#542 - Dave Ramsey on Being $3 Million in Debt + Filing for Bankruptcy & Almost Getting Divorced + The Reason He Doesn't Give Listeners Money + Common Financial Advice that is WRONG + His Coolest Famous Friend

00:00:06
Speaker 1: We spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned. We had a brand new baby and a marriage hanging on by a thread. And I'm twenty eight years old. In the final bankruptcy, after fighting it for two and a half years, they crushed me.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Welcome to episode five point forty two with Dave Ramsey who I've known Dave for a long time now, and it was really good to sit with them for an hour. I don't know I like Dave. I think if you're around Dave a little bit, you're drawn to him. There's a reason he's successful. His website's Ramseysolutions dot com, which teaches you practical ways to handle your money, work, and relationships so you can create the life that you want. Dave's a founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions, where he's helped people take control of their money and their lives since nineteen ninety two. He has written nine best selling books. He's a personal finance expert. He's host of The Ramsey Show. He was millions of dollars in debt. Also, he didn't grow up with money, so he got into debt because a lot of rich people go into debt Because they're rich and they think they can bounce out of it. He's broke, then went into debt and then got out of it. We talked about that. Dave was born in Antioch, Tennessee, in nineteen sixty bought his first rental property at eighteen years old. By age twenty six, he had a master four million dollars in real estate portfolio. But then Donda, Yeah, it didn't go so well. He's famous for his Baby Steps plan, which is a seven step system to help people get out of debt and build wealth. And here he is Dave Ramsey Instagram at Dave Ramsey and again ramseysolutions dot Com.

00:01:35
Speaker 3: Here we go.

00:01:37
Speaker 2: I consider you a friend. If I saw you at the grocery store, I would go up and give you a hug.

00:01:40
Speaker 3: Absolutely.

00:01:40
Speaker 2: Okay, have you hug when.

00:01:41
Speaker 3: I walked down? Yeah?

00:01:42
Speaker 2: And you know, and we've been friends a long time, yes, so I would consider you.

00:01:46
Speaker 1: I mean, you guys were just kind of getting started when we for sure hung out, and then you just like blew up and became a like an icon or something crazy.

00:01:54
Speaker 2: I don't know that that's true. But it has been good do a good ride, for sure. It's been a lot of revisionist history with me, and I was going to ask you about that with you, where with me, it's like you moved to town. Wow, you're huge. But it was like the first couple of years here, like I had to sell my whole company that I had sort of syndicated myself with my with my own money, and we started over and it was miserable and had to buy billboards against me. There was all this strategy. It was really hard for two or three years where we almost didn't make it. But that's what actually made us really make it was being so different and then weathering of all of the already set in negativity. I mean, that's really what it was. We were so different. Is that at all your story? Because now you're just super successful day.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: I have always been rich, well not always obviously, the uh you know what ended up.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: I think more than.

00:02:45
Speaker 1: We've had our waves of negativity, different things, for different reasons in different times. Around the broadcast part, we've reinvented ourselves as the platforms changed. I mean, obviously I started in talk radio. Talk radio is a big deal. When I started, Russia had been on their two years and so talk radio evolved as we grew and ended up with six hundred and eighty stations. Before he passed, we were the third largest. Now we're the second largest talk radio show in America, the only one that's independently syndicated. And today that doesn't matter. What matters now is podcast. What matters now is YouTube. Our numbers on those things on Spotify, on Apple, on those things, those downloads, it's just in the billions. And so that's but that's a reinvention in that you know, you have to conform to the new technology, and the wonderful thing is you get to reach a whole new group of people that didn't reach before.

00:03:41
Speaker 2: Was there ever a moment where it almost didn't all happen early on though, like before you started having success at talk radio, was there a decision you look back at it is like, man, this almost didn't work out.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: Oh, A bunch of them, especially in the early days. Started on WTN, which was in chapter eleven bankruptcy at the time. The station was Yes, that's the irony. The Ramsay Show starts on a bankruptcy bankrupt station.

00:04:05
Speaker 2: And I'm assuming they didn't pay you a bunch of money.

00:04:06
Speaker 1: They didn't pay me any money really matter of fact, I've never been paid by a radio station I was working. I just took the thing and they said, we'll give you some ads that you can barter, and there are six dollars a spot at the time, and so we made nothing.

00:04:20
Speaker 3: We're doing it for fun, you know, and it just and again it.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: Blew up, and then gay Lord bought it out of bankruptcy and we thought, oh, we're done. They're going to take a country and we're out of here. And they did some qualitative and quantitative research to their credit, and I found that we had a ton of phantom qum because no one ever told us to say the call letters, so there no one was writing it down in those days. You wrote it down in the book, the ratings book. And we started saying the call letters. We went to a seven from zero to a seven to a fourteen in three books. And all of a sudden that everybody in Nashville is looking at talk radio, and talk radio was kind of in a zenith in those days, so it was everybody's talking about the water cooler. This is hey, have you listen to g Gordon Liddy, George Plaster, you know in Nashville, that's that's that was the deal?

00:05:12
Speaker 2: What was what was it like for you, like as a person, like kind of like the origin story of Dave, because even I have read about you, and I know you grew up in Antioch, and Antioch is not Beverly Hills. No, no, And again my association with you is, I know the guy. I think a lot of people that watch you on TikTok is you're just the rich guy that's smart. So what's like before all that happened? You grew up in Antioch? What was home like?

00:05:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, Anioch in those days was rednecks and now it's kind of international flavor. It's the demographic has shifted. And but it was a one thousand square foot house with an unfinished basement, and we did not have living room furniture until I was fourteen, So it was just a big empty room.

00:05:53
Speaker 3: Because the end of my by the living room furniture. So I bought the house.

00:05:56
Speaker 1: Mam and Dad bought the house for twelve two hundred and fifty dollars in nineteen sixty and Dad was a serial entrepreneur, so we were either driving catallacts or having them towed.

00:06:06
Speaker 3: And so I learned a lot about entrepreneurism.

00:06:11
Speaker 2: From living through it.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean we the you know, one summer we got a nice boat to go skiing. In the next summer, we got no boat, and so and that.

00:06:21
Speaker 3: You know that. That was part of the life that we grew up with. And then I.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: Was going to go into the There we're in the real estate business. So I'm going to go in the real estate business. I got my real estate license when I turned eighteen. Three weeks later, saw my first house, and I moved out of the house and took off and went to Knoxville and got a degree in real estate, working down there sixty hours a week. They taught us work ethic and always worked your parents did, yes, always worked hard. Yeah, there's a lot of miscellaneous unpleasant in a house like that. Sometimes we put the fun in dysfunction. But but other things where they taught us entrepreneurism, they taught us hard work. They were charismatic people in terms of always telling a big tale, a big story, which has worked on my benefit. Now there's storytellers out of the mountains, you know, and that kind of stuff. So it's some wonderful I attributes. There were some things that were wonderful about it, and but you know, it was a lower middle class neighborhood.

00:07:17
Speaker 3: I guess something like that.

00:07:18
Speaker 1: I'd pay cash for my first car cutting grass, and so met my wife, Sharon.

00:07:24
Speaker 3: We got married.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: We had a dollar sixteen in our checking account, nothing and I started buying his some only real estate in my early twenties, talked some banker and the loan of me money because I could talk to somebody into doing anything, and I went deeply in debt, went broke.

00:07:36
Speaker 2: How deep in debt.

00:07:38
Speaker 1: We had four million dollars worth of real estate by the time I was twenty six, and three million dollars worth a debt and the banks called our notes. And we spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned. We had a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a thread. And I'm twenty eight years old in the final bankruptcy after fighting it for two and a half years. It crushed me psychologically, spiritually.

00:08:01
Speaker 3: Everything.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: I met God in that process on the way up, got to know him on the way down, and so we just you know, by the time I'm thirty years old, we're basically penniless again and get the opportunity just to start over, but with having had the lights turned off, the water turned off at the house. And so when those people call me on the radio and they're scared, yeah, I remember that instantly.

00:08:25
Speaker 3: I can feel it. It starts rising up in my throat.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: There's empathy involved.

