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

27:03And start breaking that down into daily activities. They're going to take me to that annual income goal. If I want to make a million dollars a year. How many of these books do I need to sell? How many of you know, what have I got to do? And you can break it out. It's simple, sixth grade math. And then you break it down into a daily activity that creates that goal. So this vision out to the future that drives the daily work I think it gives you inspiration and hope that as I push this through okay man We're ahead of schedule we're ahead of schedule we're ahead of my daily goal in the last 10 days I'm at 12 -day mark good all right boom we're on and so I can keep going out I may get there even faster than I thought and you just keep laying it out that way and Goals are just when they're done right and they're yours and you own them and the math is put with them They're very motivating and it's it's vision with work clothes on Yeah, I think the point on how hard people work, there is a unique category of hell where somebody complains about results that they didn't get from work that they didn't put in.

28:01Yeah, and it's causing effect. You're seeing cause and effect happen right in front of you. And there's not really anything that can be said that you mentioned, you know, I guess you alluded during your first, the first phase, Ramsey 1 .0, I guess, pre -Bankruptcy. That was getting the shit kicked out of you and then turning that around, realizing, oh wow, I wasn't as smart as I thought, this was difficult. And then you also said that grit, determination, some kind of resilience is one of the traits that you would like to give to somebody. I think a lot of the time, I'd be interested to know whether So how much hope you had during that moment while you were during the real financial strife?

28:45Because in retrospect, it's very easy to weave a narrative together of this is why I needed to learn this thing and look, in the grand arc of my life, I have come into land with much more insight and wisdom and I can see that for what it was. This was somebody that was too flash, that was over leveraged, that was using debt in a way that wasn't efficient and I paid the price and this is how I've come out of it. But in my experience, during that process, it doesn't feel like that at all. There's no grander purpose to this thing. You're just wallowing in uncertainty and fear and confusion and self -doubt and criticism and pay.

29:20So I just want to kind of get a sense, let's say that somebody, hopefully not bankruptcy for a million dollars, tuned up to the amount of a million dollars, but somebody's going through a bit of a rough time and you like, look, this is a way to try and reframe that difficulty right now, psychologically, so that you can start to see things with a little bit more equanimity. Now, I wonder how much you were capable of doing that at the time and how much this is you retrospectively realizing that it was good for you. It ebbed and flowed at the time. And so I distinctly remember standing in the shower or sobbing.

30:01with it so hot in my face I could barely stand there because I did not know what to do. I was so scared I couldn't breathe. And I have a wife and a brand new baby and a toddler. And the poor woman thought she married Sir Gala ahead and turns out it was goober. And I stand there feeling like a complete abject failure. Our water and our electricity to our home with two babies got cut off. I mean, it was unbelievable. Youvable. So yeah, like I said, it not I not only went broke it broke me, but I was so scared I couldn't breathe. And then I'd walk out in the sunshine and find some little deal, find some little thing and go live the next day, little vitamin D and go to church and pastor would be inspiring.

30:48I'd have some a good moment in prayer where I felt like God was talking to me. You're going to be okay. I just think we remember we filed bankruptcy in August. August. I mean, in September, September 23rd of 1988, I was 28 years old. I'm 64 now. But I can remember like it was this morning, in August, about 30 days before we filed, I couldn't sleep and I got up at 4 o 'clock in the morning and I was, the kids are asleep, sharing the sleep and I was sitting in my little recliner and I had some books stacked there that I was reading and I had a Bible sitting there and I was just crying. I was scared.

31:29And I thought, okay, God, you're going to have to help me because I don't know how to do this. And I randomly opened my Bible and it fell open and I just started looking down the page and there was Romans 5 and it says, rejoice in your tribulations. And I looked up at heaven and I said, But I don't think so. Oh.

31:58Well. And because tribulations create perseverance and perseverance character and character hope. And um, so I don't know how much closer you can get from hearing a message from God than something like that. That hasn't happened to me very often in my 40 years of being a Christian, but sometimes you get those chill bump experiences and you go, oh, that was my heavenly father going, uh, yeah, it's tough, but you're going somewhere with this hang on kid. You're going to get there. And he put his arm around me and I got up and I went to work that day 30 days later I filed bankruptcy. So I was at the bottom.

32:38I mean, that was the eight, you know, the end of the valley right there is where that was, but rejoicing your tribulations because tribulations produced perseverance and perseverance and character and hope and hope is a gift to this Holy Spirit. And so I needed some hope and I needed to see that this was going somewhere to your point. And so again, it ebbed and flowed. So, you know, 20 minutes before that, I'm a basket case, right after that, I'm strengthened and ready to go for at least a little while longer, right? And that's happened to me throughout my life. Even running Ramsey, we'll have a massive success on something and then there's a massive failure and I'm looking up going you've got to be kidding you know and so when does this get easy and it doesn't and so I have a weird prayer life but yeah it's a very antagonistic relationship with God that you've got it seems it seems passive aggressive sometimes it seems very he's not scared of me I'm okay But yeah, that's, that's, but I, I'm just a real dude and that's, that's the way it was.

33:44And so whether it was a spiritual thing like that or whether there's a friend coming along sad, I'm distinctly remember about two years after the bottom, we were starting to teach some of this stuff and there were three people that cared and, you know, that kind of stuff. And a buddy of mine, I was sitting with him at a bad, one of those bad buffets, like a golden Corral type crap or something and we went and he's like I was whining about how hard my life was and how bad it had been and how horrible the last four years have been and all this and he's like you know you want some cheese for that wine dude really I mean you just you got enough lemons you should probably make some lemonade and he goes you need to take these experiences and use them to help other people and then you're probably going to get healed yourself in the process and and that's kind of where it went but again there there was days right in the what to do and then there were days I felt fortified I left it up by a friend or by a spiritual encounter or by whatever.

34:41And so it was an ebb and flow. But did I look in the moment and look out 20 years and go, Oh, God's going to use this for my good. No, not even close. Now you railed and you amired and you aside. Yeah, I think it's just, I have this sense that we have a skewed perspective of the trajectory of people coming back from rock bottom or from pullbacks that they've had in life and errors and failures because most people see those stories portrayed through movies and The Rocky montage is three and a half minutes, right, but in reality it can be five or ten years Yeah, exactly and you're looking around going what the fuck is going like how is the This is this is not this isn't the way it's supposed to be I didn't shine up for this story correct and And the self -belief of the protagonist, Rally Wavers, sure they're going to meet some heroes journey, challenges that's going to be a little, the bad guy comes out before the fight's available to ready to start and Rex's ankle or whatever it is.

