Dave Ramsey is a financial guru, bestselling author, and talk show host. He's been on the show for 30 years and is one of the most well-known financial geniuses in the business. Dave is also the author of The 7 Principles of Financial Independence, a best-selling book on how to get out of crippling debts and become financially independent. In this episode, Dave talks about how he got started in business, how he and his wife got out of massive debts, and why you should have life insurance in case something should happen to you. He also talks about the importance of having a good relationship with your spouse and kids, and how important it is to have a solid financial plan in order to keep your family healthy and on track to live a life of financial independence. Dave also shares some of his personal finance tips and tricks that he uses to keep his family on track and keep them free from crippling debts. Check out the Sunday Special with Dave Ramsey on his new book, 7 Simple Steps to Financial Independence. Subscribe to his new show on Amazon Prime and listen to his newest podcast, The Simple Thing, wherever you get your eardrums are plugged into the most powerful, most powerful and most powerful devices. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about it! You'll get 10% off the first month with the discount code: PODCASTBUILDINGAPPIRACY. at checkout for a chance to win $10,000 and receive $10 off your first month, plus an additional discount when you sign up for the next month, and receive an additional $5,000 when you shop using the discount offer, and a FREE shipping offer when you become a member of the program begins! and get an ad discount of $50 or more gets 20% off their first month and get a VIP membership when you enter the offer starts. FREE PRICING starts from $99 or more than $50,000 gets you a year and get $10 or $25,000 is available in the offer gets you get VIP access to VIP gets $4, VIP gets a course? Learn more about the Podcoin, PrimeBook and VIP membership starts in May 1st and VIP access gets $99, VIP membership gets you an ad-only offer starts after they get a discount, and they get $50 and they also get $25 or $24,000 in VIP access.
00:00:24.000But before we get to Dave Ramsey first, let's talk about your impending death.
00:00:28.000So the fact is that you're going to plot sometime.
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00:01:36.000My family's been listening to you for a long time.
00:01:38.000I didn't even know about it, apparently, as it turns out.
00:01:40.000Over the weekend, I found out my in-laws listened to you, and my wife apparently listens to you, and I didn't know about it, which says something about both our marriage and the success of your show.
00:01:47.000And I want to start by asking you, I want to get into your financial strategies and kind of your life strategies, but what is your background for people who don't know your story and how you came to your kind of realizations and program about financial independence?
00:02:01.000Well, I started out with all these letters and licenses after my name that said I was supposed to know something about money, and I started with nothing.
00:02:08.000And we ended up with about $4 million worth of real estate by the time we were 26.
00:02:12.000And back in the 80s, I was making a couple of hundred a year, which neighborhood I grew up in, we called that rich, because it was starting from nothing.
00:02:29.000We got a chance to start over with a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a thread and so kind of pierced through the academics and through the lens of faith and through the lens of common sense found really common sense money stuff and we started doing it ourselves.
00:02:48.000Maybe you can explicate some of the baby steps that you use, because I know so many people who have had serious debt problems and have been attempting to get out of those, who have used the steps that you talk about.
00:02:57.000So what are some of those steps that you talk about?
00:03:00.000You know, what we figured out was that personal finance, I kept trying to fix it with the math, because I'm a math nerd.
00:03:07.000And then I finally figured out it wasn't a math problem.
00:04:02.000And then you start your investing into your retirement, kids college and pay off your house early.
00:04:07.000Typical millionaire pays off their home in about 10.2 years.
00:04:10.000And then you're set up for baby step seven, which is just build wealth and be outrageously generous.
00:04:16.000So, I want to talk about some of those ideas, because there's a lot there, and as you say, a lot of that is psychological as opposed to monetary.
00:04:22.000So, when I first heard about your program, and I've talked to, as I say, a lot of people who have used your program, there were a couple things that jumped out at me, because I, too, am kind of a math-minded guy.
00:04:30.000The first one was, when you talk about the debt snowball, you start with small to large, you list all the debts, and you say, okay, we've got a $200 debt, pay that one off first, and, you know, build up to the big debts.
00:04:40.000And I'm sitting there going, okay, well, if you have a $200 debt at 2% interest, and a $10,000 debt at 10% interest, Why not start with the one with the high interest rate?
00:07:01.000I mean, and that's sort of, I guess, the question, because it sounds like there are certain situations, like, there are situations in which, if you have to have a government-sponsored debt, it seems to me those are the situations in which it's a bad idea to really take out debt.