00:08:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, thirty years later, I can still feel it in my body.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: I watch a lot of clips because I think that's the way that I consume you most is the clips that go viral and millions. You can talk about millions, billions of downloads, but I like, I'll go look at a random clip of somebody calling in going We're seventy million. And you're like, and you have all these little anecdotes. Do you have like a list of anecdotes that you can go to if somebody calls about certain things or are they just firing off in your head?

00:08:55
Speaker 1: Well, I mean some of them are joke lines you used ten years ago and they work, so you keep using them, right, and and people connect to those turn a turn of phrase better than they do just solid information. And so if you can wrap it somehow and something makes them laugh or make them go, oh my god, he just said that out loud, or get a little bit of shock value. Then then it helps them remember, It helps them learn from the process rather than simply be entertained by other people's disasters.

00:09:22
Speaker 2: I always want my doctor to not be emotionally invested, because I think they work better if emotion is not getting in the way. If I have a surgeon, now, I don't want I'm feeling sad for me. I want them coming to do what he was trying to do, like go ABCD, cool, we got it, let's get out. Like that is my hope. Whenever I go in and have to have somebody work on, I don't want them to care. I need them just to do their job because I feel like sometimes emotion gets in the way. Now it can good, it can help in a good way as well. But whenever you're dealing with people that have sad stories, do you ever just want to be like I will help you?

00:09:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, well we do. I mean we don't give them money, but that's.

00:09:56
Speaker 2: What I'm saying, Like you could just be like you ever want to do that and be like let me just give you something.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know what we had to do early when that first, you know, because What happens the first time you do that is you've changed the show into a telethon, and people are going to start calling to get money instead of get help and answers, and money's really not what they need. But there's a couple of times. I mean, we had a lady though that gosh a year and a half ago, call in and she owed sixty thousand dollars on her house.

00:10:24
Speaker 3: It's worth four hundred thousand.

00:10:25
Speaker 1: Her husband had gotten killed in an accident on the job, thirty years old, and she's four payments behind, getting ready to lose a four hundred thousand dollars house with a sixty thousand dollars mortgage. I can write that check and be done. And she's got no problem, right. And he was in the roofing, he fell through a roof. He's working on a roof and I'm talking to her and I said, listen, one hundred percent chance you are not going to lose this house, okay, And she started crying. I said, look, there's no possible way. I'm going to walk you through. I know how to deal with the mortgage company. We're going to put them on hold. We're going to set them on the sidelines, and we're gonna hook you up with some local churches and we're gonna get you caught up.

00:11:03
Speaker 3: Some people are gonna help you.

00:11:06
Speaker 1: But I've got in the back of my head that was what I was tempted to, but I'm not going to because I don't violate that rule.

00:11:11
Speaker 3: I never do it.

00:11:12
Speaker 1: But what happened was another guy in the roofing business in Murphysborough called us five minutes later and paid off her house. Wow, you know, and so people do stuff. But I didn't facilitate it. I didn't cause it. I didn't put out a gofund me. I didn't talk about it on the air. I just said, honey, you're gonna be okay. We got this. You have too much equity to lose this house. We're not gonna allow it to happen.

00:11:33
Speaker 2: What do you do in a situation like that, When you say, put the mortgage company on the side.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: We can just they will.

00:11:38
Speaker 1: They're required to do what's called a forebearance to attempt a four barans to do a workout plan, and we just know how to work the language with them, and our coaches can get on the phone with them and if she's four payments, fight behind. We can set up double payments for eight months or something like that. We'll help her get an extra job. Again, local church will step in maybe catch her up anyway. In this case, the guy just distinking thing off. Wow, that's wild. Yeah, it's neat.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: It has to make you feel good too about what you're doing. I feel at times like I'm so separated because you know, I've got four or five podcasts, we got the radio show, but I'm in a room. I don't get to like see people. When I tour, it was awesome because I would get to see people. Yeah, and I would actually get to see the humans, and it would almost reinvigorate me because I know people are listening and I can see the actions happening from things I talk about. But at times that barrier is there.

00:12:31
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:12:31
Speaker 2: But it's really cool whenever you can do it and know there are humans out there that will act yep.

00:12:37
Speaker 1: Well, and you know the same point. We do a lot of live events, and it's one of the reasons we do live events is for us because it keeps us in tune with the humans because again, you're sitting on stage. Yeah, two three thousand people sitting there you can judge quickly the room. You can feel the room if you've been doing it a while, is to is this material working? Am I connecting? Am I helping? All the light bulbs coming on over their heads? Or are they flipping me off in the back of their head? And the body language and the tone and you feel it in the air, what's happening in that room and so you're you know, it's a way to proof text the material, but it also it just invigorates us because we get to see the humans and we go, yeah, dad, gum, this is cool. And what's really cool these days is with YouTube and podcast, I've got the youngest audience I've ever had. So the nineteen year old kid that's valeting my car at the steakhouse is like, here, Dave Ramsey, you know, like, and that's never happened to me in my whole career. But it's awesome. Which the poor guy he automatically gets a huge tip, just because I'm so thrilled that he's listening, you know, I mean, if you're nineteen and you get the stuff we teach, you're going to be so stinking rich.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: Do you feel though, that you have to tip also because that you don't want people saying Dave Ramsey didn't tip me.

00:13:50
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Yeah when it's bad service, everybody gets a tip. It doesn't matter. Yeah, way and a good one. Yeah, because we don't I don't want to be on one of those lists of people that stiffy people and that stuff.

00:14:01
Speaker 2: So when you started doing that radio show at one radio station, look what was the goal from that.

00:14:08
Speaker 1: To get leads to create The radio show itself as a business did not make money for ten years, it lost money, and so it was it was a lead make We were gathering humans and they would come to live events.

00:14:21
Speaker 3: We made money on those.

00:14:22
Speaker 1: Later on we had a class called Financial Peace University that exploded.

00:14:26
Speaker 3: And they would come to that and they'd buy.

00:14:27
Speaker 1: Books, multiple best sellers over the years, and so it turned you know, we were able to monetize the exposure from a business perspective, but all of that ended up being a brand mix. Actually that caused us to find different ways to help people, because some people are more helped in live events, some are more helped in a classroom setting, Some are more helped by book sitting in a corner, some are more helped just listing on the show, those kinds of things. So we got all these different ways we can get at you to get you the information so you can change your life. And and so it was all about serving them out there, but in different ways.

00:15:04
Speaker 2: My best friend who's also on my morning show, Eddie, like he followed what you have taught for a long time is like payoff your smallest first, because he was like forty or fifty thousand dollars in debt at a time when he didn't have that money. He says he doesn't have it now and he does. He has four kids. I don't think he has anything, but he like it's older twenty did like he paid off the eighteen dollars one forty two dollars and then it took him five or six years and he was able to clear forty thousand dollars in credit card debt. I feel a bit that there should be a cap on credit card interest rates coming from where I come from, where people they don't have money, they don't have resources, they don't need. I didn't know about money. I grab a credit card and it was like nineteen percent. This sounds awesome. I can actually buy stuff, clothes or food and the next thing, you know, it's out of control.

00:15:53
Speaker 3: Right.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: How do you feel about interest rates on credit cards?

00:15:58
Speaker 1: Well, probably the worst offender in that whole space would be called the payday lender.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:16:05
Speaker 1: Those rates run four hundred to eight hundred percent. They make a nineteen percent look and.

00:16:10
Speaker 2: You can cash you too, Like if we used to go into those and you the great thing about those is you would actually get hard, hard money, yep, or a credit card. You got credit and maybe you can, you know, maybe not spend it all, but that cash it goes quick because it's.

00:16:22
Speaker 3: In your hand. Yeah, and oftentimes for the wrong things.

00:16:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:16:26
Speaker 1: So and then you've got this ridiculous rate on this thing. So some states have now limited or outload those the payday lenders. I prefer to teach so many people how not to get screwed that it puts the people screwing.

00:16:46
Speaker 3: People out of business.

00:16:47
Speaker 2: Just marketplace pressure, more so than regulate.

00:16:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, more so.

00:16:50
Speaker 1: Than regularly, because you know, there's always people are who want to mess up, are always going to find a way.

