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Feb. 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:16
Dave Ramsey | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 36
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That's how you succeed in business, is you do the right thing.
It's how you succeed in life, you do the right thing.
You know, I'm going to give up something today.
I'm going to live like no one else so that later I can live and give like no one else.
Here we are on the Sunday special with our very special guest, financial guru Dave Ramsey.
Super excited to have him on.
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Well, Dave Ramsey, thank you so much for stopping by the program.
I really appreciate it.
Well, I'm honored to be here.
You're a legend.
It's an honor to be on with you.
Well, I mean, right back at you.
My family's been listening to you for a long time.
I didn't even know about it, apparently, as it turns out.
Over 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.
And 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?
Well, 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.
And we ended up with about $4 million worth of real estate by the time we were 26.
And 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.
But I was stupid.
I had borrowed too much money, and I spent the next two and a half years of my life losing everything we owned.
Too much debt.
And I got a Ph.D.
in D.U.M.B.
We 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.
That was 30 years ago.
Maybe 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.
So what are some of those steps that you talk about?
You know, what we figured out was that personal finance, I kept trying to fix it with the math, because I'm a math nerd.
And then I finally figured out it wasn't a math problem.
It was a me problem.
The guy in my mirror is the problem.
If I can get that guy to behave, he can be skinny and rich.
But he's got issues.
And so I figured out he needs a clear path and basic financial planning slash mixed in with a little common sense to make some gumbo.
We came up with an idea that, hey, do this first, then do this, then do this real clear and don't deviate from it.
And lots of people did it, and it worked.
And we called it the Baby Steps, because you can do anything if you just take a step at a time.
Baby Step 1 is $1,000.
Quickly save a little starter emergency fund.
2 is knock off all your debt, except your home, using the debt snowball, listing them smallest to largest.
Attack them in that order.
3 is an emergency fund.
Go back to that $1,000, raise it up to a fully funded Grandma's Rainy Day Fund.
3 to 6 months of expenses.
So now you're sitting with $15,000, $20,000 bucks, and no debt except your house.
Now you can breathe.
That's a foundation.
And then you start your investing into your retirement, kids college and pay off your house early.
Typical millionaire pays off their home in about 10.2 years.
And then you're set up for baby step seven, which is just build wealth and be outrageously generous.
So, 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.
So, 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.
The 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.
And 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?
It's mathematical blasphemy.
It really is.
For a nerd like me, it's like fingernails down a chalkboard.
We're doing it wrong, you know?
We're doing it wrong.
But the thing is, if you go to the Y and you sweat and you drink water and you don't eat white bread and you gain weight, you will quit.
And the same thing getting out of debt.
You need some quick encouragement.
You need to go, this might work.
And then you pay off another one.
You go, well, this might work.
And you pay off another one.
You're like, get the neighbor in here.
This might work.
Hey, baby, come over here.
Look at this.
We paid.
And you start to get this thing happening.
It's called hope.
And you actually believe it's going to happen.
And so, and what happens is the more people get excited, the more they believe, the deeper they'll sacrifice and the faster they get out.
And so this debt snowball thing, even though it's, you know, it's a paradox, even though that it works, it works.
And people don't get out of debt using the other because they get stalled out.
And I always just laughingly tell our audiences, you know, if we were doing math, we wouldn't have credit card debt in the first place.
It's not a math problem.
So, I want to ask also about who kind of your target audience is?
Because, you know, I think that there are certain situations, right?
I came from a middle class background.
By the time I was, you know, a teenager, a late teenager, I'd say we were sort of upper middle class.
And I incurred debt for college.
I incurred debt for law school.
You're very anti-debt for college.
I agree with you that many college debts are worthless.
But for my wife, for example, she's a doctor.
As people know.
And she went to medical school and she also went to pre-med for undergrad.
Are there any situations in which you think that taking out college debt is worthwhile?
Well, I just don't teach people to borrow money.
The shortest path between where you are and wealth is to stay in control of your largest wealth-building tool, which is your income.
Now, that puts some serious hurdles in place when you're going to law school or you're going to go to med school.
But I talk to people who go to med school.
And they find a way.
They get scholarships.
They do fellowships.
The MD-PhD program.
There's all kinds of ways to do it.
But it's tough.
It's tough.
But so is paying off $250,000 freaking dollars in debt.
That's tough too.
So you're going to pick your tough.
You just got to pick which one.
I 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.
If 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.
But 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.
If 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.
So, you know, are you supposed to forego med school?
Those are federally insured loans, too.
And 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.
We'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.
I mean, we the people are stupid.
We're really stupid that we're guaranteeing these loans.
I mean, because there's no guidelines on this whatsoever.