00:07:12.000If you gotta take out a student loan from the government in order to go major in gender studies, good shot, you're never gonna be able to pay that off.
00:07:18.000But there are certain professions where the income coming out is gonna be good enough that there's a reason the bank is giving you a low-interest loan.
00:07:26.000If you're taking out a loan for pre-med, They're presumably giving that loan hoping they're going to get knowing, or having actuarial tables suggesting they're going to get paid back on the other end.
00:07:34.000So, you know, are you supposed to forego med school?
00:07:37.000Those are federally insured loans, too.
00:07:38.000And the inherent problem, and it becomes a policy problem when you get right down to the core of it, with $1.4 trillion now in student loan debt.
00:07:47.000We're basically loaning 18-year-olds who have never had a job and want to get a degree in left-handed puppetry up to $145,000.
00:08:14.000You know, maybe we put your arm around a little junior and say, you know, we really do need to get a degree in something other than, you know, German polka history.
00:08:24.000Let's try to get something that actually is marketable and that you can put some tools in your belt to earn a living so you don't live in my basement when you're 32.
00:08:31.000And it's funny that you come at this from a different angle from people like Peter Thiel, obviously, but you end up in exactly the same place, which is, college is very often a waste of time.
00:08:39.000Maybe you ought to just be going out and learning a career, apprenticing yourself, actually making something yourself.
00:08:43.000No, I don't think it's a waste of time at all.
00:08:44.000I mean, higher education, we just completed, one of our Ramsey personalities, Chris Hogan, we just completed the largest study on millionaires ever done.
00:09:45.000As far as taking on debt, I'm focusing on debt because this is one of the areas where, as you say, the kind of statistically minded folks look at you and it sounds like blasphemy.
00:09:54.000Talking about entrepreneurialism, when you look at the number of businesses that are started in the United States and that are successful, the percentage that were started off of some sort of loan from family, from friends, from a bank, there are a lot of businesses that were started off, at least with somebody investing who was not the original person.
00:10:11.000Where, you know, our business, for example, we started off with an investor, and we went to the investor, and we had an obligation to pay off the investor, and our business doesn't exist without us actually borrowing money and then using it to build our business and then paying back the investor.
00:10:24.000And that's true for an enormous number of publicly traded companies.
00:10:27.000Is there a happy medium here, or do you really believe that it's just a matter of scrimping and saving until you can get together enough money to start the business?
00:10:33.000Because sometimes you actually do need a spend of scale in order to make sure that you can get launched.
00:10:37.000Well, if you're an income... I mean, if you're in-game as an IPO, if you're wanting to go public, you're probably dealing with a vulture capitalist at that point.
00:10:47.000You're probably about to get yourself into a situation where somebody owns your soul, and that's going to be part of the process.
00:10:53.000If you're doing something like you guys are doing, you've got an angel investor that's setting you up and believes in your cause, and that gets you going.
00:11:01.000In my case, we started on a card table in our living room.
00:11:20.000So when it comes to kind of personal character, how much do you think that financial decisions are about education of people to make the right decisions?
00:11:26.000And how much is it about actually being able to put off That's called maturity.
00:12:40.000You know, one of the things that I think is so fascinating about your approach is that it is an approach that is driven by personal responsibility.
00:12:46.000So much of what's going on in the country, in politics generally, is driven by precisely the opposite attitude.
00:12:55.000And it seems like politicians make bank off of basically telling people that nothing they do is their own responsibility and that everything that is wrong in their life can be blamed on outside forces.
00:13:05.000In America, how much of what's bad in people's lives do you think can generally be blamed on the decisions they make, and how much can be blamed on outside forces, if you had to balance that out?
00:13:16.000Well, I think you can be born into a situation where you don't... I grew up in a neighborhood where people said stuff like, the little man can't get ahead.
00:14:33.000And there's a different message there in that ideology.
00:14:35.000But, you know, the problem is if you start to believe someone else is going to fix your life, whoever it is, your employer, your mommy, the president, the Congress, you're screwed.
00:14:44.000Yeah, well, this is one of the things I really fear because I am seeing it rise on both the left and the right.
00:14:48.000There's this sort of new right-wing populist movement that suggests, okay, well, you know, all the problems that you're having in life, you didn't get married because you couldn't afford it.
00:14:55.000And it's like, well, maybe you should have made some different decisions.
00:14:57.000And single motherhood is not a financial decision.