00:16:56
Speaker 3: I would find a way.

00:16:57
Speaker 1: I'd find a way around whatever the regulation was to find to get to get screwed. And so and the people that are going to mess you over. They're going to find a way around it some way or another. And but but the credit card interest rates are horrendous. They're ridiculous, and old fashioned word we would use is called usurers. There used to be in the old days. There were usury laws in a lot of the states, like blue laws. You weren't allowed to open your business on Sunday in some old days in the fifties and the sixties, that kind of thing, And there were usury laws you couldn't charge more than a certain amount. And when credit cards first got on the scene in the seventies and started really becoming a thing, there were some states that the banks couldn't do business in because they could not charge that rate. And that's probably not a bad thing. But I would prefer to just make it to where it's so uncomfortable that that you that everybody stays away from it. And when they stay away from it, then the people go out of business.

00:17:59
Speaker 2: I'd like advice. So when I started buying anything, I only ever paid cash because I was so afraid of going in debt. Had no money, so I had nothing but anything I had it was four hundred bucks for old crappy Subaru. It was always cash. I don't owe anything to anybody at all. Now even my house pay cash for it. I've always been so scared of debt because never had money, never wanted to owe at this point, and is there a good debt that I should be involved in because I have none? And that's great. But am I costing myself money?

00:18:33
Speaker 3: No?

00:18:34
Speaker 1: The data says that you've done it the right way. Everybody talks about that the sophisticated person will use debt to their advantage, but we don't actually find that in rich people.

00:18:46
Speaker 3: What we find is they.

00:18:47
Speaker 1: Get out of debt and stay out of debt because your most powerful wealth building tool is your income, and something happens to your income, especially in a world like you and I are in where we're self employed and self employed and in this bot like both. When I don't have any debt, I don't have to think about doing the right thing. I just do it and if somebody doesn't like it, oh well. But if I have to make a payment over here, then I got to think about that. And you take a guy in a regular job, he'll put up a toxic job because you've got to pay a stupid car payment. But if he hadn't got a car payment, hadn't gained debt, then you know, he just starts walking out the door, and though the guy's yelling at him, where you going, he goes, I don't even payments. So I put up with this, and he'll go get a better job in a less toxic environment. So those of us that are self employed end up making more money because we're not our stomach's not in knots trying to worry about paying a payment, and so we can go do what's the next cool thing and take a risk with cash, and we can do the and we can stand up when we need to stand up on something, and you know, whatever the consequences are, that fine. But you're not gonna get my house, and you're not gonna get my building, and you're not gonna get my business because it's all free. Nobody's coming at me.

00:20:05
Speaker 2: It sounds like a version of fu money, like no debt exactly. It's kind of few money. It's like, I don't believe in what you're saying, so f you and you can do that a bit without debt. I do feel like you said, I've been you prosper when you do that. Yeah, I agree, and I feel better, so then I perform better exactly, just generally speaking exactly, But I do feel, like you said, I feel I've been conditioned to think that since I'm not using debt to my advantage, that I'm doing wrong and I'm making less because of that.

00:20:31
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:20:31
Speaker 1: The interesting thing though, the people that are teaching that are not people that have money. They are people that have studied finance and the college professor told them that. But it's not you know, like, we did the largest study of millionaires ever done, one hundred and sixty seven of them. The number of them that said I borrowed deeply in order to build wealth was very close to zero. Out of ten thousand millionaires, almost none of them. The data does not support that. It's quote unquote sophisticated and the proper path to build wealth.

00:21:05
Speaker 3: The people that have done the wealth building didn't do it.

00:21:08
Speaker 4: Let's take a quick pause for a message from our sponsor. Wow, and we're back on the Bobby Cast.

00:21:22
Speaker 2: When someone's super rich, like like Jennifer Lopez, buys a seventy million dollar house, do they get a mortgage on that? For the most part, just generally speaking to really rich people get mortgages.

00:21:34
Speaker 1: Most of the billionaire types don't. Some of the celebrity billionaire types would if they've got someone quote, I've got me a man that's managing my money unquote, and some characters giving them advice and all that. Some of those people will take out a mortgage. But most of them they're like, you know, I, you know, if you're at the top of your game in the golf world, and you know, you don't want to think about a mortgage while you're standing over that putt.

00:22:04
Speaker 3: You know that putt might be a million dollar putt.

00:22:07
Speaker 2: The same you're talking about even earlier exactly. That's influencing your brain.

00:22:11
Speaker 1: And most of those guys understand that. You know that I play ball differently, I stand over that putt differently, I take a different record.

00:22:21
Speaker 3: Deal or I don't.

00:22:23
Speaker 1: And because I got this stupid thing hanging around out there, and you get into the things, like you know, Ed McMahon passed away bankrupt. You know, Johnny Carson's sidekick back in the day, had one hundred and ten million dollars in debt. And we spent a lot of time with Pam and I have permission from her to say this, so I wouldn't Otherwise I wouldn't have disclosed that. His wife, Pam called me when Ed was on his deathbed and I got to know her and we hung out. Our coaches have coached her to try to bring their life back around.

00:22:53
Speaker 3: And uh, but they he did. He did that.

00:22:57
Speaker 1: I mean, there's financial people in air quote giving him advice, deeply in debt and one of the most famous guys from the nineteen seventies, Johnny Carson sidekick no money.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: A lot of athletes will go into debt, same thing. And a lot of the athletes, even that I know, didn't come from much. Therefore, when they get it, and I think there's also an idea of well, if I'm getting at this level now, I'm going to get at this level forever.

00:23:26
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:23:26
Speaker 2: When you have a shelf life. But I know I have a shelf life doing this as well. Now I don't have to run, thank God, I'm using my brain, not my body. But I also know that you know, when the sun's out, get it yep, because the sun ain't always going to be out. Man, How do these athletes lose that money? Is it bad advice? No advice?

00:23:46
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of everything. I do a lot of NFL rookie camps, and I'm standing in front of these kids, going, hey, NFL stands for not for long. It's three point eight years average, Seventy eight percent of you will leave the league physically disabled for life. The divorce rates fourfold the national average. The bankruptcy rates ten old the national average. So you generally don't come out of the NFL well unless you unless you just decide, I'm not gonna be a stereotypical athlete. Now, you know, some of them are brilliant, and some of them come from a background. You know, one kid, he was a lineman that nobody ever knew his name, an offensive lineman, which is generally some of the smartest people on the team. But the uh, you know, he had an NBA from Michigan and his mom was an obstetrician and his dad was a lawyer. Well, this guy, you know, he he can't. He didn't come out of the hood. He came out of that situation. So he's got He grew up around money, had some acumen about it, and you know, he banked everything he made, paid cash for his house and he came out of the He'll come out of the league wounded physically, but with a lot of money. And I know several of those guys, but we don't know their names usually, but the ones that are really sad, It's like I'm sitting on a stage and his kids.

00:24:58
Speaker 3: Like, Dave, what do you do on the fifteenth?

00:25:01
Speaker 1: I give my mom ten thousand bucks at the first of the month, and she calls me on the fifteenth and needs another ten thousand What do you do?

00:25:06
Speaker 3: How do you tell your mama?

00:25:07
Speaker 2: No?

00:25:08
Speaker 1: I said, well, honey, your mom's got the same problem you got. This isn't gonna last. And then what's she gonna do? Because you can't do this for twenty years? And so you guys are consuming this money, It's gonna go away. So when need to get your mom into financiation university. When you to get your mom on a budget where she can take advantage of this. If you want to help her, what you teach her to fish? Not just give her fish? And the same thing for you. Well, I mean he had six six cars and bought three of his buddies a car and thought he was Elvis Presley and all this stuff, and you know, in a year and a half later is out of the league, and you know, and it was a name that we would all know if I said it, and so, but it's just it's I guess it's just the background or the acumen, and it's not there's no knowledge base at all. And one of my buddies came out of that and he's, you know, getting Dave, getting out of the hood's easier and getting the hood out of you. Yeah.

