This Past Weekend - E498 Dave Ramsey
Episode Date: April 30, 2024Dave 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. Dave Ramsey: https://www.instagram.com/daveramsey Investing Essentials Livestream: https://bit.ly/3UBzcbZ ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ BetterHelp: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp — go to http://betterhelp.com/theo to get 10% off your first month. ShipStation: Get a 60-day free trial at https://www.shipstation.com/theo. Thanks to ShipStation for sponsoring the show! Manscaped: Go to http://manscaped.com and use code THEO for 20% off plus free shipping. Tommy John: Go to http://tommyjohn.com/theo to get 25% off sitewide. ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reiner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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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 I can't believe you guys made my studio here Dave.
We just want you to be home and come back again.
Well yeah I'll stay.
Anytime.
I'll stay man.
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, what's on the campus 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 on the glass
so the pub area for the public to come in and hang out while we're doing the shows and then we've got a
2500 seat auditorium up on the hill up there that we do events in the event center
So it's been quite a quite an adventure like what type of events on the hill up there that we do events in. Wow. 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 1100 team members so we do staff meeting up there
and devotional on Wednesday up there and then, but we'll do weekend long events.
We've got a money and marriage event with Rachel Cruz my daughter and dr
John Delaney 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 some 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 more 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.
I said, what could you do?
And I said, well, I guess I could cut grass.
And he took me down here on Nolensville 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 have, if you force a kid to get a job nowadays,
I think protective services will come and get you.
That's exactly right.
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.
But 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.
So, but then-
That's rich, where were you driving?
A Jag.
That's what I always,
cause none of my friends could spell Jaguar,
so I needed a Jaguar.
Yeah.
So, but I'd done stupid stuff and too much debt
and the bank got sold, called our notes
and spent the next three, 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...
Yeah, I thought I had it all dialed in and I had nothing dialed in.
Dang. I was stupid on steroids, yeah. Yeah, I thought I had it all dialed in and I had nothing dialed in.
I was stupid on steroids.
And so we, 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.
Well, I mean, it's the day we filed bankruptcy.
That's like, that's hell day, you know.
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 family friends
and stuff that we'd grown up with. But I had started a faith journey. I'd met God 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 need
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 start 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.
With that turnaround moment, was there like,
did it lead you to be like,
I need more than just believing that finances
are gonna take care of me, or like?
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 we hit-
You hit the border and ladders, huh?
We sat around, whined and moaned
and blamed everybody else for about a year
and 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 course correct and adjust.
And so yeah, I think our faith, our new faith at that point,
it was very young and tender,
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 my wife's from the hills of East Tennessee,
frying pan throwing, there's an Olympic event. You know, I mean my wife's from the Hills East Tennessee, frying pan throwing.
There's an Olympic event, you know, I mean, it's
like, it's a hillbilly woman.
So it was, it was rough.
And so we about killed each other and, uh, I
think she would have left, but she didn't have a
car.
So, um, but yeah, the, uh, so, I mean, that's the
stuff that we did.
And, 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.
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 you... Sounds like it's from 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.
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 crockpot, you know.
That's signing up for it right there.
It is really.
You name, or 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, what, 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 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 bucks,
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.
But to get you through this week,
you can do a lot of pressure washing.
You're right.
You can turn into a car detail company
and then turn it into something else
and then sell that and do something else.
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 yeah, they're there
You know every move they make is a step towards where I want to be in ten years
Where I want to who I want to become and so okay?
I might be pressure washing so I can get the money to go to code school
Pay ten thousand bucks and go to code school. Oh, then you can make 150 a year coding. And so what's the 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 buy an old car at a repo lot,
and come home, fix it up, put it back on the market.
Back in those days, there were classified ads
in the newspaper.
And so we'd turn around and sell the ad car
and 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.
You got a damn Pontiac full of candelabras or something
driving all through.
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 somebody knew how
to buy something and flip it over.
Or go to the police auction.
That was always a big thing.
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 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...
Thanks, man.
But, I mean, there's a lot of bad comedy clubs
in the line-up before you...
with wrong people in the audience before you get to be the Theo
Vaughn of today.
You know, there's a price to be paid to win.
You don't win, you're an overnight success.
Yeah, I worked my butt off for 30 years to be an overnight success.
You've worked your butt off for a decade plus to be an overnight success.
Just because somebody found you on Netflix last week,
that don't mean you just started on it.
I don't know how it happened.
Right, yeah, I mean, even when I think back,
like I used to get all these,
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 it like, and I remember when I got a three disc burner
so I could burn three at a time, dude.
Wow.
And what'd those sell for, man?
They were probably 300 bucks, 400 bucks.
Wow.
But you could get that little stack.
