Dave Ramsey is a personal finance expert, best-selling author, broadcaster, and host of “The Ramsey Show” where he lends advice to people calling in with financial questions.
Dave Ramsey joins Theo to chat about his journey in the world of money, how he overcame bankruptcy to start a successful company, the biggest lessons he learned as a business owner over the years, what traits make a smart investor, the thing most millionaires have in common, the truth about today’s inflation and housing market, how to spot a scheme, and much more.
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I'll be in Boise, Idaho on June 28th at the Extra Mile Arena.
Idaho Falls, Idaho on June 29th at the Hero Arena.
And Salt Lake City, Utah on June 30th at the Maverick Center.
Pre-sale is active now for these dates with code RatKing.
General on-sale starts Wednesday, May 1st at 10 a.m.
local time.
Today's guest is a financial advisor and a radio host.
You know him from The Ramsey Show, where he gives advice to callers who have questions about their finances.
He has a two-day live stream event coming up later this month, which we'll talk a little bit about.
I'm grateful to spend time with him today, Mr. Dave Ramsey.
Shine that light on me I'll sit and tell you my stories Shine on me And I will find a song I'll be singing I'm going to stay Shine on me
I can't believe you guys made my studio here, Dave.
We just want you to be up.
I want you to be home and come back again.
Well, yeah, I'll stay anytime.
I'll stay.
Apparently, it's no big deal.
I didn't know you guys had an air.
You guys were running Airbnbs here.
Yeah, we totally replicated my studio here in your Ramsey.
Is this a campus, pretty much?
Yeah, I guess that's what we call it.
Yeah.
And is it so you have investment, like what's on the campus?
Because this is, it's beautiful.
No, thank you.
Thank you.
We've got two office buildings and, of course, the main lobby area where we broadcast the shows on the glass.
So the area for the public to come in and hang out while we're doing the shows.
And then we've got a 2,500-seat auditorium up on the hill up there that we do events in, the event center.
So it's been quite an adventure.
Like, what type of events will you do up there?
Well, we do our Ramsey events.
I mean, we've got, number one, we've got 1,100 team members, so we do staff meeting up there and devotional on Wednesday up there.
But we'll do weekend-long events.
We've got a money and marriage event with Rachel Cruz, my daughter, and Dr. John Deloney, two of our Ramsey personalities in the fall.
It'll be mammoth.
We'll have it sold out here in a couple of weeks for a total money makeover weekend.
So it's public coming in for public events to learn something that we're doing usually around the money subject or the leadership subject.
We use it for our entree leadership stuff.
So it stays pretty busy.
Wow.
Yeah, it's remarkable.
Dave Ramsey, man.
Yeah, thanks so much, man.
So you, so just for a lot of our viewers will know you, but some who wouldn't.
So you started out in finance.
Like, how did you get in?
Like, what made you care about money out of the gate?
Like, did you have a, did you guys have allowance issues in the home?
Yeah, we did.
You did?
Yeah, we were not on allowance.
We were on commission.
Work, get paid, don't work, don't get paid.
So, yeah, I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood.
So daddy believed in work, like real work.
Like, I was 12 years old, and I came in and said, I need some money to go to the quicksack and get an IC.
And he said, no, you need a job.
Wow.
I said, what could you do?
And I said, well, I guess I could cut grass.
And he took me down here on Nolansville Road and printed up 500 business cards that said, Dave's lawns.
Go knock on the closest 50 doors and ask the opportunity to provide their lawn care needs.
So at 12, I ended up with 27 yards to cut.
So I think they call that child abuse now.
Yeah, look, yeah.
Well, yeah, I think if you force a kid to get a job nowadays, I think the protective services will come and get you.
That's exactly right.
You know, it's pretty, sometimes it can be like that.
It can be kind of alarming.
There wasn't a protective service that would have protected them from my parents.
Yeah, so anyway, we grew up doing that, and then I started buying and selling real estate in my 20s and got rich starting from nothing.
And I had, at least where I came from, I mean, I had a million dollar net worth, and I was making $20,000 a month in 1983.
Oh, yeah.
But then where were you driving?
A jag.
That's what I always, because none of my friends could spell Jaguar, so I needed a Jaguar.
But I'd done stupid stuff and too much debt.
The bank got sold, called our notes, and spent the next three years of our life losing everything.
And that's what made me care about money, to answer your question.
Wow, because, yeah, because if you go to a high pretty early, that's wild.
Yeah.
So did you think at that point you thought, oh, this is it.
Life's just going to be a...
I was stupid on steroids, yeah.
And so we, yeah, with a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a thread, we got the opportunity to start again in 1988, September 23rd.
Well, you remember it like that.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the day we file bankruptcy.
That's like hell day.
Do you have to go to the bank to file it, or how do you do it?
No, it's a federal court.
It's a nice little procedure that you go through that's pretty intimidating.
And were you still like, was your dad still like a mentor at that point for business or anything?
No, no, they had moved away by then.
And I had guys around here that were, that were family friends and stuff that we'd grown up with.
Wow.
But I had started a faith journey.
I'd met God.
And so as an adult, because I was pretty much a wild character in my youth.
And so I started finding out that the Bible said something about money.
And then I started talking to old rich people.
And both of these things said, you know, just common sense.
Just live on less than you make.
Have a plan.
Get out of debt.
And, you know, I've got all these degrees and letters and licenses and crap after my name that says I'm supposed to know something about money, but I was broke.
And so I needed a new set of information.
So I found common sense and started using it.
And then people started asking us, okay, how did you turn your life around after all that garbage?
And this is what we did.
And they went, can we do it?
I'm like, yeah.
And we started showing people.
And then, you know, 35 years later, here we are showing people, millions of them.
Yeah, no, it's unbelievable.
I mean, everybody knows Dave Ramsey and everybody's had, you know, has used you for financial guidance and stuff Over the years, or gone to you with certain questions.
I know you guys take so many questions on your show.
And with that turnaround moment, was there like, did it lead you to be like, I need more than just believing that finances are going to take care of me?
Yeah, I think that's probably part of the journey there.
I mean, somebody said, how'd you bounce back?
And I'm like, dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce.
It's splat.
So, you know, we hit your ladder.
We sat around and whined and moaned and blamed everybody else for about a year and, you know, figured out finally it wasn't everybody else's fault.
It was my fault.
I caused it.
I'm the idiot, signed up for the trip and got to take it.
So I had to, you know, I had to course correct and adjust.
And so, yeah, I think our faith, our new faith at that point, it was very young and tender and not a lot of knowledge or anything.
But anyway, we're just trying to figure out how do you navigate with two little babies and sitting here broke.
And, you know, my wife's from the Hills of East Tennessee, frying pan throwing theirs in an Olympic event.
You know, I mean, it's like it's a hillbilly woman.
So it was rough.
And so we about killed each other.
And I think she would have left, but she didn't have a car.
But yeah, so I mean, that's the stuff that we did.
But again, gradually, we just sat down with the yellow pad and said, okay, here's what we have coming in.
We can't spend more than that.
And we're always going to give some.
We're always going to save some.
And we're going to feed ourselves.
And then what do we do next?
And then the next week.
And then the next week.
And okay, now we've got to get a little bit better.
And started gradually getting our income back up.
And it was not a bounce back.
It was years, it feels like.
But then, you know, the thing about this stuff, this common sense thing, it's not a microwave.
It's a crock pot.
Yeah.
It cooks up good, but it takes a while.
It takes a long while, yeah.
And then sometimes you realize you look in the thing and you're like, I don't even have this thing plugged in either.
There's that too.
Yeah.
There's that problem.
You're just sitting there watching a bowl of cold meat water for eight hours.
So sometimes.
Sounds like it's from experience, man.
Might have just happened, yeah.
I've been through some things.
Yeah.
Well, if you don't have a wife, you have a crock pot.
This is true.
I mean, it's definitely, and it's a sad day for a man when you realize, you're like, oh, damn, this is, you know, when you go in to get your crock pot, you know.
That's signing up for it right there.
It is really.
And you name her, some people name it after a woman, and I'm like, well, this is getting a little crazy, I feel like.
But when you look at like, yeah, like when I think back on jobs that I had, like I was, you know, I sold, I used to sell hamsters outside of Raves when I was young.
I've sold, I worked in dairy.
I sold Mexican food door to door.
I used to clean out wishing wells in our town.
We had a plethora of wells in our parish.
What else?
Collecting cans and taking them over to the scales.
I sold Italian or semi-Italian food.
Just all types of things.
And I try to offer suggestions to like people that were like me growing up, like how do you find a job that could start to change like if you don't have much.
And I often go to like pressure washing.
That's what I'll tell people.
You buy a pressure wash, you can get a pretty good one for about $600.
And then you can start a business.
You can make your day's lawn care cards.
And next, you know, two weeks later, you're a dang business owner.
You know, are there suggestions like you have like that for people that are like, you know, like, and it can be a first job even, like, what do I start?
I mean, lawn care is a great one.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to me what people will pay you to do if you're just willing to go do it and you show up on time.
And then I think the piece that goes with that is, okay, you don't want to start pressure washing and go, hey, I want to be 63 years old, which is what I am, and still be pressure washing.
That's not a plan.
To get you through this week, you can do a lot of pressure washing.
You're right.
You can turn it into a car detail company and then turn it into something else and then sell that and do something else.
And what I figured out was these wealthy people, they don't think, thank God it's Friday.
Oh, God, it's Monday.
They're not living for the weekend, right?
Every move they make is a step towards where I want to be in 10 years, who I want to become.
And so, okay, I might be pressure washing so I can get the money to go to code school and pay $10,000 and go to code school.
Oh, then you can make $150 a year coding.
And so what's a step?
What's the method to get there?
What's the path to get there?
And so the problem I think sometimes is if you feel like you're taking a job like that, and I've done all that, not the exact same thing, but I've done a bunch of crappy jobs too and entrepreneurial things.
And I'd buy an old car at a repo lot and come home, fix it up, put it back on the market.
And back in those days, there were classified ads in the newspaper.
Oh, yeah.
And so we'd turn around, sell the car, or buy a bunch of junk at some auction.
I was there to buy the house, but I'd buy half the estate and then put it in, turn it into a garage sale next week.
Oh, yeah.
You got to have a condiac full of candelabras or something driving off.
You get some deals on stuff.
And so it was a lot of fun.
Horse trading, we called it growing up, but no horses involved, but there was, you know, somebody knew how to buy something and flip it over.
Or go to the police auction.
That was always fun.
That's a lot of fun.
There's some weird stuff there, man.
Is there?
But yeah.
And all that stuff.
And so, but it needs to be that that's not where you're staying.
It's a path of where you're going.
And, you know, that changes everything.
It's like, you know, even your, you know, this meteoric, fabulous, famous career that you've done.
I mean, you're just, man, amazing.
Congratulations.
And, I mean, there's a lot of bad comedy clubs in the lineup with wrong people in the audience before you get to be the Theo Vaughan of today.
You know, there's a price to be paid to win.
You don't win.
You know, you're an overnight success.
Yeah, I worked my butt off for 30 years to be an overnight success.
You worked your butt off for a decade plus to be an overnight success.
And just because somebody found you on Netflix last week, that doesn't mean you just started on that.
I don't know how it happened.
Right, yeah.
I mean, even when I think back, like I used to get all these comments, I would get all the email cards and go before the shows and put them on all the tables so I could get back in touch with people.
I would buy like the CD or DVD burner and burn a DVD and then sell it after the show.