35:45His coach gets put into a coma and he needs to be able to do the competition without him or whatever it might be. But the self -belief never wavers. And I think in my experience, that's not the way that personal growth and that life trajectory goes at all, then you are going to swim in a lot of self -doubt and uncertainty, and there's not even the promise of any glory at the end. And that makes the whole thing feel scary, because you go, maybe I'm just applying all of this effort, and I'm going to end up at an even more broken place in the future. And you know, that false narrative that you just bounce back, you know, that thing.

36:24Like, I remember when I came out with the first book I was being interviewed I don't know, some today show or something like that. And the guy goes, so you lost everything and you're 20s. And now you're teaching people financial piece. How did you bounce back? And I remember it just hit me like that was stupid. And I said, dude, when you fall that far, you don't really bounce. It's more of a splat. And he just looked at me. Just like that wasn't the answer that fit the. It's not very narrow to talk about. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and so the thing I would say though is if someone's watching you and I right now Talk about this and they go, yeah, I'm in the soup People do react two different ways to being in the soup.

37:07We all have the the fear and Then the momentary courage or the momentary hope followed by You know another day another injury followed by another betrayal followed by a momentary We all have that then the choice you have to make the individualized to make while we're in that and I made that choice semi -consciously was you can choose, all right, I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna adopt the victim language and I'm just gonna sit down because I quit. And those are the people that never recover from their divorce. They never recover from their business loss. Or you can say, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so lost I don't know I'm gonna do it too, but I do know I'm gonna take the next step.

37:53The next step. I'm gonna take the next, I'm gonna do the next right thing that's in front of me, and the next right thing that's in front of me. And it might even not be the right thing, but I'm gonna do the next thing. And sitting is not an option. I'm gonna keep walking. So keep walking if you're in this. And the old country song, you know, if you're going through hell, keep going. And so, but I meet people that, and they call on the show, it's like a lady called the the day and she's talking about her divorce like it happened 20 minutes ago and I'm like, how long ago were you divorced 40 years?

38:24I'm like, honey, you're still living emotionally back in that thing. The language she was using was fresh. And she's still sitting there mad at him and he's gone and gotten to other wives since then. I mean, you know, right? Move on. And so, but that it's real easy to quit in that. And it's not a quitter thing. it's just this natural reaction. I'm gonna get up one more time, even though I don't feel like it, and walk out into the sun. Get a little vitamin D, get a little prayer, meet with my buddy, and let him make fun of me, and then I'm gonna get after it again. And I'm just one more time, one more time, right?

39:03Yeah, I remember toward the end of my 20s, and I was really trying to sort of work out. Some of the predictors for when I felt bad around when I felt worse, when I was in the soup, as you would say. And I remember I wrote it, action is the antidote to anxiety that you really don't fear the future when you're moving yourself toward it. And it's a vicious spiral because the very thing that's hardest to do when you are struggling is precisely the thing that would make you feel better. Right? Your motivation is that it's lowest. You don't want to get out of bed, you don't want to go to work, you don't want to think of a new idea, you don't want to apply effort to something or pick up the bar or not eat the comfort food or whatever it is, stick to your routine.

39:46But then when you start to roll that boulder a little bit, it accumulates an awful lot of momentum, which is exactly how you see people get unbelievable outcomes. Like it seems superhuman. How does this person get so much done in a day? How are they so successful? How are they so balanced? All the rest of it. So, well, they are on the positive side of the same momentum that is currently kicking your ass. Exactly. We developed a little theorem around here to talk to our team about this, called the momentum theorem, focused intensity over time, multiplied by guy equals unstoppable momentum. And one of the things we talked about in the little book I did on it was just this idea that when you have negative momentum, you are better than you look.

40:31When you have positive momentum you are not as good as you look. That's great. That's really important. So don't believe the lie either way. If you've got positive momentum, you are harvesting crops that were planted yesterday. Not this morning. They were planted a year ago, put them in the ground, and today I'm getting this fruit, and thereby I think I'm a genius, but it was actually a year ago. I was a genius. Or you got crops going in the ground, there's nothing coming out of the ground yet and you're planting, you're planting, you're planting, nobody can see you, nobody knows you're there, you're anonymous, but you're a lot better than you look.

41:09Cause wait till this rain and the sun comes, there's going to be a crop in the spring, and suddenly you're going to be that genius. So, you know, that's how that stuff works. I remember talking about going through this stuff, this idea of walking, continuing to walk, that's something that you brought up. I love that. We were snowskying the other day until you ride, and I'm a mediocre snowskier here for 65 year old dude, right? But I like to go down the hill and go fast. I enjoy it. So, you know, go. And so I'm skiing with my kids like 40 and 30 years old and they haul, but I mean, they go. And so the old man's trying to keep up and he's huffing and puffing.

41:43So we jumped off a lift. We were running cruiser blues, you know, good and double blues. That kind of stuff. We had a black every now and then, but they were cruisers. They were groomed. So we jumped off it. And there's There's just one run until you ride that when you get at the top of it on black, it's a, it's a, it's a groomed black. It's unbelievably steep. You can see downtown tell you ride and it looks like you're going to fall into Main Street when you fall. I mean, it's right there. It looks like a toy box and there's nothing between you and Main Street. It's just air. It's that steep.

42:17It's an unbelievable. And I pulled up on top of that thing and I looked at one of the kids, you know, these dirty girls. I'm like, they went, that's steep and I went, yeah, and if I stand here about three more heartbeats, I'm gonna walk back because I'm getting really scared. So I gotta go where the fear's gonna take me over. And I thought, you know what, that's what I've done half my life. You gotta go or the fear's gonna take me over. Because if I stood there, my heart rate was going, this was just the other day, I was scared. You know what I mean? It's like, I was scared, but I thought, you know what, I can do this stupid thing.

42:51I can ski it, I know I can ski it, but if I stand here and think about it, it's going to, the fear is going to kill me. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green stream that I could to see which one was best, and I came across AG1 and I've stuck with it for over three years because it's the best. It's the most comprehensive, highly tested, and rigorously formulated. They genuinely care about holistic health, which is why I've got my mum to take it, and my dad to take it and tons of my friends too. And if I found anything better, I would switch, but I haven't, which is why I still use it.