00:26:03
Speaker 2: I don't feel like it's all the way out of me yet. I have such trauma from yeah that I make decisions. Even my wife will have to say to me, hey, you're reacting from trauma. There'll be certain things. I'm just like, I don't, don't. She's like, you're, okay, be rational about this, you know, be rational about this spend even if it's a healthy spender, if it's something that's going to be positive. I still my stomach still gets the knots well ours does.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: Too, because of going broke. I mean, Sharon, my wife is terrorized during that time.

00:26:31
Speaker 3: I mean she.

00:26:32
Speaker 1: It's like, and but what helps us is we we measure it against our generosity if we're spending, and we also just use the ratio model, And I mean we look and say, okay, we're going to buy a car that costs that that's more than I used to make any year.

00:26:50
Speaker 3: Now, how is that? Okay?

00:26:52
Speaker 1: Well, it's a very small percentage of our world, and we always ask ourselves the question, and it helps us kind of process the trauma. Uh, okay, if we take that much money right now in our current world, looking at the math that we have today, and burn that much in the middle of the floor, does it change our life? If it does, it's probably too big a thing. But if we're like, you know what, really wouldn't even notice it. So we need to go on that trip. We need to buy that car, we need to make that gift, that that generosity piece, because once that money's gone, it's okay, we don't we it's not a big enough part of our life anymore that it matters. Mathematically, we're not at risk, you know. But because the trauma is your body is tightening up, telling you.

00:27:38
Speaker 3: You're gonna die, You're gonna die, You're gonna die.

00:27:40
Speaker 1: It's like, no, I'm not even gonna get a hangnail, you know, And I have to I have to use my mind. Doctor John Deloney's one of our team members. He always says, when you look at when you're in trauma, facts are your friends, and so what are the facts? And that helps me process my momentary trauma in the middle of that.

00:27:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, mine is back in the park. Everything, everything, any even me getting sick and missing a show leads to streams or ratings going down, which leads to less revenue coming in, which leads to no job, which leads to no money, which leads to back in the trailer park or back in whatever many apartments we lived in. Just like that.

00:28:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, And but you know, and I've known each other long time. I've watched you process that. It's kind of part of your story that you that you do process it, and you process it in the open like we're doing right now all the time. And what that's given you the ability to do is as you're going down that chain, at some point Bobby goes, that's not true. That's not actually a fact, that's a feeling. And then you go, h Okay, I can probably get off the crazy cycle here. I can step off the crazy train because we're not going back to the trailer park. I mean, there's it's almost mathematically impossible for you to screw it up at that level.

00:28:59
Speaker 2: Almost.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: I mean, it's really it really is. I mean me too, me too. I'm not going back to anyock. I mean it's almost mathematically impossible with this stage.

00:29:06
Speaker 2: Do you keep cash on you always? I keep cash on me too, for tipping for the most part. And I do feel like I have to tip big because I worked in businesses where I needed tip, And secondly, I don't want end up on a freaking TikTok.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm not as worried about the TikTok thing. To me, it's a form of generosity and so and and I've done most of those jobs too, and they're hard jobs, and so I try to find unusual ways to do that. And my wife is like, you just give them way too much money. I'm like, he is parking one hundred and forty thousand dollars car. I don't need to give him five dollars. This is Ferris Bueller's day out. I mean, come on, seriously, this is a valet we need to love on a little bit here.

00:29:47
Speaker 3: I agree.

00:29:47
Speaker 2: We are cars bad investments. Yes, are they an investment at all?

00:29:51
Speaker 1: No, They're not investment. They're a consumption. Yeah, because they go down in value like a rock. I mean, that's where Chevy gets that.

00:29:56
Speaker 3: You know.

00:29:57
Speaker 1: It's just like they all go down in value, right, and so but we consume them. And again boats, same thing. I got boats, I got cars. All these things go down in value. But as long as they're a small percentage of your life, then they don't kill you. But if you make fifty thousand dollars a year and you have a seventy five thousand dollars car, you can't you can't absorb that mathematically. It's going to take you to your knees. And so you bought a car that's killing you. And that's half my show. Sell the car, right.

00:30:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do see a lot of clips, yeah, where it's hey, sell the car, get it a piece of crap and drive that for a while until you get yourself back on your feet.

00:30:32
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:30:33
Speaker 2: Repairs though, repairs on those pieces of the crap.

00:30:35
Speaker 3: Nothing like the payments on the big ones.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:30:38
Speaker 3: I agree.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: You feel like that's a lot of people though, that their cars are number one flaw in their financial portfolio.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a lot, and it's going way up in like the last decade.

00:30:50
Speaker 2: Why do you think that is.

00:30:51
Speaker 1: It used to be like a five hundred dollars car payment was the average. Now it's like eight hundred is the average. And I get a lot of people calling me with two twelve hundred dollars car payments, and you know that's that's twenty five that's thirty thousand dollars a year in car payments.

00:31:06
Speaker 3: And you're and you make a hundred.

00:31:08
Speaker 1: There's no way you can mathematically get on the other side of that. Those stupid things are killing you. To impress somebody to stop light, you will never meet.

00:31:16
Speaker 2: I was gonna ask if it was all to keep up with the Joneses.

00:31:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, most of the time it is. Or for me, I'm a redneck. It's a loud muffler, right, I mean, come on, you do drive a big truck? Can I say that? I can say you drive a big truck?

00:31:27
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:31:27
Speaker 2: I do. I've got a Raptor R. Yeah, yeah, no, it's big. It's cool. I can't drown that truck, guy, I can't. I got an SUV for the first time, all right.

00:31:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what's your go to drive? What's your daily driver? Well?

00:31:37
Speaker 2: I got two cars, one big shot out to Hundai and then two, I have a Lamborghini suv.

00:31:44
Speaker 3: Wow, very neat. That's a cool car.

00:31:47
Speaker 2: I know nothing about cars.

00:31:48
Speaker 1: That's a cool car, though, that car. And if people look at me, that will go cart that sucker will go. That's a quick boy.

00:31:56
Speaker 2: Yes, it's loud too.

00:31:57
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:31:58
Speaker 2: I just if I had more like understand of cars, I think I would like it more. I just I'm not a car guy. But my wife was like, hey, you should get an suv. You keep hitting potholes and cars I don't see very well either, And.

00:32:11
Speaker 1: What's the what's your guilty pleasure that you do know something about that?

00:32:15
Speaker 3: You spend money on baseball cards? Oh cool, all right?

00:32:19
Speaker 2: Like I've got some like vintage baseball tend to always go up in value. New baseball tend to fluctuate. And so that to me is fun and I treated as fun hobby. Yeah, but I do go heavier into advantage because I don't want the loss to be as much as it could be if everything goes wrong. Like I've got some old like Mickey Mantles and like, oh man, yeah, and I've done it. It is fun to me. The greatest part about having resources now is getting to do all the things I didn't get to do as a kid, which I don't get to buy baseball cards, and now I just do it at a different level. But it feels like what it would have felt like, I think when I was twelve, getting to go and buy baseball cards at the baseball card show up.

00:33:00
Speaker 1: And you're doing it, you know, with a maturity level and an intellect so that you're actually gonna make money on it.

00:33:05
Speaker 3: That's kind of cool too.

00:33:06
Speaker 2: I have a guilt that sets in though if I buy anything big, I have to give that amount, okay, and I don't. The guilt is not that I give, but I think I'm guilted to give. And I think I we give a I think a fair good amount anyway, But when I buy something that I feel like is a bit extra, there's an extra little monster in there going, hey, don't be don't be a jerk like you have. So whatever you just bought, you need to also give to something. Is that healthy? Mm hmm.

00:33:35
Speaker 1: It's a good practice if you're doing it, if you're just constantly guilt tripping yourself constantly.

00:33:40
Speaker 2: Now the utility I get, and it's that.

00:33:42
Speaker 1: Sounds that sounds thing, But I mean, you ought to always be building your generosity muscle.

00:33:45
Speaker 2: And we do that.

00:33:46
Speaker 1: We do the same thing, but not from a guilt perspective. We just say, all right, if we're going to spend that on a car, are we doing good with our generosity?

00:33:53
Speaker 3: Because if we're not, we probably are.