I'd burn like, and I remember when I got a three-disc burner so I could burn three at a time.
Wow.
And what'd those sell for, man?
They were probably $300, $400.
Wow.
But you could get that little CD.
I'm not talking about the burner.
What were you selling the CDs for?
Oh, the CDs for?
Probably $10, but I'd take eight.
And volume discount, too.
If you want 10 of them to give for Christmas presents, I'll set you up.
Oh, I sold one to a lady one time.
This was in Missawaka, Indiana.
She bought one.
She drove three hours home.
She said it didn't work, and she drove back the next day to come and change it.
I was like, it's just a dang $8.
She spent more in gas, but I guess it was just the point of making sure she got what she paid for, which I understand.
But yeah, when I think about all the different things or missing certain events in people's lives or something at work, sometimes I wish I'd had a little bit better balance.
But also liked working.
I think I really liked it.
But yeah, I don't think it's as easy as having like things evolve though, too.
Like one thing I'm thinking, say if you start a pressure washing, right?
You're going to start to learn how to do business.
That's something you don't realize you're going to learn by starting a business sometimes is that you're going to learn how to do business.
And next thing you know, you might have an employee.
And then you're like, oh, wow, now I'm an employer.
I've never been an employer.
What's that like?
And you just learn like you'll do taxes and business that you'll file for LLC.
You'll do all these things.
And then you're just building up knowledge.
And then part of you, or for me, I notice, will start to bloom a little bit and be like, well, now what else do I want to do?
Because you've seen one thing that you tried and started with.
You've seen it work or not work even.
You've learned that, hey, it didn't work out.
But yeah, the more like kind of steps you take into doing business, the more that you become somebody who walks like a business guy in some ways.
Well, you change your identity.
You change who you are.
I mean, I'm not the little redneck hillbilly kid hell raising that I was when I was in high school.
I got a lot less hair, for one thing, but I'm also not that guy anymore.
For that matter, I've been married 43 years.
My wife's not married the same guy she married 43 years ago.
Thank God, because he wasn't much.
What kind of hair do you have?
Something good?
Not as good as yours.
I never got that, but I had that 70s thing going with the little feathers on the side.
You remember those?
Yeah.
You don't remember them, but you've seen pictures with that.
Oh, yeah.
The problem with the part down the middle is the part gets wide if you're not careful.
Yeah, yeah.
Dude, what would you say to like somebody who's going into business with a friend?
That's one thing I think about a lot of times.
What are things, like a partnership with a friend, right?
Or starting a partnership with just a new business person?
I mean, it could even be a spouse.
Like, what do you say?
Like, what are pitfalls that people can look out for in advance of that kind of stuff?
Well, I mean, the biggest thing we run into, we coach about 10,000 businesses with the entree leadership brand, small businesses, and they're anywhere from 500 to 200 team member size.
And so what I tell those guys, and I'll be speaking to them, you know, we do an event with about 3,000 of them once a year.
I'll be speaking to them in the next couple of weeks here.
And so one of the things we tell them is really, your beer drinking buddy and you're sitting around talking about opening a business is a bad idea.
One of y'all needs to open it and the other one needs to work there.
And you can pay him out of the profits if you want.
You can be generous.
But somebody, anything with two heads is a monster.
And the only ship on sale is a partnership.
So generally speaking, don't do a partnership generally.
Now, if you're going to have friends work on your team, which I mean, I got a bunch of them, a bunch of my team is friends.
And they either became friends while they're here or they were friends and then they came here.
I've got family in the building.
My kids work here in their 30s.
And so how do you navigate that?
Well, we had to learn from a family business perspective, and it works for friends as well, to separate the hat that we wear.
And so my hat that I wear with my buddy, you know, it's friend and, you know, we're having a cigar together or playing golf or doing whatever.
It says friend on it, right?
Fantasy football, yeah.
Yeah, whatever.
And so, but when we're at work, my hat says CEO.
Right.
And his says, you know, technology or whatever.
And so you do your job.
I'll do my job.
And I'm going to treat you like I would treat the other team members because I treat them all nice and good with dignity.
I don't yell and scream and cuss at people.
So, I mean, we treat them right.
And you're going to treat me with the same respect that you would if you worked in a place letting the CEO walked in the room.
Not that you bow or something like that, but you don't roll your eyes and go, you don't use friend talk at your CEO.
And so you change.
You can't run up and tickle them or whatever.
Well, that's strange.
But the idea being that like my kids, you know, my daughter, Rachel Cruz, is a huge personality, three, four number one bestsellers and, you know, speaks all over America.
It's constantly on the network TV and stuff.
And we've got eight of those people that are personalities that do different things.
And so she gets paid, not as my daughter, but based on the work that she does there.
And then when I'm, you know, she's got three of my grandkids.
So when I got Papa Dave hat on when I'm with the grandbabies at Thanksgiving dinner.
But when we're here, I'm dealing with her.
Everybody in the room knows she's my daughter, but I treat her the same way I would treat Dr. John Deloney or Ken Coleman, the other personalities as well.
So you just got to separate that and wear different hats.
So when you're wearing your friend hat, then act that way.
And, you know, when you're at work, you're wearing this hat and, you know, you've got to perform.
I've got to perform.
And so family doesn't get a pass and a friend doesn't get a pass for incompetence or, you know, just I'm not going to come to work today.
No, that's not how we, we're all coming to work today.
Yeah.
If you are going into business with a friend, what are something that people can like, what discussions need to be had up front?
Say you're going into a partnership with a buddy, you know, so you don't run into lawsuits down the line.
Yeah.
Well, you may.
Nothing you do keeps you from, I mean, people can file a lawsuit for anything, even if it's not true.
They can just make up something.
So it's, and they do.
We've run into that.
But what we tell folks, if you're going to do a partnership, make sure you got really good documentation.
And the best thing you can do is talk through and have in the document all the bad things that can happen.
And a lot of them are Ds, divorce, drug use, disinterest.
I don't want to work anymore.
Disability, death.
You know, what happens when these things happen?
So, because you may be just great working with your buddy and he owns half the company, but his wife's cuckoo and he dies.
Now you're partnered with cuckoo.
You know, that's a bad plan.
So you need to have this laid out.
What's going to happen in these situations?
I mean, you know, I've had a guy working here that was one of our top leaders many years ago, got MS. He was driving home, six miles home, got lost on the way home, brain lesions.
And so he obviously became disabled.
So what happens to that guy?
He was one of my top guys.
He was, you know, he's paid off the bottom line like he was a partner and just a wonderful man.
He's passed away now.
And, you know, how do you treat him?
How do you treat his family in the worst case scenario?
And how are you going to take care of them?
And because you want to take care of your buddy.
You don't want your buddy's kids to be homeless because something happened to him if he's your partner.
In this case, this guy was one of my right arms.
So you just got to think that stuff through because it's going to come.
Something's going to come at you.
And if you haven't anticipated it, because everybody goes into this stuff like, oh, it's all going to work.
Nothing works like it's supposed to work ever.
It never works.
It's never as easy as it sounds when you're sitting and talking about it the first time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you find yourself having unrealistic expectations about going into business spaces?
That's some things that I've struggled with in my life, especially recently.
It's like just unrealistic expectations that things are going to work or that they should be a certain way, like not leaving space for anything, really.
Trying to just really have a lot of my own will, I guess, in some ways it is.
But also it's just.
You know, observing you from the outside, I think you probably suffer from this intense desire to be excellent.
Yeah.
And all that means is you're excellent.
And so if you demand that of yourself, it's okay to demand that of the situation, of the project, and even the people.
I work my tail off.
And so I don't hesitate if somebody's not to go, hey, come on, pick it up.
Right.
You know, it's not like I'm kicking back and asking you to go down.
No, I'm going.
Right.
So keep up.
Right.
You know, and same thing with a project.
We get on these projects now.
So I do, I have, I still have unrealistic expectations.
I do have a reality perception after 30 freaking years of doing stupid stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm convinced we've survived about 90% of our ideas.
Everything that good that's happened happened on about 10% of them.
But when you're starting it, I mean, you're going for a walk in the morning and, you know, you're sitting on the dock having a cup of coffee at the lake and you have this idea.
They're all good then, you know, but when you're half a million dollars in and you go, oh, this sucks.
This is awful.
And so you come to the realization that even though we demanded excellence, even though we drove the lane, put the ball on the hoop, even though we didn't have product market fit, something's off, pricing's off, something's off.
And I mean, but if you're not trying stuff, you're not growing.
So you got to try stuff, but you're going to screw up a lot of it, even though you demand excellence.
But I don't have hesitation at all expecting excellence and expecting it.
Why would you enter something you didn't think was going to work?
Of course we think it's going to work.
I was a stupid reporter the other day.
He's like, did you ever have any idea it would be this big?
And I'm like, well, of course I did.
I'm getting people out of debt.
There's like everybody is my market.
Of course I thought it, but what I didn't know is how much work it was going to be.
I didn't have any idea I was going to have $100 million in payroll.
I didn't have any idea that it was going to take that to do it, but I knew there was a lot of need.
I knew that it could be big, but I didn't know how bad it was going to be, how hard it was going to be.
Yeah, I think that's the thing that, you know what, that's funny when I hear you say that, because yeah, I started to get busier with stuff that was business, I just wanted to be a comedian, you know, and then got into podcasting, and then you have employees, and then they have feelings and you have feelings.
Yeah, and you have relationships with them, you know, and so and so it's like all these things.
Next thing you know, it's like I spend a lot of my day, most of your time gets gone kind of because you have, there's another responsibility.
And so then I'm just like, man, I'm just, I never, I didn't expect this much more work to come out of, I think, just having some goals, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
I thought I was going to be on the radio and sell some books on getting out of debt.
And, I mean, who knew I needed 400 people in a tech, in a tech department, you know?
And so it's the same thing.
You're exactly right.
But the good news is that, like you said earlier, it's an opportunity to learn, opportunity to grow.
That way you don't just stay in the pressure washing business.
And so I still enjoy the stage.
I still enjoy being on the radio and the podcast to YouTube every day.
We still do that show every day, three hours a day.
I still enjoy all this stuff, but I also enjoy running this place.
I'm running it with my son.
He's the president now.
And that's awesome.
You know, we had breakfast this morning and we're having a lot of fun working on the problems and looking at the new opportunities and all that.
So it's the entrepreneurial side is fun.
Yeah.
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What do you say to like employees who want to talk to their employer about getting a raise or getting, like, what is a good way to approach an employer about that kind of stuff?
You know, a lot of stuff in business like that are relationship things.
If you'll just switch the moccasins a minute, wear their moccasins.
So if you were the supervisor or you're the owner of the business, how would you want someone to talk to you about it?
And so, I mean, I really appreciate when our folks come in and go, hey, you know, I'm making this and, you know, here's two or three positions in the marketplace that are more for the same position.
And so, you know, what I'm curious about is what I can do to be worth what those people are doing because I want to be worth more to the business.
And if they say it that way, oh man, yeah, I'm like, yeah, okay, here.
Yeah.
Well, matter of fact, you know, we probably have overlooked that.
We probably just need to give you a raise.
But maybe, yeah, maybe there's three things you need to do to level up to be ready to do that.
And so it's an opportunity for growth and those kinds of things.
Because really, if you're an employer, your team has to make you more or save you more than they cost.
Or by definition, you go out of business mathematically.