00:15:00.000It's not that you got pregnant out of wedlock because you couldn't afford it.
00:15:03.000The classic studies are that 97% of the 30-year-olds that graduated from school, high school, Before they got married, and got married before they had a kid.
00:15:22.000Almost everyone below the poverty level somehow got that out of order.
00:15:26.000They got pregnant before they got out of school, they got pregnant before they got married, they got married before they got out of school, they got it out of order.
00:15:45.000So in a second, I do want to ask you about what's happened because it feels like there's been a decline in both happiness and I've attributed that to a decline in virtue and religion.
00:15:55.000I want to see kind of your perception of that in just one second.
00:15:57.000First, let's talk about your health care program.
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00:16:19.000Best of all, you could save a lot of money with MediShare.
00:16:22.000The typical savings for a family is about $500 a month.
00:16:24.000Your savings could be more, they could be less, but think about what you could do with that extra money every month.
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00:16:32.000You can join MediShare anytime, so just call them today and check it out.
00:16:36.000Just head over to MediShare.com slash Ben or call 844-61-BIBLE to find out more.
00:16:57.000So I want to talk about some of the aspects of virtue that you're talking about because I fully agree with this.
00:17:09.000I think that the supposed crisis that we're having in terms of happiness, the rise in the opioid epidemic, although some of that is due to bad diagnoses and people being given medical opioids and all of that, the rise in suicide, the rise in single motherhood, that in the end, these are mostly personal problems.
00:17:25.000These are people making bad decisions, and they're making bad decisions because they've been taught by society, by the government, by the culture that if you make a bad decision, it's not really your fault.
00:17:33.000And at the beginning of wisdom is recognizing that it's probably your fault.
00:17:38.000Where do you think these kind of – where did things start to fall apart, or do you think things are really not that falling apart?
00:17:44.000There's pockets that are falling apart, and there's sometimes a malaise or a fog over some things, but then there's entire segments of the population that are booming like never before.
00:17:55.000They're having the best years of their life right now, and maybe did even under Obama, you know?
00:18:00.000They had the best years of their life.
00:18:02.000But, I mean, we share a book in our faiths, in my Christian faith through Jewish faith, the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Wisdom.
00:18:08.000And all throughout the book of Wisdom, the fool is juxtaposed with the wise.
00:18:13.000The wise does this, the fool does this.
00:18:15.000Wisdom is this, and wisdom is, in the Hebrew, you know this probably, is the art of living life well, is really what it means.
00:18:47.000And then when I quit doing that, I actually saved money.
00:18:49.000I had some money in the house of the wise.
00:18:51.000I mean, it was just, it's remarkable, isn't it?
00:18:53.000And so the art of living life well, and when you start to believe that if I plant corn, I'm going to get corn.
00:19:01.000If I'm going to reap what I sow, if I'm going to live in a cause and effect world where I actually can impact my own destiny, there's variables around me.
00:19:27.000I've got a southern drawl, and for years in the radio business, now we've got 600 stations, but for years people in Boston thought we broadcast from a double-wide because we were in Tennessee, you know, with no shoes, you know?
00:19:37.000I mean, there's all these isms, right?
00:19:38.000Everybody's got an ism they've got to bust through.
00:19:41.000I don't care who you are, but if you truly believe because of your ism, whatever it is, that you can't win, you're not going to get corn if you plant corn, then why would you ever plant corn?
00:19:54.000Yeah, the way that I've put it on my own show is that I root for reality because there's nothing else to root for.
00:20:00.000There's a lot of folks out there who are rooting against reality.
00:20:02.000And you see this not only in politics, but you see it in culture, just the general thing where people look at their life and they go, X or Y isn't fair.
00:20:09.000Here's a person who's really rich, and I'm not really rich, and that's unfair.
00:20:12.000And you see politicians say this without any solution.
00:20:54.000But, you know, I was arguing with this lady, liberal lady, and she was mad at me because I had made a lot of money selling books to people, helping them with money.
00:21:02.000And she's like, well, you're taking advantage of all these people that are broke.
00:21:04.000And I said, You know, when I sold 5 books for $10, nobody was mad.
00:21:10.000But all you people got pissed off when I sold 10 million of them.
00:21:32.000Which means they did something in the marketplace.
00:21:35.000So the American dream is alive and well.
00:21:36.000One of the things that I love about your show is that you actually do defend the morality of the free market.
00:21:41.000And that's something that very few people are willing to do in this day and age.
