Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Dave Ramsey

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

NOT going to lie, this episode was a wee bit nerve racking to record!!! Despite the, ahem, LARGE number of requests we received for this topic (which would make you think it was ubiquitously reviled), the acolytes in this group ride HARD for their leader! Money and religion are the twin engines that make the world go ‘round, dear culties, and as such, they are the perfect mediums for sinister influence. This week’s subject has been ~blessing~ the airwaves and teaching your parents how to be debt free AND godly since the 1990s…the OG finance bro…the one and only… Dave Ramsey. This week, Amanda and Reese take a trepidatious foray into the chaotic, testosterone-filled, rapidly aging world of Ramsey Solutions with the help of seasoned Dave Ramsey experts (though, tbh, *survivors* is probably a more apt word) Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni from the Frugal Friends Podcast. Follow us on IG @soundslikeacultpod @amanda_montell @chelseaxcharles @reesaronii Watch the new season of Sounds Like A Cult on YouTube! To order Amanda's new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, click here. To subscribe to Amanda's new Magical Overthinkers podcast, click here :) Thank you to our sponsors!  Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, go to https://www.squarespace.com/CULT to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Earn points by paying rent right now when you go to joinbilt.com/CULT. Shop the SKIMS bras at SKIMS.com. After you place your order, select "Sounds Like A Cult" in the survey and select our show in the dropdown menu that follows.

Thank you to our sponsor Squarespace. Start with a free trial at squarespace.com. It's where dreams become websites. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to https://www.squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Listen up renters, you have got to check out builtwards. Earn points by paying rent right now when you go to joinbilt.com slash cult. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash cult. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you joinbilt.com slash cult to start earning points with your rent payments today. Culties with ta-tas. Do yourself a favor and check out Skims Bras. Shop Skims Bras at skims.com, now available in 62 sizes from 30A to 46H. If you haven't yet, be sure to let them know we sent you.

After you place your order, select podcast in the survey and select our show in the drop down menu that follows. The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. So there's really no option for you to get out of debt unless you do it in a way that puts you at the mercy of both Dave and God. You really are ashamed if you deviate from the steps. They certainly position themselves as the personal finance go-to for Christians. And once you kind of lock into that, the rhetoric and ideology around Ramsey Solutions is we are

the one-stop shop. There is no language whatsoever supporting find your own path. It's lock into Ramsey from the beginning till death and we have everything that you need. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Amanda Montell, author of the books Cultish and The Age of Magical Overthinking. And I'm Reese, Sounds Like a Cult's coordinator and today's co-host. Every week on this show you're going to hear about a different zeitgeist-y group that puts the cult in culture, from Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders to tradwives, to try and answer

the big question. This group sounds like a cult categories does it fall into? A live-your-life, a watcher-back, or a get-the-fuck-out? After all, not every modern-day culty-seeming group is created equal, and cultishness can't weasel its little way into your brain via a plethora of unexpected methods and in places where you might not think to look from seemingly harmless self-help circles to religious to good-to-be-true, get-out-of-debt, financial-freedom type gurus like the one that is our focus of today. We are talking about the cult of Dave Ramsey.

If you love Dave Ramsey, I hope you will hear us out. If you hate Dave Ramsey, I hope you will find our critiques skewering enough. If you've never heard of Dave Ramsey in your life, I hope that you come away from this episode with a better understanding of how the promises of Christianity and the promises of Christianity and the promises of financial liberation can coalesce in culty ways even in 21st century America,

especially in 21st century America. Oh God, I have been navigating a little bit of anxiety about today's episode. Yes and no, I did hear from our guests who you will meet in short that they once mentioned very briefly the subject of today's episode on their podcast Frugal Friends, like and subscribe, and following that they experienced the true wrath of his followers and accolades just based on that one little teeny tiny itty-titty-bitty critique. So I was like, alright, let's go for it.

Let's enter the lion's den. Hereon sounds like a cult. I guess I no longer feel that precious about our Apple podcast reviews. Go ahead and tank them. No matter what I do, people are just going to call me too giggly. So fuck it. Today we are talking about the cult of Dave Ramsey, who, Reese, you actually, as it turns out, had already heard of and been familiar with. I was alerted to this man's existence basically the moment that this show launched back in 2021 because people were instantly begging us to cover it.

That said, Reese, first off, could you tell us about your introduction to this cult leader of sorts? Tell us. My introduction to this man, as with many of the people I come to parasocially hate, is through a YouTube channel by the name of Fundy Fridays, which I highly recommend everybody go check out. Every week they do these really well-researched deep dives on different figureheads in the fundamentalist Christian sector. They did an episode on Dave Ramsey a year or two ago and I was like, oh, I think I've seen clips of this guy floating around the internet. It always just gives very old man yells at

cloud energy. Then the more I researched, the more I too became a little scared of what was to come post this upload. But I'm also a little bit excited. I can't say I'm not excited. I know Reese was like, well, just make adorable, highly shareable memes out of all the hate comments we received, which I thought was a resourceful idea. And with that, we would love to introduce today's hosts, the folks responsible for this pleasure and pain today. Everyone please welcome hosts of the Frugal Friends podcast, Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni. Hello. So great to be here.

Hello, we love to bring pain. So how great of us to be here. Jen and Jill, could you tell us a little bit about the both of you, your experiences with pleasure and pain, your experiences and prior knowledge of Dave Ramsey and why you suggested we put ourselves through this episode.

Well, okay, so I was the one that reached out to you, Amanda, because you were on our show and it was such a fantastic conversation and I love your books. And we have been hosting Frugal Friends for the last six years. And what started as a podcast about how to save money on all kinds of things over six and a half years really transformed

into how do we figure out what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. The way we got from point A to point Z was realizing that the stuff that we learned about personal finance at the very get-go was not the healthiest way to manage money. It was a way to manage money and it was a way to figure out how to spend money, how to earn money, all those things. But we just found that it left more scars than was necessary when we already all have so many scars around money. That's what Jill and I have been doing for the last six years. Kind of like almost everyone in personal finance, we started by reading the Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. We started by paying off debt. My husband and I paid off $78,000 of debt in two years.