And so if you'll look at that as a team member, it's like, how can I add more value than I cost or save more money and depending on what they're working on, but then I cost, then it's kind of a no-brainer unless the employer is a jerk and greedy or whatever.
But most employers are just trying to figure it out too.
We're just trying to go, especially small business people.
I mean, we love our people.
They're family to us.
And, you know, we want to help them win.
We want their kids to go to college.
We want to be with them 20 years and watch them grow up.
You know, we want all that.
We want good stuff for you.
But we also don't want to close because we overpaid everybody and didn't make any stinking money.
So then everybody loses.
So you've got this balance.
Employers got that stress they're carrying.
So if you'll keep that in mind when you're asking, how can I add value that's more than I cost or save you more than I cost?
Then like I've got a lady in logistics.
I mean, she saved us several hundred thousand dollars with contract negotiations with our logistics people on the shipping more than she cost.
Wow.
Well, it's easy to say, yeah, you're worth that.
That's a no-brainer.
I like sharing with her.
I mean, we always tell people around here, if you kill it and drag it home, you know, go out there, kill it, drag it to the cave.
I'll share it with you.
Let's figure it out.
You know, you bring in a million dollars in revenue.
We can probably divvy that up.
We can probably figure out something to do with that.
You know, I don't need to take it all home, but I also don't need to give it all to one person either.
So we figure this out.
And you can do that when you're adding value.
And so just look at it that way, not like, on the other hand, I had a guy come in years ago, long time ago, and he'd been to school half his life.
He had more degrees than a thermometer.
And he just, you know, he said, hey, man, you know, at these big companies, people, they got this many degrees, they make a certain amount of money.
And he said, I'm not making that here.
We need to adjust my income.
And I said, well, dude, I'm sorry.
This is small business.
Your raise is effective when you are.
I mean, we don't pay you for degrees.
We pay you for bringing in more than you cost.
And right now you're not.
So, you know, he left and went and worked for corporate America where they'll pay him for those degrees and they can get away with that.
But small business can't do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do you say?
Like, what is some of the ad, or even just like to get a little bit more minute with it, like, what are just, say somebody's out there listening, like, man, I feel like I want to talk to my boss about a razor.
I want to, how do they, what are some, should they tell themselves certain things to prep themselves to go in there?
If they, should it just be comfortable?
Because it's just a space where a lot of people get really uncomfortable, I think, you know?
Yeah, you know, anytime I'm in a situation like that, where I'm uncomfortable, where there's conflict or a negotiation, if you want to call it that, I found that the more options I have, the calmer I am.
And so if there's only one thing, I mean, if I don't get this, I'm dead.
But if you've got like six people wanting to hire you and, you know, you want to go in and go, hey, you know, I'd like to stay and I like it here and I like you and work.
But I got all this other stuff, your body language changes.
You know, you don't have to be cocky about it.
You don't have to swagger in or something, but you can come in with a lot of confidence if you've got options.
But if you've got it all dialed in, it's this one thing.
And if I don't get this one thing, the whole thing's over and you add this drama, then you tighten up.
Yeah, you can feel that energy in there.
And it changes the conversation.
Your vocal cords change even.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there can be things, even if it's not financial, you could get, well, is there a possibility that my car could be paid or insurance?
I think there's always different possibilities of things you can ask for, even that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it depends on how the business is structured and what's going on.
There's a lot of different things you can do to help people and do different things.
And sometimes we've had situations where someone is just in a financial situation, you know, they got in trouble.
And they come in, we sit down, we go over their budget, and we go, okay, number one, we're going to get you in a situation so you're never here again with your budget, how you're handling your money.
But then number two, you know, your house is four payments behind, so we're going to catch the house up.
And so that's just like a one-time thing.
That's not a permanent raise because the raise wasn't the problem.
Their mismanagement at home was the problem.
So, you know, we help them fix the mismanagement, and then we catch them up.
Now they're at even.
Now they can run.
Yeah.
Would you buy it?
Do you still think it's good to buy a house?
I'm a homeowner, right?
Like for the first time, like last year or two years ago.
And sometimes I'm like, is this the best thing to do?
Like it's tougher to have like freedom to just go where you want.
You know, you can't just go.
And then sometimes it feels like there's so many expenses with a home.
Sometimes it feels like, I'm not saying it's true, but it feels like I'm not really building up any equity or saving money.
What do you think about it, Dave?
Well, again, the scope, over the scope of time, you're making money without a doubt.
By owning a home?
Absolutely.
I mean, again, I'm old, so I've gotten to see this thing happen.
I got my real estate license three weeks after I turned 18 years old in 1978.
And the first house I sold was to a buddy of mine from high school, which means he wasn't smart because he let me sell him a house.
And I'm stupid.
He's like, now I'm going to live in one of the rooms, buddy.
I just want you to know straight up.
How's this going?
But yeah.
Anyway, I sold him that house for $42,500.
And it's on East Ridge over in Antioch.
And that house today would be probably $800.
Wow.
So, you know, and if you bought a house four years ago, you've gotten in Nashville.
I mean, you've made serious money on it in four years in terms of value increase.
But yeah, the nickel-dime expenses, the messing with the repairs, I mean, crap, the more stuff you own, the more repairmen you have to know.
I mean, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's got a motor in it or it's cars or houses or boats or all this stuff.
Something's always freaking breaking.
There's always something screwed up.
And it does get the feeling of just the hassle and the aggravation.
There's no simplicity to it at all.
Your life gets more complicated.
So be careful what you wish for.
But homeownership in general, absolutely.
We did the largest study of millionaires ever done in the West.
I saw that.
And the typical millionaire that we found, 89% of them were first generation, meaning they did not inherit their money.
It's not how they became millionaires.
So 9 out of 10, that's good news for everybody.
We all got a shot.
Right.
But the two things that got them there was simply putting money in their 401k and buying a house and paying it off.
And so I'd meet a guy, you know, he's 42 and he pays, he owes, you know, he had a house of $600,000 or $700,000 and he had like $600,000 or $800,000 in his 401k and he's 42 years old.
So he's worth over a million dollars and he paid off his house.
So home ownership is a key part of the first, you know, $1 to $10 million of net worth that somebody builds.
And so, yeah, I'm a huge believer in home ownership.
Don't do it stupid because buying a house you can't afford makes you broker.
That's why they call them brokers.
But yeah, it's a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is your study right here.
How did you come upon these millionaires?
You know, we did a detailed study and sent out not just from us, but we just went to the population and found them.
We had a research firm in New York City looking over our shoulder to make sure our research methodology was tight because we knew we'd get a ton of pushback from people who think that America is dead and there's no chance for anybody to win.
You can't get up off the bottom.
Little man can't get ahead, that whole thing.
You're saying that's not true.
The problem is little man gets ahead every day in America.
We see it right here.
And I've met them for 30, 40 years, you know, doing this.
I run into them and some of them did it because they did our stuff, but some of them just said, you know, I'm going to live on less than I make.
And, you know, it was an interesting result.
So these are the top five careers of the millionaires that you guys looked at?
Yep.
Engineer.
Well, what we found was what occurred most often.
Okay.
Engineer was number one.
The most often occurring among the people we surveyed that were millionaires was engineer.
Number two was accountant.
Number three was teacher, which is surprising.
Number three, management business.
Number five is attorney.
Medical doctor didn't even make top five.
We always think of doctors and lawyers, you know.
Yeah.
But they're actually number six, but they're notoriously bad with money.
They make a lot of money, but they're like music stars or something.
They're notoriously bad with money.
And so that was interesting.
We couldn't figure out at first what these things had in common because they don't seem to have anything in common.
What we finally figured out is all five of these are process people.
You follow a process, a set of rules, and you learn the rules and you follow the rules.
You're an engineer, there's only one way to build that building and it doesn't fall, right?
If you're an accountant, it's not art.
You don't get to make up how you do accounting.
There's one way to do it.
Teachers have a lesson plan they have to follow.
Business has always a set of best practices.
Attorneys, there's the law.
And you can only conduct yourself in court a certain way or the judge will smack you backwards.
All of these are process people.
So they discovered, because of the way the brain worked that led them into these careers, they discovered the process of living on less than they make, living on a budget, starting to invest, being generous, paying off their house, that kind of stuff.
And they follow that process and that's what got them there.
It was not that the interesting thing is one-third of them, 33%, made less than $100,000 a year.
Wow.
They were not making bank.
They were not earning their way into it, really.
Yeah, because you would think teachers, you always hear we got to pay these teachers more, you know.
And we do.
I mean, that wouldn't be bad at all.
But there's the way the teachers' brains work, they do process, and that's the secret sauce.
And all of those, I guess, you have to have an education for.
Well, that's true.
Well, you have to go to college.
Do you have to go to college to be a teacher?
I don't know if you can.
You have to.
You do?
Yeah.
Definitely.
Definitely.
Sorry, teachers.
I didn't.
Some of mine didn't.
some of mine some of yours didn't go to class some of mine didn't either some of mine would be in classes with me i was like what it's like ric flair came on here one time and he said he was in a rehab facility for drugs and alcohol and he looks over one day at lunch and one of the doctors is also in the facility that's not good sound yeah it's like well that's definitely you're at a hooters bro i'm like you're not you're just at a hooters um yeah that's what the people say a lot of times is it
does feel like that now it feel there's a lot of energy in there it feels like um the american dream isn't possible that it doesn't exist where do you think a lot of that energy comes from um that that is the it feels like that's the consensus these days would you agree with that it feels like that uh there's a lot of there's a lot of loud people that have that i don't know that it's necessarily a consensus uh among americans because consensus means that
most people agree with it right okay so i'm not sure of that but there's enough there's enough people that are making noise in that regard but there kind of always has been i mean if you go back to the you know the the 70s with the hippie movement it was the same kind of thing right and so there's always been a you know my group the baby boomers and so there's always been somebody in the group that felt like the system was rigged man we got to get the system you know yeah yeah we can't beat the system the little man can't get ahead you know and so the neighborhood i grew up in people say that you know and they never said it with like enthusiasms
like the little man can't get ahead yeah like eeyore is their spirit animal oh yeah and where is my tail yeah that's just that's it and i'm stuck and life's bad and you know and no you're not get up off your butt and go get a pressure washer i mean there's stuff to do you know so uh and most of these people again these millionaires uh and a million dollars is not that's not a billion dollars that's a million there's a lot of difference millionaires don't have jets millionaires don't have seven cars and
four houses no you know they just got so they've just got a paid for house and some money in their retirement that's what it amounts to and so there's a people kind of have a different mindset there and they think okay i can't be like this rock star well you might not be there's not as many billionaires as there are millionaires yeah so but anyway can it be done yes it can be done and there is there's a lot of uh loud noises out there i don't know where that comes from it's a i think it starts with and one of the reasons i pushed back and did this study and then we ended up doing a number one
best song book on it baby steps and millionaires pushing back in the marketplaces against those voices is because they're not it's not true that you can't get ahead right and when you convince someone that it's true you're stealing their hope and you shouldn't steal people's hope man that's evil yeah and so you ought to encourage people to go do stuff now you should not encourage them to go on american idol if they can't sing yeah okay but you you should you know so stop their nightmares but also encourage their dreams so
this hopelessness that goes with that i feel stuck i i'll never get a house i'm a gen z i'm a millennial i can't get ahead in today's world you boomers bought your house for two baskets of strawberries and so now i'm stuck and you don't understand and and housing is so expensive honey it's always been expensive i was doing an interview on npr the other day and the lady said you know i was riding with the uber driver and the uber driver said his daughter is a dancer and
a barista and she couldn't get a house and i went that's been true in every generation yeah if you serve coffee and you're in nashville and you're a dancer yeah i think that's that's just going to be that's not those are not you know career fields that you're going to make enough to be able to afford a house that's not that's not a new thing that doesn't mean the system has failed yeah and who's buying java off a stripper either you know to be honest i'm not saying i didn't say what kind of dancer i didn't i didn't have any idea there but
yeah oh okay yeah i thought yeah i didn't know but yeah like who also i guess it would be nice though if a stripper just shows up as a nice cup of coffee actually that's probably not a bad deal don't they have that nude barista uh drive-through or something where's that at you know that is a thing that's right i saw that that's a while back that's old news yeah it's old news but it definitely still i think some people pretend like it's nude news every day when they roll up there like let me see the headlines huh um not sure exactly how we got there
but okay well yeah but i'm just saying that's a unique business right there that's kind of wild you know that'll be definitely um but the the back to your thing the the thing is hope is a decision and it's got to be based on you know you you've had the actual reality in your life of going from collecting cans to sitting here i've had the reality in my life of going from mowing grass to millionaire in my 20s
to losing it all i'm so dumb i had to do it twice damn so you know i've got that reality and so when someone says it can't be done i went uh wait a minute hello um and i don't really i'm fairly smart but i'm not a rocket surgeon i mean i don't i don't really know how to do stuff i just i'm figuring it out as i go right and and so i think anybody can do it no it's good to hear yeah i think people having a hope like that is important you know and
i think that's yeah it's just really important to hear that that yeah if you take away somebody's hope because i guess that's what a lot of this this uh these loud voices are doing right i never thought about that that much they're just trying to take away hope because once they have your hope they can kind of keep you there i feel like if they're running us if they're running a game you know and they're they're manipulating that's one thing and that's particularly evil but it the other one is just they really have lost hope and so they're angry and
they don't want and they want to loudly proclaim that it's not possible which makes them feel okay that they're not winning that they haven't gone and done something yet and because winning's hard man it's hard yeah it takes a lot of work man yeah i was talking they had uh kid rock was on a couple weeks ago and he was talking about how um yeah if you want to re if you want to have success you're going to have to probably work 60 hours a week six you know 60 to 80 hours a week, he was saying.
