The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 243: The Best BBQ Comes From a Crockpot

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Dave Ramsey joins Mike to discuss his documentary, Borrowed Future; How Student Loans Are Killing the American Dream, the pitfalls of three easy payments, and why great BBQ never comes from a microwave.

The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean teaches us how our choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. Well, here we go again. It's episode 243. It's a good one. I just can't figure out what the title is.

And as I sit here looking at Chuck, looking at Chuck, looking at me, I'm not 100% sure we're going to come up with one, but ultimately, Chuck, who cares what we call this thing? It's one of the best conversations we've ever had on the podcast. It's a great conversation. I mean, it's just a matter of order. One needs to have a title to refer to something. It can't just be episode 243.

Why not? Because the minute I give it a title, you're going to say, well, what's the description? And then I'm going to have to send you a description, and you're going to write that up. And then after we get the description, there are going to be questions like, well, where are we going to put the ads? And how many ads do we have in this one anyway? I don't even know anymore. It's a very strange place you've brought me to, my old friend, where we just record a conversation every week with somebody way more fascinating than us

and then sit here like a couple of MOOCs, trying to figure out how to describe it, what to call it, and if there's anybody out there we can take some money from. This is the strangest business I've ever been, and I swear to God. Well, let's not bring God into it. There's no need to swear. It'll be fine. What are the options for the title?

Well, I'll tell you, you can't say, let's not bring God into it because the guy we're talking to is the one and only Dave Ramsey. And Dave is an evangelist against debt. He is a preacher for responsible spending. He's one of the most important voices out there, I think, right now that's counseling prudence. And with regard to our sweat pledge and the way it lines up with our work ethic scholarship program, There's a conversation I've wanted to have for a while. I'm in a movie that Dave produced and is out right now.

I just saw it. It's called Borrowed Future. Modesty aside, it's great. So our conversation does have a touch of God in it. It just doesn't have a title yet. And I'm torn, man. I'm torn because he tells a great story about starfish, cheetahs, gazelles, and lottery tickets.

So I think we have to take our inspiration from that in some way. Dave Ramsey is saving Starfish. That's not bad. I was shooting for not bad. Yeah, so that's good. He would be embarrassed by that because the analogy and the story actually comes from Zig Ziglar, another famous sales guru slash preacher slash so forth from years ago. So he would want Zig to get credit for that.

But you want Dave's name and the title, right? It doesn't have to be because it'll be in the description. But I'm saying everybody already knows. now if this is actually what we're doing is the preamble, they know that it's Dave Ramsey. They've heard that. Oh, yeah. Well, it's not a surprise. We want them to.

No, it's not. We're not keeping them under a bushel and, you know, lifting it up and go, oh, surprise, everybody. It's Dave Ramsey. No, no, that's not what's happening. Well, let me say in all seriousness, really, if you or your kid or your grandkid, your niece, your nephew, whatever, is trying to figure out the wisdom of going to school, the wisdom of borrowing, money, how much money to borrow, and what might happen as a result. Honestly, you've got to watch this movie, Borrowed Future, and you really need to listen

to this conversation, no matter what we call it. I was thinking, if you're going to scratch, you might as well sniff, because he talks about lottery tickets in this thing, and it made me laugh when he gets into the whole scratch and sniff thing. But you hate that. I don't like that. It's a goofy title, but it doesn't say anything. Good barbecue doesn't come from a microwave.

That says something. It speaks to the fact that... He did say that, yeah. Good barbecue comes from a crock pot, not a microwave, because it takes time in the same way that it takes time to deal with your financial future. It's true. I mean, he makes the good point, but I think what he actually says is the best barbecue comes from a crock pot, comma, not a microwave.

That's a big one. Now, that's a long title, but if you wanted to make it shorter, personally, I'd go with the best barbecue comes from a crock pot. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I like that because that's what it is. That's what it does, not instead of what it doesn't. That's right. It's a little more positive.

And friends, this is a positive conversation, even though it touches on a little bit, there's some bad news in this conversation, but it's real. It's a cautionary tale. I'm not kidding, man. We got $1.7 trillion of student loans on the books in every single day. hundreds, maybe thousands of people stumble into the same trap. Something's got to be done. We've tried to do our part at MicroWorks,

but nobody has done more to push the rock up the hill than Dave Ramsey. He's my very special guest in episode 243, which I think, Chuck, we have just agreed to call. The best barbecue comes from a crock pot. Can I get an amen? Amen, brother. Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Dave Ramsey. Right after this.

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Well, first of all, Dave, I hope you don't mind. There you sit in a clean, professional studio setting. And here I am in the back bedroom of my producer. You can tell by the conspicuous presence of a bed. I hope that doesn't make it weird for you. Well, it's a dirty job, I guess. You know what? I thought you of all people would appreciate the nod toward parsimony.

I could have checked into a hotel here in L.A., but we're in and out, lickety split. And I thought, you know what? If Dave has time to talk at 8 o'clock in the morning, I'll just crash with Chuck and we'll get it done. And we are grateful. Game on, brother. Honored to be with you.

Where exactly are you sitting right now? Is this your headquarters? It is. Our headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee. Yeah. Where you came and spoke a while back? Yeah, one level up from where you were on the stage. Dave, you've been one level up for as long as I've known you.

I wanted to thank you for that because that was early on in relative terms in the lockdowns. I want to say something like, was it May or June in 2020? Yeah, it was June, yeah. We were all told we were going to kill each other just by having it. I was hearing the same thing. I just put the old Dirty Jobs crew together. and put him in an RV and took what we called a road trip, R-O-W-E-D, because I was just so desperate to get out.

And among other things, just see if the great outdoors was where we left it. But you did a full-on event. You brought your people in. You sat there face to face. And, I mean, a lot of great things were said during the event, Dave. But mostly it was just the fact that you had it that I think reminded so many people that life is for living. But it is. And, you know, your whole thing on managing risk and, you know, zero crashes at the factory and all this kind of thing, zero problems, zero injuries in so many days and all that kind of a thing. It's the same kind of a thing. We just assess risk all the time. We were assessing risk, and we had 1,500 people that still wanted to come to a leadership event. And we had world-class speakers and teachers like you. And we felt very reasonable doing it. There were a lot of people felt like we were unreasonable, but we really weren't taking a poll. Not everything is a focus group.