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44:06That's drink AG1 .com slash modern wisdom. There's a... I want to give it a better term than cultivated stupidity. Conscious ignorance, maybe you could say, or tactical ignorance around things. Yeah, a lot of the time there is... There is a period where you're supposed to plan, where you're supposed to reflect and ruminate and sort of think about stuff, but that can be a trap as well. And I think that a lot of people who like to listen to shows like yours and like mine, they'll be thinking about their thoughts. They'll be thinking about themselves. They'll be strategizing, but there is just a, there is absolutely a time for straight action without having to ruminate too much.

44:47Yeah, you can get paralysis of the analysis. Yeah. What are some of the biggest psychological errors that people make when it comes to thinking about wealth and business building? What are the traps that people fall into?

45:06One of the ones I've been working on a lot with our Entry Leadership Clients, which we coach about 10 ,000 small businesses under the brand Entry Leadership, that this book is in, as a matter of fact, it's in that same brand. Then of course we work with people on the financial side, and so I did the book millionaire, baby steps millionaires, and there's a number one again. teaching, you know, here's what these millionaires look like. We did a huge study on millionaires. Here's what they really look like. And so in both of those cases, I'm spending time with the wealthy or I'm spending time with a successful small business person.

45:39In either case, I'm appalled at how much damage the anti -success movement has done to their psyche. I'm appalled that they actually, too many Many of them, they're very successful on almost every front, but when I look at them and say, you haven't done anything wrong. You did everything right is why you're successful. You are not a moral reprobate for becoming wealthy or becoming successful. Quite the opposite. I'm proud of you. You have done good stuff, my son, my daughter. I'm amazed that somebody has got a $5 million net worth and I look at them and say that in their body language changes.

46:23their shoulders go back their head comes up because this communist negative anti -wealth, anti -success stuff that is floating around has had an impact on them and an impact of their spirit. The hope Steelers I call them has stolen a lot of these people's pride, their hope, and I've started getting quite frankly pretty angry about these people that are spreading this negative thing about successful people, because I got to tell you, I know a lot of billionaires, not just millionaires, and the percentage of wealthy people that are bad people is lower than the percentage of the population. Now, there is bad people among them, but they did not get there by doing something wrong.

47:17By and large, They got there by doing more right than anybody else did. They served more chicken. They served more Pizza they served more business help. They served more something than you did shut up, you know and Man, but they it's amazing to me to sit with the guys got a fifteen or twenty million dollar net worth and a guy like me from a redneck A hillbilly can look at him and go dude I'm proud of you. You did good and he goes you know I did But nobody says that to them. Everybody says you're a dog, you're an idiot, you're a crook, you must have done something wrong. The eat the rich and all this stupid one percenters and operation wall streets and language and all that garbage that's out there.

47:59And it's having an impact on success is now getting a bad name, you know, and it didn't use to have a bad name in America. Yeah. What do you think that's come from? Um, uh, communist college professors.

48:20Okay. Uh, but if that's surely those communist college professors, what, what they in tenure when the people that you're speaking to were going through college, always, yeah, they've always been there. I mean, honestly, truthfully, there's very little, there's very few people that believe that communism is a better system than capitalism, unless you're on a college campus. You can't find them. You can't even find them in communist countries that think it's better than capitalism. There's nothing more capitalism than a good communist, right? Honestly. But this idea of equal wealth for unequal effort and call that fair.

48:59That's not fair. God I work 60 hours, he should make more money, guy work six hours. That's not fair. You make the same money and you work, that's not fair. My kids used to say growing up, well, that's not fair. I'm like, fairs were the tilt of world and the cotton candy is, kid. You know, you want some fair go get some.

49:20Yeah, I'm very grateful that where I'm from, the northeast of the UK, it's spittin' sawdust, blue -collared stuff. Yeah. There was no ads and graces. and in some ways for the British people that are listening and the Australians and maybe some of the Canadians and maybe the working class Americans as well, that has some pains because if you try and stray from the beaten path a lot of the time that's locked down on, that's not exactly supported, you're kind of in a role model desert a lot of the time there's not that many people. I was having dinner with some Aussies and they could have said tall poppy syndrome.

49:57wrong. Correct. And I said, well, that's not an Aussie thing. That's an Aristotle thing. But okay. Yeah. Still. It's a little over. It's not a little over than Australia is. Yeah. Yeah. But still, you know, that poppy that you can't stick your head up. You must be cut down. Yes. And in the envy and jealousy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I really didn't like that. But one of the things that it gave me was people like the sort of person I didn't want to be like. and avoiding pitfalls are almost as important as expediting successes. So, okay, I don't want his relationship with his wife. I don't want the way that he drinks his problems away.

50:35I don't want the fact that he seems to be using gambling as his get out of jail free card for all of the problems that he's got, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's not working. Your ideal, your value set is not working. The fruit is not there. And you look at that and go, okay, I don't want to do that. Correct. But one of the things that does give you is no airs or graces or expectations, no sense of entitlement. Precisely correct. There's zero entitlement. What myth of martyrdom are you going to have? You won't promise anything. And I think I wonder whether the anti -wealth movement in America is kind of like a bastard love child of the American dream from the 60s that if you give people blue sky vision, white picket fence, this is the sort of world you can get.

51:28It doesn't really matter where you started. You can ascend into the middle class and maybe even above. That's a big hope. And if you get to the stage where the world doesn't deliver the thing to you that you expected or that you hoped, even if by pretty much all metrics, Gen Z and millennials financially even adjusted for inflation are in a pretty good spot. intergenerational competition theory, they compare themselves to where their parents were at their same age, their ability to access things like housing and their level of comparison across the internet, even if they are wealthy, they don't feel that wealthy comparatively.

52:04And that means, well, maybe there's something wrong with the world. Maybe this is unfair in some sort of way. Maybe the system is broken. Maybe work actually isn't the solution to these problems. Maybe I shouldn't be resilient. Maybe the system is the issue as opposed to the meritocracy or my efforts that I've put in all the way that I've approached things. Yeah, I get the disenfranchised feel feeling. I understand that. I've been there myself. We were just talking about that. But the, you know, the mean old banks took Dave down, right? The mean old IRS took Dave down. The president changed the tax law and it affected the real estate business in the 80s.

52:41Big time shut down the entire SNL industry because of that. And so I was a victim. I was a victim. I was a victim of all these things. And yet I was the one signed up for the trip. No one made me sign those documents. No one made me sign those mortgages. No one made me do any of it. It was an act of my free stupid will. And so I had to kind of get through that. So if you're going to stand and scream at the machine, 40 years later, where are you? Still standing there, screaming at the machine, and you've had 40 years of a substandard life. So it just doesn't work for me. It's impractical to me.