For a period of time, not your whole life.
Right.
I mean, we started this thing, man, I was 16 hours.
My wife had, you know, and she's like, I was a single mom for two years.
You know, you were gone.
I was on the road doing book tours.
I was out speaking everywhere.
I was going crazy, going to cities, trying to get radio stations to carry the show.
Back when talk radio was the thing, and that's how we all got started was in talk radio.
Oh, yeah.
Do you ever meet Paul Harvey?
No, I didn't.
No, I didn't.
Oh, yeah.
That's so cool.
I know y'all's timelines.
It's iconic.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
I knew all the guys that are current Rush and Sean, Hannity, and all those guys are all contemporaries, and they're all friends and, you know, people that have been around the business like that.
And a lot of the new guys that are doing really good work, too.
But anyway, we're just out there hustling, man.
And you got to leave the cave, kill it, drag it home.
And my wife grew up on a farm, so she's like, yeah, hard work's how you do this.
So get after it.
Now, you can't maintain that.
It was two years.
It wasn't 20. 20, I would have lost my family.
You can't maintain relationships.
My kids would have been messed up.
And so by the time my kids got on up, I didn't miss a prom.
I didn't miss a hockey game.
I didn't miss whatever.
The big games, I mean, the little stuff I'd be gone during the week.
But we started putting these dates on the calendar and we would book our events around them.
You couldn't book on top of that.
And I still do that.
Yeah.
When people talk about discussion these days about how inflation is growing so fast, I guess, that it's not, that the minimum wage isn't keeping up with it.
It feels like detrimental.
It feels sometimes impossible.
If you look at the minimum wage, how is this going to, it would feel impossible almost, I feel like, if you were trying to take care of a family or something on that, you know?
Well, truthfully, minimum wage has never, I don't think since even it was formed in the 70s, I don't think any time in history minimum wage has been enough to take care of a family.
So you've always had to think beyond minimum wage if you wanted to excel, if you wanted to have, you know, A, build some wealth or B, just take care of a family, those kinds of things.
So minimum wage is not designed for that.
Entry-level jobs are that's not designed.
What's more disturbing than minimum wage is that wages in general, average household incomes have not kept up with inflation.
And so that's alarming.
That's more alarming because that's the whole population.
It's not just this segment that enters entry-level stuff at minimum wage.
Because if we go all the way back to minimum wage, I'm cutting grass for $3 a yard in 1972.
There are dinosaurs in the yard.
We had to get them out of the yard.
But I mean, 1972, $3 a yard.
But minimum wage was $1.65.
My buddy's working at Burger King, flopping whoppers, and he's making $1.65.
If I can cut that $3 yard in an hour, I'm making double minimum wage at 12 years old.
And that's how my little math brain was working.
So I'm running that mower.
I'm going.
You can even cut somebody's yard and just go to their door and be like, hey, just cut your yard.
No, I mean, it was my job.
They were one of my clients.
I had to go cut their grass.
But some people, I bet if you rolled up to my door and knocked on my door and said, hey, man, I just cut your yard, will you give me $10 for it or whatever?
Except for that other guy you hired to do it that's coming next week.
There's a problem with him.
But I mean, you've always had the opportunity to beat minimum wage.
So you don't want to sit and say, okay, minimum wage is my gauge of whether I can go win because I can go do something that beats minimum wage.
Right.
So that's kind of a political football that gets kicked around a lot, I guess, then.
It is, and it enters into this discussion falsely.
It's a false narrative where I think the real narrative that is a little bit scary is that wages have not kept up with inflation.
And because we've had this unusual surge in inflation, and it's blamed on Biden politically, but some of it's his fault, his policy issues, but most of it is just the lingering results of the pandemic.
And so the shortages of things always drive prices up on anything.
Anything there's a shortage of, prices go up.
And there was a shortage of freaking everything.
Remember supply chain and all that stuff people talk about.
And so everything shot up.
Real estate shot up because people sat around in their houses during the pandemic.
And then, you know, when the sun came out and the curve was flattened and all whatever, you know, and we're all back out.
Well, these people all wanted new houses.
I mean, they came out of their house like a Baptist after a casserole.
They were going for it, man.
I mean, they were getting it, you know, so and the house prices, you know, 20, 21, wow.
That was an artificial thing, though, that was created by the market being dormant and people being trapped.
And then this idea of looking around at their house going, my house sucks.
I need a new house.
Boom, they hit the market hard.
And it's still not recovered from that.
It's still got the ripple of that.
And some of the other things are hit that way, too.
But there's some things, again, there are policy issues, but most of it is just the smoothing out of that.
And Trump nor Biden should get the credit nor the blame.
It was more how the marketplace was functioning.
So you think that inflation will come down?
Is that the right term to talk about inflation?
I do.
I don't think it's permanent.
Again, to the extent that the politicians leave their hands off of stuff, but both parties.
Because the marketplace will smooth out.
Again, demand, prices go up.
Number of people want to pay that.
No.
So now demand goes down, which brings prices down.
So the thing smooths out eventually.
You find this equilibrium, this balance.
And the problem is the shortage drove the prices up and the shortage remained.
And then people's appetite, they just kept coming, man, like freaking piranha.
And the marketplace surges is what drove the pricing as much as anything.
Now, that's not true in oil and gas at the pump.
That's a whole different subject.
That's not true on a few other things, but housing for sure, you know, bread, grocery store cart, yeah, all that for sure.
You always hear about like the national debt, right?
People talk about that all the time.
And it just keeps going up, apparently.
Like, is that a real thing that affect it almost seems so fictional now that it's like, is it a real thing that could cause something to happen and like in our lives?
Or like, is it like, what is it?
You know what I'm saying?
Because everybody's like, you know, it's jazillions.
They're making up amounts of money now.
Yeah, it's a whole lot of people.
Some kid told me yesterday it was 65 zigillion jerjillions.
And I'm like, that's how much it is.
I mean, right now it's 34. It's a number that I don't even know.
How can you teach kids numbers in school, but you can't even teach them a number that would let them explain the national debt?
Yeah.
You know, I went through a period of time in my 20s when I was first starting to do this stuff, late 20s, that I was worried that the hockey stick of this thing, the growth of the debt was going to cripple the economy and even cause a complete collapse.
And, you know, so I've observed people in my world write books on the end of the world.
You know, here's the economic end of the world coming, the economic end of the world.
And they keep being wrong.
So I don't want to write that book.
So is it concerning?
Yeah, it's concerning because anytime a group of people, us, keep spending more than we make and we keep electing people that don't have any ability to curb their appetite for our money, it's, phew, man, that, that philosophically, spiritually is scary, mathematically is scary.
Is it going to cause a crash?
Apparently not.
Because it never, I mean, I've been doing this a long, I've been watching this thinking, when, you know, when, you know, but it's not.
And obviously what the national debt is, what it does do factually is it robs money from the economy that could be producing something.
And so, because what happens is, is the government issues a bond.
That's how they finance the debts, treasury bonds, T-bills and T-bonds.
And so they issue that bond, and then an investor goes and buys that government bond because they're going to pay him interest on it.
If that investor had done something else in the marketplace with that money to produce something rather than sit on this bunch of fat in D.C., it would have ginned up the economy.
I see.
So it's stealing money from the economy in that sense.
And it's becoming a large, the interest only on it is becoming a larger and larger portion of the, quote, budget, unquote, as if they've got a budget.
Yeah, I put money into kind of T-bills.
I'm kind of a say.
Oh, it's you.
It was.
It was you.
Okay.
Because there's a lot of me, I don't trust the stock market that much.
I feel like it's so manipulated these days.
I feel like there's like darker forces that are like, you can use the media to control it and like can like create articles to affect how the market goes.
So that's kind of like, so I prefer something like a T-bill or something like that.
That's just like a safe, I know what it's going to be pretty much.
Well, there's always been falsehood and manipulation in the market.
There's always been to a degree.
Do you think it's still a safe place for people to invest?
I do.
I've got millions and millions of dollars in mutual funds.
So the way to offset that is, number one, if you don't, I believe it's there.
I believe it's a very small percentage, and I don't know where it is exactly.
I can't point and say that guy, that one, you know, that girl, that thing right there.
I don't know exactly where it is.
But I mean, is there people that fluff the thing?
Absolutely.
They fluff it.
Absolutely.
Is there people that, you know, that right before the news article goes out, they sell their stuff insider trading?
It happens all the time.
Sometimes they get caught and go to jail.
It's illegal.
But does it happen?
Oh, it's common practice.
Is it so widespread that it makes the investment improper or imprudent?
No, I don't believe that.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be investing.
So I invest.
So if I'm in a mutual fund, I'm in 90 to 200 different stocks, and it's stuff that you drive by every day.
It's McDonald's or Home Depot or Dell Computer or Apple or Exxon or whatever, right?
That's in that room.
That's the Seggo or whatever.
All that.
And so in those 90 to 200, is there some percentage of that problem going on?
Yeah, there is.
Some percentage, but not enough that it, in general, those 90 to 200 companies, I'm spread out wide enough, diversified.
I'm spread out enough that I'm catching all the good, and it's more than offsetting the falsehood that's out there, and it's more than offsetting that.
So as Home Depot makes more money, then I'm participating.