But isn't it interesting how the line needs to be drawn in so many different places? And where a company or an organization or an individual draws the line between prudence, caution, courage, and practicality? I mean, if we learned anything these last couple of years, I think, it's that maybe for short period, of time we can look to our leaders to tell us where the line is. But in the end, it's going to come down to you and me. Yeah, you've kind of got to, you know, use your critical thinking skills and assess what you are actually observing, not the people panicking and the mob running around and say, this is what's actually occurring, the actual numbers and the data. And I certainly don't want to bring harm to anyone anymore than anybody else does. And the odd thing is,

is that we didn't. And no one got sick as a result, thank goodness. You know, all of us that came in and spoke and taught, had a wonderful experience. And people were afraid and they were at a moment and time that they needed to, A, be together. It's not good that man be alone. And they also needed to kind of do something. They needed to move in the middle of this thing. And it gave them a way to make a statement about that. And thank goodness we have the freedom in Tennessee to have the freedom and still do to be able to to do that kind of a thing. It worked out. I think what we've observed is this, you know, when I went broke back in my 20s, I lost everything. One of the things I lost was my need to impress others. I used to be that guy who really tried to do everything. I was an arrogant little twerp,

you know. I bought a car. I wore a watch. I did everything to impress other people. And all of that was burned out of me by that going broke experience. And I lead the same way, our 1,200 team members here at Ramsey. We lead by not trying to impress other people, but by doing the right thing. principle-centered leadership instead of optics. And one of the sad things about the pandemic was that a lot of people who were in leadership roles didn't lead. They instead reacted to optics. They were more concerned about the way it looked than the way it actually was. And so we just don't do things the way it looks. We do things by the way they actually are. And what are the actual principles? And we're going to stand on that. And that uniquely makes a whole bunch

of people uncomfortable from time to time. There's the rub. Standing for your principles in and of itself is usually processed as an act of courage. But when the active standing for your principles becomes an existential threat to somebody else's notion of what principled behavior is,

then all of a sudden you're in a fight you probably didn't look for. And that's how I've likened this whole thing. You and I might have talked about it on stage, but watching people emerge from whatever this has been is not unlike watching people navigate the five stages of grief, right? You can look around at any time and say, okay, yeah, that one's still angry. That one's still bargaining. Yep.

She's in denial. He's just depressed. This one has accepted it. I said to marry my business partner when we left Franklin last time, I said, you know, he's going to get a lot of heat for this. But no matter how you slice it, somebody's going to come out. first and somebody's going to come out last and as we see this reemergence isn't it amazing to see how tightly so many hang on to whatever inertia has kept them in whatever state of fear they've been living yeah it's been real

sad and I think you're right the word existential is there and just to watch adults in full-on panic and the anger that comes out of that panic, out of that level of terror, that level of fear. They were so afraid and they were so angry as a result of being so afraid because they truly believe they were going to die or that someone that they loved was going to be killed by one of us that held an event or something. And I understand that. I'm not mad at them for having that feeling, having that emotion. But that doesn't make it a fact. I invited you on a day, Dave, in part to talk about fear because I watched the documentary last night

that you invited me to participate in, borrowed future, watched it from start to finish. Thank you. Somewhat selfishly. I had seen my clips in it before, but I hadn't really sat down to process the whole thing. And what struck me as I watched it, aside from the fact that it's awfully good

and should be required viewing for really any parent and any kid who's trying to figure out the cost of their education, what struck me is you can't really talk about debt, which is the only four-letter word growing up in my home that was totally off the table. You can't really talk about debt without talking about fear. There are different houses on the same street. So much of what you've done in your business, with your books, and with your message, has to do with navigating that fear through the lens of debt.

And I wonder if we could just start with a bit of a riff on that. Has it ever been a more important topic at a more critical? time. Well, the student loan debacle is certainly at an epic place. I mean, we're in an apex, hopefully an apex with that. Hopefully it's topping out because the voices like you and me are so loud against it now and the out of control spending. But what ends up happening is, I read a book years ago, like in the 70s, it was written in the 70s. I read it, I guess, in the early 80s, written by a con man. And he said, you can't be a successful con man. You can't convince people to do something that is a con, a Bernie Madoff type of a thing, unless they're one of two things. They're greedy

or they're afraid. And if you can activate fear or you can activate greed, you can get people to do things that are completely illogical and they fall susceptible if they're falling in that to being conned. And really, that's what I see dead ass. I think it's greed. It's the only way I can prosper. It's the only way I'll have a car that nice. It's the only way I'll be able to travel. It's the only way I'll be able to go to that school. It's the only way I'll be able to buy that house is debt. That's a form of greed. I want to buy something I really can't afford.

I want to appear to be something I'm really not mathematically. So that's a form of greed. Then on the fear side, it's the foamow, the fear of missing out. That becomes the fear side. Or the fear of, you know, if I don't go to school, if I don't go get the four-year degree, ho, ho, ho, I'm going to die. Oh, we're never going to make it. oh, I will never become who God made me to be.

It's this ridiculous level of, it just comes up in their voice, their octave changes, the chemistry and your body starts changing when you're doing all that, and then you run off and go $200,000 in debt to get a degree in left-handed puppetry. You know, and it's just dumber than a rock, but it is truly fear-based. What about patience or impatience, or maybe we would call it, in my foundation, we talk a lot about everything you just said through the lens of delayed gratification or the lack of it. How much of that do you think fuels people to make poor decisions? Oh, 100%.

And the narrative in the ad sales, the sales that the advertising and marketing world that sells debt, which, by the way, it is the most aggressively marketed product of all products, more money and sophistication and brainpower is spurious. selling debt than any other product, and mathematically prove that if we want to do. When you get into that, really what they're activating is, you know, buy now, pay later. That's the opposite of delayed gratification. Three easy payments. I mean, no interest till April, you know, whatever.

It's all the opposite of delayed gratification. And so they're tapping into a very childlike portion of our primitive emotions with the advertising narrative, and they're activating that child that lives inside of us, the one that throws the fit on the cereal aisle and screams and yells because they want that cereal and it has a little temper fit. We've all got the temper fit kid inside of us. His name is immaturity.

One definition of maturity is learning to delay pleasure. So this is really, when we get down to it, about growing up. Do you remember the old commercial? I think it was preference by L'Oreal, and the tagline was because, I'm worth it. And God help you today. It's like a Saturday Night Live skit. Again, where do you draw the line between parody and advertising? Today, you can't make fun of the idea that that tagline is silly because we all, I mean, our worth goes to our self-esteem.

