Why Smart People Make Stupid Money Decisions - Dave Ramsey - #932

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Let's talk about both of our favorite topics, Dr. John Deloney.

**Dave Ramsey** (0:04)
And it's his favorite topic.

**Chris Williamson** (0:05)
It is. Oh, man.

**Dave Ramsey** (0:13)
What a star, though. I mean, he is blown up. He's brilliant, he's quick, and he's helping a lot of people. We're real proud of him.

**Chris Williamson** (0:20)
I have no idea how I wasn't familiar with him until relatively recently. I guess the Internet's a big place, right? But he's great. He came out to see me here in Austin. We immediately had that, did we just become best friends moment? He's phenomenal. His insights are great. He seems to have, I'm going to put this, he's got a Ramsey signature to him in a way, quite firm, I would say, sometimes bordering on scary.
Moderately intimidating, but also warm and feels like he's doing it, like a particularly brash uncle that needs to give you the kick in the ass that you needed.

**Dave Ramsey** (1:09)
Yeah, that loves you, but will tell you the truth. That's what we all try to do around Ramsey and portray both of those things. A, we love you and B, that means we have to tell you the truth for your own good because we care about you, and we want you to win, and continuing to do that horrible thing that to yourself is silly. So whatever it is, whether it's John or any of the rest of us, but John certainly has fallen into that fold, and he is brilliant. He's very articulate. I mean, I'm in the third meeting with him, and we're talking about interviewing and talking about turning him into a Ramsey personality. He's so quick on the draw. I went, you can do this. All we got to do is put you on with a microphone and start answering questions. He didn't know what it was.
I'm like, look, I've done talk radio for 30 years. You draw fire and re-holster before the bullet hits him. I mean, it's quick. He's really, really good, and he does care deeply.

**Chris Williamson** (2:04)
How do you describe what you do? Let's say that someone meets you and they're not familiar with you. You're at a cocktail party, you're at a gathering of some kind. So, David, tell me about what you do for work.
How do you coalesce the myriad of different things that you've got going on?

**Dave Ramsey** (2:23)
These days, I would just tell them, I'm the CEO of Ramsey Solutions, and we put on a bunch of podcasts and a bunch of curriculum, and have a bunch of best-selling books, and YouTube, and all that stuff. I'm one of the people that does all that as well as be the CEO. So, it's like that. But I mean, there's 1,100 of us in a building, and there's 500 people doing tech all day long. So, and I've never written a line of code in my life, so that's freaking intimidating. But that's all part of the picture. But I don't, you know, I don't want to try to one-up somebody to cocktail party. That's not, but yeah, the elevator pitch, if you will, that would be it, I guess, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
Is that where you've imagined that you might end up when you just started doing little talk radio, coaching people, speeches in a bad suit, as you said?

**Dave Ramsey** (3:14)
Yeah.
I think what I did realize, because I've been entrepreneurial my whole life, and I did see the size of the need. And getting people out of debt is not exactly a niche market. I mean, it's massive. We always laugh and say, me and Jenny Craig got a big job, right? And so it's massive. It's everybody, right? And so I saw the size of it. What I didn't know when I was 32 years old and opened the first little 800-square-foot office and so forth, I didn't have any idea how much work it was going to be. And I didn't have any idea how much I was going to have to learn. And of course, the rate of change in the marketplace, because in those days, there wasn't internet. And so Talk Radio, AM Talk Radio, and we were on FM Talk Radio when it first came out as well. And then on Satellite, on XM and Sirius, when they launched those satellites, as two separate companies originally and later combined. But I mean, so we're just dabbling in the front edges of whatever was going on in the marketplace and trying to get to all these people. But to scale the thing, man, when I look back 35 years, I was really, I had no idea how much work it was gonna be and that I would need 1,100 people in a building to do it. I just thought, you know, there's a lot of people need help. I'll go help them.