53:28The philosophy, that philosophy is, I'm going to be a victim, I'm going to scream about this, I deserve better. the system is broken. You can yell about all that if you want, but you're not controlling any of the controllables. Your only option to have a higher quality life is to control the controllables. And are there, is there racism? Yes. Is there sexism? Yes. Are people less likely to believe a guy that is bald than a guy who has a great head of hair? Yes, there's baldism and so there's all kinds of things that can hold you back that are unfair, but I can't fix that Since I choose not to have a hair piece.

54:13I can't fix that So I've get to do it anyway. I can stand and yell about how unfair it is that people that you know The people in the radio business thought because I was broadcasting from Nashville I must not be wearing shoes and being a double -wide because they had ignorant stereotypes of Southern hillbillies, right? And then because they'd watched the Beverly hillbillies when they were a child and thought that was real. And so, you know, ignorance, ignorance is what all prejudice is based in. And so are those things real? Did I get, did I get, as I grew a 640 station network, did I get unfairly characterized as not being smart because I had a Southern accent.

54:54Oh, like every day. I can yell about that, but I don't think I'm going to change the stereotype of some Yankee and Cleveland Ohio. The only thing I can do is go, you know, outlast him and then he ends up working for me later. Getting onto the principles of business, how do you come to think about people building a business that they're going to love.

55:21Well, we started figuring out, as we looked at our history and the things that we had been through, was that there was actually a cadence. There was actually a rhythm to it. And there were some leveling up as we went along. And we started trying to quantify how that happened and what the levels were. And then we started looking at, okay, it's not just germane to the Ramsey story, the Ramsey solutions growing from a card table on my living room to a $300 million operation today. So it's not just remained to that, but if I'm talking to a heat and air guy that's got 40 trucks out there and he's got a successful heating and air business, which is a lot.

55:57We talk to that guy every day or I'm talking to a veterinarian that's got, you know, 30 employees in a huge, large and small animal operation doing very well financially or a dentist. These are our small business people that were coaching all the time. What are they seeing? What are we seeing as we walk with them over a decade? What is holding them back where are they? We started identifying and trying to put words to the framework that we were seeing naturally. It was a struggle. We wanted to do that because we had the experience with the Total Money Makeover book, which is like 12 million copies sold now, that the baby steps that we teach, the seven baby steps, the fact that we gave someone a clear path caused them to take action because they could see that it was if I do this Then I'm going to do this then I'm going to do this then I'm going to do this it gave them the next thing to do And then they would take action versus sitting and getting as we said earlier paralysis of the analysis So a clear path gives people hope if I know if I know what what roads I'm taking to get to Florida I can step down on the accelerator Because I've got a plan and I've got and I'm going to go there and I'm going to take that exit and then I'm gonna turn there and I've got a plan to get to Florida from where I am right now.

57:12And so I can go. I can go. I can go. But if I don't know where I'm going, it's a little hard to be enthusiastic about it. So that's what we, that's what started this whole thing. And then we built what we called the Entry Leadership System, which is just the clear path for small businesses. The first piece of it that the book is based on is the five stages of a business, a small business in particular. Again, we work with 98 % of our customers are 204 team members. So these are the quintessential small businesses. 54 % of the gross domestic product in America today is created by that group. Over half of the economy in America is small business.

57:50They are literally mathematically the backbone of the economy. And so what are they going through? Well, the first stage is we talked about it early in the conversation is the treadmill operator, the solo pranurant. I'm just gonna set up a table. I'm gonna turn on a computer. I'm gonna do whatever. I'm gonna swing a hammer. I'm gonna turn a wrench. I don't... whatever it is you're gonna do. But the treadmill operator is when you first get started. It's exciting because you're you're jazzed up, you're living the dream, and you're working your butt off, and it's starting to work, and it makes you smile, and I'm not working for the man.

58:22I got control of my destiny. It's just a blast. but you are running your legs off because you are the sole producer of revenue and you're the sole producer of the product And so you not only got to make the widget and deliver it But then you got to collect the money for making the widget and delivering it and if you don't come to work one day Nothing happens if you don't come to work for a week because your own vacation Revenue goes down because no one else is producing revenue. You're on a treadmill at this stage I would come home from work and flop down on the couch and my wife would go what'd you do today?

58:52and I have no idea, but I did a lot of it and exhausted. And so just run, run, run, run, run. I was working 16 hour days, man, getting this thing off the ground. And she had two little kids at home and this was three, four years after going broke. And so now she's a single mom basically. But we're gonna get financial peace by God. We're gonna get this going. And so, how do you level up out of that? Well, by time management, for one thing, you gotta start working on your business, is not just in your business. So you've got a time block, some of your weeks out, some of your hours out of the week and go, I've got to take care of accounting, I've got to take care of some SEO, I've got to take care of stuff that's not just directly related to production of revenue and collection of revenue.

59:35And this also when you hire your first people so that you've got someone else to lift the bales with you. You're not the only one lifting the bales. And so you get you get your first person, your second person in there, that kind of thing. So you're building delegation, you're starting to build time management and that levels you up and then you go up to Pathfinder we call it. Pathfinders, you know, typically the Pathfinders got eight or ten people, something like that. And everybody's working their butt off and they're going in about nice, like, Hurden cats. They're going about 92 directions.

1:00:06They'll try to nail Jello to a tree. We're all working hard. We're all having fun. It's great adventure. We're tired together. There's not a lot of planning, there's not a lot of role clarity. The communication is drive by communication. We just would say, hey, man, I'm out the door, go get something and we're just moving. And but you start making a little money and the whole thing's not on your back and you can start leveling up out of that by starting to put mission and vision in place, starting to get some role clarity. Look, this is your job. You gotta get that done for your work on this other thing.

1:00:39We gotta really start to have key result areas, some KPIs, you start measuring some things, and then you'll level up and you'll go to Trailblazer. Trailblazer is fun, it's the middle one. And this is when you actually think you're gonna make it. You know, we're getting there. And we actually think we're gonna bust through this thing and there's a lot happening, but there's almost no planning. A lot of it is, thank God it's Friday, oh God it's Monday. You know, and you just go, go, go, go, go again, but you don't have good systems, you don't have good processes. At this stage at Ramsey, we were killing so many trees because we had stuff on paper.