We all want to believe we're worth it. But to tell somebody they're worth it is to presuppose the idea that suddenly they think they're not worth it. So add to everything you just said and the con that comes along, I think there's another pillar under it, the constant whisper in your ear that says, hey man, why not you? You deserve it. Why should you wait? Look around at all the prosperity. You called it phoma. That's exactly what it is. And I've never seen it at this level. It's a word we really didn't use 20 years ago. And we use it in conversations. every day now, and the word is entitled. I feel entitled.

And that never came up before. And really, about the last two decades, and, you know, the first place we started talking about it was the millennials, when everybody was trashing on the millennial generation, is they feel entitled. It's an arrogance with the entitled. I am due this just because I woke up and breathed air, and that's entitled. There's a lack of humility in that that is, again, very, very good. childlike in a negative way. There's not entire generations that are entitled. There never has

been. But there's always been people within certain generations that were twerps. There's in my generation there are and there were millennials that were twirps. But there's millennials that are awesome. I got a whole building full of them. I think they're amazing. I do too. I think we talked about this a couple years ago in Franklin. And I said something on stage, modesty aside, that actually I wrote down because it struck me as kind of clever at the moment. But we were talking about snowflakes. And we were talking about entitlement. And it occurred to me that you and I are, I think, each just on the north side of 60. We've done okay in our chosen fields. We're white. We got good cards. We played them pretty well. Who the hell's going to listen to us, Dave? Really? I mean,

you can go out and you can shake your finger and I can lecture and we can scold and we can shout it from the rooftops. But the truth is, if the snowflake thing is real, then we are the clouds from which the snowflakes fell. And whatever is going on vis-a-vis entitlement today, I'm so glad to hear you not paint with a broad brush. There's a millennial in my office right now that works circles around my partner and I. They're great kids out there with a great work ethic. Yep. It's dangerous, isn't it, to talk too broadly and unpersuasive? Yeah, when I'm speaking at leadership conferences, I've often told leaders it's my favorite generation to hire as a leader because there's only two kinds. They're awesome or they

completely suck. I mean, they're useless. And they'll tell you, they'll tell you in the interview, I don't really want to work much. They're bold about how much they suck. And so the ones that are on fire, oh my gosh, it's the most passionate, driven, ambitious, other-centered, servant mentality. Charge the gates of hell with a water pistol, man. I love them. And we got a building full of them that are some of the smartest, best team members I've ever hired from any generation. I love this generation. Isn't that amazing?

I remember this probably seven years ago, maybe eight years ago, Chuck. I'm not sure you were even there yet, but we had somebody over at Microworks who started, and it was exactly as you described, Dave, gung-ho, ready to go. And our mission really was to focus on closing the skills gap, one job at a time. Well, this person had been working for about five, maybe six months and walked into my office one day and said, Mike, I just got to tell you, man, I've been here nearly six months in this skills gap, still not closed. On the one hand, I'm like, holy crap, man, did you really think, don't you get it? We're Sisyphus.

We're Don Quixote. We're not going to close the gap. What we're going to do is try for the rest of our lives. And we're going to enjoy failing. We're going to fix that one. Yes. We're going to fix that one. We're going to fix that one.

The old starfish thing, the Ziegler used to tell. Yes. You know what? Riff on that too, because I'm sure a lot of people aren't up to speed with Zig Zigler and Starfish. He used to tell the old story the guy walking along the beach and there's another star, the starfish had all been washed up on shore thousands of them. And he's throwing one back and throwing another back and throwing another back. And the guy walks up to him.

He goes, you can't help all these starfish. And he said, nope, but I hope that one. I don't know if you knew this, but my buddy Chuck, who's here with us today, taught your course at his church. Correction. I led it. I didn't teach it. Dave teaches it. Yeah.

Well, whatever it was, in his attempt to disseminate useful information, he took a quasi-leadership position. And how many people are doing that through your organization right now and how many students? Starfish are being reached. Yeah, it's been pretty amazing. We've now had that course that he's talking about that was taught in a church, Financial Peace University, and we've had 50,000 churches now lead it since it began, and close to 10 million people have been through it. It's pretty bizarre. Because of guys like Chuck, though, it's pretty cool. Well, I mean, obviously. You know, you're pretty good yourself. I got to tell you, there's a story about a cheetah and a gazelle that you deliver so beautifully, and it really drives the point home. Well,

Don't tease us for crying out loud. What's the story? Because I'm guessing it doesn't work out well for the gazelle. Go ahead. You take it, Dave. Actually, it does. There's a Bible verse that says, deliver yourself like the gazelle from the hand of the hunter regarding debt.

If you've gotten at a debt, this is your method out. And so we do this whole riff about the cheetah is the fastest mammal on dry land, can go from zero to 67 miles an hour and four leaps. And yet the gazelle is only captured one in 19. times when the cheetah launches after him. He's slower, but the difference is the motivation. One's trying to have lunch, and one's just staying alive. And so deliver yourself. You've got to run like a gazelle, like your hair's on fire, to get out of debt. You can wander into debt, but you can't wander out. And it's a whole stage movement thing. You know, you love theater,

and I do too. And so there's a whole theater piece that goes with this. The principle is pretty simple. Intensity is how you get out of debt. Focused intensity. And we call it gazelle intensity around here. Well, there were some gazelles in the movie, borrowed future, which again, I'll plug shamelessly, and there were also some cheetahs. How involved were you in making this thing? And what were your personal thoughts when you were watching some of these interviews, which are incredibly powerful? That guy with over a million dollars in debt, the orthodontist, God, your heart breaks for that guy, for all of them. Yeah, the little high school teacher, the little football coach.

Oh, man, he's just a sweet man, and he's just hammered. It was just, it was bad. What happened was we had never done something like a documentary or something like that. We tell stories for a living. We communicate from stage and with books and stuff, but we'd never done a long form thing like this. So we started pulling these pieces together, and just the first time I watched it was just at my house with a bunch of people sitting around.

We're all sitting around just enjoying it. And it was really bad, to be honest with you. The story arc wasn't there. There were too many villains, for one thing. There's plenty to choose from in the student loan debacle. Too many cheetahs. Yeah, exactly. The team, the video team worked on it.