00:21:44.000It's all about the shortcomings of the free market, income inequality, the idea that people are being exploited.
00:21:48.000And it seems like they're coming from this perspective that even basic elements of life, intelligent gaps, this should be somehow rectified.
00:21:57.000And you see this with, they'll use Bill Gates as an example.
00:21:59.000How is there a Bill Gates in this country who's worth this much money?
00:22:02.000And then you'll see somebody who's worth no money.
00:22:04.000And you say, well, he's contributed more.
00:22:06.000And they say, well, but that wasn't his choice.
00:22:48.000And she said, my parents told me my whole life, it doesn't matter where I'm coming from, what matters is where you're going.
00:22:53.000And you just decide that's what we're going to do.
00:22:56.000But that has all the way back to do with this thing called hope and this belief that if I plant corn, I shouldn't be shocked if I get corn.
00:23:03.000If I plant nothing, I can't gripe about the farmer who planted corn and was out there toiling to kill the weeds and in the hot sun.
00:23:11.000Meanwhile, I'm standing over here watching the guy and then I go, well, it's not fair that he's got some corn.
00:23:16.000I mean, I wonder if some of the complaints that are cropping up, particularly among young people, and I speak a lot on college campuses where there are a lot of young people who make exactly these complaints, that this is coming as the result of a breakdown in religious community.
00:23:27.000Because, you know, I'm a religious person, you're a religious person, there are a lot of rich people, people who have been, you know, I've been a lot poorer, I've been, you know, I've done well.
00:23:35.000That's changed, but I've watched the same thing happen to people in my community who I grew up with, and so I know all of them.
00:23:40.000And so it's hard to be a lot, it's a lot harder to be jealous of the guy that you've known and grown up with and he can go to for help than some random guy on the street who you have no association with.
00:23:48.000And as we fragment as a community, there's more of a feeling of, well, maybe that guy owes me money, as opposed to, well, I've known my next door neighbor my entire life.
00:23:57.000We go to the same church or the same synagogue.
00:23:58.000The one area of equality that matters more than any, we are equal, which is we are all equal before God, right?
00:24:05.000With that breakdown, I'm wondering if maybe that's what's caused a lot of the feeling of dispossession.
00:24:09.000Well, and it also contributes to racism, also contributes to arguments between religion.
00:24:16.000I mean, if you sit down and spend time with people and actually develop a relationship with people that have a different situation than you've got, you're going to learn there's good people and there's bad people in almost every one of those things.
00:24:27.000I know wealthy people all over the world that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, they're some of the best people on the planet, and I know some of them that will cut your throat.
00:25:29.000And that's the most pessimistic piece I've got about it.
00:25:34.000And so, to the extent that we can, people like you, can get out here and be thought leaders and teach people that what happens in their house, at the end of the day, is probably a lot more important for the quality of life they lead over the next several decades than what happens in the White House.
00:26:06.000And I actually met Him on the way up when I was making that money, and then when we were losing everything, I got to know Him on the way down.
00:26:11.000So, I started studying scripture because I had all these letters in license after my name about money, and then I broke something.
00:28:46.000This is one of the things that drives me up a wall.
00:28:48.000I know so many people who are both adults and teenagers, but it must have been inculcated in them when they were teenagers and now they carry it forward.
00:28:57.000You're 25, and you've screwed up your life, and if somebody says anything that crosses you, it's because they don't love you enough.
00:29:02.000That if they truly loved you, then they would just accept you as you are.
00:29:05.000And so, well, maybe I'm trying to not accept you as you are because you suck the way you are.
00:29:34.000So what are your rules for relationships?
00:29:35.000You know, there are a lot of folks who are married or thinking about getting married.
00:29:38.000Do you have any sort of relationship rules and advice for folks who are getting married that they should keep kind of first and foremost in their minds?
00:29:45.000Oh man, I've been married 36 years and happy wife, happy life is the first one.
00:29:53.000As far as the money piece goes, we have learned that when people handle their money together, that they're really setting their life goals together.
00:30:42.000One might be the nerd that's going to do more of the details, but we're going to be two adults pulling the wagon together.
00:30:48.000And there's tons of data that says you're not going to build wealth unless you do that.
00:30:51.000So, I know, again, you don't get into politics too much, but from a general political view, I am going to ask you one political question, which is, what do you think the proper role of government is?
00:30:59.000Because it seems like nowadays people think it's to fix income inequality, guarantee people jobs.