1:01:18We had 73 spreadsheets trying to time together to create a P &L, the accounting system sucked. And this is Dave Freakin' Ramsey and the accounting system sucked. I can't believe it, you know? But it was like, because we had all these different business units and they were all kind of running their own thing and then we're trying to get them all to talk to the mothership and it was awful. It was very disorganized, very chaotic. And so you start really putting in place something entrepreneur is hate, which is some governance. And you say, all right, this is the process. We're all going to adhere to that because otherwise we're going to kill each other.

1:01:48This is the system. And we're going to do away with the other systems. You can't have 73 types of software. This is the one we're using. And people get mad and they, oh, you're being coming corporate America now. No, I'm just trying to keep from going crazy. And, you know, and so, you know, and you just keep doing that stuff. And then you level up and hit the most the best one of all which is peak performer. This is the best of the five. Peak performer man, you got a well -oiled machine, you're bailing cash. You are making profit like you never thought you'd make in your life. Things are working.

1:02:21You start to look good. People start to want to interview you because you're so smart. You're able to attract talent because this thing's shiny. It's working. The system's the processes where you got good strategic thought. But when I was at the trailblazer stage, I couldn't spell strategic. Everything was tactical. But I hired some MBAs accidentally because I was trying to get some talent on the team and I don't have an MBA. But these guys, 100 % of the MBA programs teach strategic thought. And so these guys started telling me the importance of getting above the problem, seeing a 30 ,000 foot view, quit running into the wall, Dave.

1:02:56If you turn right and then turn left, you can walk around it and burn less calories. But you got to get above it to see the way around the wall. And so it's slowed down a little bit get above it and develop a good map to Florida, right? And so I always laugh and say these wonderful people stop taught me strategic thought and I taught them how to work So um, then we move you know, so then you get up in this per peak performer There's only one negative thing about peak performer is you can start to believe you're great and slow down and Quit iterating and quit breaking it before it's broken and those are huge mistakes And so the trick at peak performers shock the monkey baby.

1:03:34I mean, get the get the pedal prod out. Just turn the back turn the fruit basket over. Just have emergency meetings mess with people, mess with the thing. So we can not rest here. We're not as good as we look what we were saying earlier. We got big time momentum, but we're not as good as we look and we're not gonna fall for this lack of humility, this hubris that Jim Collins talks about and how the mighty fall. This is where they fall. And they get hubris in the peak performer. And if you can just stay dialed up there, a lot of companies spend, you know, two decades in the peak performer stage, never move out of it, and just bail money.

1:04:10The last stage, then, is the stage Ramsey's at, which is the legacy stage. And that's where you start to think about, okay, how's this go on generationally? What happens at the end of the founder's life, or the end of the founder's career? How are we going to exit? Are we selling out? Are we bringing in joint venture capital? We're going to do an IPO or we're going to hand this to the next generation of family. What are we doing? And you got to start planning and working on a good 15 years succession plan. It takes a good 15 years to build a solid and execute a good solid succession plan. People that do it in 15 days fail because you just toss the keys out as you grab your chest and fall back into the grave.

1:04:52And so that that doesn't work because the customers don't know what's going on. the vendors don't know what's going on. The team doesn't know what's going on. And the old man that started it is now 80 and there seems to be no plan. So it's hard to attract and keep talent who wants to work for that because when he dies it's gonna fold up like a Walmart tent. And so you know, we don't want to do this. And so we started working on our 16 years ago at Ramsey and we're deep into it. And it's troubling emotionally, but it's the noble and the right and the wise thing to do at the legacy stage. So those are the five stages in a quick rundown, a machine gun style.

1:05:29And that's what the book's about. And then there's six drivers that run you through those things. We talked about one of them a lot, the personal driver, the problem with my business is the guy in my mirror, the solution to my business is the guy in my mirror. That's the first of the six drivers. And so that's the framework that becomes the clear path that gives you hope. If you're running something that I can level up at each one of these things and it's going to get a little easier. and then something else is going to get a little harder because it's scale now. What are your principles and process for finding and hiring good stuff?

1:05:59It seems like that's very important to move people beyond each level in something that probably a lot of solo printers get stuck on. It's the number one pain point in small businesses. It's hiring and keeping and firing, hiring and keeping talent and firing because small business people love their people, their family. by the nature of the fact that it is a small business, I know them. They're not a social security number that I can cut to get stock price up. This is somebody I sit and have lunch with. I know their dog's name. I know their kid's name. You know, and so this is a process to lead these folks in that kind of a setting and to hire them and attract them.

1:06:42So what you've got to do is you're continually looking for not only people that talent. But people that are on fire for what you're doing. We call them crusaders at our place. That align with your core values. It's more important that they align with your core values and that they're enthusiastic than it is that they have talent. If you bring in a talented player onto a football team and he disrupts the locker room, he takes more from the team than he adds. He could be a hall of famer and still hurt the team more than he helps the team on the field. Because nobody wants the block for the guy. He's a butt.

1:07:26That's what happens in a business as well. So we made the mistake in business like we did with education. I'm saying, oh, if you have a piece of paper, that's your qualification. You've got the talent. You've got the certification. You've got the degree. Who cares if you're a jerk? Who cares if you sleep around on your wife? Who cares if you're doing cocaine as long as you do your job and you got the degree then then that's all we care about and that's a Huge mistake you cannot build a a quality culture a productive culture a safe place for people to work with those kinds of people in the room That you know every time we let crazy in our building accidentally we find out what door they use and we put a lock on it Because crazy will shut the flight freaking place down You burn all your calories dealing with their drawmines that are getting your work done and it's like God I wish I just hadn't had didn't have team members or wish I had just me be a lot easier Well, yeah, because sometimes I feel like I'm running a beauty parlor You know, it's just ridiculous and so but that's how small business people feel about it and how I have felt at times so we just became

1:08:32militant about not letting the wrong people in the building Yeah, you got to have talent, but that's secondary to you've got to be aligned. You got to be ready to go. And that's why I've got the quality of Gen Zers that I have. That's why I told you I got five or six hundred of them that are in their Gen Z and they're fabulous. They'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol. And don't you mess with Ramsey because they're part of Ramsey. They'll take you down. In other news, whoop is the best fitness tracker I've ever used. It's a 24 -7 health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep. your strain, your recovery, your stress and more to provide you with personalized insights that help you reach your goals, whether you want to put a little bit more effort in the gym, or encourage yourself to get some extra hours of sleep.