And the parents, many times, don't care, don't bother to be involved, or don't know how to lead their kid.
You know, they're like, well, they're 18, they make their own decisions.
That's probably not a good idea.
You 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.
Let's try something else, you know?
Let'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.
Let's have a plan here.
And 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.
Maybe you ought to just be going out and learning a career, apprenticing yourself, actually making something yourself.
No, I don't think it's a waste of time at all.
I mean, higher education, we just completed, one of our Ramsey personalities, Chris Hogan, we just completed the largest study on millionaires ever done.
We studied 10,165 of them.
And the vast majority of them have a four-year degree.
They didn't use debt to get it, though.
That's what's odd.
68% of them have a four-year degree.
And almost none of them went to prestige schools, though.
Most of them went to state schools and community colleges and that kind of a thing.
But, you know, it turns out being smart, being educated is a good thing.
It's just, you know, what are you studying and what are your expectations?
But it just breaks my heart when I get a young lady calling me from Atlanta last week on my show.
And she's got $165,000 in student loan debt for a master's degree in sociology.
And she makes $38,000 working for the state of Georgia.
I mean, it's just...
Where were her parents?
We as a culture failed her to tell her that was going to work.
But then you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, well, education isn't a good idea.
But we're just stupid about education.
That's the paradox.
As 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.
Talking 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.
Where, 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.
And that's true for an enormous number of publicly traded companies.
Is 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?
Because sometimes you actually do need a spend of scale in order to make sure that you can get launched.
Well, 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.
I mean, a venture capitalist.
You're probably about to get yourself into a situation where somebody owns your soul, and that's going to be part of the process.
If 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.
In my case, we started on a card table in our living room.
We've got 806 employees today.
We'll do about $200 million in revenue this year.
We've never borrowed a dime.
But it did take us 20 years.
You know, 20 years later, we're an overnight success.
Yeah, it sounds like a pretty good plan.
I mean, 20 years to $200 million in revenue ain't a bad thing.
It worked out.
So 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?
And how much is it about actually being able to put off That's called maturity.
The ability to delay pleasure.
And that is a character quality.
Integrity, there's a high correlation between integrity, wholeness, not just telling the truth in honesty, but this full on integrity.
You are who you are all the time, that's integrity.
And not only do you tell the truth, not only do you honor your word in situations.
High data point correlation between that and the ability to build wealth.
This idea that you cheat your way to the top is mythology.
It truly does not work out there.
I mean, think about it.
If you go to the local car place and get your car worked on and he cheats you, you tell everybody you know.
You don't tell everybody you know.
And if you go in there and he says, oh, it was 35 cents.
I fixed it.
Don't worry about it.
You tell everybody you know, because you just found a unicorn.
You know what I mean?
So where the guy just did the right thing.
And you send your family, your friends, and that's how you succeed in business.
You do the right thing.
It's how you succeed in life.
You do the right thing.
Integrity, the ability to delay pleasure, the ability to say, you know, I'm going to give up something today.
I'm going to live like no one else so that later, I can live and give like no one else.
That's the way we say it on the show.
You 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.
So much of what's going on in the country, in politics generally, is driven by precisely the opposite attitude.
So, you're smart.
You stay away from politics.
I'm in politics full time.
And 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.
In 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?
Well, 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.
It was a victim mentality.
Blue collar thing.
It's like, you know, the union will take care of you.
The government will take care of you.
I sure hope we can elect a, you know, a president or a congressman will take care of us.
Because a little man just can't get ahead on his own.
And is that a reality?
Yeah, if you think it is.
If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right, Henry Ford said, you know.
And so there's a reality to this.
And so the belief is the real privilege.
It's not the skin color, and it's not the socio-economic thing.
It's the belief in the culture you come out of.
I mean, I grew up in Tennessee, and we're hillbilly culture.
My family's Scotch-Irish, and proud hillbillies of the best kind.
And an interesting bunch.
They'll fight you.
For their freedoms.
And yet sometimes they'll adopt that victim mentality.
And a whole bunch of those folks, I mean, J.D.
did a nice book, Hillbilly Elegy, that indicated that probably that's a bunch of us are who elected Trump.
But it was all that he was a little bit Reagan-esque in that it's up to you, I'll just make it where you can win.
You know, and I'll do it for you.
And there's a different message there in that ideology.
But, 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.
Yeah, well, this is one of the things I really fear because I am seeing it rise on both the left and the right.
There'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.
And it's like, well, maybe you should have made some different decisions.
And single motherhood is not a financial decision.
It's not that you got pregnant out of wedlock because you couldn't afford it.
The 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.
That's all they did.