And so I guess I viewed it probably 10 times over a period of a year and a half or two years while they're working on. It shouldn't take that long to do a documentary. But if you don't know what the flip you're doing, it takes a little longer. So, you know, it took us a little longer. And so, but they really got dialed in. We're going to tell a story. Here's our story arc. Here's how it builds. And it does. Now, I mean, it's gripping. I'm very proud of the delivery, the narrative, the way it's laid out. The edit on it is crystal. It's terrific. And I'm not just bragging because it's ours. I didn't do any of that. I just

watched it with them. And I would agree, or I'd put a little bit of input here or there. And I say, you know, that guy's not, he's not carrying the water, cut him out. That's not working. And they're going, yeah, but he was a nice guy off camera. I don't give a crap. Get him off. You know, the hard work you do. in production to get something polished. And you make choices of what's going to be on the floor and what's going to be on the screen, the edit floor. And so, you know, we went through that whole thing. And the good news is we put it on Apple TV, on Google Play,

and on Amazon Prime. And I'm looking down here at the numbers. Number five documentary on Amazon Prime for the year. Number two on Apple TV for the year. Number one on Google so far for the year. And so the doc just has gone Zoom Zoom. Several hundred thousand people have already viewed it. Thank goodness.

We didn't really expect to make a lot of money on it. Something like this, you don't make a ton of money for the rentals and all that versus what you spend on the stupid film. What we were trying to do was stir up a ruckus. And boy, have we, we pissed some people off with this, which is exactly what we wanted to do. Yeah, you did. Well, I'll tell you, if it makes you feel any better,

I had to pay 99 cents to watch a damn thing last night. I didn't even get a complimentary copy, and I'm in it. We sent you a copy. Yeah, the link expired, and now, you know, I got nothing. No, no, no. Hang on. You're cheap. We would have taken care of you. We know 99.6 means a lot to you. Dave, you did take care of us. We couldn't watch it on my big screen together, so I paid the 99 cents. It's okay. Three easy installments.

No, man, nothing on credit. We're going to have this film paid off by June. I got my one-third of 99 cents out of those guys. I'm in good shape, man. Congrats. Yes. Seriously, when it landed for me, I actually didn't look at it as a documentary. And I know we have to call it something. Yeah. There are only so many kinds of stories you can tell, right? The hero's journey, this, that. Most of them are operas. Some of them wind up being Greek tragedies. But this is a cautionary tale. That's really why I wanted to talk to you. This month, my little foundation is doing its annual work ethics scholarship thing.

Yeah, I love it. And as you know, we have a sweat pledge and you got to sign it. Yep. And one of the things that really chaps people's butts every year is the tenant in the pledge that says, I would rather live in a tent and eat beans than purchase something I cannot afford. And it makes people so angry. That and the whole riff on safety third and personal responsibility.

And again, different houses, same street. But it's not just our relationship with debt that I'm interested in. It's the fact that we get so angry when we're told we ought not do that. When we're told about cheetahs and gazelles, what is in us that makes this relationship so dysfunctional and so hard to fix? And what's so interesting is you can choose to do. just not sign the pledge and not sign up for the scholarship. So where was the thing written that says you get to change Mike's deal? If you don't like Mike's deal, don't do Mike's deal.

You don't like Dave's deal. Don't do Dave's deal. Why do you have to be pissed off? Just wander off. Oh my gosh. It's just, you know, what is the deal with these people? I don't get the anger. This idea that you get to tell everyone else how to live,

That is fairly new and has escalated. It's probably magnified with social media because all of a sudden we told everybody their opinion was important. And by the way, if you've done nothing, your opinion's not important. I'll help you with that. So you don't get to tell Mike the safety first. You don't get to tell Mike. And that's reasonable. And there's people that I completely disagree with.

And I feel strongly that they're wrong. But I don't get to tell them how to run their thing, you know? They're doing something over at that church over there. Just don't go to that church. I mean, I don't like that Walmart doesn't pay $15 or $18 million an hour. Well, then don't shop at Walmart. I mean, what's your deal? I mean, why do you get to tell Walmart what to do?

Do do do do do do do. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first. This is a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first. This is a huge time saver, hours and hours of save time. And it helps people like me find the people who can function in a non-traditional work environment like microworks. In other words, ZipRecruiter works for me, and they'll probably work for you too.

Post a job for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash row. And watch what happens. Odds are you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. Ziprecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Right. It's the desire to have every box checked.

If we don't agree on everything unilaterally, then we can't be friends. Yeah. That's different. It's just different. There just used to be a time when, okay, I got 10 boxes, you got 10 boxes. We agree on three of them. hey, that's the basis for a relationship, maybe even a business. Yeah.

But what happened to make us so incredibly discriminating in a way that ultimately has redounded to our, well, not to our benefit? It's eliminated opportunities, this way of thinking. Yeah, it has. I mean, if you don't like that flavor, there's a reason Baskin-Robbins has 58 flavors, or 57, whatever it is, get you a different flavor. And so if you don't like, Dave, you don't like, Ramsey, then maybe Susie Ormond, you know, or you don't like Susie, maybe Robert

Kiyosaki. And by the way, I don't agree with everything either one of them say, but I'm not mad at either one of them. They're fine and they're not mad at me. I hope. I mean, Robert and I've been friends for a long time. We disagree on almost, I mean, we agree on almost nothing when it comes to money. But I really respect what he's done and he's, you know, rich dad, poor dad is a book everybody ought to read, you know. And so, but we don't have to agree. He goes deeply in dead. I tell people not to. And we laugh about it when we're at dinner and everybody else is pissed. Well, Chuck and I were just having this conversation yesterday. Yeah. And I haven't had Robert on the show yet, but interestingly, I actually did the voiceover years ago for Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

He has no idea. But yeah, one of the first infomercials I ever did. I didn't know what I was talking about at the time. But to your point, it's pretty interesting. That guy will look you square in the face and say, I love debt. I love it. I hate taxes, but I love it. But I love it. I love debt. Your message, it looks like it's the opposite, but isn't it in part because you're talking to a different type of person? Like, you're talking to the fat part of the bat, men and women who, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck and work for a living. I got to think that's part of the equation. Well, I mean, I'm fine with no one being in debt and he's fine with everybody being in debt. You know, it's okay. I mean, it's, we don't have to be mad about it. And I don't have to

go over there and try to run his organization or vice versa. We can just admire what the other person has done and respect the parts that we do agree on and still be reasonable human beings. Why does everybody so angry? Yeah, of course, stipulated, stipulated. But if we can get in the weeds for just a moment, a lot of people are listening to this right now who are probably right on the verge of considering some kind of a purchase. Now, I always imagine, it's signing on the dotted line for a student loan, but it could be anything. What have you found is the most persuasive way to encourage people to think twice about the purchase of a thing that they can't truly afford?