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1:09:49So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it, after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Join by going to the link in the description below or heading to join .woop .com slash modern wisdom. That's join .woop .com slash modern wisdom. How do you assess, how do you find assess and motivate people to have that level of passion and buy in? I don't motivate them. You can't motivate people. I hire motivated people. And so do you need to incentivize them appropriately? Yeah. And it's not necessarily money. It's culture. give them a place to work that's real, give them something to work on that is changing people's lives that does have meaning.

1:10:32Give them the ability to participate in meaning in that kind of stuff and plug into that and they'll tell you, they'll tell you up front. That's the other thing about Gen Z, they're just and millennials too, they're just brutally honest. They're like, you know, I'm just looking for a job. You don't fit in here. We don't have anybody works at J .O .B. Everybody here is on the team to put the ball in the zone, man. This is like a passionate thing and you're gonna stand out like a sore thumb if you're mailing it in around here. Does the importance of building culture in that sort of a way lend a Advantage to businesses like yours that have a Single spot where everybody works.

1:11:13I don't know whether you have anyone that does work remotely I imagine there must be some contractors somewhere that have to contribute to tech stuff and servers and things but But I imagine that that level of motivation, that level of culture building, that level of buy -in is significantly harder if you've got a team that's distributed around the world and never sees each other. I would suspect it is. I've never run anything like that. I don't know, but I think your observation is probably correct. It's one of the many reasons that we work at work. We don't have any team members that are on our payroll that work anywhere except in this building.

1:11:49And there's 1100 of them. But we do have some contractors and vendors of different kinds. Obviously, they don't work for me. They work for themselves somewhere. I don't know where they work. It's not my job to keep up with them. But the people inside the building, because then we create this, you know, so much is transferred with body language and tone, so much quality of communication is. And so when I'm sitting in a meeting, we can have a really constructive argument, a good fight. about a bad idea or a good idea. Now, and not kill the players. It's two guys in the huddle going, no, I don't run the ball over there.

1:12:30That they've been catching us every day over there. Let's go up the b -hold and it's to the a -hold. And so, you're just arguing about the play being called, not the competency or not the dignity or not the quality of the player. That's not, you don't fix that in the huddle. But we get in the room, we do everything so collaborative and we have a healthy level of conflict continuously around here. And the longer you've been here and the longer higher in leadership you are, the more dramatic some of that conflict is to wear an outsider visiting that room might be really confused as to what they were observing.

1:13:10They might not understand how much trust and love and respect is actually in that room that allows you to talk like that. But I mean, we get at it. But that's, it's all an act of love because we're all trying to get the same thing done. And you can argue with me and go, Hey, that's a stupid idea. Just like I can tell you that's the same thing. And go, but I'm not gonna call you stupid. That's different than saying a stupid idea. And navigating that through a Slack channel as opposed to posting to a different face to face. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Talking about money problems, we've touched tactically on a lot of different things today.

1:13:49Do you think that money problems are existential problems in disguise? Is there something deeper going on that it's an outgrowth of somebody's self -image, some spiritual issue that they've got going on, some existential problem? Or is it all just come down to tactics? No, it's 100 % what you're talking about. You're exactly right. There was a guy on Christian radio when I first started, named Larry Burkett, he's since passed away, but he used to say, money problems are not the problem. They're the symptom. There's something else going on. They're the symptom of some extreme thing going on or some minor thing going on.

1:14:28Could it be greed? That's the problem. And then that's gonna lead you to do what I did, build a house cards and it'll fall in on you. Could it be immaturity? Could it be I'm trying to prop up a self -image? Could it be a cocaine addiction? We've had the honor of walking with a whole lot of people into their sobriety over the years in a lot of different kinds of addictions. And 100 % of addicts have financial trouble, eventually. 100%, there's no exception. And so I just, it matter of time, it shows up in the money always. And so, but that's the extreme, right? But the, you know, the money problems could be from a marriage problem.

1:15:15But they're not, so the symptom is not really the fact that we can't get along and so we're doing revenge spending with our spouse or we're hiding stuff, financial infidelity. We got six credit cards. My husband doesn't know about it. My wife doesn't know about that kind of stuff. If all of that is symptomatic of a broken relationship, it's not the problem. It's the symptom. And so we all, that's one of the reasons the Ramsey show, uh, overall these 35 years from talk radio to podcast to YouTube now has been so popular. So compelling to watch and listen to it because you're not really getting the financial question.

1:15:51You're really getting these people's lives, which are compelling. I mean, it's like watching a train wreck. You know, and sometimes it's like watching a victory. A victory dance, they just won the Super Bowl, a debt -free scream, right? And so all of the, this is a personal visceral victory. And so that's what's compelling about the show. It's not that we showed somebody how to do a Roth IRA.

1:16:18It's, personal growth, masquerading is a way to make wealth. It's somebody changing their life. It's just that finances that particular current bug back for some other person. It might be their body weight for some other person. It might be their marital status for some other person. It might be their friendship circle or the place that they live or whatever. And this is the vehicle for personal growth. Disfunctional family origin, family origin where they grew up, they just grew up in a toxic situation raised by wolves and they don't know how to do it. And so, I understand. And, you know, I grew up in this neighborhood, it gave me that mindset up, I grew up in that neighborhood, it gave me that mindset.

1:16:56And so, you know, all of that is in the, in the gumbo. And you stir it, and you stir it, and you put the spices in, and you keep stirring, and you can make some good gumbo, but it takes a minute to get there. Dave, your analogies, the stuff of fucking legend, nailing gelo to a tree, it's like a Walmart tent that needs folding up. I just look, as a Brit, we just do not have this level of color when it comes to the analogies that we use. You've mentioned, I've heard you mentioned before, money's 80 % behavior and 20 % sort of head knowledge. Why then is it so hard for people to change their financial behavior even when they know what to do?

1:17:40If money is mostly behavior as opposed to knowledge, why do smart people go broke, why do people struggle to change if they've got the tactics in front of them? As soon as they believe that it's gonna work, they change. And as soon as they believe deeply, they change dramatically and scare all of their parents. Is that hope? believe as in I can do this thing as opposed to believe in the strategy. I think if I plant this corn this way, I've never done it before, I'm actually going to get corn. So I'm going to plant the corn. I think if I, okay, the debt snowball, I'm going to list my debt smallest to largest, pay minimum payments on everything, but the little one, attack the little one.