High school, and they did it in the right order, in other words.
97% are above the poverty level.
Almost everyone below the poverty level somehow got that out of order.
They 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.
It's the success order.
All kinds of data points on that, statistical evidence.
And it's not a political statement, it's just This is the proper way to live your life.
Turns out morals have implication.
Character has implications.
So 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.
I want to see kind of your perception of that in just one second.
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So I want to talk about some of the aspects of virtue that you're talking about because I fully agree with this.
I 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.
These 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.
And at the beginning of wisdom is recognizing that it's probably your fault.
Where do you think these kind of – where did things start to fall apart, or do you think things are really not that falling apart?
You know, it's strange.
There'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.
They're having the best years of their life right now, and maybe did even under Obama, you know?
They had the best years of their life.
But, I mean, we share a book in our faiths, in my Christian faith through Jewish faith, the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Wisdom.
And all throughout the book of Wisdom, the fool is juxtaposed with the wise.
The wise does this, the fool does this.
Wisdom is this, and wisdom is, in the Hebrew, you know this probably, is the art of living life well, is really what it means.
And that's what we've lost.
is wisdom, not knowledge.
But we've lost wisdom, as juxtaposed with the fool.
And if you read through Proverbs, you go, well, I've done that.
I'm a fool.
I've done that.
So I'm going to quit doing that.
So I'm going to be wise.
In the house of the wise are stores of choice of food and oil.
But a foolish man devours all he has.
If you spend everything you make, you're a fool.
Fool, fool, fool.
I've done that.
And then when I quit doing that, I actually saved money.
I had some money in the house of the wise.
I mean, it was just, it's remarkable, isn't it?
And so the art of living life well, and when you start to believe that if I plant corn, I'm going to get corn.
If 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.
There's isms.
I mean, there's racism and sexism and baldism.
There are people that won't let me do stuff because I'm bald.
Hadn't been a bald president elected since television.
Go look that one up.
It's interesting.
But I mean, you know, these kinds of things are very... We got one with bad hair, but we don't have any with no hair.
So Jerry Ford was not elected.
I'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?
I mean, there's all these isms, right?
Everybody's got an ism they've got to bust through.
I 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?
That's hopelessness.
And that's the path of the fool.
Yeah, 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.
There's a lot of folks out there who are rooting against reality.
And 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.
Here's a person who's really rich, and I'm not really rich, and that's unfair.
And you see politicians say this without any solution.
They just sort of put it out there.
And this is their actual talking point.
You say, OK, well, let's assume for a second that that is unfair, and that if you were God, you would even all that out.
You're not God.
You're not evening all that out.
And even if you would even all that out, it wouldn't result exactly in what you want here.
Maybe you should stop fighting reality and deal with reality instead.
Actually, wealth equality is unfair.
Because effort is not equal.
Smarts is not equal.
I'm not as smart as Bill Gates.
He's helped more people than I've helped.
And as a result, he has more money.
I mean, I haven't changed the world with a computer.
He did.
I'm not Steve Jobs.
I didn't do that.
Now, I've made a good bit of money.
I've helped a whole bunch of people.
But, 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.
And she's like, well, you're taking advantage of all these people that are broke.
And I said, You know, when I sold 5 books for $10, nobody was mad.
But all you people got pissed off when I sold 10 million of them.
And I helped 10 million people.
And so, you know, your level of return is the level of help.
And so that just defeats the wealth equality argument completely.
Because we now know that 79% of the millionaires in America today, 8 out of 10, inherited zero.
Zero.
Which means they did something in the marketplace.
So the American dream is alive and well.
One of the things that I love about your show is that you actually do defend the morality of the free market.
And that's something that very few people are willing to do in this day and age.
It's all about the shortcomings of the free market, income inequality, the idea that people are being exploited.
And it seems like they're coming from this perspective that even basic elements of life, intelligent gaps, this should be somehow rectified.
And you see this with, they'll use Bill Gates as an example.
How is there a Bill Gates in this country who's worth this much money?
And then you'll see somebody who's worth no money.
And you say, well, he's contributed more.
And they say, well, but that wasn't his choice.
He was smarter, right?
He was smarter.
He grew up better.
How do you answer that?
He did.
And he is.
And And, you know, George Clooney's prettier than me.
So, I mean, so what?
Deal with it.
I mean, this is your hand.
Play your hand.
And, you know, we had a leadership event.
We did our entree leadership event last summer and got to spend some time with Condoleezza Rice.
And she grew up in a In a segregated neighborhood outside of Birmingham.
And she was talking about coming out of that segregated neighborhood to become Secretary of State.
She's brilliant.
Brilliant lady.
And 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.
And you just decide that's what we're going to do.