But the funny thing is, so something Dave has on his show every day is these debt-free screams, right? But you have to fill out a form and agree that you followed a certain set of rules to accomplish that. And I would not have been able and was not able to do a debt-free scream on Dave Ramsey's show because I didn't pay off my debt the right way. We can get into that later, but that was the precipice for me to look for a different route. This can't

be the only way to do finances, to do money. I, Jill, began my journey into just understanding how to manage money with Dave Ramsey. I did the Financial Peace University, which they make you at one point, you usually do it in a group, you watch these videos together and then you discuss. And at one point, I think it's like module two,

everybody cuts up their credit cards. The moderator has a couple of scissors and everybody does this. If you choose not to, you are asked before the group to explain your reasonings why. At the time, I had a very beautiful Monet painting across my credit card and I just thought it was too pretty. But the group was not having it. I did not cut it up. Literally girl money. It does. And similar to Jen, I became debt free. It took me very long, however. It took

us six years to pay off $60,000 worth of debt. And we took on debt in that process, which similar to what Jen's describing would not qualify as what you're supposed to do when you are moving through debt freedom and achieving some of these different financial goals. I think recognizing I want more freedom and less shame and recognizing that that was a lot of the language that I received around this, but really trying to plow my own path with my personal finance and doing fine on the other side of it, by the way. I want to ask about why Dave Ramsey was like step one for you and like maybe hear a little bit about your background, your family, like what was going on there.

But first I want to offer some fast facts because there are, I assume, some people who've clicked onto this episode who've never heard this man's name in their life. And that reflects well on you. Let me explain. Dave Ramsey, personal finance plus religion, mentor and coach. This man has no real credentials, but he does have an empire He is the host of a radio show He operates all kinds of endeavors under an umbrella company called Ramsey solutions

He is the creator of the school that Jill here is a proud graduate of Financial Peace University. It's a nine week program. There's a workbook. There are prerecorded classes to handle money. God's way. So according to the religious news service, Dave's other workshops and seminars can run you anywhere from three grand to 10 K, which is ironic considering he's trying to teach you how to be debt free.

So my first question for the two of you, and feel free to just jump in however you know how to do this. My first question for you is, could you tell us a little bit about Dave Ramsey's background, his teaching methods, and what drew you to those? So I learned about Dave Ramsey in college when I was about to take out a lot of student loan debt and some friends gave me the CDs for my car to listen to Financial Peace University in my car. When I started, I didn't take the class with the big group and the card cutting, but I did listen to the CDs and read the book when my husband and I got engaged.

That was how I grew up in a first generation church home. It wasn't like a long history of being in the church. While there were a lot of people around us that subscribed to Dave Ramsey, my parents didn't really know who he was. So I never heard about him growing up even though he started to gain popularity in the 90s and the early 2000s is where things really took off where a lot of churches were hosting financial peace universities. And one time we taught financial peace university, but it was only as a way to correct the things that were in Financial Peace University.

I did not know this. I am learning new things. Yeah. Yes, we did. You wanted to rewrite your own like an addendum. I did. I wanted to add all the addendums that needed to be there, but we're not. It's giving like, here's the Bible, and now here's the Branch Davidians, and now here's Fruit of Friends. Yeah, yes. Dave did not co-sign that. There are actually so many subsets of the Dave Ramsey teachings now, and it's all under

this like, well, Dave's doing good work. He's helping a lot of people, but I do this. It's all very hush-hush though, because if you say that you're doing it any other way, just like Jill said, you have to explain yourself and then you're still not accepted. There's only one way to do it. That culture is promoted because he only promotes his stuff in churches. It's easy to get Christians on board because if you're okay with a God for one thing, you're kind of okay with a God for one thing, you're kind of okay

with a God for another thing. I still go to church, I'm still a Christian. I know that's very weird for somebody who grew up in church to say, but I just think it's easier to see the BS that's in some of these churches. I think I have a very sensitive BS meter just to begin with, but I can see it's just easier for some people who are accustomed to having a god to worship and everything is infallible right here to then translate that to also having one person you follow for money, one person you follow for wellness, and just being devotees of a person, even though that's

doctrinally unacceptable. For some reason, it's very easy to translate over. They certainly position themselves as the personal finance go-to for Christians. Once you lock into that, the rhetoric and ideology around Ramsey Solutions is we are the one-stop shop. There is no language whatsoever supporting find your own path. Eventually, you may want to incorporate other voices into your understanding of finances. It's lock into Ramsey from the beginning till death and we have everything that you need. Yeah. I think in some ways that's easy. We as people do just like that. You'll handhold me all the way through. I don't have to question this. What you're telling

me is going to lead me to XYZ financial freedom. It's going to be honoring God. The ways that I do this as well, done. I don't even need to look anywhere else. But I think because he had already been such a stalwart in the space, having written books in the 80s, and then he was one of the first really to publicly talk about personal finance and then in meshing himself with Christian culture, just continued to catapult this thing. And that was some of my introduction, not necessarily through a church, but just people in our community invited us to go to this class. Honestly, we were dirt poor at the time and they were offering free food. Every time you came, they fed you dinner.

That was great for me. I get my needs met and then maybe you're going to pressure me to cut up my credit card. Okay. I'm telling you, people underestimate the power of snacks. Just a little party vibe, like I live minutes from the Church of Scientology on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. They are always throwing barbecues, little carnivals, like Christmas cookie events.