No, 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. Oh, yeah. If you want 10 of them to give for Christmas presents, 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 Mishawaka, 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 on 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 like events in people's lives or something to work like
Sometimes I wish I'd had a little bit better balance
But also liked working, you know, I think I really liked it but yeah, I don't think it's as easy as having,
like things evolve though too.
One thing I'm thinking, say if you start
a pressure washing, right?
You're gonna start to learn how to do business.
That's something you don't realize you're gonna learn
by starting a business sometimes,
is that you're gonna 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, you'll do taxes in 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 wanna 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.
I think.
You change your identity, you change who you are.
I mean, I'm not the little redneck hillbilly kid
hell raisin' 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.
From 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.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah.
What kind of hair do you have, something good?
Not as good as yours. Yeah. I never got that do you have? Something good? Not as good as yours.
Yeah.
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.
Oh yeah, I've seen them.
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,
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 a new business person.
I mean, you can 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 Entrez Leadership brand, small businesses,
and they're anywhere from five to 200 team member size.
And so what I tell those guys, and I'll be speaking to them,
we do an event with about 3,000 of them once a year,
I'll be speaking to them in the next couple weeks here.
And so one of the things we tell them is really,
you're a beer drinking buddy and you're sitting around
talking about opening a business, this is a bad idea. One of y 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 sales of partnership
So generally speaking don't do a partnership generally now if you're gonna 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 while they're here or they
Were friends and then they came here. I've got family in the building my children my kids work here in their 30s and
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. Mm-hmm. 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 we're 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 and with dignity.
I don't yell and scream because of 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 where 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 paths.
You can't run up and tickle them or whatever.
Well, that's strange, but yeah.
But the idea of being like my kids,
you know, my daughter Rachel Cruz is a huge personality.
She's three, four number one bestsellers and you know, speaks all over America.
She'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 Delaney 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 when you're at work, you're wearing this hat
and you've gotta perform, I've gotta perform.
And so family doesn't get a pass
and friend doesn't get a pass for incompetence
or just I'm not gonna come to work today.
No, that's not how we, we're all coming to work today.
Yeah, yeah.
If you are going into business with a friend,
what are something that people can,
what discussions need to be had up front?
Say you're going into a partnership with a buddy,
so you don't run into lawsuits down the line.
Well, you may, nothing you do keeps you from,
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've 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 partner with cuckoo.
You know, that's a bad plan.
So you need to have this laid out,
what's gonna happen in these situations.
I mean, I've had a guy working here
that was one of our top leaders many years ago, got MS.
He's 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 gonna take care of them.
Cause you want to take care of your buddy.
You want your buddy's kids to be homeless
cause something happened to him if he's your partner.
In this case, this guy was one of my right arms.
So you just gotta think that stuff through
because it's gonna come.
Something's gonna come at you.
And if you haven't anticipated it,
cause everybody goes into this stuff like,
oh, it's all gonna 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, where 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 gonna 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 of 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, no, I'm going. Right. So it up. Right, you know, it's not like I'm kicking back and asking you to go, 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 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 good that's happened, happened on about 10% of our ideas. Everything 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're sitting on the dock,
having a cup of coffee at the lake,
and you have this idea, they're all good then,
but when you're half a million dollars in and you go,
oh, this sucks, this is awful.
And so you've come to the realization that even though
we demanded excellence, even though we drove the lane,
put the ball in 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.
You gotta try stuff, but you're gonna screw up a lot of it,
even though you demand excellence. But I don't have a hesitation at all,
expecting excellence and expecting it.
Why would you enter something
you didn't think was gonna work?
Of course we think it's gonna work.
Like a stupid reporter those days,
like, did you ever have any idea it would be this big?
I'm like, well of course I did.
I'm getting people out of debt.
They're like, everybody is my market, you know?
Of course I thought it, but what I didn't know
is how much work it was gonna be.
I didn't have any idea I was gonna have
a hundred million dollars in payroll.
I didn't have any idea that it was gonna 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 gonna be,
how hard it was gonna be.
Yeah, I think that's the thing that,
you know what, that's funny when I hear you say that,
cause yeah, as 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-
And they have feelings.
Yeah, and you have relationships with them, you know?
And so it's like all these things, next thing you know,
it's like I spend a lot of my day most 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 gonna 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 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,
on the podcast, the YouTube every day.
We still do that show every day, three hours a day.
I still enjoy all that stuff,
but I also enjoy running this place.
I'm running it with my son, he's the president now.
And he and I, 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.
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?
A lot of stuff in business like that are relationship things.
If you'll just switch the moccasins a minute, where are 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 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, you know, 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 members,
like how can I add more value than I cost
or save more money and depend on what they're working on,
but then I cost then, you know, it's kind of a no brainer
unless the employer's 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, their family to us,
and 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.