But 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.
If 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.
Meanwhile, I'm standing over here watching the guy and then I go, well, it's not fair that he's got some corn.
I 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.
Because, 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.
That'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.
And 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.
And 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.
We go to the same church or the same synagogue.
The one area of equality that matters more than any, we are equal, which is we are all equal before God, right?
God sees us all exactly the same.
With that breakdown, I'm wondering if maybe that's what's caused a lot of the feeling of dispossession.
Well, and it also contributes to racism, also contributes to arguments between religion.
I 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.
I 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.
Just to see if you bleed.
I mean, and I know some poor people that are some of the best people on the planet, and I know some of them will cut your throat.
Hasn't got anything to do with the money.
It's got to do with their character or their lack of it.
The money just revealed it.
So where do you think the country is going?
Are you hopeful or pessimistic for the country?
You deal a lot with individuals, but on a broad level, where do you think the country is going right now?
I mean, my spoiler is that I'm always pessimistic, which is great for me because it means I'm always right eventually.
It's just a question of where the eventually happens.
But are you optimistic or pessimistic about sort of the direction that the American people seem to be moving?
I'm optimistic overall.
Overall.
There's lots of issues.
There's lots of problems.
And I think the biggest problems we've got are not structural.
And they're not systemic.
The biggest problems are belief breakdowns.
Where people believe the wrong things.
And when you believe the wrong things, then you make bad decisions.
Because your worldview is screwed.
And that's the most pessimistic piece I've got about it.
And 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.
So, what's your religious background?
Where do you come from?
Can you tell me about your parents?
Because how did you get this way, is sort of the question.
Oh, I didn't grow up in church.
I grew up, I was a hell-raising, beer-drinking hillbilly.
I was a crazy man.
No, I met God as an adult.
And 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.
So, I started studying scripture because I had all these letters in license after my name about money, and then I broke something.
I must have got some bad information.
Because I was acting on all the information I had, and it didn't take me where it was supposed to take me.
Instead, I built a house of cards that fell in on me.
Use OPM, leverage other people's money, and all that stuff, right?
And I got to thinking about it, and who was it that taught me to borrow money?
That was my finance professor in college who was broke.
Which is kind of like a shop teacher with missing fingers, right?
That's a problem.
As a young person of faith, young in my faith in my 30s, 20s, I really dove in and started learning what the scriptures say about money.
I mean, if you just read Proverbs over and over, you have a master's degree in finance.
So you have three kids.
How old are your kids?
26 to 32.
And have they followed all of your advice?
Yeah.
They're all actually functioning human beings.
They have great marriages, married good people, and have great babies and great careers.
They work very, very hard.
They are not silver-spooned by any stretch.
Well, one of the things that I love about your show is that you really do give tough love advice to a lot of the folks who call in.
I mean, it's what makes it so entertaining is that you're actually telling them the truth.
Have you ever felt bad after you get off a call that you slapped somebody a little bit too hard upside the head?
Yeah.
Oh, sure.
Sure.
But typically, what I've learned to do in the past more than in recent years, I've gotten better at it.
I mean, because I can judge.
What I used to do is I would just hit everybody the same.
And that's not fair.
If somebody joined our tribe three weeks ago, they've got a different set of knowledge.
So I can't hold them to the same level of account.
I started watching your stuff on YouTube, Dave, three weeks ago.
Okay, we're going to gently bring you along.
Dave, I've listened to you for ten years and I leased a car last week.
Pop!
You're going to get it.
You know not to do that.
I do everything you say to do and then tell me three things you didn't do.
It's like, we're going to get you, dude.
It's tough love, but you know what that is?
That's real love.
Real love is always, I mean, my son's 26.
He's a wonderful, fabulous young man.
He's a vice president in our company.
He's brilliant, great entrepreneur.
When he was eight, he would not take a bath.
His dad made him bathe, because you stink and you can't exist in society if you don't take a bath.
You know, you don't brush your teeth, you're not going to have any, son.
And I'm going to make you do this against your will for your own good.
I don't get any benefit out of it at all.
It's for your good.
That's love.
They call it tough love.
It's just being a good dad.
This is one of the things that drives me up a wall.
I 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.
You'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.
That if they truly loved you, then they would just accept you as you are.
And so, well, maybe I'm trying to not accept you as you are because you suck the way you are.
Exactly.
Maybe you should stop sucking, and then you will have earned the love.
I think four DUIs is awesome.
Just keep drinking.
It's working for you.
I mean, come on!
You're going to spend your life in a ditch if you live and don't kill somebody else.
This is ridiculous.
You're going to have to drag your butt out of the bar, boy.