It's just get people with the good time and the music and the food. Like this is a family event. This is cozy. This is unintimidating. And especially when this is a program that is endorsed by your church, endorsed by generations of Calvinism in the United States, centuries of the coalescence of heavenly blessings with monetary hashtag blessings.

And yes, like you've practiced that muscle of worshiping a single orator, whether it's your pastor or the word of God itself, like you have all of the makings of a follower in that sense, even if it's like technically not allowed. Like everything is pointing pointing to do this. I think as with most institutions, the moderators, I don't think their motives are malicious. I don't even think Dave Ramsey is malicious, but I do think that there's a lot of harm

that can be done through it. Of course, the moderators, the facilitators, I think a lot of harm that can be done through it. But of course, the moderators, the facilitators, I think a lot of it is they really have experienced some good things, right? Otherwise, why would this whole thing have grown and blown up so much? I think the holes to poke in it are some of the antiquated parts of the advice that's given, the inability to move about the cabin and have some independence in making these financial decisions as an individual. And yeah, just in general, never being able to question these teachings. It's why I feel a little nervous about this episode, honestly, because you push back against the Ramsey Empire and people come down hard on you. We have some fantastic emails and one-star reviews that we've received.

Like you said, just from trying to update the baby steps, the baby steps were first published in 1992 and have not changed since then. As a company, Ramsey Solutions is adamant that they have not changed and will not change. So just updating for inflation and for the technology, the internet was not available to the general public until 1993. So like the baby steps are older than the modern internet. And so just trying to update for some of those things. And I think try to push back at some of the shame based techniques that Dave uses, like

shaming somebody into changing their behavior is a way, it is a very efficient and effective way to get somebody to change their behavior. But again, it leaves a lot of scars that I experienced after I paid off debt and we're still encountering people who have experienced the scars that that type of motivation leads to. Yeah, that was definitely the largest thing that I encountered in my research for this episode was just how outdated all of these teachings are and how unapplicable they are to modern life, especially like the cutting up of the credit cards. The haggling with minimum wage employees is really what got me as a service worker.

That's something that I'm just like, I cannot do. And I was reading stories online of these people being like, yes, I've watched my father try to haggle with a Best Buy employee because Dave Ramsey told him it would work. As a GAP employee, I got haggled with like that. This was before I was following Dave and it wasn't until I learned about that, that I realized what had happened to me. You got Dave'd. I got Dave'd as an employee at The Gap.

Yes, but I think what is so smart about teaching specifically to a sect of people that belong to this church, there's already so many outdated ideals that you can just imprint your own genre of teaching onto. I saw so many of these like traditional Christian values that are like super antiquated that are just like Ramseisms and they really enforce a sense of control over the follower both from like a Ramsey point of view and from like a church point of view. Like the tithing being included in the personal budget that Dave provides for his students is something that I was like, oh, so there's really no option for you to get out of debt unless you do it in a way that puts you at the mercy of both Dave and God.

You really are ashamed if you deviate from the steps. And if you achieve, quote unquote, success in your personal finance, having not followed the steps, it is almost taken away from you. Well, you should have been able to buy a house in all cash. You should have paid off your debt before you started investing. It's like, okay, you're kind of a one-off example of that working, but it should have gone in this specific way. It's a one size fits all for everybody. And unfortunately, it's just not reality, like you're saying, Reese. I have friends who followed Ramsey, cut up the credit cards, never had student loan debt. So there was zero debt that they had ever interacted with, no way of building a credit score and yet they couldn't afford a $500,000 house out of pocket. But

that's what Ramsey would encourage you towards. He does talk about being able to kind of have a mortgage in 15 year and low interest. And so having a mortgage is okay, but that's assuming that people are coming to the table already having credit. But if you're following Ramsey from the start as a young person, just beginning, and you do exactly as he says, you will not have a credit score. You will not be able to buy a house with all these extra special underwriters that you have to find, especially, and sometimes it doesn't work out for people. Manual underwriting is difficult to find. And if you do find it, it is a higher interest rate than having a credit score and getting a traditional mortgage. So again, it prices people out of the market.

And they were bamboozled. They had no idea. It took them years longer than they expected to get into a house. Meanwhile, they were adopting a disabled child and it was not good for them. So there can be wounds inflicted in this. Andabbard And Dave has to know that he's doing this to people at this point. It becomes a chicken or the egg question where it's like, does it start from he believes these things and then preaches them, or is it that he believes people are gullible enough to believe them, and it's this self-fulfilling thing? I guess I'm wondering what you think his motives are at the end of the day.

What is his end goal here? We've talked about this a lot on our show. The baby steps were created between 1989 and 1992. About 34 years ago for all of our mathers out there. Yeah, again, before the modern iteration of the internet. When he created those baby steps, they were actually the best way to go. So a thousand dollar emergency fund was really reasonable using a fund manager to purchase mutual funds. Mutual funds were the pretty much best investments you could buy, much safer than buying individual stocks. In 1992, these baby steps were really a fantastic roadmap to financial freedom.