00:33:55
Speaker 1: Now we're getting over here to self self selfish rather than self liss And so you want to be bigger on the generosity side because it's more fun and it's more rewarding.

00:34:06
Speaker 3: From a positive perspective.

00:34:07
Speaker 1: But I don't ever want to guilt anybody into doing stuff.

00:34:10
Speaker 2: I live completely guilt. It's this one big guilt blanket wrapped over me. Like I do, I have guilt for my success, But I also don't think my success happened by any way other than just grit. Yeah, Like I don't think that anybody handed me anything. No, so I can rationally go, I shouldn't have this guilt, but man, it's tough to shake.

00:34:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you look at it and you go, is anybody worth this? Probably not right, But we put ourselves in a position that we scaled something. And so now we've got this, and you know, our faith wall helps us kind of navigate the emotions of that because we just go, Okay, all of this we don't own. We're managing it for God, all right, So Lord, what do you want to do with your stuff? And he says, I love my kids? You love your kid telling I love my kids. You know how to give your kids good things? Yeah, I give you some good things so you can enjoy some of it, and you know, take care of some of my hungry kids and don't give it to some of my stupid kids.

00:35:12
Speaker 3: And you know, and God's got real.

00:35:13
Speaker 1: Specific things, and so that kind of feels like I'm managing it for somebody else.

00:35:19
Speaker 3: It's easy to give away other people's money.

00:35:23
Speaker 5: The Bobby Cast will be right back. This is the Bobby Cast.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: I'm gonna ask you that question you asked me, Like, what do you do with your money that you've made? That's fun?

00:35:42
Speaker 1: At this stage of our life right now, Sharon and I I have stepped back. I'm only operating about twenty percent of the business. My son we're in the succession phase and my son Daniel runs the business eighty percent of it.

00:35:55
Speaker 3: So I'm still the CEO.

00:35:56
Speaker 1: I'm still there and I'm still on the microphone, and I won't quit being on the microphone stuff. But what that's done is it's freed me up a bunch. And so Sharon and I are doing like ridiculous.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: Travel, like where's the coolest place you've been?

00:36:07
Speaker 1: Just be like, you know, this summer we went to Budapest for three days, in Vienna for three days, and got a yacht and went up the coast of Croatia for a week, just the two of us. We were going we were going to for almost a month, and it was a blast. We had so much fun and beautiful everything and incredible food and and my mouth's watering, and the wines and the whole bit, and so we just get you know, just and again we those trips are expensive compared to anything we used to do, but they're a very very small percentage of our current world, and so we don't feel irresponsible or unspiritual to enjoy something occasionally like that. What's Budapest like, it's very neat, very neat.

00:36:52
Speaker 3: Vienna is very neat. They're both they're both three.

00:36:54
Speaker 2: It's my favorite city.

00:36:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, the I mean, Vienna's got this rich history and the arts and the whole Germanic Germanic culture all the way back Bavaria and so forth, and Budapest has very got more of a communist flavor from the old communist block, but still the I mean, they've got Michelin's Star restaurants all over the streets on both of them. The people are nice in both of them, and we loved the people. The Croatian people we fell in love with too. Just incredible folks, but just beauty and very safe. All three places that I felt a lot safer there than I do in a lot of US cities.

00:37:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's been what's craziest to me. Vienna was cool to me because it wasn't balmed, right, There's a lot of that culture that lasted through World War two because they didn't go and drop bombs on it. But yeah, I think to me, traveling is something I never did till I got older, because I never left the state of Arkansas. Yeah, it was why would I Like, everything I needed to survive was right close and it was going to cost me money to go anywhere else. But then once I started to travel, I think that was great for like my outlook on life, to see other people in far away places be actual humans, Like everything is not within reach that matters there's things that matter that we don't even get to see in our life.

00:38:10
Speaker 1: Well, and it's really really hard to hate people once you get to know them.

00:38:15
Speaker 3: That's a good point. So any.

00:38:19
Speaker 1: Stereotypes or prejudices you might have about a people group or anything, just go hang out with them for a week. You find just very seldom find a bunch of jerks. I can't hardly name a country that's full of jerks. There's hardly one.

00:38:33
Speaker 2: It's to me, it was eye opening to talk to people in other countries and they see America kind of how I would see Mexico City, meaning guns everywhere, and it's probably unfair. I've never been Mexico City, but I just have what the television has showed me. But they're like, man, everywhere you go, you guys are like guns unsafe, And I'm like, ah, it's crazy that that's the association that you guys have with us. I mean, it's not wrong, because again, I feel much safer in places in Europe, and I do if I'm in the middle of a city here in the States. And so I think for me that was a big part of it. And and it's also like the loudest people of restaurants were always Americans.

00:39:09
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, just.

00:39:12
Speaker 2: The people that were just carrying on and loud, always an American.

00:39:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're very seldom see and not always I mean Americans are. There's a lot of good ones too, but but yeah, I often look across the room and some guy's ripping a waitress up and it's that gum American, you know, instead of it's not doing it. There was an Italian guy that was absolute but one of the things we went to. But you know, but again that's all. That's just every culture has got their share. But yeah, it's Americans. I don't know what the deal is when we're traveling, but anyway, yeah, it's I didn't get the gun thing from the folks on on the I don't get that much. What I what I do get often and I come back very patriotic.

00:39:59
Speaker 3: Is is they all don't want to be here? For sure?

00:40:01
Speaker 2: Everybody wants to be an American. I say that in the people that I've met look at America like, Wow, look at all that you're able to do.

00:40:07
Speaker 3: You can do anything you want to do.

00:40:08
Speaker 2: Yeah that any time you want to do it too.

00:40:09
Speaker 1: You walk into a grocery store all the shelves are full of everything, sixty three kinds of mustard. I mean, you don't have that in most communities.

00:40:17
Speaker 2: They're blown away by Sam's Club. That was another thing. They're like, wow, you can get stuff that big because we would go, like my wife and I would go to Italy and we would do these things. We go to people's houses and they teach you how to cook, like better than like a class in a restaurant. Oh yeah, we would go and like a woman, a mom who cooks for kids would offer these classes and so we just my wife and I we would go in and learn how to make the noodles. A lot of it's amazing, but that's really where the experiences were the best, because you can just talk to another person instead of having seventeen people around, you know, managing a situation. And yeah, I come back thinking everybody thinks America is so cool because of what the ability of what we have, what we can do. Yeah, it is not everywhere else.

00:41:00
Speaker 1: And they're very polarized on politics. Our politics. They look over here and just like we are in the whole thing, and so it's interesting on that and some of the perspectives are very very interesting do you ever think about doing that politics?

00:41:14
Speaker 2: Yeah? Have you gotten close?

00:41:17
Speaker 3: No? Never.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: I just don't feel I think I get a lot more good done with what I do than any of those people could ever do. I don't think I would be as effective as a senator helping people as I am, and this is what I'm called to do. So I'm very comfortable in my skin and I just don't have I detest a situation that's full of a lack of authenticity and that's the definition of politics.

00:41:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it. There was a time five six years ago that I was approached to see if I would consider running for the governor of our can and it's mostly just asking for money. That's what I was blown away by. And my feeling now towards people in politics is that I hope people do it for the right reason, but a lot that's the new rock star because you can get on the news, you can get on social media. Just be the loudest, and it doesn't matter what state or if you have a D or an R like, just be the loudest and you're going to have some notoriety Like it's gonna come. And I don't need that because I already have that, like I can just yell stuff and be put on social media with my job, like I have a bit of a platform. So I found one. I didn't just want to get on the phone ask for money all the time. And I felt like the same as you, I could do more for the things that I cared about, because there's a only like three issues that I upper tier care about, Like there's a lot of things that I care about, but food insecurity is such a massive one for me, again just based off how I grew up. That doesn't resonate when it's time to run for office. Because I would talk and I would say, well, you know, here are the things that I care about, and I would list food and security is my number one to like, listen, we'll get to that. And I'm like, no, no, you don't understand, Like that's what I want to get to. There's a difference. And we'll get to that and what I want to get to and we're going to start with that. Yes, And that wasn't that wasn't sexy, and that's not what gets you elected. And so that's why for now, it's like, you know, I don't think it's for me, but I always want that about wondered that about you because you're definitely so charismatic, and that's eighty percent of it.