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,
the employer's 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 devy that up.
We can probably figure out something to do with that. Yeah, I don't need to take it all
home, but also don't need to give it all to one person either. So we figured 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, a 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 that
got this many degrees, they make 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 a small business.
Your raise is effective when you are.
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, what do you say, like what is some of the added,
or even just like to get a little bit more minute with it,
like what are just, say somebody's out there listening
and they're like, man, I feel like I wanna talk
to my boss about a razor.
I wanna, 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've 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 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 got like six people wanting to hire you,
and you wanna go in and go,
hey, I'd like to stay and I like it here
and I like you and I want it to 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 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 just 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.
You can feel that energy in there too.
Yeah, 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
Can you is there 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, you know
Yeah, I mean depending on how the business is structured and what's going on. There's a lot of different things you can do and
To help people and do different things and sometimes we've had situations where someone was 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 gonna 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 gonna catch the house up.
And so that's just like a one-time thing,
it's not a permanent raise,
because the raise wasn't the problem,
their mismanagement at home was the problem.
So 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 mean, 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 and you're like
now I'm gonna 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 bucks 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 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 freakin' breakin'.
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 home ownership in general, absolutely.
We did the largest study of millionaires ever done
in North America.
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 nine out of 10, that's good news for everybody. We all got a shot. Right. And then the, 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 six or seven hundred thousand bucks and he
had like six or eight hundred thousand bucks 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
one to 10 million dollars 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 it's a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is your study right here.
How did you come upon these millionaires?
Uh, you know, we did a detailed study and sent out, uh, 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's 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's a, it was an interesting,
interesting result.
So these are the top five careers of the millionaires
that you guys looked at?
Yep.
Engineer, accountant.
What we found was which, what occurred most often.
Okay. Engineer was number one. The, accountant. 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 is accountant.
Number three was teacher, which is surprising.
Number three, management, business.
Number five is attorney.
Medical doctor didn't even make the top five.
And 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'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 know, if you're an engineer, there's only one way to build that building and it
doesn't fall, right? If you're an accountant, there's not, you don't, it's not art. 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, you know, there's
the law, right, and you can only conduct yourself in court a certain way or the
judge will smack you backwards, right? And so all of these are processed
people, so they discovered because of the way they're the brain work 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 followed 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.
They were not making bank.
They were not earning their way into it, really.
Yeah, because you would think teachers,
you always hear, we gotta pay these teachers more, you know?
And we do.
I mean, that wouldn't be bad at all.
But 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.
We have to go to college.
Do you have to go to college to be a teacher?
I don't know if you have to. You do? Yeah, definitely. Sorry, teachers, I's true. We have to go to college. Do you have to go to college to be a teacher? I don't know if you have to.
You do?
Yeah, definitely.
Sorry teachers, I didn't.
Some of mine didn't go.
Some of mine.
Some of yours didn't go to class.
Yeah, some of mine didn't either.
Some of mine would be in classes with me.
I was like, what?
It's like Rick 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.
Yeah, I saw you last definitely.
You're dead at Hooters, bro.
I'm like, you're not. You're just at a Hooters.
Yeah, that's what the people say a lot of times is it does feel like that now.
It feels there's a lot of energy in the air.
It feels like the American dream isn't possible,
but it doesn't exist.
Where do you think a lot of that energy comes from?
It feels like that's the consensus these days.
Would you agree with that?
It feels like that?
There's a lot of loud people that have that.
I don't know that it's necessarily a consensus
among Americans.
Because consensus means that most people agree with it?
Right.
OK.
So I'm not sure of that.
But 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 70s with the hippie movement,
it was the same kind of thing.
And so there's always been my group, the Baby Boom 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.
Yeah, you know, and so the neighborhood I grew up in people say that, you know, and they never said it with like
enthusiasm. It's like the little man can't get ahead. Yeah. Like Eeyore is their spirit animal. Oh yeah. Where's my tail?
Yeah, it's just antsy.
I'm stuck and life's bad.
And, you know, 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, and most of these people, again, these millionaires,
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 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 in four houses no no they just got 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 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 by selling book on it baby steps millionaires
pushing back in the marketplaces against those voices
is because it's not true that you can't get ahead.
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.
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, okay? but you should, so stop their nightmares,
but also encourage their dreams.
So this hopelessness that goes with that,
I feel stuck, 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 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 just gonna be that's not those are not you know career
fields that you're gonna 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? To be honest.
I'm not saying they'll... I didn't say what kind of dancer. I didn't have any idea there.
Oh okay yeah I thought yeah I didn't know but yeah like who also I guess it
would be nice if a stripper just shows up at a nice cup of coffee. Actually that's probably not a bad deal.
Don't they have that nude barista on a drive-thru or something? Where's that at?