One of the things we found was we did a, I read some research that was done several years ago, and when they interviewed people who had lived a life at the poverty level or just above, their entire life and maybe even their family before them, maybe generationally. And they started asking them about their vision, how they thought about decisions. Their vision length was, thank God, it's Friday, oh God, it's Monday. Very short decision-making paradigm. On the other end of the spectrum, talk to wealthy people and sometimes coming from wealthy families, their vision when they decided to make a financial purchase in both cases when you're going to make a purchase was 10, 20, 60, 100 years. How does this purchase affect me a decade from now? How does this purchase affect me?

I'm talking to a 30-year-old. When you're 50, how are you going to feel about having bought a car that the payment is $764? Do you not think that the 50-year-old version of you is going to come back and smack you? I mean, but when you're looking at the shiny car and you're smelling, and I love cars, I'm a car guy, man. I get it. I get that driving that thing off the lot and hearing that muffler, or in the case of a Tesla, hearing nothing, whatever it is. I get that, you know, that you're going to get a buzz off of this, but it's all short term. And in finance, almost always something that feels good now and hurts later is going to make you broke and keep you broke,

and something that is going to feel good later, very seldom feels good now. Well, isn't that part of the long con with education, though, to look at the transaction and to couch it, and maybe that's an unfair characterization, I'm going to stay with it, to couch it as an investment instead of a purchase. That's just, the language is such a fungible thing. and if you're trying to convince somebody to sign on the dotted line, what better way to appeal to their reasonableness than to tell them it's an investment? Agreed, but even if you're going to call it an investment,

you should at least do your due diligence on the investment. You're going to spend $225,000 to get a master's degree in sociology, to get a job with the state making $38,000 as a caseworker. this is not an investment. This is stupidity on parade. You would call that a bad investment. Hello. So at least if you're going to call it an investment, don't be blind to the fact that you need to dig into what is the return on investment. And that'll lead you to the cheapest purchase for the degree in marketing that's going to give you the greatest return in the marketplace today. And if you start doing that, you're not going to be a social worker, you're going to be a welder. If you start doing that,

you're not going to be signing up for a master's degree in whatever, you know, nuanced, left-handed puppetry, whatever, female studies or something, and then be a barista. And so you're not going to do that. If you're couching it as an investment, at least be an intelligent investor. But the misnomer is, is that it always works, no matter how dumb you are about going about it, and that's where people get screwed. The problem is the pivot. A logical person who couches it as an investment when confronted with the points you just made

would say, you know what? You're right. I'm wrong. I was thinking of it all wrong. But what we see in the movie and what we see every week in our foundation is the pivot where they say, okay, never mind. It's not an investment. But it is the proximate cause of my happiness. It is the thing that will bring me joy. And as they said back in the 70s, preference by L'Oreal, because I'm worth it. So I'll take the 225 and I'll get my degree in sociology.

And the fact that they only pay me $38,000 a year, now that's incidental. Because now what we're talking about is the certainty. And again, Dave, we see it in the movie. The certainty with some of those kids, I was put on this earth to do this. I was put on this earth to make movies. And you're 17. What? I'm sorry, but you're not equipped to make this call. Yeah.

Right. You're not equipped to make the call. Chuck, you wrote something down last night when we were watching this. It's like a childlike approach to an adult decision. A kid's approach to an adult decision is how one person described it. Anthony O'Neill, that's his quote. Anthony O'Neill, right. It's great. It's a child's decision on an adult problem.

And again, what is that? The investment idea, twisted, becomes toxic. But this follow your passion idea, twisted, becomes toxic. This is a ridiculous set of scenarios that you already know your passion, having done nothing in life yet. I'm sorry, you don't yet. I had no idea I was going to be this passionate about broadcasting at 61 years old. There was nothing indicating that when I was already.

headneck hillbilly, beer drinking hellraiser at 17. Okay? Nothing indicated this at all. There was no way I could have prepared for to follow my passion. But I found it by degrees by evolution and I'm very passionate about what I'm doing. And I have found a passion. I'm a great teacher, communicator. It's what I do for a living. I found the zone that God wanted me to be in.

I'm in that zone. I'm in the flow. Whatever you want to call this stuff. But it didn't get there with this. Oh, I figured it out. I figured it out at 17, you know? Right. I use this word every single day, degree,

and I almost always use it when it's preceded by the word college, and we almost always have similar conversations the one we're having now. But what you just said, you used it in its true sense. Enlightenment, as opposed to entitlement, or any level of understanding or self-awareness occurs in a matter of degree. It's the frog in the boiling water. It's the skin on an onion. A little bit more, little bit more, a little bit more.

But the way we think about a college degree is, ta-da, here it is. You did your four years, you signed on the dotted line. Here is your physical degree. It's a real diploma dilemma because when you get handed a thing that's called a degree, it's easy to forget that it's just one more piece of skin on the onion.

Yeah, that's one of the thing. That's one of the thousand cuts that you're going to use to win, death by 1,000 cuts. It's one of the cuts. It's a degree on the thermometer. One degree. It's not 40 degrees. And the problem with exactly what you're talking about is when we put the degree, the college degree, in the bucket with the wrong definition of where success comes from and what success really looks like,

then you get the idea that the one degree will cause success. Yes. And the bucket that it's in that I'm describing is this idea that the one thing I do is going to be my breakout. I want to be on the front cover of Fast Company magazine, which by the way usually is not a good thing for you. It doesn't end up well. You know? And so I want to be on the cover of slow company magazine. Not because I'm slow, but because I want to move by degrees. Okay? I want to move slowly because the people that I've met who have rich, full lives, who we would call, in quotes, successful are standing on a huge pile of garbage, which is all the mistakes and dumb but things we've done in our lives that we survived. The only difference is we're standing on them instead of laying under them. And so they call us successful because we stand on a mountain of mistakes, a mountain of degrees that we have evolved through, the enlightenment that we've gone through to get there. So I'm certainly not the same dad I would have been when I was 20. Thank God. My children look at me when I'm with the grandchildren.

Who are you? What did you do with my father? So I'm different, right? I've evolved over time. I've been married 40 years. Thank God my poor wife is not married to the idiot she originally married. You know, he has evolved by degrees. You know, this is, and this is what success really is. It's not like, one's marriage seminar. We're done, baby. Life is good. Hot sex. We're going from now on. It's awesome. Wow, I love that. I had not thought about that simple word in such an obvious way. But good on you.

Since you brought up your misspent youth and the mistakes as you've passed. It's my brand, brother. The one thing I'm sure everybody listening has in common is a measure of regret and looking back and just, you know, if they're being honest, shaking their head and wonder at many of the decisions that they've made. You mentioned twice that you went broke. There was a moment in my life. I went to bed feeling very wealthy and woke up with absolutely not a penny to my name. I know how that made me feel.