1:18:29It's not mathematically correct. Well, actually technically is, I'll tell you in a minute. But it's not, what about the highest interest rate? Can we pay that off first? No, you need a win. So you believe you need to get the locusts of control straight You need to get the sense of agency a sense of I can control the controllables I am actually driving this bus. I am not a victim of the culture I can actually control and I can actually pay this stupid car You pay off a low $500 credit card. You go, okay, that's one down Maybe let's try it again and then you pay off a $1500 and then boom you knock out a $3500 motorcycle payment and then you know and and then as the the more the proof is in there, the more they get fired up, the deeper they sacrifice, the faster they go.

1:19:10And we all do that. And probability of completion there is much higher than the probability of completion of paying off the highest interest rate for us, because it might take three years for you to get a win. And so, when you factor in probability of completion, that snowball is mathematically superior to doing it the other way. But nobody puts in probability completion in the mix. psychologically superior. And people actually do it. They don't do the other one. Look, I've had a number of conversations. Richard Dawkins was one of the people that I had this conversation with. And I tried to explain to him why trying to force people either out of faith or into whatever world view it is that he wanted through raw, what he would consider rationality, is fundamentally unpelling because what they're telling people to do is to deny the thing that's most real to them, which is story, narrative, persona, legend, archetype, and rely on the thing which is most unreal to them, which is statistic, probability.

1:20:22It's a, we have no sense of that. And I think that you have, I really appreciate the first time I learned about your death's noble. You're right. Mathematically in raw spreadsheet terms, mathematically suboptimal, but as soon as you fold the complexity of a human and our motivation system into it, it makes way more sense. And again, probability of completion. So as a result. And so that's what it is. That's why the seven baby steps. That's why the clear path. That's why we went back to that same motivation on the business outline we just did, was we're still trying to show, okay, I'm a treadmill operator.

1:21:00Now when I level up on my time management, I get my first team member, I get to move to the next level. Oh, this is working. This is working. I'm gonna work a system. I see a believable system, and I'm gonna plug into it. If you go to the gym and you run for two hours on a treadmill and you change your diet and eat sawdust and crappy food, crappy tasting food because it's healthy or whatever. And then you gain weight, you will quit. You would only do those punishing activities. If they, unless you're a masochist, you would only do punishing activities in order to win. No, discipline seems pleasant at the time, but it yields a harvest of righteousness.

1:21:47Yeah, things are going to be hard, but you can do hard things the hard way or hard things the easy way and Trying to let me choose your heart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he does he does among many other things What about people who sort of self sabotage their wealth once they achieve it? You know somebody's finally reached something approximating escape velocity and Stubbs comfortable what have you found from all of the people that you've spoken to your studies? Why do people end up tumbling back down? Most of the time it's because they believe wealth is morally reprehensible. It's a cognitive dissonance to engage in something you believe to be wrong.

1:22:30It's not sustainable. You won't continue, humans won't continually engage in things over a long period of time in things they morally believe to be wrong. Even if it's quote unquote profitable. And so if you have bought into the wealth is evil or the wealthier bad people or crooks or whatever and then you become one How do I how do I handle this dissonance in my brain this disconnect in my brain? Well, I have to self sabotage is what ends up happening and so and they'll even do stuff like You know sometimes I'll see wealthy people and we all know the names that say well, I'm not leaving my children any wealth Well, that's what that says is that I did something wrong and I wouldn't do that to my kids.

1:23:17Wealth is evil, so why would I put it with my children? And that's usually where that comes from. It's the same thing. It falls in that same bucket. And so I guess there could be other psychological things that we'd have to ask Deloney or somebody with a PhD in counseling. But in my mind, you know, pop psychology, there's probably a sense of I'm not worthy that It might be a secondary reason of, I don't feel like I earned this because everyone has a sense of a turtle and a fence post when you get there. If you see a turtle and a fence post, we know two things. One is a curious site and two is eating it by himself.

1:23:52And so you have that sense of, I didn't get here by myself and I must, you know, and so I owe some kind of debt to society and because I'm not personally confident or worthy. Now, if you get there with a healthy self image, you say, I had a lot of help. I had some good folks help me. I got a few breaks. I had God blessing me. I'm not completely responsible, but I'm also partially responsible because I'm actually the one that did this stuff. And so you don't take 100 % credit, but you don't try to cast off and take no credit. That's a good, healthy, mental state when you get there. And those people don't self -sabotage.

1:24:35But if you feel like you did something wrong or you feel like, like, uh, uh, I owe, uh, a debt back to society because the society gave this to me. I didn't do anything. I'm unworthy of this. Then you have to somehow disband of the thing. Is it interesting? We went from greed is good to wealth is bad in six circles. What a, what a knock. What do you think about how social media distorts understanding of wealth and success and what we should have by a certain age? It's a serious problem. In the old days, there was a book out called Afflew Inza and they could track the amount of television you watched, and there was the advertisements that you consumed.

1:25:22The more hours of television you watched, the more credit card debt you had, the more overspending you did. today you can take that with an exponential factor in the social media. Much more powerful. Yeah, it's much more powerful. It's much more the the influencer role, so to speak, is not as commercial. It's not as in your face. It's much more subtle and the influence that it has of people putting their highlight reels of their life on Instagram. No one puts crappy stuff about their life on Instagram, right? We always, and you know, real children don't look like those kids. I mean, really seriously.

1:26:01I mean, where did you get those stepper children? And my children were never that clean all at once. How did you pull that off? You know, you're looking at these pictures going, who are these people? And I mean, no one ever says, oh, my husband just got me a 1994 Honda accord and we're dead free, hashtag blessed. You know, no one does that, right? And so, um, but so it's all this highlight reel, it's not real. And it's interesting to me the word that we use for it is it's virtual, which literally means not real. And yet we treat it in our psyche as if it's real. And so then we get this idea that, oh, well, because of chip and Joanna, and everyone can fix a house up.

1:26:46No one, you hurt your hand with that hammer. Not everybody can fix a house up. You're gonna cut your finger off of that saw. Do not do that. So not everyone needs to be touching these power tools. And so, but it's a facade. I mean, it's not real. It's like walking through a Hollywood set and you walk through the front door of a house and there's nothing back there. It's not real. And that's the problem with it is it's peddling a lie. And then your psyche knows that, your intellect knows that, but your psyche buys it anyway. And then based on that, I hit, you know, put stuff in the cart and hit submit.