You know that is a thing. That's right. Yeah. 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 new news every day when they roll up there.
Let me see the headlines, huh? I'm 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 a gift from me.
But back to your thing, the thing is hope is a decision.
And it's got to be based on, you know,
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, wait a minute, hello.
And I don't really, I'm fairly smart, but I'm not a rocket surgeon. I mean, I don't really, I'm fairly smart,
but I'm not a rocket surgeon.
I mean, I don't really know how to do stuff.
I just, I'm figuring it out as I go, right?
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, 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 a game, you know,
and they're manipulating, that's one thing,
and that's particularly evil,
but the other one is just, they really have lost hope, and so they're manipulating, that's one thing. And that's particularly evil. But the other one is just, they really have lost hope,
and so they're angry, 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.
Because winning's hard, man, it's hard.
Yeah, it takes a lot of work, man.
Yeah, I was talking, they had Kid Rock was on
a couple weeks ago
and he was talking about how,
yeah, if you wanna have success,
you're gonna have to probably work 60 hours a week,
60 to 80 hours a week he was saying.
For a period of time, not your whole life.
I mean, we started this thing, man, I was 16 hours.
My wife had, and she's like,
I was a single mom for two years, you were gone. I was on 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, that's so cool, I know y'all's timeline is off.
I know y'all's timeline is off. 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 people that have been
around the business like that.
But, 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 gotta 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.
That was two years, it wasn't 20.
20, I would've lost my family.
You can't maintain relationships.
My kids would've been messed up.
And so by the time my kids got on up,
I didn't miss a prom, I didn't miss a prom.
I didn't miss a hockey game.
I didn't miss whatever.
The big games, I mean, 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,
you hear a lot of discussion these days about how inflation is going, is getting so, is growing so fast, I guess, that it's not,
that the wage, minimum wage isn't keeping up with it. It feels like detrimental. Like if you, like,
it feels sometimes impossible. If you look at the minimum wage,
you're like 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 it has 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 the entry level jobs,
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 more alarming
because that's the whole population.
It's not just this segment that enters,
entry level stuff at minimum wage because you know,
if we go all the way back to minimum wage,
I'm cutting grass for $3 a yard in 1972 okay a thousand there
were dinosaurs in the yard we had to get them out of the yard but you know I mean
1972 three dollars a yard but minimum wage was a buck 65 my buddies working it
at you know Burger King flopping whoppers and he's making a buck six five
if I can cut that three dollar 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, you know, I'm going.
And so, so you-
You can even cut somebody's yard and just go to the door
and be like, hey, just cut your yard.
No, I mean, that 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 bucks for it or whatever?
Except for that other guy you hired to do it
that's coming next week.
But yeah, there's a problem with him.
But yeah, but yeah, but yeah, I mean that,
you've never, you've always had the opportunity
to beat minimum wage.
I see.
So you don't wanna 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. So you don't wanna 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,
because we've had this unusual surge in inflation, The real narrative that is a little bit scary is that wages have not kept up with inflation
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
were talking about.
And so everything shot up, real estate shot up
because people sat around in their houses
during the pandemic and then 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. They were getting it, you know? So and 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, 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 the,
um, both parties, but the, parties, but the as a 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, you know, so the thing smooths out eventually
you find this equilibrium, this balance.
And the problem is the price that the shortage drove the prices up and the shortage remained and then people's appetite they just kept coming
man like freaking piranha and that the marketplace surges is what drove the
pricing as much 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 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 affects,
it almost seems so fictional now that it's like,
is it a real thing that could cause something to happen
in our lives or like, is it, what is it?
You know what I'm saying?
Because everybody's like, it's zillions.
They're making up amounts of money now.
Some kid told me yesterday it was 65 zillion gergillions.
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.
So I've observed people in my world write books on the end of the world.
Here's the economic end of the world coming, the economic end of the world.
They keep being wrong, so I don't want to write that book.
Is it concerning?
Yeah, it's concerning because any time 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 philosophically, spiritually is scary.
Mathematically is scary.
Is it going to cause a crash?
Apparently not.
Yeah, because I mean, I've been doing this a long,
I've been watching this thinking, when, you know, when?
But it's not.
And obviously what the national debt,
what it does do factually is it robs money
from the economy that could be producing something.
And so, because what happens 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 DC it would have churn 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, but you know,
Um, yeah, I have I put money into kind of t bills. I'm kind of a say, uh, which you yeah
I know it was it was you okay
Um, because I 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 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, that girl, that thing'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,
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, 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 the night.
Rooms to go 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, 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 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 than 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.
Then boom, 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,
somebody 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 percent. 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. 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,
and, but there's, you know, there's a tenant
that doesn't pay or does pay,
or it's empty and I can't get a tenant.
You know, 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 he 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,
what'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 more than two.