The thing is, is in 34 years, the internet has made purchasing index funds, which are low cost, much more accessible. You no longer have to pay a fee. But what Dave has done, and I've actually had like a Zoom call with somebody who used to work there, who used to sell ads for Ramsey's different radio shows, so all the personalities radio shows. So I got a behind the scenes of how profitable each arm of the business is. The most profitable arm of his business is his endorsed local provider program. I'm not a hundred percent sure that's still what it's called, but it is essentially a marketing arm that markets different investment advisors,

real estate agents, insurance providers, stuff like that. And so they pay him to advertise for them. And what people will do is people who've gone through Financial Peace University and are ready to start investing or buy a house, who do you go to for your financial advice? Duh, Dave Ramsey. Go to the website, fill out a questionnaire, and he will give you three to five different endorsed local providers for whatever you're looking for, real estate, investment, whatever. And all of the investment

advisors he recommends are commission-based salespeople. They're not fee-based fiduciaries who are legally obligated to work in your best interest. They are salespeople for investments. So yes, they're selling mutual funds, but they're selling very expensive mutual funds. In 92, paying 1% to somebody to manage your investments wasn't a lot. Today, you can buy investments for 0.02% and they track the market. And it's well known after hundreds of studies that actively manage funds, very rarely beat the market. And when they do, when you add that 1% rate,

it's not enough to compensate. But Dave's math is you'll make 12% on your investments when you work with one of my people, which is just widely criticized by anyone and everyone because the S&P 500 has returned 10% over the last 30 years, 7% with inflation. 12% was a small, probably figured it out in 1992 and just kept with that number. So yeah, he's not going to change the baby steps because they lead to the most profitable arm of his business. I have to ask though, it's so upside down and backwards from my perspective because

I'm like, when I see thriving businesses in America, something that differentiates them is that they're like incredibly nimble. They're reading the culture, like they're reading the market and they're adapting and that is what allows their market cap to skyrocket and for them to claim so much of the market and whatever. But Dave Ramsey is like doing this opposite thing. He's like digging in his heels to this ancient idea about money that like, yeah, maybe started out as decent enough advice and is now outmoded and increasingly, and this is one of the cultiest things that I'm noticing thus far, increasingly fixated on obedience. And like, perhaps there's a world in which updating his business would cause it to actually improve.

But I wonder if his resistance to doing that in combination with this like obsession with obedience and doing all the steps exactly as they're meant to. I wonder if all of this has to do with the like fundamentalist foundation beneath all of this. Like, no one's updated the Bible. I think that's it. I truly do. And it's the same with the company culture as well. It's a very relational-based culture within. So really, from what I have heard, promotions and advancement, it's a very top-heavy culture.

You don't question the people above you, and your best chance at advancement is becoming buddies with the people above you. And so that's just hearsay, that's what I've heard, but that's very similar to a culture of what you're describing. And I think, again, because it's so enmeshed with Christian culture, people in that environment are drawn to the tried and trues, these anchors you can hold onto and not question and not need to. Yeah, there's obedience certainly involved in it, but also just show me the path and

I want to walk in that path and tell me it'll go good for me and I want it to go good for me. I think this whole language around tough love and you can do it if you work hard enough. And some of these are generational pieces, right? We've got the boomer generation with some of this ideology already. He is of the boomer generation. And those who latch on to that type of ideology are going to find a wonderful land here of, here's the hard truth. I'm going to give you the tough love and pick yourselves up by the bootstraps and do this, this and that and you can't go wrong. And

I think that the big pushback here is life doesn't work like that at least anymore. It is not that way. It's not just if you do enough, if you are enough, if you shame yourself enough, if you do these exact things, it's going to go this exact way. It just doesn't. Life is far too nuanced. Humans are far too intricate and dynamic that we can't rely upon. I can blindly do this one thing and it's going to go exactly how I want it to go. But people want that. It's easier. And I think when you feel as though someone's telling me the hard truths, I think sometimes we can equate difficulty with it being right, especially within the Christian culture. If it's hard, it's right. If it's difficult, you're doing right. That complexity bias.

Yeah. You are being upright and righteous the more that you sacrifice and suffer. There is a lot of that here. He will encourage you beans and rice gazelle like intensity towards your debt. That rhetoric is present in so many culty corners of American culture. Like you will see that exact same rhetoric hanging on a poster in a CrossFit box. You will see that exact same rhetoric in certain diet programs. I will never get over the Christian undertones and overtones when I go into the frozen section of a grocery store and see a thing of frozen mac and cheese that says guilt free or sinless or something

because it's like 2% fat or whatever. I'm just like, we grow up in this culture where we think, I think this is like a platitude that was in the movie Love Lies Bleeding. Pain is weakness leaving your body. We have this like self-flagellating attitude toward labor and reward that is like so American Protestant capitalist. And now, a quick word from our Cult Followed sponsors who make the show possible. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is responsible for soundslikeacult.com. It was the natural choice because Squarespace is a household name.

It is an all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs, artists, podcasters, hello, to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it super easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place on your terms. I have found Squarespace super easy to use, super easy to update. Check out some of the updates on soundslikeacult.com. And what helps make it easy are a few core features

like the Squarespace asset library where you can upload, organize, and access all your content from one place. They also have these flexible website templates and they have designs for every category and use case and then customize your look, update it, add features to fill your unique needs. You can even host videos on there.

Use their video collection to organize your video library and showcase your content on beautiful video pages. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to https://www.squarespace.com slash cult to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, real talk. I am a renter. I know many of those listening to this podcast are also renters and we've all been there feeling like we are just lighting our money on fire with those rent checks.

But here's the deal. Built Rewards has figured out how to make paying rent more rewarding. So you can say goodbye to those horrible feelings of frustration and hello to BILT Rewards. BILT is breaking ground as a neighborhood rewards program that hooks you up with points on your rent. Every month you pay your rent and you just watch the BILT Rewards roll in. I have found in my personal experience that BILT is super easy to use. I'm technologically not the savviest and it was super easy for me to figure out the built website

to start racking up points, which you can use in so many different ways. You can put your points toward a flight or a hotel stay built partners with over 500 airlines and 700,000 plus hotels and properties, which is cool because I love to travel and this is a way to kind of like hack your rent payments to help you do more of what you love. Earn points by paying rent right now when you go to joinbuilt.com

slash cult. That's J O I N B I L T dot com slash cult. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you joinbuilt.com slash cult to start earning points with your rent payments today. Oh culties, I have a personal confession to make. I went a good 10 years without wearing an underwire bra. Why would I, right? They are so uncomfortable. I was like, an underwire bra feels like a straight jacket without any of the mental health benefits. I'm kidding. Anyway, then I tried Skim's bras. This is not a joke. This is not a bit. These are the only bras that I wear. I'm wearing a Skim's bra right now. This is not a joke, this is not a bit. These are the only bras that I wear. I'm wearing a skims bra right now. They are not only comfortable, but they look so good.

