people that are able to come and not pay tax on their global stuff. But he is on fire in the UK. Uh, every video that he puts up on his YouTube channel is a million to two million plays. Every debate that he does, he's on BBC uh, News uh, Channel 4's News Night. He's on BBC Question Time. And um, I would be I'd be very interested I would be fascinated to try and work out a way to get you and him to have a sit down and have a discussion to see what America versus the UK because a lot of people in the UK now have this perspective. I think it's a an outgrowth of pain. And it's an outgrowth of um expectations not necessarily being met. Cost of living is very bad there. Lots of unemployment especially among people under the age of 25 which you may have seen. Um and then a very different sort of message uh coming from the other side of the pond. But I'll send you I'll send you some stuff to to have a look at. Uh I I think you'd be very fascinated to see what's going on in the UK at the moment. Sure. It sounds like a you know quintessential argument just between capitalism and socialism. Uh I mean John Mayor Kanes was British obviously and Keynesian economics uh you know came in with FDR and was arguably uh some people say one of the things that turned the America around out of the great depression was government spending and taxing the rich uh to do that and um so the Keynesian economic mentality has now invaded all of the American colleges as well. I was taught it as fact as opposed to Adam Smith free market uh you know capitalism as fact. Um, but I had good critical thinking skills and so I've gone past that and I don't I think John Maynard Kanes was a Um, and so I really have no use for that. So you're saying that you're saying that the British don't have an illustrious history of providing you with uh Well, not that guy. I mean I don't, for all I know, Adam Smith might have been British. I don't know. But the uh uh he probably was. But the father the father of capitalism. But uh uh I'm it's not about Brits. That's not the for me. I mean, I I uh uh I don't have a problem at all with that, but it's just a matter of okay, do we believe that governmentrun and governmentmaintained lifestyles give us the answer? And uh the truth of the matter is is that probably in America today uh the little man, the guy starting from nothing has a better chance of building wealth because of the freedoms and the ease of access to the markets, the ease of access to information. uh if he has drive or she has drive and has two brain cells to rub together, you probably have a better chance of becoming wealthy in America today starting from nothing than and in any place at any time in history. And it wasn't because we took it from someone else and gave it to you. It's because you have access to go get it. And that's the difference. That's the difference in the mentality it sounds like. I don't I don't know this guy at all you're talking about. So I'd be interested to look at it. Yeah, that'd be fun. Dave Ramsey, ladies and gentlemen. Dave, you're awesome. Uh, I knew that I was going to enjoy today, but uh, you exceeded my expectations. So, you too, brother. I've heard big things about you guys. You're blowing up. I'm so proud of y'all. Anything we can do to help you, let us know. Uh, well, I think John has demanded that we do dinner at some point soon in Nashville, so perhaps I'll only two hours from Austin, so I'll uh I'll jump on a plane and I'll see you guys soon. That would be great. A demand to be included. Uhhuh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh, new book. Tell everyone where you can get where they can get your new book. Oh, anywhere. It's uh Build a Business You Love. And you can get it at ramseysolutions.com, but it's in all the booksto Amazon, wherever you want it. It's everywhere. Heck yeah, Dave. I really appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you, man. It was a lot of fun. Thanks. Do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a god? Is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself? Well, the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you, bespoke. So go and go and check it out.