00:31:03.000In your ideal world, you're King Dave Ramsey.
00:31:06.000You get to decide what government does and what government doesn't.
00:31:09.000What do you think government's actual role is?
00:31:11.000Well, God has been smart enough so far to not allow me to be involved in that.
00:31:45.000But as far as, the reason I'm a conservative is, you know, I was sitting with John Stossel one night about 15 years ago, back when he did 2020, back a long time ago.
00:32:20.000Capitalism is what happens if you leave people alone.
00:32:23.000You know, they will go and function in their own best interest.
00:32:26.000Some of them will do it crooked, some of them will do it with morals, some of them will do it sanctified capitalism, some of them will do it wrong, and you wish you hadn't let them run loose, just like when your children grow up sometimes, you wish you hadn't, but that's the way it is.
00:32:40.000But I see so much good happen, more good happen, in the marketplace when you let people do their own thing.
00:32:49.000Anytime you put a large number of people in a small area geographically, there has to be more rules.
00:33:26.000And so, I love the old systems of government.
00:33:30.000I'm an old guy, so, you know, highways and take care of the military and a bunch of this other stuff, you know, they were just trying to engineer votes.
00:33:39.000And they should be out of all of those businesses.
00:33:41.000So, yeah, if you made me king, there'd be a whole bunch of folks unemployed that used to work for the federal government very quickly, because I'd just do away with a bunch of it.
00:33:48.000But I'm not going to be king, so you're safe.
00:33:52.000So in your program, you talk a lot about how when you get wealthy, you should give a lot of charity.
00:33:56.000What do you think the role of charity is?
00:33:57.000Because there's a whole group of folks who are sort of the Ayn Randian objectivists who say that the best way that economics works is to never give charity.
00:34:03.000The best thing you can do is invest your money, create more jobs.
00:34:06.000Why do you think it's important for folks to give charity?
00:34:08.000Well, it has nothing to do with the economy.
00:34:10.000It has to do with what it does for you.
00:34:12.000God teaches both of our faiths to give very, very clearly.
00:34:16.000Tons of Scripture, the Talmud, the Old Testament, what we Christians would call it, and in the New Testament as well.
00:35:02.000And so it turns out that the person who gives is also the person who holds the door for you.
00:35:06.000They're also the person that has a level of humility.
00:35:09.000They understand the center of the world really doesn't run through the top of their head.
00:35:13.000But there's a spiritual Result, a character-based result and a psychological result when you go through the tactical step of mathematically giving your money away.
00:35:24.000And so when you reach over and you see a lady waiting a table in a greasy diner and you leave her a $300 tip and she's pregnant, that lady needs some money.
00:35:39.000But what it did for you was more than any other player.
00:35:43.000Oddly enough, charity is selfish in that regard.
00:35:46.000If you understand what it does for you, what it does for your kids to see you give.
00:35:53.000I've got a good friend who's an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Rabbi Daniel Lappin, and he cannot stand the phrase, and I agree with him, give back.
00:36:52.000I mean, what if we could get a whole culture that started giving, not because of the economic impacts, not because they helped this little charity, or not because this kid was fed, although that's a wonderful thing, but we got a whole culture of people who are highly attractive and selfless, instead of selfish.
00:37:09.000And mean, and nasty, and on Twitter, you know?
00:37:14.000I mean, it's just unbelievable, you know?
00:37:18.000It's because I think that what happens is that the folks who don't give charity tend to be the folks who are very eager to take somebody else's money for something else.
00:37:25.000I mean, there's a really high crossover.
00:37:27.000And not to get too political again, but the stats show that red states give a lot more charity than blue states, that religious people give a lot more charity than non-religious people.
00:37:35.000And those people also tend to vote for small government because, again, those people Understand that when it comes time, when the pedal hits the metal and it's time to help somebody out, that in the end it's up to them, it's not up to somebody else, and that casting it off on a third party is a mistake.
00:37:48.000And one of the things I always note on my show is that when it comes to charity, yes, I have a commandment to give charity, but there's no commandment to receive charity.
00:37:54.000And we seem in our society to have reversed it.
00:37:57.000The commandment is mostly that society owes something to me.
00:38:01.000It used to be that if you took charity from somebody, You felt the obligation toward that person because you knew who the person was.
00:38:08.000And I always cite the movie Cinderella Man, where James Braddock is walking back into the welfare office, the role of 20s, and paying back the welfare office.