Let me tell you about one of these bras that I like. I have a smaller chest, okay? And I was looking for a bra that would give me a little lift without sacrificing the comfort of a bralette, which is why I fell in love with the Skims Weightless Scoop Bra. It's perfect. It has a kind of mesh material that makes it feel like you're wearing nothing at all, but it also offers amazing support, and I need that support.

We all need that support emotionally, physically. Skims can do so much. Shop Skims bras at skims.com, now available in 62 sizes, from 38 to 46H. If you haven't yet, be sure to let them know we sent you. After you place your order, select podcast in the survey and select our show in the drop down menu that follows. I am desperate to talk about what Dave Ramsey's flock says about him as a demagogue.

But first, Reese, could you explain a little bit more of Dave Ramsey's background because we were mentioning, you know, he's of the boomer generation. He really appeals to like a certain demographic. And I want to talk a little bit about where he comes from to provide context for that. Yes. So, and as earlier, you were talking about his need for just this control. That could only come from someone who started selling real estate and then fell down an MLM pipeline and then eventually ended up at like financial religious dictator. Like it all makes too much sense. So Dave Ramsey's got his start selling real

estate, like his parents who gave him very many benefits and a very nice leg to stand on in the real estate world until that all got severed because whatever legal loophole he was exploiting got cut or I don't know, however one would, I guess he would close a loophole. And this famously, as Dave likes to say, made him bankrupt and he became super obsessed with this concept of debt and I would bet it has yada yada ego, yada yada male, yada yada shame, all of that. That all translates into I need to make debt the enemy and destroy it and all of that. So of course this leads into an MLM because where else do you go when you want financial freedom and what do you get when you join an MLM? You get Jesus! How convenient! He always is there.

Not always, but most of the time. Dave Ramsey likes to tell the story that someone at an MLM convention of some kind told him that you will never be successful if you don't know God. I feel that was probably more of a like, in your money-making endeavors, make sure to be ethical. Christ-like values is probably the way that person intended that statement. But Dave Ramsey took that to mean, okay, I need to exploit the religious. Then he was off to the races.

He founded the financial coaching company Lampeau. This has now been rebranded to become Ramsey Solutions. Yeah. He does use the real estate thing to really promote real estate, but buying real estate in cash, which like what Jill said, people can't really afford to do. A lot of his wealth and his success is because of his real estate. He has a lot of real estate in the Nashville area, almost to the point where I wonder if that's more profitable to him than Ramsey Solutions. I'm sure it's not, but it is like so much. So speaking of Tennessee, he now has a 47 acre campus for business operations in Tennessee. He was able to build this in part because of his 1992 debut book, Financial Peace.

From there, accompanying tours were launched, which sparked his Ramsey Solutions empire that we've been discussing, which is contingent on the five biblical principles of wealth. I will not go into each one. This year, he also became a rotating host on the Nashville radio show, The Money Game, resulting in Dave getting his own three hour financial advice show, The Ramsay Show. Dave is exceptional at marketing. I think the whole culture, not just Ramsay though, this isn't, I don't want to bash one person because I think that's too often done. There's already enough influencers now that have built their platforms on just singularly bashing

Dave Ramsey and even influencers now who are trying to replicate him. So that's never something that we want to do, but we just want to shed light on how he's doing what he's doing. Yes. What systems have paved the way for him. We just want to shed light on how he's doing what he's doing. Yes, what systems have paved the way for him. We want to just expose realities, not hearsay or opinions, because the realities speak for themselves. Give permission to make your own decisions. I think that's the thing that seems the most dangerous to me is the way that shame can

set in around money if you continue to be involved in this system for decades and just the inability or lack of permission that you're going to find to pave your own path, identify what's going to be the most beneficial financial decision for you to allow other voices in at the table. We love the concept. It's a Japanese concept, shuhari, which stands for follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules. And I think, again, for both Jen and I, we followed Dave Ramsey's rules. We followed Ramsey's solutions rules for a time. It helped a bit. We had to shed some of that shame around some of our money decisions

and choices that was embedded as a result of kind of going through these courses. But find the permission to then break the rules, transcend the rules, find another way of doing things. Yeah. And I think what makes something a cult is that you are required to be obedient to those beginning rules. You're not allowed to break any rules. You can only do the shoe part. You can't do the ha-ree. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And another element of cultish influence,

cultish affiliation is this intense us versus them division. And it sounds like in this group, you have to obey every step to a T or you are an outsider, you are a heathen, you've disappointed this authority figure. And we also on the show talk about how like, you know, you do not have to be this sort of desperate brainwashed stereotype to get enmeshed in a group like this, because really above all else, the thing that makes someone vulnerable to a cult is optimism. You know, if you are financially struggling and don't think there's any hope, you're not

going to get involved with Dave Ramsey. But if you are well connected in your church community and have a little bit of money to spare on courses and, you know, have this myth of meritocracy baked into you as I do, as so many of us do, whether we're Christians or not, those things are gonna set you up for Dave Ramsey fanaticism. Even though you're right, he is not the only person building a platform on like problematic money ideologies. He is like the God above all else in this community.