Yeah, you get in, oh yeah, I got into some real estate,
and it was a night, it was so much extra work
that I didn't realize, you know.
Complaints, somebody's Airbnb-ing 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 gotta.
Need a fireplace.
Yeah, yeah. Just crazy people just, yeah. It's like you can't just do a fire like you got a need a fireplace. 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 and 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've still got more risk than you would
in a T-bill but you're gonna make a little more. Now, you want a little more
hassle, go to the real estate. You're gonna make a little more. So you don't wanna be,
I try to just say it's a risk return ratio.
If I'm gonna take some risk and have some hassle,
I want some extra money for that.
Yeah, yeah, because it's the stress it causes.
It's like, do I wanna 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 spent 30 minutes of my day dang checking stocks
and that's the time I could have just had him doing my work.
Yeah, I'd buy a mutual fund, 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.
Because I'm not betting on this week,
I'm saying, okay, 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. $1992,000 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 buying the gold just buying the right to
buy the gold and he said he put in 5,000 bucks and if the if it goes up the
option goes from 5k to 50k well 10x my money and 14 times in a row this guy had
hit. You put it in and I in and he had predicted and he said,
okay, we need to go in right now and put 5,000,
I dropped 5,000 bucks in there.
15th time he didn't hit.
It's either, 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.
It's how options work.
It's just, it's an uber high risk situation. It's super crazy. It was just gambling. I mean, it's an option. It's how options work. It's just your it's a 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 faster. 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
You know 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?
Really?
Why?
All these rednecks are buying.
Pull one up.
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 gonna 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 a big bird meat,
big white meat, so.
Just bring up a picture of an emu, brother.
You can't find one now, I guess. Here, you got the images right there. Well, you got the commercial, right, big white meat. Just bring up a picture of an emu, brother. You can't find one now, I guess.
Here you go, here's the commercial.
Let's scroll down a little bit, let me see what we got.
See, he's got a little meat on him.
Oh gosh, yeah.
It's hilarious though, these rednecks around Tennessee,
they were having emu farms.
Dang, have you ever had any of it?
No, I managed to stay out of that scam.
That was one of those fad things that didn't work.
So yeah, that's a damn tall turkey.
Like 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 bag fulls.
Women fighting, like cage match fighting in the airport gift shop to get the beanie baby.
Remember the Princess Diana Beanie Baby?
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's in me in there.
So yeah, see $49,000 on eBay for the Princess.
Never sold though.
Never sold.
Never sold.
Didn't happen.
Never sold.
Yeah, they had, my buddy won his family's football pool.
It was like their NCAA, their college football pool
they did every year.
He won us 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.
Bro.
They're back.
They're coming, they're happening right now.
My buddy to this day is, uh, he's big into Christmas houses.
No rent, rent in my, the tenants don't make much noise.
And the, uh, and the street lights are always on. Electric bill's low.
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 a $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. I was like, she's
going to be pissed off. 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 spoken out against crypto, I know I'm not a crypto fan.
I lost $2,000 in crypto.
Just like everyone in my friend's day 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, yeah, 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
investors always the crockpot they're always a long play they're always saying
okay I'm gonna invest in mutual funds I don't care what stock market did this
year I'm thinking what's it gonna be in 20 years,
what's it gonna be in 15 years,
and how am I gonna 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,
in 20 years this is gonna look 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 does,
that they're not custom building, they call it a spec house.
It means speculation.
They're speculating that they're going it a spec house. It means speculation.
They're speculating that they're gonna sell that house.
It's a short term play.
They're not building that house and that subdivision
hoping to sit on it 10 years.
They're building it hoping to sit on 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 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, in a sense, that's what happened to me when I went broken 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 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, they can call my notes in 90 days,
so they called a million too in 90 days,
and it crashed me.
Because I was a speculator, I wasn't an investor.
Now I would have told you I was a real estate investor.
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 Monday.
If I gotta 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 wanna do some of that,
but quit calling it investing,
because then it causes you to put too dead,
got much money in it,
because you lose your butt then, and that's where you get scammed.
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?
Is that kind of what happened for you,
or do you still have things
that you'd 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.
A lot of people are real 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 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, it's fun to be with people.
And it's fun to be with people that wanna be there.
And it's addicting in that regard.
So I enjoy that whole thing, I enjoy that scene,
I enjoy running the business,
but 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.
And yeah, but there's nothing wrong with,
especially in the first couple decades,
with almost all your energy doing that,
other than family stuff.
Yeah. What are some, like, obviously like obviously learned a lot of financial lessons over
the years like what were some personal lessons 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 feel like? You know I yeah I didn't know how to lead.
I mean, like you said earlier, we're talking about hiring an employee.
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. 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, 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 get on.