I mean, this isn't going to work for you.
And you've just got to love somebody enough to go, I'm not going to participate in your crazy.
I'm going to stand over here on the side and show you what sane looks like.
Come join us.
It's more fun over here.
So what are your rules for relationships?
You know, there are a lot of folks who are married or thinking about getting married.
Do 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?
Oh man, I've been married 36 years and happy wife, happy life is the first one.
As 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.
They're sharing their fears.
They're sharing their stresses.
They're sharing their dreams, because your money all runs towards those things.
The way you handle your money symptoms more of a symptom of what's going on in your life than the actual problem.
And so when we can get couples to start talking, it's amazing.
They go through one of our classes, and they've been married 12 years, and they come back, you saved our marriage.
I'm like, you went the wrong class.
The sixth class was down the hall.
Yeah.
All we did was we made them start talking about their money.
One checking account, shared accounts.
We're going to know everything that's going on, both of us.
There's no, I'm going to take care of you.
You're not good with money, honey, so I'll do the money.
No, we're all on this together.
One 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.
And there's tons of data that says you're not going to build wealth unless you do that.
So, 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?
Because it seems like nowadays people think it's to fix income inequality, guarantee people jobs.
In your ideal world, you're King Dave Ramsey.
You get to decide what government does and what government doesn't.
What do you think government's actual role is?
Well, God has been smart enough so far to not allow me to be involved in that.
I pretty much agree with him.
Politically, I'm sitting here, so I'm obviously conservative.
Very conservative.
Probably just to the right of Genghis Khan.
You know, and my liberal friends, my liberal listeners, I make fun of them all the time on the air, but they know I love them.
And I'll help them with their money, and I'll help them with their marriage when they call in.
I'll help them retire with dignity.
I'll show them how to do it.
But I like people.
You know, I'll help you wherever you are.
That's okay.
But 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.
And he said, I read up on you.
And I said, oh, really?
That didn't take long.
And he goes, yeah, you're a social conservative and economic libertarian.
And I said, I never thought about that, but I probably am.
I probably am.
I'm an economic libertarian because I'm a free market.
I mean, I am a capitalist pig.
I love capitalism.
Capitalism is what happens if you leave people alone.
You know, they will go and function in their own best interest.
Some 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.
But I see so much good happen, more good happen, in the marketplace when you let people do their own thing.
Anytime you put a large number of people in a small area geographically, there has to be more rules.
We call that civilization.
If you're going to be in the middle of Montana and there's more sheep per capita in this square mile than people, and there is.
It's beautiful up there.
I love Montana.
But you don't need it.
You can just walk around with a gun on your hip and you can just shoot it if you want to.
But if you do that right here in the middle of L.A., you'll not only go to jail, but you'll endanger people.
Well, we call that most of the city, actually.
Legally, I mean.
You know, the point is, more people, you have to have more rules.
And government is the same way.
And so, I love the old systems of government.
I'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.
And they should be out of all of those businesses.
So, 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.
But I'm not going to be king, so you're safe.
It's OK.
All righty.
So I want to ask you about charity.
So in your program, you talk a lot about how when you get wealthy, you should give a lot of charity.
What do you think the role of charity is?
Because 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.
The best thing you can do is invest your money, create more jobs.
Why do you think it's important for folks to give charity?
Well, it has nothing to do with the economy.
It has to do with what it does for you.
God teaches both of our faiths to give very, very clearly.
Tons of Scripture, the Talmud, the Old Testament, what we Christians would call it, and in the New Testament as well.
Tons.
So why would a loving God suggest that you give money?
It has nothing to do with economics.
Your synagogue does not need your money.
My church does not need my money.
They're going to be fine, I promise.
So that's not what it's about.
This is about what happens in me.
When I turn loose of money and I see the result, it moves me from selfish to selfless.
It grows my character.
And selfless people are highly attractive.
Much more so than selfish people.
And so it turns out that the person who gives is also the person who holds the door for you.
They're also the person that has a level of humility.
They understand the center of the world really doesn't run through the top of their head.
But 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.
And 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.
Now, you helped her.
The economy was affected.
But what it did for you was more than any other player.
Oddly enough, charity is selfish in that regard.
If you understand what it does for you, what it does for your kids to see you give.
I'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.
He says, you're not giving back.
You didn't take anything.
Right.
You're just giving.
You didn't give back indicates somehow you took advantage of the culture and you owe the culture a debt.
You don't owe the culture a debt.
That's not true.
But you owe yourself a debt to learn to have that element of your character.
Because people who give are always grateful people.
They're more humble, and they're more selfless, and they're highly attractive people.
They're who you want your kids to be.
They're who you want to be when you grow up, you know?