1:27:27Going back to some of the trends that we've seen, both on social media and also, I think, some of the anti -wealth or money, negative perspectives of sort of the modern world. The classic middle management position that takes up a big chunk of people who are helping, you know, some medium -sized business, the average American working and average job, do you think that that middle management position, the average one now, earns enough, is the cost of living crisis, spending crisis or an earning crisis? this? It's probably both, but the solution is to understand, when people look at that and frame something up the way we're talking about there, it's not an accurate portrayal of life because all we're doing is taking a snapshot in the moment.

1:28:22And if you would take a snapshot of me right before a file bankruptcy, right after a file bankruptcy, I mean, and said, okay, we're gonna analyze the economy based on the macro economy based on where Dave sits right now. I mean, he's a college graduate. He's a father of two. He's 28 years old. And look at where he is. That snapshot would give you zero hope. But snapshots aren't how life works. Life is a film strip. It's a series of snapshots strung together. And next frame, something's different. Better or worse. The next frame, something's different. better or worse the next frame and so the film keeps running and so that guy in middle management is not there for 40 years.

1:29:05He didn't get there and stay exactly in that place and never move. That average American doesn't stay there. They move around. I mean, every person now has 14 positions before or they retire. So he's not gonna be there. We know that. And here's the thing, I'll run some numbers sometimes. I'll say, okay, if you saved 15 % of your household income and you had an average household income of $70 ,000 and you run it out and you did that for 14, 15, 20 years, whatever you do, $7 million in your 401k. Okay, you just run the compound interest out on the average household income, save a 15 % of their income.

1:29:46It's easily north of $5 million. And I'm like, but that is based on the fact that over that 15 years ago, I never got a raise. So he started at average and for 15 years, never got a raise, which by definition is a loser. How do you start at average and not go up at all? You know, I mean, that by definition. So this is not how humans work. They go down. They go up. They go down. They go up and but there's an overall trajectory of up. Very few Americans in their career making less than they made at the beginning of their career. You take a 35 or a 40 year career path and you go, okay, in and out of jobs, in and out of careers, maybe change complete directions, but at the end, at the apex of my life when I'm at my maximum earning potential and am I making less than I did when I was 22 years old and I just got out of school.

1:30:38No, almost zero. You can't find them. I mean, now you could have the exception to be a medical problem, you could have all these other things. But I'm talking about just in general terms, that's a fairly easy set of assumptions. So, bottom line is if you're in your 20s and houses are too expensive because infrastructure is 6 % and your wages haven't kept up with what the Boomer curve was, which are all accurate mathematical statements. You'll be okay, because when you're 30, it's gonna be different. It's gonna be different, right? So be up or they'll be down? House prices will be up. Your income's gonna change.

1:31:12And I don't know what the average income's gonna change, but your income's gonna change. 100%. Your income's gonna change. And can you outpace, can you personally outpace the fact that we just haven't kept up? Well, I did and you did. So, and John Deloney did, and other people do, and we do it all the time. So go do that. That's your thing. Are you familiar with a guy called Gary Stevenson? It's Gary's economics on YouTube. I'm sorry. I don't keep up with things the way I shoot. I'm going to send it over once we're done. I would love for you to have a look at this guy. British guy, he was a trader.

1:31:54I want to say for Goldman, I can't remember where he was, but he was one of the top traders for a while at Goldman. And is now campaigning from a very aggressive, left -leaning perspective in the UK for super high taxes on high net worth individuals. And he's talking like 20 million to 50 million underbub. He's particularly trying to target billionaires, non -domy people that are able to come and not pay tax on their global stuff. But he is on fire in the UK. Every video that he puts up on his YouTube channel is a million to two million plays. is every debate that he does. He's on BBC channel falls newsnight.

1:32:38He's on BBC question time. And I would be very interested. I would be fascinated to try and work out a way to get you and him to have a sit down and have a discussion to see what America versus the UK because a lot of people in the UK now have this perspective. I think it's an outgrowth of pain. It's an outgrowth of expectations not necessarily being met. Cost of living is very bad there. Lots of unemployment, especially among people into the age of 25, which you may have seen. And then a very different sort of message coming from the other side of the pond. But I'll send you some stuff to have a look at, I think you'd be very fascinated to see what's going on in the UK at the moment.

1:33:16Sure. It sounds like a quintessential argument just between capitalism and socialism. I mean, John Maynard Keynes was British obviously, and Keynesian economics came in with FDR and was arguably, some people say one of the things that turned the America around out of the Great Depression was government spending and taxing the rich to do that. And so the Keynesian economic mentality has now invaded all of the American colleges as well. I was taught it as fact, as opposed to Adam Smith, free market capitalism as fact. But I had good critical thinking skills and so I've gone past that and I don't...

1:33:55John Maynard Keynes was a moron. And so I really have no use of that law. Okay, so you're saying that the British don't have an illustrious history of providing you with... Well, not that guy. I mean, I'm for all I know Adam Smith might have been in British. I don't know. But he probably was. But the father of capitalism. But it's not about Brits. It's not for me. I mean, I don't have a problem at all with that. But it's just a matter of, okay, do we believe that government run and government maintained lifestyles give us the answer? And the truth of the matter is that probably in America today, the little man, the guy starting from nothing, has a better chance of building wealth because of the freedoms and the ease of access to the markets, the ease of access to information.

1:34:50If he has the driver, she has drive, and has two brain cells to rub together, you probably have a better chance of becoming wealthy in America today starting from nothing that in any place at any time in history. And it wasn't because we took it from someone else and gave it to you. It's because you have access to go get it. And that's the difference. That's the difference in the mentality. but he sounds like, I don't know this guy at all, you're talking about so. I'd be interested to look at it, it'd be fun. Dave Ramsey, ladies and gentlemen, Dave, you're awesome. I knew that I was gonna enjoy today, but you exceeded my expectations.

1:35:25So, you too, brother, I've heard big things about you guys. You're blowing up, I'm so proud of y 'all. Anything we can do to help you let us know. Well, I think John has demanded that we do dinner at some point soon in Nashville. So perhaps I mean, it's only two hours from Austin. So I'll jump on a plane and I'll see you guys soon. I demand to be included. Uh -huh. New Buck, tell everyone where they can get your new buck. Oh, anywhere. It's build a business you love and you can get it at ramseysolutions .com, but it's in all the books, you know, Mamm's on wherever you want it, it's everywhere.

1:35:57Thank you. Dave, I really appreciate you. Thank you, Mamm's. There's a lot of fun. Thanks.