As whoever, Apple makes more money, then I'm participating because I'm one of the owners of the company.
Tiny, tiny little bit.
When I own, you know, in that 90 to 200 stocks.
So that's how I don't buy single stocks mainly because they're higher risk and much more volatile.
And you're much more prey to, what if that was the company that was screwing around?
Yeah.
Then boom, you know, you bet the whole dadgum farm on that one horse race and that guy fell out.
No, we're not doing that.
So I don't like that much risk.
So I like the diversification of mutual funds.
That's where all my retirement is.
It's what we recommend, what we teach.
So I only do two kinds of investing.
I buy real estate that I pay cash for and I buy mutual funds.
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If someone had like a, they have a, you know, some money, they're thinking about putting it into the market or they're thinking about buying like maybe a small apartment building or something like that.
Do you feel like that's a good choice for people?
Yeah, I don't get in partnerships on them like we discussed earlier.
I just buy them.
But yeah, real estate makes more.
If it's good income producing real estate, you'll make more on it than you will in mutual funds.
Mutual funds average 10, 12%.
Real estate, you ought to make 17 to 20, including the tax benefits, the appreciation that's going up in value, and the cash flow.
Those three things do it.
The problem with real estate is it's a pain in the butt because you've got to deal with it.
You know, the roof leaks, whether it's commercial office building, whether it's a house, doesn't matter.
And so, and I've got a lot of both.
But there's a tenant that doesn't pay or does pay, or it's empty and I can't get a tenant.
It's a hassle.
There's a hassle factor to dealing with.
Even if you hired management, I mean, my son-in-law runs all the Ramsey real estate stuff.
And I grew up in real estate, so I love working with him on it.
But he handles the day-to-day to day.
I don't screw with all that today, but it's a pain.
So this idea that I hear this stuff on social media stuff, it's real estate's passive income.
Bull crap.
Nothing passive about it, dude.
Your butt's active.
I mean, you're right in the middle of it, or you're getting screwed, one of the two.
Yeah, you get in.
Oh, yeah, I got into some real estate, and it was so much extra work that I didn't realize, you know, complaints, somebody's Airbnb in the building, somebody's, you know, started a fire or something, you know, because they didn't want to use the heat in their unit or whatever.
It's like, you can't just do a fire.
Like, you got to...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just crazy.
People just, yeah.
People just, yeah, doing fires.
Yeah, just stuff like that.
I think a lot of alarming stuff.
But yeah, there's no easy real, there's no easy way to it.
Well, I mean, the T-bill, you know what you're talking about?
That's, you don't buy it and you forget it.
They send you a check.
It's not as big a check, but there's no hassle.
Yeah.
You know, mutual funds, a little more risk, because you're in there with all these companies.
There could be something going on.
Even if you're in 90 to 200 and limited the risk by spreading it out, you still got more risk than you would in the T-bill, but you're going to make a little more.
You want a little more hassle?
Go to real estate.
You're going to make a little more.
So you don't want to be, you know, I try to just say it's a risk-return ratio.
If I'm going to take some risk and have some hassle, I want some extra money for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it's a stress it causes.
It's like, do I want to be, because I'll notice, yeah, like some stocks is too much stress for me because I'll check them too much and I don't like it.
And then it's like, I've spent, you know, 30 minutes of my day dang checking stocks and that's money time I could have just had him doing my work.
Yeah, I buy mutual funds, set it and forget it.
I don't even know what the market has done this year.
Wow.
And I do this for a living.
Wow.
I don't keep up with it.
I don't, because I'm not betting on this week.
I'm saying, okay, you know, look at what the stock market has done since 1980, since 1990, since 2012.
Look at what I would have made if I'd have put $10,000, what it would have made.
And that's how I'm playing it is the long haul, the long play.
Wow.
God.
Well, there it is.
1992, $1,000 would have turned into $5,000.
Was there ever a stock that you bought, Dave, where you were like, man, I wish I would have held on to that?
That you just remember, like even when you were younger?
Was it one?
No, I never bought single stocks ever.
The only dumb thing I did is I bought gold one time.
This buddy of mine, again, you know, these buddies in my 20s, he was making money, and he had this gold guy that we could buy options on gold, which we don't even buy in the gold, you're just buying the right to buy the gold.
And he said he put in $5,000, and if it goes up, the option goes from $5K to $50K.
I'm going 10X my money.
And 14 times in a row, this guy had hit.
And you put it in, and he had predicted.
And he said, okay, we need to go in right now and put $5,000.
I'll drop $5,000 in there.
15th time, he didn't hit.
It's all or nothing.
So I lost the whole 5,000 and no sign of 50, right?
No.
So I'm done.
You think it was a pyramid scheme or not?
No, no, it's an option.
That's how options work.
It's just an Uber high-risk situation.
It's super crazy.
It was just gambling.
I mean, it's just gambling.
You ever been in a pyramid scheme?
No.
I've been in a couple.
Are you talking about multi-level or pyramid?
I mean, I don't know what it was.
Whatever level it was, I lost on it.
I know that.
You didn't get off the ride fast enough.
Oh, yeah.
No, we had, yeah, oh, yeah.
One, I was a child.
I got involved.
I'd saved up a, I mean, probably most of the money I had.
And I got into this thing, and it was a scam.
And that was horrible.
God, that killed me.
And then another time they had a dude when somebody was selling like glitter mining or something in our area.
And they sold a bunch of shares of that shit and screwed everybody.
I remember in the 80s, everybody decided that emus were going to be the new meat.
What?
And so all these rednecks are buying.
This is unbelievable.
All these rednecks are making emu farms.
And so it's like ostrich meat, right?
And so they were.
Oh, come on, brother.
So it was a big deal.
And a lot of people decided they were going to sell everything and open an emu farm.
Really?
And because for the meat, it's like ostrich meat.
It's like, I don't know, it's big bird meat, big white meat.
Just bring him a picture of an emu, brother.
I can't find a dang.
You can't find one now, I guess.
Yeah, you got me.
You got the commercial.
There he is.
Scroll down a little bit.
Let me see what we got.
See, he's got a little meat on it.
Oh, gosh, yeah.
Yeah, so it's hilarious, though, these rednecks in around Tennessee, they were having emu farms.
Damn, have you ever had any of them?
No, I managed to stay out of that scam.
That was one of those fad things that didn't work.
Yeah, that's a damn tough one.
It's like buying beanie babies.
Everybody's collecting beanie babies.
Dude, I remember beanie babies.
They were going to get rich on beanie babies.
Oh, yeah.
And now they have two garbage bags.
Women fighting, like Cage Match fighting in the airport gift shop to get the beanie babies.
Remember the Princess Diana beanie babies?
There it is.
Yeah.
It's supposed to go for like $10,000.
Never happened.
Never once.
Nope.
Sorry.
My dog plays with them now.
We had the whole freaking collection.
Not because it was an investment, but because my wife was freaking obsessed, and I was traveling, and she's at every airport.
She sends me in there.
So, yeah.
See, $49,000 on eBay for the princess.
Never sold, though.
No, never sold.
Never sold.
Did they?
Never sold.
Yeah, they had, my buddy won his family's football pool.
It was like their NCA, their college football pool they did every year.
He won it was like $600, dude.
He was so excited.
He could have changed his life.
And instead, his mom convinced him to buy a Christmas village of like rare Christmas village houses.
Oh, yeah.
They're back.
They're back.
They're happening right now.
My buddy to this day is.
He's big in the Christmas houses.
No rent.
Rent in much.
The tenants don't make much noise.
And the street lights are always on.
Electric bills are low.
So running into a lot of issues, but God, that just broke him, man.
He never recovered from that.
Dude, I met a dude yesterday in Tennessee.
He said he took out an $800 life insurance policy on his wife.
I'm like, $800?
That's pretty insulting.
Well, yeah, that's what I felt like.
I'm like, dude, do not tell her that.
She's going to be pissed off.
And he's like, well, my truck payment's $7.99 a month.
So that solves it.
Yeah, speaking of like, yeah, like kind of traps, I guess, like, what are like, so a lot of things you've spoken out against crypto, I know.
I'm not a crypto fan.
I lost $2,000 in crypto just like every one of my friends did when it first came out, right?
Like NFTs, things like that, that kind of pop up that really, they're almost, to me, some of them seem like the modern day pyramid scheme in a way.
The emu farm.
Yeah.
It's a lot of emu farms, baby.
What do you, how do you, why are more people falling susceptible to these types of things, do you think?
We always have.
That's human nature.
We want, we're wired by God to look for the shortest path, to look for optimum, to look for the best, the quickest, the easiest.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That makes our lives better because we create inventions and things that make our lives better.
That very wiring created the automobile or created the iPhone or created things that make our lives better.
And so that's a good wiring.
But where it gets off track is where we think we can short-circuit a proven process.
And it causes you to jump from investor to speculator.
And investor is always the crock pot.
They're always a long play.
They're always saying, okay, I'm going to invest in mutual funds.
I don't care what stock market did this year.
I'm thinking, what's it going to be in 20 years?
What's it going to be in 15 years?
And how am I going to be doing?
And so I'm thinking long term.
The speculator needs a quick flip.
And so Bitcoin has never really been about investing.
It's a speculation.
It's a short-term play.
No one bought that and said, you know, in 20 years, this is going to look brilliant.
No one did.
They all thought quick money, easy money.
No one flips houses with nothing down that they saw on TikTok.
You know, quick flip, quick flip.
When a builder even builds a home that they're not custom building, they call it a spec house.
It means speculation.
They're speculating that they're going to sell that house.
It's a short-term play.
They're not building that house in that subdivision hoping to sit on it 10 years.
They're building it, hoping to sit on it 10 days.
And so it's speculation.
So where you get confused, where you mess up is where you can fall into scams and get rich quick and violate basic investing principles is when you move from investing, which is long-term mentality, to speculation, which is quick hit.
I want quick money, easy money, quick money, easy money.
And that's that wiring, that's positive wiring gone astray, you know, become toxic.
And so, and in a sense, that's what happened to me when I went broke in real estate because I was buying houses.
I was doing Flip This House before Chip and Joanna were born, you know.
And so that's what we were, we were getting it.
And I've owned like 2,000 houses in my life.
So I was churning them, man.
But I was doing it on 90-day notes, short-term notes, because I was not buying them as a long-term play.
I was buying them, fix them, and flip them.
And the bank got sold to another bank.
They look up and they can call my notes in 90 days.
So they called a million two in 90 days, and it crashed me.
And so because I was a speculator, I wasn't an investor.
Now, I would have told you I was a real estate investor.
Right.
But the actual definition of the term investor means longer-term horizon, long window.
And so if it's, thank God it's Friday.
Oh, God, it's money.
If I got to move it this calendar year or in the next two calendar years to make money on it, then you're playing the roulette wheel.
You're playing Texas Hold'em.
That's speculation.
You're gambling then.
And that's a different thing.
It's okay if you want to do some of that, but quit calling it investing because then it causes you to put too dadgum much money in it because you lose your butt then.
And that's where you get scammed is you're looking for something for nothing quick, a quick turn, double my money fast because I don't think I can get there long term.
So I'm so desperate and so scared, so fearful, so greedy that I got to get it right now.
And that's what I was doing.
And it worked.
I got a million dollars worth of stuff, but I didn't keep it because I built a house of cards.
Obviously, when you work, sometimes it's weird.
Like people ask me, like, what hobbies do I have and stuff?