00:38:15.000Is there a single person in the United States who gets a check from the government who would ever think about doing that today?
00:38:20.000But if you do it in the context of a community of which you're a part, you know exactly how much you owe to everybody else in your community.
00:38:28.000If you've received it, it changes your gratitude level.
00:38:31.000If you've received help at some point in your life, you're a grateful person.
00:38:35.000And if we could create a whole culture of people who were selfless rather than selfish, and in the process, Out, you know, we gave so much into these institutions that you could literally, you literally, financially, economically could make the government irrelevant.
00:38:56.000So what do you think, as a person running a massive, massive business, what have been the biggest obstacles that you've faced in taking your business from non-existent to a $200 million business?
00:40:26.000And you can't win at business with a room full of donkeys.
00:40:28.000And so, sometimes a donkey can dress up, they put on their interview clothes, they look like a thoroughbred when they come in.
00:40:33.000But you have to talk to them long enough until they finally go, and you hear, that one's got a drug issue, I don't think we're going to do that.
00:40:40.000That one's doing some crazy butt stuff in their personal life, I don't think we need that toxic stuff in here.
00:40:45.000Have you seen any quick indicators of the donkey?
00:40:46.000And so, because, you know, everything moves to the speed of trust.
00:40:49.000And if you can't trust people's competence, their excellence, their integrity, their intent, then it's hard to work together.
00:40:56.000You can't get work done because you're always looking over your shoulder seeing who's going to stab you.
00:40:59.000And so we just fire people if they do stuff like that.
00:41:03.000Have you started, have you seen, I mean, you've gone through so many people, it sounds like, have you seen any, like, quick indicators of the donkey?
00:41:07.000Like, how do you spot the donkey right off?
00:41:09.000We just talk to them and they'll tell you.
00:41:11.000And we love millennials for this reason.
00:41:13.000The millennial generation is a fabulous generation.
00:41:16.000I get asked all the time in these leadership conferences, how do you hire millennials?
00:41:56.000What do you recommend in terms of management?
00:41:57.000Well, I wouldn't really have hired you if I didn't need you to do something I didn't want to do.
00:42:02.000So it's delegation, but I'm going to require you do the stuff with excellence and with a spirit on it that the customer loves the fact that they came into contact with the Ramsey organization.
00:42:14.000It's a high level of expectation, more like a coach.
00:42:20.000A coach is somebody that loves you dearly, but you're a little bit afraid they'll go crazy at any moment and kill you.
00:42:28.000That scene from Patton where he goes in and yells at the soldier and he leaves and his adjutant says to him, they don't know when you're joking, generally.
00:42:36.000He says, it's not important for them to know.
00:42:59.000Well, I mean, this does seem to be the commonality between all the good managers that I've ever seen, is that they do, it's all about hiring the right person and leaving them alone.
00:43:06.000That if you have to intervene with the person too much, then you're a bad manager and you're a bad hirer.
00:43:11.000If you have to be in their face all the time, and that's why when I look at presidents, you know, I'm not gonna name any names, when you look at presidents and they're constantly shifting staff, or they're micromanaging, or going over people's heads, that's the mark of a bad business to me, is somebody who has to have only closely held people who can't delegate out to- No, you're a control freak then.
00:43:28.000And so, but you can't, if you delegate without being able to trust someone's competence and their integrity, that takes time.
00:43:35.000If you delegate without doing that, then you're just irresponsible.
00:43:38.000And so, and we have made the mistake in business and in government, if we just hire someone who's talented and they got a good resume, then we'll just turn them loose.
00:43:45.000We'll walk with you a little bit here.
00:43:48.000Make sure you know how to do this stuff the way we're doing it.
00:43:50.000Make sure you really know how to do it, that you're not just got a good resume and so forth.
00:43:54.000So I'm going to trust your integrity and your competency.
00:43:57.000And the bigger the job, and the more money that's involved, more customers that are involved, the more that's on the line, the longer that's going to take.
00:44:04.000So as an advocate of the free market, some of the big questions that have come up recently, one that's obviously starting to take center stage, is the question of technology and the idea of a permanent underclass.
00:44:14.000The idea that there's going to be some sort of IQ dichotomy, where people who are smart are going to be able to work and get jobs, and everybody else is going to be replaced by technology.
00:44:22.000Do you see that as a problem in the future, or do you think that technology will be more of an aid than a hindrance?
00:44:28.000Technology is both simultaneously in all of our lives a blessing and a curse.