That's who I want to be.
I meet those old men, those old women, they got those beautiful faces, you know?
And then you meet the ones that don't have beautiful faces because they're angry and they're selfish.
And it's up on their countenance when you get old.
And because when you get old, you become more of what you're going to be, right?
You know, and that's what charity does.
Now, think about this, though.
If we could look at that on the macro level, what would happen?
Oh, baby.
I 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.
And mean, and nasty, and on Twitter, you know?
I mean, it's just unbelievable, you know?
Yeah.
No, and I think that's exactly right.
It'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.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's a really high crossover.
And 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.
And 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.
And 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.
And we seem in our society to have reversed it.
The commandment is mostly that society owes something to me.
It used to be that if you took charity from somebody, You felt the obligation toward that person because you knew who the person was.
The person had a face.
And 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.
Is there a single person in the United States who gets a check from the government who would ever think about doing that today?
Probably not.
But 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.
Well, and all that is is gratitude.
If you've received it, it changes your gratitude level.
If you've received help at some point in your life, you're a grateful person.
And 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.
You could put them out of business.
It'd be wonderful.
So 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?
People.
Our people on our team are our greatest blessing and they're our greatest pain.
We love them and they drive us nuts sometimes.
People.
The human resource and loving them well, compensating them well, attracting the talent and people of character, people that have quality.
Tell me about that experience.
How does that interview process work?
That's a lot of vetting.
and all that kind of crap.
You know, I mean, that has been our biggest obstacle.
We hired 200 folks last year, but you have to go through 10 interviews with us.
We're very hard to get on with.
But we win Best Place to Work every year.
Why?
Because we're the best freaking place to work.
We take care of our people.
I mean, we're very, very good to them, but we require a lot.
You have to bring it, baby.
We're playing for the Super Bowl. - Tell me about that experience.
Like, how does that interview process work?
That's a lot of vetting.
I mean, maybe we'll start doing that around here. - Well, I mean, I was so dumb when I first started.
I thought if you hired people, they would just work.
You know, and that was dumb.
I mean, I thought they would actually care and they wouldn't steal.
And it turns out you have to hire people that work and care and don't steal.
You can't just hire people and then they want to do those things.
So you have to actually vet that process.
There's a due diligence involved.
So we just found out if you spend more time with people, you get to know them, they'll tell you.
We call them thoroughbreds or donkeys.
You can't win the Kentucky Derby with a donkey.
Never been one win, ever.
And you can't win at business with a room full of donkeys.
And so, sometimes a donkey can dress up, they put on their interview clothes, they look like a thoroughbred when they come in.
But 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.
That one's doing some crazy butt stuff in their personal life, I don't think we need that toxic stuff in here.
Have you seen any quick indicators of the donkey?
And so, because, you know, everything moves to the speed of trust.
And if you can't trust people's competence, their excellence, their integrity, their intent, then it's hard to work together.
You can't get work done because you're always looking over your shoulder seeing who's going to stab you.
And so we just fire people if they do stuff like that.
Have 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?
Like, how do you spot the donkey right off?
We just talk to them and they'll tell you.
And we love millennials for this reason.
The millennial generation is a fabulous generation.
I get asked all the time in these leadership conferences, how do you hire millennials?
How do you hire millennials?
I love them.
They're awesome.
Because there's really only two kinds, awesome and sucks.
And that's only millennials.
And they'll just tell you, I suck.
I live in my mother's basement.
I don't intend to work.
I got a participation trophy.
I'm not doing squat.
They'll just tell you.
And good, we're not hiring you.
But the other ones, the ones that care, and they join a cause, they'll storm the gates of hell with a water pistol, man.
They're missional.
They will fight.
They believe.
They're loyal.
It's the best generation I've ever hired.
As an old leader, I can tell you, it's a fabulous generation.
What's your management style?
I mean, how's it like in your office?
There's some people who are, you know, delegators.
There's some people who are micromanagers.
What's your management style?
What do you recommend in terms of management?
Well, I wouldn't really have hired you if I didn't need you to do something I didn't want to do.
So 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.
It's a high level of expectation, more like a coach.
A coach is somebody that loves you dearly, but you're a little bit afraid they'll go crazy at any moment and kill you.
That's probably me.
That 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.
He says, it's not important for them to know.
It's only important for me to know.
Well, I mean, I'm not unkind.
I don't yell and scream or anything like that.
It's not, but, but I mean, it's, you're going to do the stuff because that's what we're all here for.
And this, this place is bigger than any one of us.
And so you're going to get your work done.
And, uh, and if you don't, then, you know, we'll set you free in Jesus name.
There's stuff you can do.