But the weird thing is like a lot of my hobbies became my jobs.
You know?
Did that, is that kind of what happened for you?
Or do you still like have things that you like to do outside of?
You know, as I got further down in the business in the last several decades, I actually do have things I do outside of here.
But in the first few decades, it was just, you're right.
I get great joy out of the stuff we do.
We help people.
You know, a lot of people are scared.
They're broken.
They're about to lose their house.
They've been through bankruptcy.
Their marriage is on the rocks, whatever.
We're able to help them.
And that's, you know, it's wonderful.
I have a lot of fun doing the show still.
Again, I mean, once you've been on stage with an audience, our gig's a different gig, but it's still, you know, it's fun to be with people.
Yeah.
And it's fun to be people that want to be there, you know, and it's addicting in that regard.
So I enjoy that whole thing.
I enjoy that scene.
I enjoy running the business, but I also have picked up a few things away from here so that distractions and I don't know if they're hobbies, I guess, but I end up collecting stuff or whatever, doing that kind of stuff.
But there's nothing wrong with, especially in the first couple of decades with almost all your energy doing that other than family stuff.
Yeah.
What are some like, obviously you've learned a lot of financial lessons over the years.
Like what were some personal lessons that you had to learn along the way too that like kind of helped you?
Like was there some things that have kind of stood out to you, you feel like?
You know, I think you're not going to be able to do that.
Yeah, I didn't know how to lead.
I mean, like you said earlier, we're talking about hiring an employee.
Yeah.
I was so dumb that I thought if you hired people that they would like work.
Yeah.
They knew what to do.
Well, no, that they would just actually work.
I thought they would just show up.
I thought they'd be on time.
I didn't think they'd steal.
I was so dumb that I thought all that.
And so I just like, if you could fog up a mirror, yeah, let's go do this together, man.
Come on, get in here.
I'll put you on payroll.
Let's go.
And then I got all this crazy and all this drama and all this other stuff.
I was horrible.
And I was pretty much a boss.
Bosses push, leaders pull.
And man, when I was 32 years old, I didn't get that.
And we hired our first person when I was 32. And so, you know, over the years, I've had to learn to not be behind.
Because, I mean, if you're a boss, you're just at the back of the cattle and cracking the whip.
And it's like you're moving at the speed of the slowest cow, you know, like the slowest common denominator in the room.
You know, it's like you can get on.
If you're a leader, you're standing at the train going, we're leaving.
Anybody want to get on?
Because this thing's going.
You better keep up because we're going hard and you better get it.
And so I had to get around front of that and say, all right, I'm going to lead.
And then I went to this Christian conference with a guy named John Maxwell, who's become a great friend.
He's one of the top leadership speakers in the world.
Is he, really?
And he said, you know, you should be a servant leader.
And I went, say what?
I'm one right in the check.
I ain't the servant.
I'm confused here.
And I thought he meant subservient.
And what he meant was you got to love your people and you got to care what's best for them.
And sometimes that means telling them hard truth that they don't want to hear.
Sometimes it means they can't work anymore because they can't behave, you know, that kind of stuff.
And so I realized I had been serving my kids by making them brush their teeth against their will.
You know, so they have some teeth later that's serving them.
So it's a servant leader, right?
And so, yeah, I'm good with servant leadership.
And so I had to learn that.
Gang, I sucked.
I was a horrible boss because I just, I was going so hard.
I thought everybody else was going hard.
And I was pissed off because they weren't keeping up.
And I'm like, well, you hired a bunch of donkeys and expect to win the dadgum Kentucky Derby.
And no donkey ever won, man.
So we had to look for thoroughbreds and have a donkey ectomy.
And it was a problem, man.
And so, yeah, I sucked.
And I'm a world-class leader today.
It's one of the things I'm best at.
I love our people.
I love our team.
The way this place functions and operates, it's one of the best places in Nashville to work, probably the best places in the world to work.
And it's not perfect.
We screw up, but we treat people right.
We care about them and we expect high things out of them.
We expect them to get it.
And they do.
We got a great team.
Wow.
Yeah, I think that's something that I have slowly like had to, yeah, that's been a tough journey for me.
Like even just having a few employees, it's like you're suddenly a boss.
You didn't even want to be a boss.
Like some of that too.
I think just a realization, like, oh, I'm the boss, I guess.
And they're like, well, yeah, you are.
And I'm like, well, I was just trying to get crap done.
Who knew?
And I needed somebody to do that thing.
And you brought you in to do that thing.
And then you brought all your crap with you when you did that.
Now I got to deal with your crap.
So, you know, and that's been a 30-year journey.
That's huge, boss versus leader.
That's really, It's such a good way to look at it.
And would you go to conferences and stuff to learn about that stuff too?
Because I'm sure you had to evolve in that space.
I did.
I read like a maniac.
And so I'm going to read leadership books, business books.
I still read like crazy.
I love to get new information.
In this digital age, an old guy like me, I'm sitting in these meetings with these studs and I don't even know what they're saying.
And they work for me.
I'm like, what did you just say?
So I have to keep up.
I mean, I got to work hard.
I got to pedal hard just to stay on the bike.
And so, yeah, I still do that stuff.
And I still, you know, hang out.
And the good news is some of the guys, they're the best writers and thinkers in the world have become friends over the years.
And so they're my running buddies.
So we hang out.
I get to talk offline with them and they're still teaching me stuff.
It's cool.
What about like fiction?
You read anything like that ever?
Oh, yeah, always.
All the Jack Carr stuff, you read Jack?
Yeah.
Yeah, I read all that stuff.
And Brad Thor's a friend.
I read all of his stuff, all those spy novels and stuff.
Fiction makes airplanes fly fast.
Yeah, it does, huh?
Yeah, Jack Carr, that's wild, dude.
Yeah, I was like a big John Grisham fan when I was growing up.
Yeah, I read all of his.
Every one of his.
Daniel Silva's the guy he writes like the character of the prognostic is an Israeli Mossad spy, you know, versus Jack Cars is a former SEAL team.
And, you know, and Brad Thorrs is the same stuff.
You know, they're all former Delta, former SEAL or whatever, that kind of stuff.
So it's in the same genre, and I've read all of his stuff too.
But again, I just, so yeah, I do read fiction.
Something you like, yeah.
When people look at like there's an election this year, it's an election year.
When people look at the election, do you feel like who they vote for could have an effect on their future finances?
Sure.
Sure.
Not as much as the candidates would like you to believe.
Right.
It turns out that I've done stupid stuff under every single White House, and I have done smart stuff under every single White House, and I've increased the size of our business under every single White House.
None of them have been dumb enough to destroy my life, and none of them have ever sent me any money.
So most of them don't even send me my money back.
So, you know, what happens at your house is way more important than what happens at the White House.
But yeah, policy does matter.
It changes whether we've got $3 gas or $5 gas.
And that matters because if you run a heat and air company and you've got 30 trucks out there and you're trying to feed your family, trying to feed that guy who's on that truck's family, and the gas price doubles run that truck down the road to fix somebody's heat and air, it changes the whole P ⁇ L on that company.
And then that guy wants a raise and it ain't there because some duber at the White House turned the faucet on or off on the oil.
And that stuff matters.
That shows up.
And so, you know, policy does matter in that regard because it affects things.
And policy during stressful times matters because whether people feel Ronald Reagan didn't do anything special, but he made people feel like it was going to be prosperous.
Whether you agree with him or not, he was a motivator.
He was aspirational.
That's a good point, huh?
He didn't really have any magic wands that he waved at the Reaganomics or, you know, raise.
An Art Laffer that wrote the Reaganomics stuff lives here in town.
He's a friend of mine.
He was on Reagan's cabinet at the time.
He's in his 80s.
Wonderful man, brilliant man.
But Art Laffer did not turn America around, Ronald Reagan.
But Ronald Reagan made people believe again.
And when you can believe, instead of believe everything's bad, it's horrible.
It's divisive.
We're not going to do anything.
People sit at home and they don't do things.
And then the economy starts to, that stuff does have an effect.
But you can win in any situation.
So vote for who you want to vote for.
But don't vote for them because they're going to fix your life because they're not.
Now, that's a great statement.
Yeah.
In the end, it really comes down to you, doesn't it?
You still believe that it really seems like that.
Yeah, I really do.
You know, John Stossel wanted to interview me many years ago, back when he did 2020 and all that stuff.
And he was a scary dude because you know if he's going to come at your throat or whether he's going to be a friend in an interview.
And we went down there and we were sitting off stage or on stage, I guess, doing the interview.
And he said, you know, I've read all your stuff.
And he goes, I think, I don't think you're as much of a conservative as you think you are.
He said, I think you're a social conservative and an economic libertarian.
Okay, I'll go with that.
And so, yeah, the economic libertarian would say, you know, if it's to be, it's up to me.
Get up, go mow some grass, get you a pressure washer, get your button gear.
And, you know, the government's just something you got to overcome.
They're in the way.
They're not going to lift me.
If I'm waiting on the government to lift me, all I can think about is the DMV line.
I mean, come on.
You know, so I'm not.
So I'm that guy.
But it comes out of my Scotch-Irish redneck history.
You know, I mean, the Scotch-Irish are always been fighting everything.
They've always been independent.
Think of Braveheart, you know, as independent.
High blood pressure, too.
Yeah, always looking for a fight.
You know, always looking to stir something up.
If there's no drama, just make some.
And so that, you know, I've made a good living doing it, though.
Yeah.
Where'd you meet your wife at, Dave?
College.
Oh, you did?
Yeah, marketing class.
Nice.
And you went to college in Tennessee or not?
I did.
University of Tennessee.
You did?
We both graduated from UT.
Nice, dude.
Is there a better place to see a football game than Nealon?
Wow.
It's a religion.
Yeah, it really is.
It's wild.
It's so sweet over there.
When they're winning, especially.
Yeah.
It's kind of nice lately.
Yeah, it helps.
The past two years has been definitely a good time to get on board.
Not good being with 110,000 people when you're losing because they are angry rednecks.
But yeah.
I'm one of them.
I'm like, oh, I'm pissed.
Do you go to some games ever?
We had sweet seats for years when our kids were down there.
And so we'd go down almost every game.
But the kids are grown and got grandkids and we're traveling doing other stuff.
So we gave those up.
So I'm not mad about it.
It just kind of that phase went away.
Yeah.
Watching on the TV now, but better experience anyway.
But yeah, so.
Where did you meet your wife at school?
Do you remember?
Where at school?
Yeah.
Yeah, in marketing class.
Oh, in class.
You saw her, huh?
Yeah, she was cheating off my paper.
Was she really?
But she was cute, so I thought it was a good idea.
I let her look up.
That's a good idea.
It's your paper.
It's your paper, honey.
Have you ever been approached by like, I know you've had different, obviously books and like programs for people to achieve wealth and to save their money.
Have you ever had a package or something you've taken to like a shark tank or to like a something like that where they've tried to no, because we kind of bootstrapped every bit of this.
It was just like we make a little money, we try something new with that money.
We make a little more money, we try something new with that money.
And again, we've lost a lot of money, done a lot of stupid stuff doing that, but we've also done some things right that have worked.
And so, I mean, we're the second largest talk radio show in America, 680 stations, about 10 million listeners on talk radio alone.
Hannity's number one.
Rush was number one.
Hannity was two.
We were three.
Rush passed away.
Not a good way to get to be number two, but it happened.
I mean, he's Elvis.
He invented rock and roll.