00:44:35.000We've got kids whose screen time is blowing their brains up.
00:44:37.000There's all kinds of problems with their brains with too much screen time.
00:44:42.000We all check our inbox and have to keep it clean like we're OCD or something, guilty, and so on.
00:44:58.000And so it really doesn't require that much brain matter to take advantage of technology.
00:45:04.000Most people turn on their televisions and sign into Netflix.
00:45:07.000Most of them are listening to this podcast and they're figuring out a way to do that at all social strata.
00:45:12.000And case in point, the dollars that are flowing into those things, we can see that that's happening.
00:45:16.000So there's enough brain matter, gray matter, to take advantage of technology.
00:45:20.000But it's always a blessing and it's always a curse.
00:45:23.000And, you know, I always think about the, you know, the story of the guys that used to bring ice blocks and tongs on a wagon and set them in a box called an ice box that was basically a cooler in your kitchen.
00:45:38.000It was not, it didn't have any refrigeration.
00:45:41.000Well, the ice tong guys went out of business, right?
00:45:44.000Well, one of them had an ice house in Dallas.
00:45:48.000Jerry Graham and Jimmy, Jimmy Graham, they called him Uncle Jimmy, and he decided to store bacon and milk and stuff in his ice house, and you could come by and pick it up anytime between the hours of 7 and 11.
00:46:25.000So you've had a ton of callers, obviously, over the years.
00:46:29.000Is there anyone that really sticks out to you as particularly memorable?
00:46:32.000Or it's just at this point kind of faded into the...
00:46:35.000I've had several of these, but I guess the first time it happened, it sticks in your memory.
00:46:41.000She called me from San Antonio, and it was Monday, and San Antonio's a big military town, and her husband, a special forces guy, had been killed in Afghanistan the day before.
00:46:54.000Well, we work with military folk a lot, so I knew all their programs, and they do a great job of coming around the spouses when they lose somebody.
00:47:02.000So I knew that they were going to be there, but we were able to plug her in with a good church locally, and one of our coaches locally, and one of our investment advisors locally, and we were able to put all those people around her to help her and walk with her.
00:47:13.000Because, obviously, in two minutes on the radio, I just cried with her.
00:47:18.000Tore me up, I'm thinking about it right now, but I can't imagine getting that call.
00:47:22.000Those guys standing on your front porch, you know?
00:47:52.000In a second, I want to ask you about, as I sort of referenced vaguely earlier, there's been this debate that's broken out now among people on the right.
00:48:00.000On one side of the debate, people like me.
00:48:02.000On the other side, people like Tucker Carlson.
00:48:03.000We had Tucker on the show probably a couple of months ago at this point.
00:48:07.000And Tucker was going on about how America had left the non-college-educated man behind, how these people were basically stuck, there was no way to get them forward, and he actually said in a monologue on Fox News that the free market is just a tool.
00:48:23.000That we shouldn't see it as a system, we should just see it as a tool, and just like any other tool, we should be able to play with it and do what we want with it and all the rest.
00:48:29.000And when he was sitting in that chair, one of the things that I said to him is, it seems to me that you've lost the sense of American adventure.
00:48:36.000Because he said, you know, why should it be that if you grew up in a small town, and your grandparents are buried here, and your parents live here, that you should have to pick up and move if there are no jobs in that town?
00:48:45.000I said, well, because that is the biblical injunction and has been the nature of Adventure-seeking people in all of human history.
00:49:11.000He needs to get out of Manhattan more.
00:49:14.000You know, when you walk around with real people out here, some of these little towns are dying.
00:49:19.000And evil Walmart took over the town, or evil whatever took over the town and ran the little guy out of business.
00:49:26.000Again, that's a marketplace disruption.
00:49:28.000There's a great old book, one of John Grisham's books, Painted House.
00:49:34.000It's fictional, but the story is about a cotton-picking family, white trash, lower-income white trash in Arkansas, and the cousin had enough, Picked up, got in the truck, got a bus ticket, went to Detroit because they were hiring people to build cars.
00:49:51.000And he came back a year later with a Yankee wife, right, and driving a new car, and he made more money than the rest of the family put together, putting cars together for Henry Ford.
00:51:23.000When it comes to the question of, sort of, how to raise your kids in this culture, what sort of tips do you have for young parents, particularly, who are being hit with a lot of cultural influences that suggest precisely the opposite of exactly the lessons you teach?