But what's your story? How did it happen and how did you recover? I was greedy and I got into Get Rich Quick real estate and I bought nothing down real estate, like they tell you to do on the infomercial and like they tell you to do in finance class, by the way. I took my finance professor's advice on how to handle money and he was broke.

This is a problem. Okay, so, I mean, if your finance professor is broke, it's like a shop teacher with missing fingers. This is a problem. So I went from nothing at 22 years old, started buying real estate with nothing down, talked bankers into it. I could sell bankers on loaning me money like nobody's business. And so by the time I was 26, I had about $4 million worth of real estate a little over a million dollar net worth, which means I owed $3 million. A lot of that was, I was doing flip this house before there was cable TV to talk about how. Chip and Joanna hadn't been born yet, but we're doing that thing, you know, fix it up, flip it, all that kind of stuff.

And the bank got sold to another bank, and they looked down and went, there's a child, owes us a million dollars. And they called our notes and spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned. And so with a brand new baby and a toddler and a marriage hanging on by a threat at 28, I filed bankruptcy. And I got the opportunity to be completely terrorized for two and a half years by my stupid actions that had set me up for a trap door that I fell through all the way into the Alice in Wonderland hole for sure. And so we said, okay, that plan didn't work. So I'm not going to go back and do that again,

which is borrow all you can, right? Because it always works when it's real estate. You know, the tenants pay the bill. You don't have to worry about it, right? And all this would be yes. And so I started learning gods and grandma's ways of handling money. We call that common sense, and it turns out it's very marketable. and I've done really well teaching other people what we learned the hard way and also removing

their shame by saying, hey, everybody's done stupid. If you've made mistakes with money, that makes you like over 12. Everybody has. You know, you've got to forgive yourself, but also learn. Don't keep going back to the same thing and expect to have a different result. You have to change the mix. Again, where do you draw the line between? no one should live in shame unless they've done something shameful at which point how do you get through the shame of doing a stupid thing it seems like you own it right and then you ask whoever can grant forgiveness forgiveness yeah a higher power your spouse yeah but looking at these stories in our film our film see how I did that you're there right just like that

Chuck I'm a co-owner pretty good matter of fact I'll have to say you're 99 cents back since you're one of the owners now. I'll just take the interest. It's like my point is you're talking about a lot of smart people, right? We're not talking about brain damaged people. We're not talking about people who were just purely greedy or purely selfish or purely fearful. It's all of this mix.

You know, when I got conned, the group of people that I was in, everybody except me was either a doctor or a lawyer. And I look at that guy last night, a million dollars in debt. He's paid all 400,000. He's an orthodontist. He's smart, right? He did virtually everything right, except the one thing that was so, so breathtakingly misguided, that your heart breaks. Oh, man. You know, again, this was a cautionary tale. I don't know how the average person could contemplate of getting out of a $600,000 obligation. You were, what, $3 million in the hole. How did you do it? How did you get on the other side of it? Well, it was all in real estate. We sold most of it in the process of the two and a half years as we were going down, but we sold it

for pennies on the dollar, so we didn't end up, you know, we end up in the hole each time, because real estate that sells quickly is known as cheap. And so, you know, it was a process that we went through. But, you know, I guess the dealing with shame or dealing with the guilt of the stupid thing is kind of a personal responsibility thing. It's a little bit of one of your sweat things that you sign, right? And it's, I'm going to take responsibility. Yes, did other people do things to me during that time? Was I a victim? Yeah, definitely. We had bankers that just broke the law. They were just misbehaving at unbelievable levels. Ronald Reagan changed tax law and it wiped out a bunch of real estate people. That was during that time, right? And so, you know, I could

blame the president. Everybody likes to blame the president for their problem. Whichever president it So I could have done that. And so I kind of did. I sat around whined and blamed everybody else for a while. And that's part of the stages of grief, I guess. But then there was a moment where my buddy looks at me as good friend and he goes, okay, at what point are you going to go, I was stupid? At the point you say that day, that's the point your healing will begin. Or you're going to be a victim for the rest of your life talking about this 40 years from now as if it happened yesterday because you're still living in it. You're either going to put it in behind you and learn from what you did. Your part in it was this. That banker could only do that to me because I stepped up on that and asked him to. I signed the paper that allowed him to do this to me. And so it's my fault. And so I'll just never do that again. And you have a lot of never again moments due to the marks that you got, the stripes that you have, the scars that you have from what you've done, from what you went through.

I'm sure you got three or four things that came out of that. You went, because of that, never again do I do this, this and this. And when I smell this, I run because it smells like a condomie. And so, you know, I don't bar. I haven't borrowed a dime since then, ever, for any reason. And there's no one that has any possible thing they can say to me to get me to do it because of what I've been through. That's the inverse of the shame is it becomes conviction.

You can read about the perils of a hot stove, or you can touch one. Yeah. There's really no teacher-like experience. Everything we've said so far is kind of a micro look at finance. finance, M-I-C-R-O. But I talk to people a lot who will look at their personal finances, and they'll look at our sweat pledge, and they'll listen to our whole rap on debt and say, look, I live in a country, I pay my taxes. We got a $30 trillion deficit. And I see these people kind of say, what are you talking about? If it's okay for our country to be that far in that hole, what's the big deal for

me? There's no debtor's prison, really. Some bad things. will happen for sure. But I guess what I'm saying is I'm often accused of overstating the perils of debt. And it is not really a persuasive argument, but what can you say when one of your students points to a $30 trillion obligation and say, what's the point? I really can't control what the Island of Miss Fit Toys is going to do in Washington. I don't know what they're going to do next. It's the bizarre group of humans. And so, I can't control that. It's not something that's within the weather.

I can't fix that. It may rain. It may not rain. I can't do that. But I can control what I do. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure. But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level,

we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. they're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next

generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode, join the skilled trades movement, support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. and see too how easy it is to get involved.

Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. skills, U.S.S.

Skills USA. Within my locus of control, and by the way, people who are highly successful, they understand that they control the controllables and they can't control other people. And you can't use, well, so-and-so does drugs and didn't kill him. And so he's done LSD trips every weekend since I've known him, I didn't kill him. So what's the problem? Does that somehow validate LSD trips? I mean, come on.