And I also think something that makes us so vulnerable to folks like him, whether it's Dave Ramsey or someone else, someone more secular, is just like the disgraceful financial literacy in this country. I mean, this is what your podcast is all about. Yeah, if someone's promising to teach you about money and to teach you how to make America work for you, what knowledge do we learn in school? What reference point do we even have? Not much, you know? Yeah, it's nice to be able to listen to Dave Ramsey

tell you that if you're in debt, while right now that means it's your fault and it's a moral failure, you being bad because of your debt implies that you can be good if you fix it. And with no other education about any of the societal factors at place that put people into poverty, it instills this false hope within people that if they can only listen to Dave and do it Dave's way, they'll get everything

they've hoped. It's the same thinking as an MLM. And I think the religion helps to create this narrative specifically that it's you, not the system if it doesn't work for you. Yeah. And I think Dave is an entertainer above all else. And even if we did have financial education in schools, nobody is incentivized to really pay attention unless it's the how to make money part. Nobody is incentivized as a teenager to listen about like investing or spending money or taxes or any of that. You really do have to be at a certain like rock bottom point to listen.

And Dave brings that with so much energy that it's just like, it's magnetic to a lot of people and he offers the hope. So I really do think that's a part of why he's been so successful is because he is a really good entertainer. Like, Jill and I have actually both met him. We've been invited to his campus in Franklin, Tennessee. Like, we've been there, we've met him, and he's not the shaming, like, calling you stupid, yelling at you person off of the air.

He's quiet, he's kind. I've been to a lot of parties at financial conferences. I've been to a lot. I've never been to a better party than the Ramsey Solutions party. It was. I did smoke a cigar and have some whiskey on Dave's porch. He let people smoke cigars in his private office. Anybody, not weird, but had the great whiskeys, great hors d'oeuvres, the nicest people. He's just showman. He knows how to do it. He's just very skilled and he's never going to be the person that's going to be brought down by an allegation of sexual harassment or something like that.

Famously, when you take a picture with him, he won't touch you. He puts his hands in his pockets. He said that he's scared into acting right because he knows if one false move, everybody's watching him and everything's going to go down. Which doesn't bear for his employees who- Means he surrounds himself by men. Yeah, which that's a big reason why he surrounds himself with a lot of men. But if you're a dude and I'm hiring you, you have to bring your spouse on the interview so I can make sure that not only you but also your spouse will be loyal to me.

That's something that I found really interesting, were the spousal interviews. Anywho, in all of this chaos that is his persona, and it seems like he is very in a sort of Gordon Ramsay way, if you can allow yourself to be sort of this heel character, this someone that already positions themselves as someone who's not going to be nice, but that justifies itself with good advice. Or people say, well, yes, Dave Ramsey sucks and is awful, but he got me out of debt, or but he saved all of these people. Do you think any of this is merited? Like, do you think his good effects outweigh his negative? Is there anything to it? I'd say, what if we could do it without the butt stuff? You know?

Yeah. I think there's enough voices out there where you don't have to give the butt. That being said, I think it has helped a lot of people. I just think the ability to move on from it. I think getting locked in this is the one-stop shop is what's dangerous. I think everyone's going to have their own opinion on that. Those who are a little bit more militaristic minded might not have the same perspective on guilt and shame as somebody who is trying to remove themselves from that sort of narrative self-talk environment. From my perspective, I think that you can have the messaging and it not be portrayed

in this exact way and still have the results. If it's not necessary, then is it worth it? I would probably say I don't think so, but again, we're talking decades. Ramsey Solutions and his team, they've been doing this for decades and have helped a lot of people. At various times, the advice might have been better during a certain decade than during another. I think where we sit currently, for where we sit currently, I don't think it's the

best option out there. Yeah. And we say a lot, like Ramsey is very much the ends justify the means. That is very much the entire ethos of the advice that he gives. And for us, the ends never justify the means. The ends are deaf, right? The ends never justify the means because the means are all we have. And so let's focus on what we are doing now, how that will affect us and others in the future instead of just looking to the end. Because that's what I did when I was paying off debt. The ends always justified the means. And then I paid off my debt and it changed nothing about how I feel about money. It only left me with more guilt for spending money and feeling almost pointless because I had achieved the only goal in quotations that mattered and

I didn't know what to do next. I didn't have purpose. Let's focus on our values first, our purpose first, and then we make the spending and the earning and the debt payoff revolve around that. It can go up and down in certain seasons, but we are people first, number second, if you're even going to put it that high. Having the freedom to think like that is, I think, something that baby steps really lack and that we're trying to get into more people's heads. Hopefully, if somebody is drawn to this podcast simply because of the name on it, that's what we're trying to do. Now, something I continue to get distracted by throughout this whole conversation is the fact that we are still using some of Dave Ramsey's

coined terminology. So, we are still humoring the use of this term baby steps and baby steppers. I'm on baby step two. And you sent along some of the other culty language that he created and has propagated, including phrases like live like no one else. So later you can live and give like no one else. And so he has all of these like catchy platitudes and thought terminating cliches and buzzwords and such. And it's so clever because, you know, as all effective cult leaders have done, you have to coin terminology like this to create that sense of culture, that solidarity, that us versus them.

And the culty language is like the first thing you adopt because it's invisible, it's organic, it's seemingly commitment-free. And it's also, as we're all demonstrating right now, the last thing you let go. Like it really starts to shape your worldview. These baby steps are now a real realized phenomenon because Dave Ramsey named them.