Well, 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.
That if you have to intervene with the person too much, then you're a bad manager and you're a bad hirer.
If 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.
And so, but you can't, if you delegate without being able to trust someone's competence and their integrity, that takes time.
If you delegate without doing that, then you're just irresponsible.
And 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.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
We'll walk with you a little bit here.
Make sure you know how to do this stuff the way we're doing it.
Make sure you really know how to do it, that you're not just got a good resume and so forth.
So I'm going to trust your integrity and your competency.
And 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.
So 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.
The 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.
Do you see that as a problem in the future, or do you think that technology will be more of an aid than a hindrance?
Technology is both simultaneously in all of our lives a blessing and a curse.
We've got kids whose screen time is blowing their brains up.
There's all kinds of problems with their brains with too much screen time.
We all check our inbox and have to keep it clean like we're OCD or something, guilty, and so on.
And yet I can do more.
My personal efficiency is way through the roof.
compared to even 10 years ago.
And so it really doesn't require that much brain matter to take advantage of technology.
Most people turn on their televisions and sign into Netflix.
Most of them are listening to this podcast and they're figuring out a way to do that at all social strata.
And case in point, the dollars that are flowing into those things, we can see that that's happening.
So there's enough brain matter, gray matter, to take advantage of technology.
But it's always a blessing and it's always a curse.
And, 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.
It was not, it didn't have any refrigeration.
And then Freon was invented.
Well, the ice tong guys went out of business, right?
Well, one of them had an ice house in Dallas.
Jerry 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.
And he started a little market chain.
And the ice business today, by the way, is a $5 billion a year business.
And nobody's got tongs.
So what does that mean?
It means we adapt.
Those that are going to win, there's market disruptions, welcome to life.
And they come at you and they present either the death of your business or the life of your business.
Be ready, they're coming.
So you've had a ton of callers, obviously, over the years.
Is there anyone that really sticks out to you as particularly memorable?
Or it's just at this point kind of faded into the...
I've had several of these, but I guess the first time it happened, it sticks in your memory.
She 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.
And she's calling me, crying.
What do I do?
Well, 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.
So 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.
Because, obviously, in two minutes on the radio, I just cried with her.
Tore me up, I'm thinking about it right now, but I can't imagine getting that call.
Those guys standing on your front porch, you know?
Those get you.
But, you know, radio's a blast.
There's humans there, man.
One guy called and said, my wife says she won't have sex with me if I don't make at least $600 a month.
What do you think about that, Dave Ramsey?
I said, I think I'd get to work.
He started cussing and yelling.
We had to hit the dump button.
In 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.
On one side of the debate, people like me.
On the other side, people like Tucker Carlson.
We had Tucker on the show probably a couple of months ago at this point.
And 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.
That 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.
And 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.
Because 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?
I said, well, because that is the biblical injunction and has been the nature of Adventure-seeking people in all of human history.
That was the guarantee of America.
But it seems like this is a mindset that's setting in for a lot of folks.
I was born here.
I should stay here.
There's no reason for me to leave.
Do you see that as a trend as well?
Well, Tucker and I started on Fox Business when it first started together.
He's been a friend a long time.
I wish he was sitting here so I could insult him in person.
That's just hogwash.
He needs to get out of Manhattan more.
You know, when you walk around with real people out here, some of these little towns are dying.
And evil Walmart took over the town, or evil whatever took over the town and ran the little guy out of business.
Again, that's a marketplace disruption.
There's a great old book, one of John Grisham's books, Painted House.
It'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.
And 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.
And so what'd he do?
There was no economic things available, so he picked up and he went to Detroit.
I mean, when the hurricane hit New Orleans, you know what happened?
We got Cajun restaurants all over the United States, because people left.
And never went back.
They left because their homes were destroyed, their businesses were destroyed, but then they got comfortable.
We've got great Cajun restaurants.
Two of them are friends of mine in Nashville that were from New Orleans, and the only reason they're there was Katrina.
That's the reason they're there.
So when economic calamity or lack of opportunity is there, you pick your butt up and you move.
There's always been a diaspora.
An economic diaspora.
There has always been that.
There's always been movement, you know, to the state of Florida, you know, because of the snowbirds.
There's always a thing.
And taxation and policy drives that.
There's people leaving the state of California as if the place is on fire right now, going to Texas.
I mean, the whole political makeup of Texas is shifting because of California's moving there to get away from the taxation.
And the same thing coming out of Connecticut and out of New York.
I mean, you've got to make a lot of money extra to offset the taxation.
So all of those things play into, and there's always been a sense of, you need to move.
I don't want to move.
I like my town.
I'm comfortable there.