It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous flow of logic and critical thinking breakdown. down. And so the thing with us is, the way we look at it is we look at the debt persuasion discussion through whatever lens you're looking at it in. If it's a person of faith, we talk about what the scripture says. Now, you either believe the scripture or not. If you're a person of faith, you're supposed to believe the scripture. And so this is what it says. Now, argue with God. Okay? So if you want to have an intellectual, mathematical discussion, I can have that with you. Because debt increases risk 100% of the time. More debt is more risk 100% of the time.

Oh, and by the way, you could look at the study we did, which is the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America. We finished it up airtight research, over 10,167 millionaires, in-depth study, really good research. Ramsey Research Team did it. And we found that 89% of them became millionaires not because of an inheritance. Nine out of ten. This idea that the wealth is inherited is absolute BS. It's statistically inaccurate. It's a math thing.

It's a fact. It's not a feeling or a political stand. And so we know that. Now then, what is the shortest distance between where you are and being one of them? Well, all we can do, study best practices. What did they do? They avoided debt like the plague and they invested in their 401K. Most of them are millionaires because they have a paid-four, five or six or $700,000 house. And they got a million two in their 401K after 20 years of working and getting a match or doing their

with the IRA and mutual funds. It's really not sexy. It's a little bit boring, but it's the quickest right way to become debt. And let me just tell you, the number of them that said that they made their money with airline miles by using their credit card that they became wealthy was precisely zero. The number of them that became millionaires because of the lottery was precisely zero. It's statistical evidence. You can talk about and rationalize that this leasing, this stupid, $60,000 car when you make $40,000, $40,000, is, is okay because everybody else does it, but it's not going to take you where you think you want to go.

My dad is heroic to me. He's 89 years old. He was a high school teacher, his career. His wife worked very briefly and then went about the business of raising my brothers and me. They're living in an assisted living facility today. He is exactly the guy you just described. They're not rich by today's standards,

but they have more money. then they'll be able to spend. He's saved. You know what the truth is, Dave? The shortest distance doesn't necessarily have to be short. That's the thing. Like, that's the tautology here. Anybody can get to be a millionaire,

but it's kind of like the Colorado River carving the Grand Canyon, which brings us back to patience and delayed gratification. And not simply doing a bunch of smart things, but affirmatively not doing a bunch of stupid things. and rationalizing your butt off. I mean, well, somebody's got a win, scratch and sniff. Oh, give me a break. Hey, man, if you're sniffing that thing, you're doing it wrong.

If you walk one mile to the market to buy the lotto ticket, statistically you are more likely to be struck by lightning twice than to buy the ticket that wins. Oh, my gosh. This is ridiculous. I'm just stuck on the idea that scratching the ticket is no longer enough. Now I have to sniff it. You've got to sniff it, Mike.

You got to sniff that lotto ticket. All those little pieces that you've scratched off. Yeah, you got to smell it. What you said earlier about debt is risky, therefore imprudent, but risk is critical to success. Therefore, you need to take some of it. But back to the line, where do we draw it? You've actually done a great job of being crystal clear and everything I've read that you've written, which is let's not finesse it.

Debt, bad, period. Am I over simplifying? It's not because Dave says, or it's not because it's a shtick, it's truthful. When you don't have any payments, you have money. It gives you the ability to build wealth. And people don't come take crap from you, you know? I mean, and when there's a pandemic, you know. This is a thing, man.

I mean, you just have to, I don't know. But I would have been the guy arguing with you when I was $3 million in debt telling you how smart I was because I was a brilliant 24-year-old, you know. Let's talk about the safety net because so much of a safety net is mental, you know. When I lost my money, I didn't lose my health. I didn't lose my ability to work. I didn't have kids. I didn't have debt. I didn't have obligations.

All I lost was my safety net. but I can still hear the sound of my sphincter slamming shut when I look down and didn't see the net where I left it. That was relatively easy for me to get over. But when people lose that safety net, or let's say somebody's got $8,000 in credit card debt and they've got $10,000 in the bank and they're looking at an investment opportunity, do you tell them to choose that investment opportunity wisely? or to simply pay the damn debt off before you even start thinking that way. Because the shortest distance between where you are and wealth is not borrowing money on a credit card to invest, which is the actual net effect of not paying the credit card off and investing instead.

If you have the money and you could have paid the credit card off, instead you put it in an investment, it says if mathematically you borrowed on the credit card to do the investment, which now makes the investment really sound stupid. But you just have to reverse engineer this stuff a little bit and realize what you're actually doing, and you're trying to find a shortcut. And we all love shortcuts. But we all know barbecue in the crock pot is better

than barbecue in the microwave. Shortcuts lead to long delays. That is so good. That's excellent. Say that again one more time, barbecue in the... Listen, we've all traveled all over, and everywhere you go is the best barbecue. I mean, if you're in Texas,

they tell you it's the best brisket barbecue. If you're in South Carolina, low country, barbecue. They'll tell you. Tennessee, Nashville, you know, we got hot chicken and we got barbecue. So, I mean, everywhere you go, they tell you it's best barbecue. But we all know it didn't come out of a microwave. 100% of the time. You know, it's cooked in the backyard so long and smoked back there on something so that the

neighbor's dogs are howling. Then you got some good barbecue. There wouldn't eat, ding! No, that didn't happen. No, no ding. I want to be respectful of your time, but I'd be an idiot if I didn't ask you. I know you love our country, and you must be reading the headlines and doing a slow shake of the head. And as you said before, it's very difficult to, would you call it a clown show?

No, the island of misfit toys. Yes. What do you see for our future as a nation with regard to the essentials that you preach every day regarding debt? You know, if you watch the news channels 24-7, I guess you just give up because all you see are just this endless parade of bad, sad, horrible people and decisions and lack of common sense and lack of compassion and everything else. But the good news is, and again, you've had the same experience I have, we've had the blessing of not just existing within our own little friend group, our own little echo chamber, but we're out in the highways and byways of America

meeting real people. And almost everyone is not them. I mean, the people of this country are our salvation. Americans, by and large, are people that love God. They love their dog. They love their family. They believe in generosity. They have common sense. They disagree about stuff. But most of them aren't nearly as angry as the two people in the boxes on the news channel. You know, most people out there, and we're going to be okay. We're going to be okay because we've got a millennial generation coming on that really does care and that is really smart. We're going to be okay. But if you looked at that bunch, you wouldn't have any indication from that bunch we were going to be okay. But I've watched, you know, bad leadership in businesses and

bad leadership in politics, and we've watched us survive it over and over and over again because the people are really strong. Dave, I'm so encouraged. I'm encouraged by everything you've done, and I'm encouraged by the film that you've made. No, we made. That's right. That's right. The film that I inspired, I believe, which we're headed for there.