00:43:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess it is.

00:43:24
Speaker 1: I've got friends that are you know, are elected officials. I'm but the last two governors are friends of mine, and I think a lot of them are good men, and you know, and a lot of our local senators and congressmen are I consider them friends.

00:43:39
Speaker 3: But I don't want to be in that world.

00:43:41
Speaker 1: They even call me and like, would you come up and testify about so and so about debt?

00:43:45
Speaker 2: And I'm like, no, I feel too with them because you talked earlier about.

00:43:49
Speaker 3: They just want to use my name as all and reads and they want me up there.

00:43:51
Speaker 2: Having no debt is the ability to make decisions based on where your heart takes you. And I feel like when you're a politician, you can't do that. It's almost like you have total debt to keep your job.

00:43:59
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:44:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's just it's a yeah, you've got to try to keep too many people happy. And I'd prefer to just pick out if I want to very selectively intentionally decide who I'm going to make mad.

00:44:14
Speaker 2: There's a lot of advice out there now because social media you have the ability to chase whatever you want. There is a niche for everything, and it's awesome and awful, and there are no gatekeepers and that's awesome and awful. You know, it's a pendulum, right, it's anarchy. Yep. What's like common financial advice? That's wrong?

00:44:35
Speaker 1: Most everything on TikTok, Yeah, TikTok is like you know, in the years was that let me think it was in the eighties and even up into the nineties, there were these things on midnight on television on the cable TV at midnight infomercials and you would watch some guy sitting by the waves and he had done nothing down real estate and buy and sell real estate and flip this and all that kind of thing, and you could buy his tape set for three thousand dollars and learn how to get rich in real estate and those kinds of doing the stuff I.

00:45:07
Speaker 3: Did to get to go broke.

00:45:09
Speaker 1: You see exactly how you would do it.

00:45:11
Speaker 2: What about time shares are those that.

00:45:13
Speaker 1: It's the legalized fraud, but the uh, it's horrible.

00:45:18
Speaker 2: So there's no good to it.

00:45:19
Speaker 1: There's no good to timeshares. Timeshares are nasty and the whole. The people in the industry are unbelievably scummy. It is a nasty world. But anyway, the so that a lot of them flip this house stuff on TikTok is all over the place, or a lot of crypto stuff on TikTok a lot of so most of us kind of get rich quick vibe. It's like, you know, I'm looking at you're looking for an easy button. I got an easy button. I'll show you an easy button for thirty four hundred and twenty two dollars. If you follow my system, you can buy and sell stocks day trade stocks, which ninety seven percent of the people the day trade stocks lose.

00:45:56
Speaker 3: Money in a six months period of time. Really, isn't that crazy?

00:45:59
Speaker 2: That's exceptionally. I thought it would be more than fifty.

00:46:01
Speaker 1: For sure, But it's just like it's a one hundred percent chance of losing money.

00:46:05
Speaker 3: It's like nuts.

00:46:06
Speaker 1: I mean, you have a better shot at the roulette wheel mathematically, statistically, So it's crazy, and the difference is in the roulette wheel at least you know you're taking a chance. But on the day trading, they think they got the system. They bought the system off some gown TikTok, and he rented a jet and then filmed it like he owned the jet, and I got a jet, and yeah right, what you got is a bunch of crap. But how do you feel like crypto? I don't buy anything that is a commodity, and so I don't buy barrels of oil off of the commodities market. I don't buy gold, I don't buy soybeans. I don't buy the deutsch Mart or the Euro. Those are currencies, and crypto is a currency, and it's a commodity.

00:46:51
Speaker 3: And so I buy.

00:46:52
Speaker 1: Things that generate money, and that way I can actually place a value on them. And that would be like a company, an example that'd be buying a stock. I don't buy single stocks by my mutual funds. But a company that's home depot's making money. You can look at the numbers. It's actually producing something. It's not just a thing. A commodity is just a thing. And the only reason that a thing goes up in value is shortages or perceived shortages. Greed and fear drive the markets. And that's why, uh, that's why crypto. Crypto doesn't actually produce anything. It's just a currency. It's not a bad it's nothing necessarily evil about it. It's a very young currency, doesn't have a long track record, and the trucker that it does have is very volatile, so it's really scary. But all the cool kids are doing it, and so that's why everybody's in it. But I don't have anything, and I don't I want to put money in stuff like that, because you know, like we said earlier, kind of trauma.

00:47:47
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't like losing money. I don't like gambling. I don't. I don't play cards.

00:47:51
Speaker 2: You don't gamble on it.

00:47:52
Speaker 3: I don't don't damble them. I don't do anything.

00:47:55
Speaker 1: My wife will put some quarters in a slot machine or something like that, but a lot of my buddies play poker and stuff.

00:48:01
Speaker 3: I get zero joy out of that.

00:48:03
Speaker 1: It makes my stomach go up into my throat and it is not entertaining for me.

00:48:08
Speaker 3: It's not funny.

00:48:09
Speaker 1: It reminds me of trauma, and I go down that crazy cycle that we're talking about, and so I.

00:48:13
Speaker 3: Don't do it.

00:48:13
Speaker 1: I don't get joy out of losing money. I understand how people get a thrill out of the possibility of losing money. So, like Michael Jordan is known to do, you know, all that kind of stuff that he's got the money to do it.

00:48:24
Speaker 3: That's fine. I'm not mad at Michael.

00:48:25
Speaker 1: It's just I don't. It's not fun for me, so I don't. I don't do that, and Crypto's right in that bucket. It's the same thing. And so I don't get joy out of being a cool kid. I don't get joy out of being on the cutting edge and whatever. I just want to buy something that's boring and has always gone up in value, like vintage baseball cards versus brand new ones.

00:48:48
Speaker 2: What do you love that you don't really talk about much because everybody wants to hear you talk about money.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: I talk about anything I really want to. I don't really have any limitations. I really enjoy teach. We coach about ten thousand small businesses with our Entrede Leadership brand, and I do a podcast called Entree leadershiphe I'm answering questions for small business people, and leadership questions come up a lot, and running a business questions. And I have thoroughly enjoyed the business part of growing our business over the years and taking care of our team and loving our team well and the leadership leadership. So I do a lot of leadership conferences as a keynote speaker.

00:49:29
Speaker 3: Or yeah, I love it, I love you.

00:49:33
Speaker 2: You're still in then, so it's not to you. You're not just maintaining by doing what everybody expects of you. Because you do it well, you still love it.

00:49:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thoroughly love it because leadership the difference in that. And when I help somebody with their money, that's a one to one transaction. If I help a guy or gal be a better leader, that helps fifty people because he's leading the one hundred people that they're leading and they weren't doing as good a job and now they're doing a great job. So that's got to force multiplier to it. That's pretty cool.

00:50:00
Speaker 2: Leadership is interesting, especially when you have to lead multiple people with different personalities.

00:50:05
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you know.

00:50:06
Speaker 2: I think one of the things because people in my industry and podcasting or radio will come to me and say, hey, how do you manage different personality than I say, differently. Yeah, I think there's not a one size fit all leadership method. Everybody must do this this way. I was going to ask, if you subscribe to.

00:50:23
Speaker 3: That same theory, I agree, agree, completely.

00:50:26
Speaker 1: Now, what you do have to have is some principles involved that apply to regardless of your personality. The principles are, well, you have to get our work done, hello on time. Good attitude principles are we have to and from the leadership position. Bosses push, leaders pull, and so regardless of personality style, my job is to sell them, to teach them. Hey, the train's going this way. The train's going to a shiny place. You want to be on the train. Here's the train. Get on the train instead of standing behind them with a whip. Because if your organization is being pushed rather than pulled, it's always moving at the be the slowest common denominator, and it grinds to a halt pretty quick because we're waiting on the do fists at the end that won't keep up, and we're you know that that doesn't work.

00:51:10
Speaker 2: I've always felt that hiring energy and attitude massive for me as far as like having successful hires that maybe they didn't know as much in a certain area as someone else that I was talking to. But it's so much easier to have to slow somebody down than to push them faster.