But if it means feeding my family, if it means living my destiny that God's given me, I'm gone.
Let's go.
When 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?
How do you shield your kids?
Because you brought up three great kids, it sounds like.
How do you go about protecting them from this and inculcating in them exactly the sort of values you're talking about?
Well, the first thing is, my friend Andy Andrews says, don't try to raise great kids.
Raise kids that are going to be great adults.
And 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.
And they're never that way.
They'll poop in their diaper right in the middle of the worst possible time and scream in the middle of church, you know.
That's kids.
That's because they're kids.
That's what they do.
But what we are going to teach them to do is to have critical thinking skills.
And I'm going to be a whole lot more concerned with your character than I am your GPA.
I'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.
And so sometimes we raise the activity level, all the activities we plug our kids into, as a substitute for teaching them character.
And, you know, we just taught them you can't lie.
It will hurt you, because I will hurt you, so that you don't get hurt later.
Well, you paddled your children.
You dadgum right.
Most of my best friends were paddled as kids.
You beat your children.
No, I'm not a child abuser.
I love my children more than anything.
I take a bullet for them.
But they turned out, and part of that was the nurturing of their mother, the fear of their father.
Let's even talk about that sort of stuff these days.
It's obviously very controversial.
I get hate mail for days.
I will after this.
That's okay.
It's alright.
I made a living off of it.
It's okay.
Well, 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.
How do you see that?
Well, I'm probably middle of the road.
My daughter called me a feminist the other day.
I couldn't believe it.
But, you know, toxic feminism, toxic masculinity has been in the news this week.
Obviously, we don't want to do any of that.
But as a husband, as a dad, my job is to love my family, to serve them, and take care of them.
And that may mean the way I serve my 8-year-old is I may make him brush his teeth.
It may mean the way I serve my 16-year-old is you don't get to drive tonight because you've not been acting right.
And they don't feel served.
When you're doing that.
But I'm serving them.
I'm their dad.
I love them more than anything on the planet.
And that's the way I view it.
My goal is to serve.
But no, I mean, my wife has been a full-time mom, but if she wanted to have a career, I don't care.
My mom was a working mom, and that's fine.
I 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.
It'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?
I don't make decisions unilaterally at our house, and neither does my wife, by the way.
So, 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.
Because spouses see stuff.
And so that, you know, we just work together.
It's a team.
So, 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.
Do you think that this is a gap that's bridgeable?
Because this is really a concern for, you know, for me, is that as I, that It's almost two separate Americas.
It'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.
And 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.
And in fact, it's an act of parental tyranny to try and teach your kids anything.
Do you think that that gap is bridgeable, or do you think it's going to continue to sort of bifurcate?
Oh, it probably comes and goes.
We kind of went through that in the hippie movement in the 70s.
We've gone through it.
We went through it a little bit with the Gen Xers.
Some of the, quote, skateboard crowd.
Remember those guys?
You know, that kind of thing.
Every generation has to push back.
And has to pull.
But yeah, we're seeing some of the fabric of our culture unravel.
Some of those values that are basic human things.
The 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.
I mean, they'll destroy a teenager's life.
Whether it's the right or the left.
I mean, the young man that stood up on the left from the school in Florida that there was a shooting.
I mean, the right went after that kid and basically just ate him alive.
He was a 17-year-old boy.
Leave him alone, people.
And then this week, the kids from Kentucky with the MAGNA hats on, or MAGA hats, or whatever you call it, and all that stuff.
The 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.
And I've had it happen to me a time or two, and in print as well.
And so you can't believe what you see on the Internet.
I know that's shocking.
But the lack of civility to stop and, let's just stop a second.
Did that pastor really do that?
Maybe he did.
Maybe he's an absolute reprobate and he should be punished and he should lose his standing for 45 years of building that.
But did he actually do that?
And so I think we got to just stop a second and breathe before we just slit everyone's throat on the first possible offense.
Oh my God, we're an offended people.
It's ridiculous.
And you get extra credit for being offended.
And you also get extra credit for being the first person to go in for the throat slitting.
Because if it turns out that you got it wrong, well, then you can sort of walk it back a little.
Maybe you apologize, maybe you don't.
But if you get it right, then you get all sorts of credit as being the first on the virtue signaling train.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I'm in charge of virtue.
That's my job for everyone else.
And it turns out a full-time job is a guy in my mirror.
Well, in a second, I want to get to the final question for you here today.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
Boom, boom, boom.
Yeah, exactly.
So here's the question.
The 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?
Because 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.
I'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.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Well, 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.
He's helped millions of people, including apparently half the members of my family, which I didn't even know.
So, Dave Ramsey, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thank you, sir.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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