If you're the leader, you're standing at the train going,
we're leaving.
Anybody want to get on?
Because this thing's going.
Right.
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, um, he said, you know, you should be a servant leader.
And I went, say what?
I'm the one writing the check.
I ain't the servant.
I'm confused here.
And I thought he meant subservient.
And what he meant was you gotta love your people,
and you gotta care what's best for them.
And sometimes that means telling them hard truth
that they don't wanna 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.
So they have some teeth later, that's serving them.
So I was a servant leader, right?
And so, yeah, I'm good with servant leadership.
And so I had to learn that.
I, again, I sucked.
I was a horrible boss.
Cause I just, I was going so hard.
I thought everybody else was going hard
and I was pissed off cause they weren't keeping up.
And I'm like, well, you hired a bunch of donkeys
and expect to win the dead gum, 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 there.
And so, yeah, I was, I sucked and I'm, I mean, 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 one of 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 did
have slowly had to, yeah, that's been a tough journey
for me, even just been a tough journey for me.
Even just having a few employees,
and it's like you're suddenly a, yeah,
you're suddenly a boss, you didn't even wanna be a boss.
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 am.
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 gotta deal with your crap.
So, you know, and that's been a 30 year journey.
And so.
That's huge, boss versus leader.
That's so, it'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 gonna read leadership books, business books.
I still read like crazy.
I love to get new information.
And 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 gotta work hard.
I gotta pedal hard just to stay on the bike.
And so yeah, I still do that stuff and I still hang out.
The good news is some of the guys that are the best writers
and thinkers in the world have become friends
over the years now.
And so they're my running buddies.
So we hang out, I get to talk offline with them
and they 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.
Read all 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. Daniel Silva is the guy
the guy he writes like the the character the prognost is an Israeli
Mossad spy you know versus Jack Carr's as a former SEAL team and you know,
and Brad Thors is all 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 that so yeah, I do read fiction.
Yes.
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. Most of them don't even send me my money back.
So 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, you know.
And that matters because if you run a heat and air company and you got 30 trucks out
there and you're trying to feed your family and trying to feed that guy who's on that
truck's family and the gas price doubles on that 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 do-ber 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.
And so.
That's a good point, huh?
He didn't really have any magic wands
that he waved at the Reaganomics.
Or you know, 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 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 about it, 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.
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 the end it really comes down to you, doesn't it? You still believe that it really seems like that.
Yeah, I really do.
Yeah.
John Stossel wanted to interview me many years ago
and back when he did 2020 and all that stuff
and he was a scary dude
because you didn't know if he's gonna come at your throat
or whether he's gonna 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, I've read all your stuff. or on stage, I guess, during 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 you button gear, and you know,
the government's just something you gotta overcome.
They're in the way.
They're not gonna lift me.
If I'm waiting on the government to lift me,
all I can think about is the DMV line.
Yeah, 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.
I mean, the Scotch-Irish have always been fighting
everything, they've always been independent.
You can think of Braveheart as independent.
Hot blood pressure too.
Yeah, always looking for a fight.
Always looking to stir something up.
If there's no drama, just make some.
And so 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 no?
I did, University of Tennessee.
You did?
We both graduated from UT, yeah.
Nice dude.
Is there a better place to see a football game than Neyland?
Wow, it's a religion.
Yeah, it really is, it's wow.
It's so sweet of it.
When they're winning especially. Yeah. It's kinda nice. Yeah, it really is. It's wow. It's so sweet. When they're winning, especially. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, it helps. The past two years has been definitely a good time to get on board.
Not not good being with 110,000 people when you're losing because they are angry
rednecks. But yeah, me, I'm one of them. I'm like, I'm pissed. But yeah.
Do you go to some games ever? We had sweets for a 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.
I'm watching on the TV now, but better experience anyway.
Yeah, so.
Where'd you meet your wife at at school, do you remember?
Where, at school? Yeah. Yeah, in marketing class. Oh, in class, you saw her, huh? Yeah, she was Where'd you meet your wife at 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?
Yeah.
But she was cute, so I thought it was a good idea.
Oh yeah, let her look over.
It was a good idea, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's your paper.
It's your paper, honey.
Have you ever been approached by,
I know you've had different, obviously books,
and programs for people to achieve wealth
and to save their money.
Do, have you ever had a package or something
that you've taken to a shark tank
or to 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...
And both of them did pills too, I think, to be honest.
I have no idea about it.
But I'm just saying, yeah. I have no idea, it. I've done them, but I'm just saying, yeah.
I have no idea.
But anyway, so anyway, we started in that world
when it grew and grew and grew and grew.
And I remember the day a guy walked in my office
and said, hey, we need a podcast.
And I'm like, what the flip is a podcast?
And he goes, I said, why do I need one?