And that is on linguistic performativity. Anyway, my favorite Ramseyism is actually this co-opted Bible verse that he loves to say all the time. And it's the Proverbs 22, seven. I think it is the rich rule over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender, which brings us all the way back to this like two circles becoming one circle Venn diagram of money and faith. And along with that is that so many of these

ideas that he teaches, like I was saying earlier, center around this complementarianism as opposed to an egalitarianism. So it's this family unit and the spousal interviews contribute to that too. Anything outside of Dave Ramsey's ideals for what you should do with your money or what you should do with your family are invalid. And all of this religious guilt he can employ to make people feel worse about their finances, like something I noticed that he was saying was that by putting yourself in debt,

you're squandering God's gift. So now you not only have an obligation to yourself and to Dave to be debt-free, but also to God. He clearly took a large page out of the MLM book because all of this rhetoric is canonical to the multi-level marketing industry. Could I ask us to transition to talk about his followers? Because I feel like we've been building up to this. It's all just been foreplay. So one of the most noteworthy parts of the email that you sent being like, I would love to do a Sounds Like a Cult episode on the

Cult of Dave Ramsey, was how terrifying and sort of doxy his followers can be. Obviously, a quote unquote cult leaders following and their attitude and their behaviors really reflect something about the authority figure. It's why Elon Musk's stans are the most annoying people alive. You know, like Jared Leto fans have a certain vibe, Goop followers have a certain vibe. Could you characterize the most extreme Dave Ramsey acolytes and talk about your experience with his supporters versus those hardcore haters that you hinted at who've built a whole career on critiquing him? Yeah. So I will say my most recent experience. so I am in the Dave Ramsey Baby Steppers group on Facebook just because I like to keep a pulse on what's going on.

Not anymore. They're going to kick you out. They're going to find you. They are going to find me. Well, I don't participate except for this one day and it was very neutral. So on the day our book, By What You Love Without Going Broke, became available for pre-order, I saw a post in my newsfeed on Facebook of a person asking for more book recommendations on personal finance that were aligned with the baby steps that weren't totally

against it. People were giving different book recommendations. One of the moderators, all she said was, total money makeover the book that this whole group is based on. Essentially like, this is the Bible, why do you need other books? But other people were giving great recommendations that were in line. They were not against what he was saying. I commented, I had to. I was like, I don't think it's an accident. I saw this today. We just wrote this book on values-based spending.

Check it out. It may be of interest. Immediately, there's a reply on the comment and I was like, oh no, here it goes. But it's somebody saying, oh my gosh, Jen, I love Frugal Friends podcast. And I was like, oh my gosh, cool. Okay. Maybe they'll keep the comment up for a little longer. So I go back later in the day and the entire thread has been deleted.

Not my comment, the entire request has been just deleted. So my recommendation, everybody else's book recommendation deleted. And so I think that's the extreme end of his followers is that- Information control. Yes. We've gotten just some of the best one star reviews and emails. If you're listening to this, you're going to need to leave five star reviews for this podcast and frugal friends.

Just don't offer that. Yes, please do. Please. Yes. We got all of these reviews and reading through them, it's truly... Will you read some, Reese? Yes, please. Let me set it up. This happened in response to, we did one episode called, Should You Still Be Following the Baby Steps? It was one of our top most listened to episodes

because it had the Ramsey name in it. Lovers or haters of it are going to come listen to episodes because it had the Ramsey name in it and so lovers or haters of it are gonna come listen to it. They came flocking and similar to how we're talking now, we're not gonna disparage this person but we are going to encourage people to use their brains, think critically, to push back against guilt and shame terminology and systems and identify a pathway that works, recognizing the facts of the way that Ramsey Solutions runs their businesses might not be most beneficial financial advice for most people. It inflamed people.

These are some of the reviews we got out of that one episode. For every one star review and every bad email, we got like five others that were thanking us for not being an extreme hater, but giving a level headed review. And I will say there was one minor slip up where we might have called him an old white guy. I did that. And that particularly was inflammatory. You're going to hear that in these reviews.

Is it a slip up if it's true? That was it. That was, he's an old. Wait, what's wrong with that? That's like factual. You tell me. I don't want to say. It was inflammatory.

I would love to be an old white guy. It's the best compliment you can get. You're in such a good position. That was the only thing that they could like hang on to. I'm seeing that, yeah. We're getting a good show for women in beta males, not the show for me. Seriously, an old white man, OMG.

Why can't we even listen to a finance podcast without having to subjected to this kind of crap? Okay, then listen to every other financial podcast run by a white man, there's so many of them. Yeah. I think you can wear all of these with a badge of honor. I mean, it could be so much worse in the reviews. Okay, we're going to talk about a couple more things and then we're going to play a game. We are. So Jill, you had mentioned that what you had said in your episode about Dave Ramsey initially was that this just might not be the best like financial method for everybody and that got me thinking about what like the financial

well-being of his employees because if he has all of these super toxic ideals around money for people who aren't on his payroll that does not bode well for the people that are and of course lo, lo and behold, we were correct. So you sent us some criticisms from Glassdoor Reviews saying things like relationships matter more than the work, leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment's notice with something else I saw online. And that led me to all of Dave Ramsey's lawsuits. He gets sued kind of a lot. One of the biggest

lawsuits that he has been involved in is this timeshare exit contract. Yeah, I was wondering if you would tell us what you knew about that. I remember listening to, when I was listening to the Ramsey show in 2015, 2016, all I would hear ads every day, every hour for, timeshare exit team. Timeshares are a waste of money. Get out of your timeshare. Call timeshare exit team. Well, it turns out they were accepting money to get people out of their timeshares without actually getting them out of their timeshares. So they are no longer around. They shuttered in 2022 after they were convicted and had

to pay back all this money to people who they were never able to get out of their timeshares. And Dave really stood by his decision to take millions of dollars from this company. So there you have it. Wow. I wonder so much, but as I've predicted, the more and more I learn about him and his acolytes and his platform, the more self-censored I become. I say that and yet I want to share a couple more of his indiscretions with regard to his employees before we do indeed play our game. So according to a battery of sources from Yahoo Finance to Newsweek. Dave has been embroiled in a few scandals with regard to his business leadership.