00:51:27
Speaker 1: Absolutely that in character. Yeah, yeah, I got to be a dependable human.

00:51:31
Speaker 2: Being on our show, The Morning Show. The hours are weird, still very hard. It sucks and forever, and I wrote about it my first book. If you were one minute late, you got sat home, And it wasn't because you had to be there at exactly that time. It was because everybody else got there before the deadline time.

00:51:51
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:51:51
Speaker 2: And by you not getting there, that shows that you feel like your time's a little more important than everybody else, yep. And that's that's when it starts to get toxic within the group.

00:52:00
Speaker 1: When I was in my twenties, I was very important, I thought, and I was going. I had ninety I was a plate spinner. I had plate spinning everywhere, all these different deals I was always doing, had deals, deals, deals, deals, deals, deals, and I was perpetually late for everything because I was so important and so I but I ended up going. I was sitting down with this guy that was going to do an investment in one of our real estate projects, and a very wealthy guy CEO, and I come in fifteen minutes late, and he goes, you're late.

00:52:28
Speaker 3: He said, yeah, I got all this going on.

00:52:30
Speaker 1: He goes, You're really important, aren't you, and I'm like, well that yeah, No, I don't mean no, but I mean he goes, no. You understand, when you come in here late, you are saying to me, I'm not as important as everything else you have going on. If you named a rock star or you named a world figure that you wanted to meet with, and you had a meeting with them, you would be early, regardless of how all the other things you had going on. But you're late to meet with me, and it says to me that I'm not important. That's arrogance. He just astized me. You know what, I don't think I've ever been late. After that one conversation, it hurt my feelings so bad. He was so right, and I said, this is arrogance. It is arrogance. It's exactly what it is. And so no, I train around Ramsey. We just say trains run on time. Trains run on time. And you know we're broadcasters too, so we're looking at the clock and you know you don't have to hit the clock. I was speaking at a church the other day and they have like four services, and so they got to get the parking lot turned over. They got it, and it's like he goes, guy goes, you got thirty four minutes, you don't have thirty five. Put the clock up, and I'm in at thirty three. Give him an extra minute to get the parking lote, you know. And he's like, nobody comes in early. And I'm like, yeah, well you said that number one, number two. It's how my brain works from thirty years after that conversation with that guy chastising me, I'm gonna be early.

00:53:47
Speaker 3: I'm going to hit the clock.

00:53:49
Speaker 2: I got like three more questions for you, and I want to go to Financial Peace University. Do you has that modified itself with as technology changes? Have you had to change elements of that?

00:53:57
Speaker 3: Absolutely? Yeah.

00:53:58
Speaker 1: And the church world has changed. It was largely in churches. Fifty thousand churches have had ten million people go through it. That's the size it was and it is. But the number of churches that meet during the week like a Tuesday night to do a marriage class or a money class almost zero.

00:54:13
Speaker 3: Now that has shifted.

00:54:15
Speaker 1: Pre COVID, it was already going down, but COVID just put a stake in it ended it. And so the way people do church has changed dramatically in the last decade. And that was you know, for better or for worse was our distribution method for that thing. So yeah, we went to digital. What is happening right now that is very exciting is we have woven the teaching pieces then do this, don't do this into the every Dollar app and so that as people are running their budgets, they're getting prompts of videos and we're teaching them the same material inside the thing in digitally. And the success rate of that is crazy good. It's probably better than when we're doing an analog. And it's just in the early stages, but all of our beta testing and stuff, we're going we're doing a release in about three weeks, the next version of every Dollar and it's but that's the methodology that we've shifted to to go to digital.

00:55:15
Speaker 2: With like Ramsey Plus because again that is so technological. And I find myself and I'm a forties starting to go like, whoa, I don't quite get that. Do you have do you have a whole younger like twenties and thirties that come in and go, hey, this is what we're gonna do and this is how it's consumed.

00:55:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the yeah exactly, because who is it? I'm I'm my target audience is not me. I'm sixty five. Yeah, I'm not the focus group, not even close. And so the target audience is thirty four year old with two kids and got student loan debt, they got credit card debt, they got car payment, and they feel stuck. And the one thing they fight about most in their marriage is money. And so we've got the antidote for their life.

00:55:56
Speaker 3: We can fix it. We've just got to figure out way to inject it.

00:55:59
Speaker 1: And to your point, the gen zs and millennials are are two wonderful generations to have on your team. I've got about six hundred of them in those two generations working for us out of eleven hundred and maybe maybe seven hundred actually out of eleven hundred. But they they are abundance mentality because they grew up with this magic wand in their hand and they can just push a button and stuff shows up on their front porch, and so why couldn't I just push a button and fix this? And so they they believe almost anything's possible in the creation of a product, the delivery of product, or the effect of a product, a digital product. And so they're to have those people in a room with that mentality and that spirit. While you're building out something like this, you can't you can't do it if you don't have them, because it's native to their brain. It's not native to my brain. My brain's native to eight tract tapes. For God's sake, you know so the but I can catch up if I force my intellect to do it. But it's not my natural state. It's their natural date. The only downside they've got and the generation is because they've got this magic one. They have no patience. They want it right now. They want everything microwave, they don't want to crockpot anything, and so if something doesn't work in about twenty minutes, they want to change it immediately. No, let's just stick with it a minute, let's cook it a little bit. Probably it could tender up. I think it's going to be okay, let's not give up on everything so fast.

00:57:24
Speaker 3: But iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. Yeah, well we're going to iterate.

00:57:27
Speaker 1: But you know so the old dog can drag them through that stuff, and you end up with this wonderful working situation.

00:57:34
Speaker 3: When you're creating products like that.

00:57:36
Speaker 2: When couples are fighting about money, does like Amazon purchases. Is that a big part of it. They're just like one of them's ordering a lot of stuff to the house.

00:57:43
Speaker 1: You know, generally it's they don't they're not working together, and there's not a lot of transparency. One of them is doing stuff the other one don't even know about. They're not necessarily hiding it. Sometimes they are. But it's like the wife is handling the money and she just gives her husband an allowance or vice versa, and then then all of a sudden look up and they go, well, I just I want a new car. Well, we don't mean money for a new car. We got all this credit card debt. Why we got credit card debt? Well, because you keep spending. Well, nobody said anything, and there was just this. It's disorganized, it's chaotic, and it's not a top down strategy for laying it all out together. We both agree to it, we both implement it, and there's tons of communication about our values while we do that, and that causes a couple to be knit.

00:58:25
Speaker 3: Together and unified.

00:58:27
Speaker 1: And the opposite of that is when you have all this chaos, disorganization and there's money flying everywhere, it's inefficient for the money piece but it's disastrous from the relationship standpoint.

00:58:37
Speaker 2: What about shared checking accounts on have.

00:58:42
Speaker 1: To Yeah, and again it's databased. Okay, this idea that you can have a roommate and be married to them and you have two separate lives and that causes success, there's no data to support that. Again, go back to the millionaire study we did with ten thousand and one.

00:59:00
Speaker 3: In sixty seven of them.

00:59:01
Speaker 1: Eighty nine percent said I worked very closely with high communication with my spouse to get here. When you interview the public, forty percent say that and they're broke, and so there's a there's causation and correlation right there. There's statistically that that data is solid, and so you know, the couples that work together have higher quality marriage, higher happiness factor when they're doing marriage surveys, higher likelihood of staying together, and a much more efficient use of the money. So you build wealth faster. It's very simple. Instead of I've got mine, you got yours, and you can't. You can't you pay your car payment. It's like, what do you This is not your college roommate, this is your wife.

00:59:48
Speaker 4: Let's take a quick pause for a message from our sponsor. And we're back on the Bobby Cast.

01:00:03
Speaker 2: One final question and when I was asking earlier if like things change, because things are changing your book, the Total Money Makeover, which I'm assuming it's sold so many because it's ever it feels ever green.

01:00:15
Speaker 3: It is, it's still on the bestseller list.

01:00:17
Speaker 2: But also are you having to expand it because new elements are introduced.

01:00:22
Speaker 3: No, it was principle based.