And 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, cause a lot of people on talk radio
didn't want to put it on podcasts
because it competed with the radio stations.
Right, so you're competing with your own numbers.
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 always always hanging out in the top ten 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 great yeah
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, cause we're platform agnostic.
I mean, wherever the action is, that's where we're gonna be.
And we didn't abandon, we didn't,
we're still dancing with the girl that brought us, you know?
So, we're still with talk radio. Still got 680 stations, still love Talk Radio.
And we're on SiriusXM. 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 put on YouTube and then
Facebook Live. I mean, crap, we'll try anything. TikTok, good God help us, we're on TikTok.
We're all on.
Working for the Chinese, they say.
That's it man, TikTok, here we go.
Cause you never know which one of these things
is gonna become the next MySpace and just disappear
and you don't know which one of these other things.
So I don't wanna bet this whole thing
and all these 1100 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,
yeah, you don't know what the next thing can be
that's really gonna 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 gonna give you some money.
You can get you a studio, you know?
And he, oh, he bought some ads from me,
he said I'm gonna pay some ads for a pizza place.
It was in my neighborhood.
And he said I'm gonna give you some money,
you should use it to get a studio.
And my first thought was I wanna 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 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,
the standup and then these long form interviews
that you're doing, and here I sit,
who knew that was gonna 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.
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.
If you just try to be somebody else,
that's all you're doing.
It's a process, sorry you actors that are friends.
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, you know, 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 gonna lose them.
And we're not comedians, but we have to study
what you guys do.
So getting to see you do this, it's brilliant.
It's a smart thing to do.
It's the same thing, Broken did the same thing.
I mean, he moved from comedy into those long forms,
and what everybody loves about Joe
is the fabulous interviews.
And I'm a fanboy of his.
I watch a lot of his stuff.
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 gonna 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 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 fear that I wanna just save this,
you know?
Well, that, yeah.
If you realize that no matter what you try,
some of it's not gonna work,
give yourself permission to fail,
then you say, okay, we're gonna put this this money in, 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 to create an environment that is a whole different thing
than when I rent a theater somewhere else, which we do both. 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 Saban playing home game.
Yeah.
I mean, we know who cuts the grass,
we know who dialed the microphone in.
I got a two 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 sounds bad
Yeah, you know, but man you get in these auditoriums you got bounce back stinking hockey arena the stinking hitting them
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 worst talking about so we've got all that dialed in. That's a reinvestment back into something
we know is gonna work.
Yeah, that's a good point, man.
Yeah, I think that was the tough thing.
It was tough for me to realize that one of my greatest
assets can be myself.
And be like, well, what if I really want to invest
in something to invest in myself?
How does generosity play?
There's a lot of fear around
generosity sometimes, you know, about like I have to made this, I have to keep it
all for me. What is your journey been like with that in life or what have you
learned about it? You're exactly right. There is fear around that and fear is
the motivator is if I give it away I'm gonna have less. Which mathematically, you
know, if I take a thousand bucks I give away a hundred, I got nine
hundred, so yeah, I've 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 ones who 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 gonna win
together. We don't have to kill each other to win, you know. 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. You know 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 have to completely... So we don't... I never talk bad about my
competitors in that world because I want to be a generous person. 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 pulled up in front of me at the, uh,
restaurant, the valet parking right here in Nashville.
We have valet parkers everywhere. Yeah. And, um,
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, that's, well, there's that.
So I'm, 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, it's a great car.
It's about a $120,000, $130,000 car. And he hands the valet $ the valet $5. Dude, that's just stupid.
So I pull up my truck, you know, it's a nice truck, I hand the guy $20, I'm like, please
take care of my baby.
You know where it was when I came out?
It was sitting right there.
Yeah.
You know?
So who prospered here?
Everybody won. 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.
I ate my truck. It didn't, there's another on my truck. It's sitting right there.
I don't have to wait on it when I come out. The kid had a good night.
Yeah. At least partly because of me.
So I think everybody came out on this transaction. Yeah.
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 didn't have any money, so it was like,
I remember I'd keep my money in a, I'd hide it.
God, I would hide that money.
I would spend half my day hiding my damn money, boy.
Gagging up dirt and hiding it.
Oh, I understand.
I met this guy, Orthodox Jewish Rabbi,
and we've become good friends, Rabbi Daniel Lappan.
He wrote a book.
Oh, he's hiding something.
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.
When you light another one, you still got your candle When 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.
And so that's a beautiful picture.
What role has faith played in your life?
You mentioned it a little bit.
How's that, what's that been like for you?
It's central.
Because I, as I said.