As long as I'm patting myself on the back, I want to say straight up to everybody who's listening, if you got a kid or a grandkid or a friend with a kid 16, 17 years old, and they're seriously trying to consider their future. This is not a slam against education. I've said it before. I'll say it again. If you don't have an education in this day and age, you are screwed. But the idea that the only education available is going to cost you a couple hundred thousand dollars

and result in a certificate, this is dangerous it will crush you it can put you on a path that you're not going to be able to get off of for a very very long time and that's the moral of the story that dave's film is put together it's called borrowed future it is 99 cents on amazon i'm not going to lie to it's a lot of an investment big money it's real money financial officer but please get this film in front of anybody in your world who is wrestling with that decision. You know, it's, it's not dogmatic. It is a cautionary tale, but it will make you think and it will give you a real look

at the unintended consequences of not delaying your gratification. What else, Dave, in your world should people know about? Have you written your four or five hundredth book yet? I was going to say, not only that, Mike, but it also shows you a way to navigate college. There's a great example in there, that kid who says, I'm going to go to college, but I'm going to pay for it. I'm going to find a way to pay for it. And he scours the internet for scholarships.

I wrote this down that this was a fact that came out in the film. Every year, $3 billion in scholarships go unclaimed. I mean, that's crazy. That's money sitting on the table. And if you're willing to go and find it, like our scholarship, Mike, this helps people. This isn't just a debt's bad kind of thing or college bad. It's like you see examples of, this is how you do it. This is what you say all the time, Mike, you know,

that your college degree has served you well, but it's you could afford it. Well, the other thing, too, that comes out in this movie, and I'm so glad the point landed was it's really not about where you go, so much as it is about where you finish in the school that you choose. And I think it has to do with emotional, really self-esteem. Maybe just chalk it up to managing expectations. but I crushed it at Essex Community College for two years, right? For 26 bucks of credit, I hit everything out of the park.

I started in the plays. I took all the courses I wanted to take. And when I left, you know, I didn't have a pedigree from the Ivy League, but I had for the first time in my life a real sense of what I wanted to do and a notion of how to do it and enough curiosity to eventually bring me back to a state school a year or so later, where I did get a degree. But by that time, at least I felt like I had my head screwed on straight. And I think that that's really the message underneath this movie.

There is no one way for everybody. And if we're going to position the best path for the most people, it shouldn't be the most expensive path. Well, and it very seldom would be. It would be the path that provides the most value, which is the, the... return, if we're going to go back to the investment discussion, on investment. And there's absolutely zero data that supports going to the famous college that everybody talks about causing success. No piece of research ever done. We can't find any. We've looked everywhere to dispute the idea that if you go to and you pay the money to go to this name brand college that everybody

knows is a big deal, apparently nobody knows it's a big deal when you actually go to work. What's the rest of your day look like? What happens to Dave Ramsey now at 9 o'clock in the morning here in West Coast anyway? Well, I've got a couple of meetings that I do in the mornings as CEO of the company, and then we do a three-hour radio show every afternoon from 1 to 4 central time called The Ramsey Show, and people call in and talk about their life and their money, and me and the Ramsey personalities, the other nine people that do what I do here on stage and write books and talk and that kind of stuff.

We do that show. Two of us do that show every day. What's the simplest way for people to get just an injection of what you guys do and say on a daily basis? Is it through one of your books? Is it through your radio show? Is it through a website? Sure. I mean, if people right now are really, really struggling financially and just want a good, top-down look at what you're all about, where do they go?

The website's ramsey Solutions.com. If you wanted to explore what Chuck's looking at, financial people, University is contained within a thing we call Ramsey Plus. And it also has in it the world's best budgeting app. And again, statistically proven. Right. My mother voted for it. So we're talking about every dollar, the every dollar budgeting app,

is all included in a Ramsey Plus membership. But you can do a free seven-day trial. And if you want to just take a view and go, hey, man, I'm scared. I don't know what to do. This guy said he went broke and now he learned something. and maybe I can learn how to do this. And maybe I'd love to be out of debt. I'd love to become a millionaire.

I'd love to be able to provide for my kids. I'd love to not be worried and fighting with my spouse all the time about money. You can jump in there for seven days. You'll begin to get a feel for what we're doing. And it's free to check it out. Chuck, what did you see when you were leading the class that you were involved in? First of all, it's amazing. It's every week Dave actually teaches the class.

via video, but you have a leader who's there to work with people, go over their budgets with them. That's what I did. And I saw a lot of people do really well. More than anything, it opens people's eyes. People have no idea how much money they spend. And I'll tell you, for me, I'm one of those guys ever since I got out of debt. I have been going around. I am, you know, there's no preacher like the converted. And you ask the ladies at the office, Mike, the young women at the office, I am constantly saying, What are you putting away? You're putting stuff away? Are you doing?

But really, it gives you an idea of where the pitfalls are. And it helps you. The first thing you have to do is see how much money you're spending. That's what happens virtually immediately with Financial Peace University. And then, you know, you get a game plan. There are seven steps that are just wonderful. I told you about some of them, you know, get $1,000. All of the baby steps are just great.

And they work. They work. Well, it's a clear path that's proven and really what. what it does is it takes you whether you're arrogant and you think you know it all or whether you're broken and you're hopeless. And we're going to show you the quickest, easiest way. And the fastest way to become wealthy, the fastest way to stabilize your household. Because it's about helping broken people and we're all broken in some way or another. The word we use around it all the time, Mike, is hope. Our goal is make sure they leave that class with hope.

You're not going to fix everything in a lesson, but you're getting on a path where you have hope that's real. And it's based on actual facts. And I saw that. I saw that hope for sure. Yeah. No, look, I think it's great. And that's what this podcast was. Three, four-letter words I'm jotting down right now. Hope, risk, and debt. Can't imagine a better conversation with anyone, Dave, around those topics. Thanks for your time. I know I probably made you late for your radio show or something, but, you know. But we literally have dozens of listeners on this podcast, Dave. So I think we're going to. We'll see if we can lower that for you. I love you, my brother. You come by and see us at night for. I love you back. Don't hang up yet. This thing has to upload, but this officially ends our podcast. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile.

Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do take some time to go on and loss a review I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge but in this world the advertisers really like to judge you don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two all you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not too. All you got to do is leave a quick five-star review. We need five. All you got to do is leave a quick... Even if you hate it.

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