01:00:24
Speaker 1: It wasn't product based, and so they you know, live on less than you make, you don't need to expand that that doesn't change when the digital world takes over. You still got to live on listen you make so that you know, being on a written plan, a budget of some kind. Yeah, maybe you're doing it on an app versus a yellow pad, but you're still you still have to have a freaking plan and stay and stick to it. You don't get to Florida unless you have a map Hello, and so you don't just take off driving and hope you get there. So, uh, those everything in that book is so principled like that based on principles and they're they're evergreen. And that's why the book has been ever green. We've updated, we went back in and changed a few of the stories, updated the stats. I think we did a twenty year edition the other day or something anniversary edition.

01:01:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it's I saw that. That's why I asked.

01:01:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like fifteen million copies or something.

01:01:12
Speaker 3: That's crazy. It's nuts.

01:01:13
Speaker 2: That book, to me, reminds me and I land on this of Dale Carnegie's book, which I've read many times, because fundamentally, even though that book was written one hundred plus years ago, that's all the same, like you want to win friends and get people to like you, be successful, like the same fundamentals. Some things have changed with technology with different abilities, different utilities, but it's the same. And I feel like that book is that exactly exactly.

01:01:37
Speaker 1: It's principles of relationships, how to win friends and influence people. And I sat next to a lady at the I was over at the ballpark watching my one of my grandkids play ball the other night, and this twenty two year old sitting there reading that book.

01:01:52
Speaker 2: You saw it. You just saw it randomly.

01:01:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's just sitting there in them stands reading that book. She's watching her her little brother or whatever it was out there, and she's reading that book. As I said, are you and twenty two, and I said, it's very cool that you're reading that. That book will change your life. And she's like, what, thank you?

01:02:06
Speaker 2: Did she know that? Was you saying that to her? I don't know, you never said, because I wrote that book.

01:02:10
Speaker 3: No, no, not mine, Dale Carnegie's.

01:02:12
Speaker 2: Oh I thought you were talking.

01:02:13
Speaker 3: Oh no, no, no, no, no no no.

01:02:15
Speaker 2: Did you think you was talking about his? No? O, I thought he was talking about his should have said I wrote that.

01:02:21
Speaker 1: No, my face would be on the front of that one. Yeah, that would be hard to get away from.

01:02:24
Speaker 2: But think about books now, is what's weird is I read everything digitally. I never remember titles of books because there's no book cover to look at every time. So when I pick up my iPad and I'm on page one seventy two, I don't see the cover again, and I just read the next page, and so someone will say, what are you reading? Oh, I don't remember the title of it. Let me go look at my bot books and see what it is.

01:02:45
Speaker 1: It's just a little yeah, I'll do that. I do that with fiction. I do it most of it digitally. I can't do audio books on fiction. It's not entertaining to me.

01:02:56
Speaker 2: I don't do audio books.

01:02:58
Speaker 1: I do them on some self improved things to podcast I just did. I had read the book hardcover.

01:03:04
Speaker 3: Uh.

01:03:05
Speaker 1: And the guy's a friend of mine, James Clear that did Atomic Habits Habits, and it's an evergreen. It's a perennial, perennial bestseller. But the uh, his audio book is better to me than the other. It's him reading it, and he did a great job with that. The book is amazing. He did a great job. But the uh, but yeah, that's stuff like that. I'll I'll hit the audio on it because it's the same I'm doing it at the same time I would consume a podcast, or I would consume something else, you know, like driving over here from my house this morning?

01:03:34
Speaker 3: What have I got on podcast? Right? And so? Or an audio book. That'd be the time frame that I would.

01:03:40
Speaker 2: Do it, all right, final final question, because you've mentioned these people that you're like your friends. Who's like the coolest friend you have that if you were to have told yourself thirty or forty years ago that you'd have this friend, it'd be like, Wow.

01:03:51
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I don't know, I would more. I don't know if there's a single person. It's more of like the same privilege you've had, And I think it is a privilege that I get to actually meet and hang out with this person and I like them. There's a whole bunch of those, you know, I mean, and lately it's been these podcasters are blowing up and moved to town. Yeah, so, like I mean, THEO Vaughn struck up a friendship with THEO. Who would think me and THEO would? I mean, that's that's two weird people hanging out together. But I love the guy and Sean Ryan the same thing, you know, same thing, love the guy and both right here in town, all within a stone stow of your house, right here in my house. And both young guys compared to me. But I you know, they're the cool kids right now, some of them, and to get to do those things, hang out with them and some of these other guys. I got to be on a bunch of podcasts in the last few year that were pretty neat.

01:04:47
Speaker 2: Now I watched on THEO is great.

01:04:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's he's he's like, he's very thoughtful. Uh like most comed most comedians that I know are brilliant people. They're very smart. Because it's hard to it's hard to do. Comedies are really tough thing and so but anyway, yeah, I just bucketed with that. And then I you know, all the country music people and all those people I've gotten to meet over the years. You have too and hang out with some of them. Smoked cigars, hang out that kind of stuff.

01:05:12
Speaker 3: I really like them. I just enjoy people.

01:05:13
Speaker 1: And but just the idea that Dave Ramsey from Antioch gets to hang out in a room with fill in the blank, I'm still blown.

01:05:21
Speaker 3: Away by that.

01:05:22
Speaker 2: That's how I feel. Because I mentioned before we started taping that John Fogerty was over here.

01:05:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's mind blowing right there.

01:05:28
Speaker 2: I got to tell my stepdad and that was his favorite band, and I was like, I had John Fogerty over and he was he doesn't care about anything I do. Not that he doesn't care in his heart, but he has no interest, right because he's still in Mountain Pine, Arkansas and only followed music or pop culture. And he's like, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. That was cool to me. Have John Fogerty.

01:05:47
Speaker 3: Absolutely, that was cool to me when I heard it. That's very neat.

01:05:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's it's great to see. I appreciate you brother, giving your time to come over and hang out.

01:05:54
Speaker 3: So proud of you guys.

01:05:55
Speaker 2: And to the girl that was reading your book, it wasn't so thought you were watching somebody read your book thought that and then you didn't say anything, and I was like, that doesn't sound like Dave.

01:06:07
Speaker 1: That would be an ego play from now on. Yeah, oh that's a really good book. Look at the guy on the.

01:06:11
Speaker 2: Front, Dave. Thank you so much, and uh yeah, one day we should go to dinner and like actually talk like humans. But I feel like your human talk is elevated above me because I tried to get you a human and you're like, no, my human thing is business.

01:06:26
Speaker 3: It's just leadership. No, I know.

01:06:28
Speaker 2: I don't think I could keep up.

01:06:29
Speaker 1: Awb Yeah, you keep playing that card. Keep playing that card, and the rest of your life it's going. It's working well for you to keep it up. And okay, hey yeah, and yeah, let's the four of us go get.

01:06:42
Speaker 3: A really nice dinner somewhere.

01:06:44
Speaker 2: Do you always have to pay when you go out? Do people expect cause people expect me to pay everywhere we go. And I'm yes, and I'm good with it because I feel like I have it, and but I wonder if that's with you.

01:06:53
Speaker 3: No, no, I mean our friends.

01:06:56
Speaker 1: We generally just everybody tossues my debit card and their credit cards in the middle of the table and the JUSTOK, whatever's on there, and we split it up. Really sometimes I'm a I'm a wine guy, and so sometimes I'll bring some good wine that they might not have, and that'd be like my extra thing. But but that's just because I selfishly want to drink that.

01:07:13
Speaker 2: What's the most expensive bottle of wine you've ever bought?

01:07:15
Speaker 3: I've ever bought five grand?

01:07:21
Speaker 2: Probably does it taste different? Oh?

01:07:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I hang out with guys that drink twenty thousand dollars bottles, and yes, I'm learning, but I'm learning with these guys. But yeah, it's you.

01:07:33
Speaker 3: You.

01:07:34
Speaker 1: You practice a little bit, you can get used to it.

01:07:38
Speaker 2: Dave, thanks for the time, man, that's awesome.

01:07:40
Speaker 3: Thank you, Bobby.

01:07:41
Speaker 5: Thanks for listening to a Bobby Cast production.