00:51:36.000Because you brought up three great kids, it sounds like.
00:51:38.000How do you go about protecting them from this and inculcating in them exactly the sort of values you're talking about?
00:51:44.000Well, the first thing is, my friend Andy Andrews says, don't try to raise great kids.
00:51:50.000Raise kids that are going to be great adults.
00:51:54.000And that's a different thing, because great kids are like little Stepford children, and they don't ever, ever embarrass you in the restaurant, and they're always perfect and all this BS.
00:52:09.000But what we are going to teach them to do is to have critical thinking skills.
00:52:13.000And I'm going to be a whole lot more concerned with your character than I am your GPA.
00:52:18.000I'm going to be a whole lot more concerned with the way you treat your brother or your sister and the way you talk to your mother in my house than I am whether you did a piano recital.
00:52:32.000And so sometimes we raise the activity level, all the activities we plug our kids into, as a substitute for teaching them character.
00:52:41.000And, you know, we just taught them you can't lie.
00:52:44.000It will hurt you, because I will hurt you, so that you don't get hurt later.
00:53:15.000Well, I mean, this is the fun stuff that we get to talk about all the time and you talk about in your show, too, is sort of the distinctions between male and female roles in the household.
00:54:13.000But no, I mean, my wife has been a full-time mom, but if she wanted to have a career, I don't care.
00:54:17.000My mom was a working mom, and that's fine.
00:54:20.000I mean, your wife's a working lady, and three of our operating board members in our company are very Very sharp ladies, and so I have no issue with that at all.
00:54:30.000It's, you know, what do you want to do with your life, how do you want to do it, and how can we support each other to win?
00:54:35.000I don't make decisions unilaterally at our house, and neither does my wife, by the way.
00:54:40.000So, big decisions, and we talk about it, and we come together on it, and that includes talking about something going on with the kids, or a large charity donation, or going to buy this building to put our company in, or, you know, in the old days when we hired people, we always interviewed them with their spouses, and with our spouses.
00:55:02.000So, you know, a lot of the basic values that you talk about, it seems like a lot of folks in the country ideologically do not hold those values, and it seems like they are located in particular states around the coast.
00:55:12.000Do you think that this is a gap that's bridgeable?
00:55:14.000Because this is really a concern for, you know, for me, is that as I, that It's almost two separate Americas.
00:55:20.000It's a group of Americans who take very seriously traditional values and who still think that it's worthwhile to go to church and inculcate those values in their kids.
00:55:27.000And then there's a group of folks who seem to think that those values are old-fashioned, outmoded, that we live in an experimental age in which you basically ought to let your kids run roughshod over you or do whatever they want, in which it's a mistake to try and teach your kids anything.
00:55:39.000And in fact, it's an act of parental tyranny to try and teach your kids anything.
00:55:43.000Do you think that that gap is bridgeable, or do you think it's going to continue to sort of bifurcate?
00:56:04.000But yeah, we're seeing some of the fabric of our culture unravel.
00:56:08.000Some of those values that are basic human things.
00:56:13.000The loss of civility, though, in the last 36 months, 48 months, has just, this political correctness, police, you can't say anything that someone doesn't like anymore without them going absolutely bananas.
00:56:30.000I mean, they'll destroy a teenager's life.
00:56:48.000And then this week, the kids from Kentucky with the MAGNA hats on, or MAGA hats, or whatever you call it, and all that stuff.
00:56:58.000The one thing you need to understand is these cameras and audio, you can make people say almost anything you want them to say when they finish.
00:57:07.000And I've had it happen to me a time or two, and in print as well.
00:57:11.000And so you can't believe what you see on the Internet.
00:58:13.000The question is going to be, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being entirely risk-averse and 10 being entirely risk-tolerant, how do you rank yourself?
00:58:19.000Because you're obviously an entrepreneurial guy, you're a guy who's actually started a massively successful business, but you're also somebody who says that you shouldn't take out debt, so that seems risk-averse.
00:58:28.000I'm going to get the answer from you in a second, but if you want to hear Dave Ramsey's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:58:33.000To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation there.
00:58:37.000Well, Dave Ramsey, it really is a pleasure to have you here, sir, and I can't express enough that if folks haven't checked out Mr. Ramsey's stuff, you haven't checked out Dave's stuff, you really should.
00:58:46.000He's helped millions of people, including apparently half the members of my family, which I didn't even know.
00:58:51.000So, Dave Ramsey, thanks so much for stopping by.