He invented talk radio.
So it was, it was.
And both of them did pills, too, I think, to be honest.
But that's I have no idea.
I've done them.
But I'm just saying.
You have no idea.
But yeah, anyway, so anyway, we started in that whirl when it grew and grew and grew and grew.
And I remember the day a guy walked into my office and said, hey, we need a podcast.
And I'm like, what the flip is a podcast?
And I said, why do I need one?
He goes, it's the thing.
And man, it was a long time ago.
So we were one of the first podcasts on Apple way back.
Wow.
And because a lot of people on talk radio didn't want to put it on podcasts because it competed with their radio stations.
Right, so you're competing with your own numbers, kind of.
Yeah, and you're messing up everything.
And, you know, now, I mean, Spotify, Apple, we're number one, two, three on Apple right in there hovering, me and Rogan and some NPR murder mystery stuff or something, you know, like always hanging out in the top 10 there.
So we're bouncing around in there, and we've had a billion and a half downloads now.
And so, and I'm like, what's a podcast?
So, yeah, you start, you know, you start new stuff.
And then YouTube, good God, the numbers on YouTube are just crazy.
And so gone up into the right hockey stick.
And so now those two have now eclipsed the talk radio business.
And so now I'm a podcaster, apparently.
At least you evolved with it, though, you know?
Well, yeah, I mean, because we're platform agnostic.
I mean, wherever the action is, that's where we're going to be.
And we didn't abandon, we're still dancing with the girl that brought us, you know.
So we're still with talk radio.
Still got 600 a station, still love talk radio.
But, and, you know, we're on Sirius XM.
SiriusXM came on.
It was two companies, Sirius and XM.
We went on both of them, and everybody's mad.
You can't be on both and be on talk radio.
I'm like, yeah, I'm on everything.
I'm on podcasts, and then we'll put it on YouTube, and then, you know, Facebook Live.
I mean, crap, we'll try anything.
TikTok, good God help us.
We're on TikTok.
We're all on.
Look for the Chinese, they say.
That's it, man.
TikTok.
Here we go.
But hey, you know, because you never know which one of these things is going to become the next MySpace and just disappear.
And you don't know which one of these other things.
So I don't want to bet this whole thing and all these 1,100 people are counting on me on one single platform.
So we're always innovating, always changing and moving.
Yeah, it's because, yeah, you kind of don't know what the, yeah, you don't know what the next thing can be that's really going to go well.
There was something you said a second ago where like you made some money and then you put it back into the company, right?
Or you tried something new with it.
That I think is a big, like one of the craziest things that ever happened to me was I was podcasting in my apartment and a guy came along and he said, hey, man, I'm going to give you some money.
You can get you a studio, you know?
And he bought some ads from me.
He said, I'm going to pay some ads for a pizza place.
It was in my neighborhood.
And he said, I'm going to give you some money.
You should use it to get a studio.
And my first thought was, I want to keep that money.
You know, I never had any money.
I'm keeping this money.
I'm not getting a studio.
I'll just do it in my apartment till it fades out.
And then I'll have the money I made from the ads.
But he was right.
He just saw that thing that I couldn't see of putting the money back into getting myself a studio, which then now I have a studio.
It's a little bit of a different place when people come.
It's more of a business.
And, you know, it was so hard for me to see that, though.
Well, and we get to see, I mean, those of us that are fanboys of your work, we get to see a whole nother side of you.
You know, there's stand-up and then these long form interviews that you're doing.
And here I said, who knew that was going to happen?
But I mean, I've seen a bunch of these long forms that you've done.
And so it's a whole different thing.
And it's where people start to recognize what those of us in the business of being on stage or in front of a microphone have known.
We know, for those of you out there, you don't know this necessarily, but most of the top flight comedians are very bright.
You know, comedy's hard.
It's one of the more hard art forms to do.
Acting, you can be dumb as a rock and be an actor.
But you just try to be somebody else.
That's all you're doing.
It's a process.
Sorry, you actors that are friends of you.
Sorry, but I mean, comedy is you're messing with people's lives.
You're messing with every part of things that mean something to them.
And you're twisting it just the right way with the right hesitation, the right move of the sentence structure and everything.
It's very difficult.
We doing motivational speaking or teaching, I teach our guys, if our audiences, if we got 2,000, 3,000 people in the audience, if they don't laugh every seven minutes, we're going to lose them.
And we're not comedians, but we have to study what you guys do.
So getting to see you do this has, it's brilliant.
It's a smart thing to do.
It's the same thing.
Brogan did the same thing.
I mean, he moved from comedy into those long forms.
And what everybody loves about Joe is the fabulous interviews.
Yeah.
And I'm a fanboy of his.
I watch a lot of his.
Oh, yeah.
He's so good at learning information.
He's so good at retaining information.
He knows a lot about a lot of stuff.
Oh, if you stop, I had dinner with him the other night after the UFC fights, and yeah, you're just ready to learn, brother.
You better, if you're going to sit down with Joe Rogan, you better be ready to learn something.
It doesn't matter if it's over a bowl of soup, a microphone.
Yeah, he just loves learning, sharing information.
He really is kind of like a library, you know.
But what is the mentality that people, it's more about like the mentality of like investing back in yourself, you know, because there's that scare, there's that fear that I want to just save this, you know?
Well, that, yeah.
If you realize that no matter what you try, some of it's not going to work.
Give yourself permission to fail.
Then you say, okay, we're going to put this money and we're going to take some home and enjoy it and be generous with it in the community and invest some of it.
But we're also going to invest some of it in the best investment, which is the freaking goose that's laying the golden eggs.
Let's have lots of these geese.
Let's figure out different things we can do, different ways we can move this business around.
Do we move to podcasting?
Do we move to YouTube?
Do we build a studio?
Do we build an event center?
Do we create an environment that is a whole different thing than when I rent a theater somewhere else, which we do both.
And we'll always go to these other cities and always be on tour, always do these things.
But the events on this campus feel way different to the customer when they come in here because we can control all the freaking variables.
I mean, we're Nick Sabin playing home game.
I mean, we know who cuts the grass.
We know who dialed the microphone in.
I got a 2 DB drop from the front of the stage to the back of that auditorium.
Wow.
2,500 seats.
It's tight and it's dialed in.
And you know how that sound crap is.
Sounds even worse in our world because we're voice music.
You can just turn it up if the sound's bad.
But man, you get in these auditoriums, you got bounce back, stinking hockey arena, stinking hitting the concrete wall coming back at you.
You can hear yourself three times and can't even tell what your timing is on stuff.
Yeah, that's the world we're talking about.
So we've got all that dialed in.
That's a reinvestment back into something we know is going to work.
Yeah, that's a good point, man.
Yeah, I think that was a tough thing.
It was tough for me to realize that one of my greatest assets can be myself.
Yeah.
You know, and be like, well, what if I really want to invest in something to invest in myself?
How does generosity play?
Like, there's a lot of fear around generosity sometimes, you know, about like, I have to make this.
I have to keep it all for me.
What has your journey been like with that in life?
Or what have you learned about it?
You're exactly right.
There's fear around that.
And fear is the motivator is, is if I give it away, I'm going to have less.
Which mathematically, you know, if I take a thousand bucks, I give away 100, I got 900.
So yeah, I got less.
But that's a short-term mentality.
And what I finally figured out after studying this all these years and watching people who are generous, there's a real correlation between people that build wealth and people that are generous.
Very few wealthy people are really super greedy and don't give.
Most of them are very big givers.
They're big tippers.
They're not like tight.
They're not like mean about money.
They're very open-handed because they know they can get some more.
So what happens is generosity is not an action.
It's a character quality, like integrity.
Integrity is not an action.
There are actions that come out when you have integrity.
There are actions that come out when you are generous.
Generous people are the one that hold the door open for you.
Generous people help you pick up the groceries when the stupid bag, they fall out and they're rolling all over the parking lot in the grocery store and you're embarrassed.
But the generous person runs over and joins the party and helps you pick up the canned goods and all that.
That's the generous person.
The generous person is other-centered instead of self-centered.
And here's what's weird.
Think about who you want to work with.
Think about who you want to work for.
Think about who you want on your team.
Think about the vendor that you want to do business with, the next deal you want to do on an advertiser.
You want to deal with a selfish person or a selfless other-centered person, self-centered or other-centered?
Well, generosity makes people highly attractive.
We want to be around generous people, not because they're going to give us money, just because of who they are.
They're just open-handed.
They're thinking about other people.
And so there's this huge correlation between generosity and prosperity.
You tend to prosper because people want you around.
They want you in the deal because you're not there for what you can get.
You're there for what you can give.
And we're all going to win together.
We don't have to kill each other to win.
And so that's how like Rush or Sean and I in the old days or other people in the talk radio business, Laura Ingram was doing a talk radio show in those days.
She's on Fox Personality Now.
We're all friends, even though we were competitors.
We were head-to-head.
If I knock Hannity off a station, I get that station.
So we're head-to-head.
But we also know I don't have to kill him to win.
I mean, I don't have to completely...
I want to be a, and I'll help them.
I've actually helped every one of those people do different things over the time.
And so it's just interesting that, and then the giving of money is a natural result for someone who has the character quality of generosity.
So, you know, and I watch people, okay, here's the stupid thing.
This guy I was watching the other day, he pulls up in front of me at the restaurant, the valet parking, right, here in Nashville.
We have valet parkers everywhere.
Yeah.
And churches even have them.
Yeah.
I mean, who's working valet?
Okay.
The Lord is my valet, dude.
I'm telling you, man, that's simple.
Well, there's that.
But the guy that's working valet, he's out there in the sun.
He's out there in the rain.
He's putting up with people's garbage.
They're not nice.
This is who's working the valet.
And this guy pulls up in a Mercedes, and I know the car is a great car.
It's about $120,000, $130,000 car.
And he hands the valet $5.
I'm like, dude, that's just stupid.
So I pull up my truck.
It's a nice truck.
But I pull in my truck.
I hand the guy $20.
I'm like, man, please take care of my baby.
And you know where it was when I came out?
It was sitting right there.
So who prospered here?
Everybody won.
Everybody won.
But you didn't give Ferris Bueller's day Off the keys to your Mercedes for five bucks.
I mean, what kind of moron?
I mean, seriously, that's just short-sighted.
That lack of generosity is short-sighted, where it sounds like I'm some kind of big guy because I gave 20 bucks or whatever to park my stupid truck, but I'm not.
But there's a payoff there.
Hey, my truck didn't, there's nothing wrong with my truck.
It's sitting right there.
I'm going to have to wait on it when I come out.
The kid had a good night, at least partly because of me.
So I think everybody came out on this transaction.
So that's how generosity works.
Yeah, that's interesting.
It's been slow to learn for me.
Not slow, but I think it's just been, yeah, I just came from such a fear mentality.
You know, we just didn't have any money, so it was like, I remember I'd keep my money in a day.
I'd hide it.
God, I would hide that money.
I would spend half my day hiding my damn money, boy.
I met this guy.
Getting up dirt and hiding.
Oh, I understand.
I met this guy as an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, and we become good friends.
Rabbi Daniel Lappin.
Oh, he's hiding some.
He wrote a book.
No, no, he wrote a book called Thou Shall Prosper.
And he said, the problem is when you have that fear is you think money is like cake.
Like if I get a slice away, I got less cake.
He said, money's not like cake.
Money's like candles.
When you light it, you still got your candle.
And you light another one, you still got your candle.
You light another one, you still got your candle.