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,
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 a
You know 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 gotta go in, you know
They don't want you back on the show if you're a butt in the green room. Yeah
and so
It turns out that all worked out for me. So
you know, the re-transformation, the 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, I'm not
arrived, don't misunderstand, but I'm, 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, I can hand this one back. This one smells bad, it's broken, 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, it 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 wanna 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 wanted to you've had so much success and such the opportunity to
To lead people to make financial choices.
You helped my stepdad paid off our house
because of knowledge he learned from you.
Wow, very cool.
I remember that.
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,
something he said, house is paid off.
Yeah, ding ding.
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.
I went in 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 was old white guys, right?
Yeah.
Right.
But YouTube's youngsters.
And so Sharon and I were in Best Buy.
And these two kids are like 17 years old run up like I'm some kind of freaking rock star
or something like, man, I love your YouTube stuff.
It's like, man, I just paid cash for my first car because I watching you. This stuff on TikTok so funny and man, I love your YouTube stuff. It's like, man, I just paid cash for my first car
because I was watching you.
The stuff on TikTok's so funny.
And man, thank you.
And there was like, Sharon's like,
God, Lee, I'm 17 years old, man, it's great.
Yeah, it's gotta make you feel 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 gotta be real about it.
You can't manipulate these platforms.
They're too nuanced and there's,
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 wanna try and be as authentic
as 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, 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 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
Delaney, that's 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 done, been on police calls when they go in
and there's a, you know, murder or a suicide
or something in the home, extreme trauma.
And your body physically reacts to trauma.
He says the way to walk through those things is facts are your friends.
Your feelings are not true.
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 Ramsay 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, now wait a minute,
how much you make a year?
We make 100,000, okay.
And so, and we're just, we're stuck, we can't move.
We can't figure out what to do. I'm like, okay, how much you own your car? 56 make $100,000. Okay. And so, and we're just, we're stuck. We can't move.
We can't figure out what to do.
I'm like, okay, how much you own 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, and you bought a car you can't afford, so stupid car.
Yeah.
He goes, oh man, you're like a genius.
Like sixth grade math.
You know, it's like, so, but all we did was peel back
the drama that are all of us, our bodies just freeze up.
We just get in freak hopelessness.
Yeah, freeze is 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 dad gum 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 gonna do?
I said, I don't know. It was Monday, we my house Friday. What am I gonna do? I said, I don't know.
It was Monday, we had five days.
What are we gonna do?
I don't know.
I said, one thing you can do is just go get another house.
She went, you can do that?
Yeah, just go get something to rent.
People will rent to you?
Yeah, people will rent to you.
So you're not gonna be homeless.
She made $120,000 a year.
I was like, what, we'll 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.
Let's go get another one.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, But we get just, ehh.
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 workers' comp didn't pay out.
They waited forever.
So the house got behind.
And she's getting ready to be foreclosed on. we're like, uh, she owed 60,000 bucks
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. We're not, somebody's gonna take
care of you. And another roofing guy called our office as while we're on the
air and caught the house up. So I mean, we're gonna take care. Other people
stepped in and heard the story, started taking care of it.
I said, you're not getting foreclosed on it.
I'm 100% sure it's not gonna happen.
We're not losing this house, $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 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 gonna let that house get sold.
Nothing else, you sell it for 200,000 before Friday.
You know, you're not gonna give it away for 60.
So we're gonna do something.
But.
Yeah, the fear, people get stuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's all we do.
Is unlock them.
Yep. Help unlock them. Yep, with 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 wanna have some freedom in the future?
What do you tell them, Dave?
Well, the first thing we tell them 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.
You don't, 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. It's not a, I need a new couch, it's a rainy day fund.
You don't touch that.
If you're gonna buy something else,
you save up and pay for it.
Then, 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 to 65,
you're gonna have about five million bucks
in mutual funds.
So, if I'm like 5X wrong, you're still a millionaire.
Shut up.
So, you really can't screw this up.
It's like, but you can screw it up
because you live in America
and you can get a $1,200 car payment
for freaking car you can't afford
to impress people to stoplight
who don't even care about you.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, they walked right,
they're called 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.
And then when you don't have a house payment, dude,
man, that's two, 3000 bucks a month.
Oh yeah, dude. You got bank to that's two, 3000 bucks a month. Oh yeah.
You got bank to be generous with, bank to be investing.
Yeah, you can take a bath.
You stack in cash.
You can relax at your house and get in the bathtub.
Stack in cash, that's it.
That's what I want.
I'll be by 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 there 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 like watching your career and watching you clean up and get get right and doing stuff
I watch your your content shift. You're doing really good. You and doing stuff. I watch 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, I remember my stepdad said that and then like
two years ago, I'll be like, man, wouldn't it be crazy if we got to have Dave Ramsey
on you, man? And then here we get to.
And then you can 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. They can call into, 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, appreciate
it and best of luck and I hope to see you around town sometime. Well hang.