That's how money works.
Money will grow around you when you're doing the right stuff that you're supposed to be doing.
That's why it's a beautiful picture.
What role has faith played?
And you're like, you mentioned it a little bit.
What's that been like for you?
It's central because I know you said other-centered earlier, which I thought was a term you hear a lot of times.
Yeah, I guess that's maybe a faith phrase.
I don't know.
But it's honestly, it's taught me how to be a better human being because I really wasn't a good one.
You know, I grew up the crap we did, man, and the way I behaved in my early years of my life.
Were you just a dang anarchist or whatever?
Yeah, apparently.
I did all kinds of just redneck stupid stuff.
But I needed to be a better person.
And it turns out, again, better people have better lives.
So the whole character shift through the faith walk of meeting Jesus and changing that, you know, it cleaned up my view of things.
It cleaned up my actions and how I react and those kinds of things.
Because, I mean, again, I grew up where it was, you know, a Scotch-Irish thing.
It's like a temper thing going on.
So you can't do that and win out there.
You can't be a jerk everywhere.
And so you got to go in, you know, they don't want you back on the show if you're a butt in the green room.
And so it turns out that all worked out for me.
So, you know, the re-transformation, be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, Romans says in the Bible.
And so the renewing of my mind over 45 years, and I'm not arrived, don't misunderstand, but like I said earlier, I'm a lot better husband than I was.
I mean, even with my grandbabies, I'm playing my grandbabies.
My kids are like, who are you?
I'm like, well, I can hand this one back.
This one smells bad.
It's broke.
You can take that one home.
But yeah, who are you?
Papa Dave.
I mean, come on, man.
You wouldn't let us get by with that crap.
I'm like, yeah, I know, but I had to make you behave.
But whatever.
You can take this one home.
You can teach it.
But yeah, it's central to everything.
I know who I am.
I know where I'm going.
It affects how I deal with kids, marriage.
It affects my money.
Affects how I lead in the business.
It affects our decisions in the marketplace.
So yeah, I guess it's central to everything if you want to look at it that way.
It's changed my life.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, absolutely.
Completely.
Wow, that's amazing, man.
It's nice to hear.
Did you, when you look at your future now, like, what are things that you still want to do?
You've had so much success and such the opportunity to lead people to make financial choices.
You helped my stepdad paid off our house because of knowledge he learned from you.
Wow.
I remember that.
Cool.
And so it took him a little bit, but I remember one day he told me he'd heard it.
And then probably 11 years later, eight years later or something, he said, the house has paid off.
Yeah.
It's pretty cool.
I love it.
What are things that still excite you?
You know, things that move the needle.
And I get to see something move with a little bit of scale out there where we can affect someone's life.
And then I run into them.
And, you know, this YouTube thing with a billion and a half downloads on that thing now, it's a whole new market that talk radio is old white guys, right?
Listeners, right?
But YouTube's youngsters.
And so Sharon and I were in Best Buy.
And these two kids, they're like 17 years old, run up like I'm some kind of freaking rock star or something.
They're like, man, I love your YouTube stuff.
It's like, man, I just paid cash for my first car because of watching you.
This stuff on TikTok is so funny.
And man, thank you.
And it was like, Sharon's like, golly, they're 17 years old, man.
It's great.
Yeah, it's kind of good.
That kind of stuff is worth, that makes it worth coming down here every day and flipping on the switch on the microphone, coming up with something, figuring out a way to connect and be authentic.
You got to be real about it.
You can't manipulate these platforms.
They're too nuanced and people can see a fake a mile away.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's true.
I think, well, it's interesting.
Yeah, I think especially now there's so much stuff out there.
It's like, yeah, you want to try and be as authentic you can to your own experience, you know, and you've had a lot of great experiences.
And so you want to be able to share those, you know, in a way that feels comfortable to people.
And obviously you guys have been doing that and doing it really well.
Yeah, what do you say to somebody like right now?
Like, what is some of your just basic advice?
Dave, if there's somebody who's, you know, they feel like maybe they don't have a chance or something, what would you give just a, what's your kind of pep talk, your financial guidance for somebody like that?
Somebody who's just like, you know, they don't know if they can figure it out.
They don't know if they have a ton of hope for themselves.
You can't change everything about them, but what are some things you remind them of?
Yeah.
Dr. John Deloney, this one of our Ramsey personalities on our team, has done a lot of trauma studies.
He's got a PhD in counseling.
And he says when you're in the middle of trauma, like he's been on police calls when they go in and there's a murder or a suicide or something in the home, extreme trauma.
And your body physically reacts to trauma.
And he says the way to walk through those things is facts are your friends.
Your feelings are not true.
And so when you feel stuck and hopeless, you got to back out and start looking about, okay, here's what's really, here's the numbers.
And here's the reality of the marketplace.
Facts are your friends.
And so oftentimes when someone calls on the Ramsey show, that's all we're doing.
They call up and they're overwhelmed.
They're frozen.
They're paralyzed.
They don't know what to do.
And we're going, wait a minute, how much you make a year?
We make $100,000.
Okay.
And so, and we just, we're stuck.
We can't move.
We can't figure out what to do.
I'm like, okay, how much you owe on your car?
$56,000.
Okay.
All right.
And how much, you know, do you have in retirement?
Nothing.
Okay.
How old are you?
I'm 26. Okay.
All right.
And, you know, and, okay.
Now, so the facts are that you really have plenty of money coming in and you bought a car you can't afford.
Sell a stupid car.
Yeah.
He goes, oh man, you're like a genius.
Like sixth grade math.
But all we did was peel back the drama that all of us, our bodies just freeze up.
We just get in freak, hopelessness.
We have to freeze a response to trauma and freezing up.
We're stuck and we don't know what to do.
And all we do is cut the dadgum trees down so you can see the forest, you know, and can't see the forest for the trees.
And so, you know, okay, here's your reality.
And it's like, you know, a lady called not long ago and she was, she said, they're foreclosing on my house Friday.
What am I going to do?
I said, I don't know.
It was Monday.
We had five days.
What are we going to do?
I don't know.
I said, one thing you're going to do is just go get another house.
You can do that?
I'm like, yeah, just go get something to rent.
People will rent to you.
Yeah, people will rent to you.
So you're not going to be homeless.
She made $120,000 a year.
And I was like, we just go get you another house.
But let's learn about the details of the foreclosure and see if we can stop it.
We were able to actually figure out how to stop the foreclosure.
But, you know, the reality was her whole life was coming to an end on Friday.
And it's a house.
There's one on every corner.
Just go get another one.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, but we get just, you know, we get just hammered.
We had another one that was really sad.
A lady was being foreclosed on, a different one.
And her husband, 36 years old, was a roofer.
He fell through the roof and got killed.
And she's got two little kids.
And the worker's comp didn't pay out.
They waited like forever.
So the house got behind.
And she's getting ready to be foreclosed on.
And we're like, she owed $60,000 on a $300,000 house.
I'm like, no, you are not getting foreclosed on.
We are stopping this.
This is not happening.
You're a widow.
Somebody's going to take care of you.
And another roofing guy called our office while we're on the air and caught the house up.
So, I mean, we're going to take care of it.
Other people stepped in and heard the story, started taking care of us.
You're not getting foreclosed on.
I'm 100% sure it's not going to happen.
We're not losing a $300,000 house for $60K.
But she was completely overwhelmed.
Other people had taken her power.
The situation, the variables had taken her power.
She could not see.
She was frozen up.
And all we did was we weren't there.
And so we weren't frozen up.
And we could see what everybody, everybody listening, everybody watching could see the same thing.
Of course, we're not going to let that house get sold.
Nothing else.
You sell it for $200,000 before Friday.
You know, you're not going to give it away for $60,000.
So we're going to do something.
Yeah.
The fear, people get stuck.
Yeah.
And that's all we do.
Is unlock them.
Yep.
Help unlock them.
Yep.
With facts.
With facts.
To somebody that's starting out right now, they're just starting out in the world.
They got their first couple of jobs.
They just got out of college.
How much money do they need to save if they want to have some freedom in the future?
What do you tell them, Dave?
Well, the first thing we tell them to do is get out of debt, everything but the house, and then have an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses.
We call it the baby steps.
There they are.
And so once you're at baby step three and you have three to six months of expenses, you don't have any payments but a house payment.
So you save three to six months.
You have savings to pay off for three to six months in case something happens.
Exactly.
It's a rainy day fund.
It's not a I want a bass boat.
It's a rainy day fund.
It's not a I need a new couch.
It's a rainy day fund.
You don't touch that.
If you're going to buy something else, you save up and pay for it.
But to answer your question, baby, step four is invest 15% of your income.
When you don't have any payments except a house payment, you can save 15% of your income.
And the average household income in America right now is $72,000 a year.
If you save 15% of $72,000 from $30,000 to $65,000, you're going to have about $5 million in mutual funds.
Say that again.
So if I'm like 5X wrong, you're still a millionaire.
Shut up.
So you really can't screw this up.
But you can screw it up because you live in America and you can get a $1,200 car payment for a freaking car you can't afford to impress people to stoplight who don't even care about you.
And that's what we do instead.
Or I need another truck, or I need another whatever.
I mean, I'm the same guy.
So then we say for kids college, six is what your stepdad did.
We pay off the house early in 11 years.
By the way, oddly enough, 11 years is the average millionaire that paid off their houses in 11 years, 11.2 years in the study that we were talking about earlier.
So that's one of the things that people did to become millionaires?
Yes.
We call them baby steps millionaires.
They walked right up this.
They get their house paid off in an average of 11 years.
Some of them seven years, some of them 14, but an average of 11. Wow.
And then when you don't have a house payment, dude, I mean, that's $2,000, $3,000 a month.
Oh, yeah.
You've got a bank to be generous with, bank to be investing.
And you can relax at your house and get in the bathroom.
Stacking cash.
That's it.
God, man, that's what I want.
I'll buy a dang bird bath and sit in that thing.
If I'm debt-free, I'll sit in the front yard in there and dang use some dang soap up.
Dave Ramsey, anything else that you want to share with her that you think?
We've covered a lot of neat stuff, I think.
I feel like we've been through a lot of avenues.
It was an honor to be with you.
Yeah, you too, man.
I'm impressed with what you're doing.
It's so good.
Well, thanks, man.
Yeah, I just feel.
I'm here watching your career and watching you clean up and get right and doing stuff.
I watched your content shift.
You're doing really good.
You're doing great.
I'm proud to know you.
Thanks, man.
Yeah, it's so crazy.
Yeah, that I remember my stepdad said that.
And then like two years ago, I'd be like, man, wouldn't it be crazy if we got to have Dave Ramsey on, you know?
And then here was you two.
And then you could tell him you were underwhelmed.
But we didn't lose hope, man.
Anyway, that's true.
We didn't lose hope.
That's true.
And so, yeah, thank you so much.
Thanks for the guidance.
You guys can check out the Ramsey show.
And then there's just so many YouTube clips.
Like if you want, I mean, there's probably a clip for almost everything these days.
Yeah.
You know, for everything you want to find out about finances, how to take care of yourself, how to move forward.
They can call into the show daily.
No.
Every day.
You can call into his show every day if you have a question.
And there's some great videos of some of the best questions that they've had online as well.
Dave Ramsey, thanks so much, man.
Thank you, bro.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
And best of luck.
And I hope to see you around town sometime.
Well, hang.
Now, I'm just floating on the breeze.
And I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of mind I found.