He has allegedly fired an employee for having premarital sex. He has allegedly fired an employee for being concerned about COVID. Allegedly, allegedly, he has threatened to find and fire another employee who made an OSHA complaint against Ramsey and allegedly, allegedly, allegedly fired an employee for pro lockdown comments made on Facebook by his wife. There's also a quote from the religion news service. Ramsey solutions offered $18,000 in severance provided that this employee and his wife would sign an NDA and agree never

to make negative comments about Ramsey. So obviously like that sense of control and obedience and like propaganda turned PR is found in every tiny pocket of his business, which, you know, makes it sound like a cult. And with that, now that we've explored, I think, the full range of his ideology, some of the worst case scenarios, how Dave Ramsey is empowered by certain, you know, other problematic systems in this country, we would love to lighten the mood by playing a classic sounds like a cult game called culty quotes. This is how it works. We're going to read you a list of quotes, catchy aphorisms, little cliches you can write on your wall. And you're going to have to guess whether each one was said by Dave Ramsey or another notorious cult leader from history.

Are you ready? Let's do it. Quote number one, most people think small because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage. I don't feel like that's Dave. That doesn't feel Dave to me. What indicates that to you?

It's not strong enough. It's not religious enough. It's too self-focused. It's not embedded enough in other religious language. So funny. This is the forensic linguistics that we love. You should be so proud of yourself because that is a quote from the one, the only Donald J. Trump.

Oh, okay. I should have said it sounds more like Trump. You're like, it's too self-focused. That quote, I wonder how old it is because it's like- It's from his book. I don't think he wrote it. Oh, I was going to say like, it's giving ghost written cause it makes sense.

Quote number two, if you really think the people here are evil, bad people, and you think that you can affect change by reaching outside of here, you are wrong and you are not welcome. That doesn't feel Dave to me either. No, it doesn't. I don't think that he'd be so overt like that. It's a little too obvious and he's very good at giving the subversive.

I don't know. Subversive manipulation. Yeah, I don't think so. That was Ramsey himself, my friends. Whoa. That was him on COVID, I think. So the times were spicy. The times were a little spicy, yeah.

So he has gotten progressively worse since 2016, but I think 2020 is when he really started to like stop caring. And you know, we've stopped listening, so I guess we don't know how they're seeing it. Right, yeah, I stopped listening in 2017. I wonder how his bottom line is. Like I would love for the Wall Street Journal to do a rise and fall

of Dave Ramsey video. If it were 12 minutes long, I would watch it. Yeah, he's having a hard time transitioning the company to his personalities from what I have heard. The retirement plan isn't going as expected. Good. All right, a couple more quotes for you. I'm so tired of being falsely accused of being a jerk when all I'm doing is trying to help

people stay in line. That one could be after the last one. I'm like, yeah, that one really could be. I'm going to go with yeah. What do I have to lose? Right? I'm not, I'm not working for money right now. Right?

She didn't put up any of her money. Did she? Don't make me go in depth for this. Oh, we should start offering a little prize. We really should. We should start offering a little prize. We should put like a sticker. If we were playing for a prize, you would have won because that was indeed

Randy on premarital sex and firing his employees for premarital sex. That was his defense of that decision. Yikes. Amanda, our last quote, take us home. Okay, here it goes. Kids are essentially immune to coronavirus. Oh, him and Donald Trump and Joe Rogan and they all said this. I've had seizures in 2020 from stress, so I tried to stay away from the news.

I mean, yes. I stopped watching everything. He said that along with everybody else he lives and works with. I'm gonna go with yes. Okay, I'll go with Jill. Yeah, I mean, you're probably right, but this particular quote was grabbed from Elon. Okay, yeah.

Wow, he has a lot of kids. So he has more than Dave Ramsey. So many, he's basically got like a litter of kittens. He's just like, well, two, one or two are gonna be weak and they're gonna die off. And so like you have to have 17 children and they all have to have exclamation points in their names. I have two children and both of them have had COVID

several times, so. Yeah, that sounds like a fact check, Elon. Incredible. Thank you both so much for guesting bravely on this episode of Sounds Like a Cult. If folks wanna keep up with you and your cult of sorts, where can they find you both? This was lovely.

And if they loved this conversation, you can keep listening. You can find us at Prickle Friends podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. And we wrote a book, Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, available for pre-order by what you love book.com. Yeah. If you want to learn how to spend money without guilt and shame, but also without going broke, this is the book for you to learn the skill of spending, finding your higher values and saying no to the things that are outside of your values, the impulse spending, manipulative

marketing, all of that. Amazing. Thank you so much. So Reese, out of our three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, and get the fuck out. Which do you think the cult of Dave Ramsey falls into? I personally will be getting the fuck out of debt, but not via Dave Ramsey's methods, that's for sure. Yeah, I, ugh, I just, if this like self-help financial freedom program is causing people

to be so dogmatic and so high temperature and fanatical that like reasonable critiques, and I don't even count this as a reasonable critique. We're calling him a cult. I mean, we also call Trader Joe's and Gwyneth Paltrow a cult, so like everyone can come out. Highbrow cultural criticism.

Yeah, like this is cheeky cultural criticism that like if you're not threatened by it, you can have a laugh and be on board. Oh, for sure. As I have literally seen, because when we covered the cult of Peloton, Peloton instructors were excited. It was smart for them not to get upset.

Because you should be proud if you're in a group that's not hurting people. Yeah, that's a great point. And if you're not a cult, you should be able to either brush off scrutiny that you find invalid or accept it if there's something in there that you think could help you do better. If you literally cannot take a joke, cannot take criticism, cannot take a bit of cheeky roasting. And I would say that this podcast is like a combination

of all of that, then like look inward or just accept that you're a cult. Yeah, yeah. And I say that with respect, but like, I agree. I think it's a get the fuck out. It's just the barrier to exit is too high. The barrier to questioning, it's the whole world. It's sky high.

Jen paid off 78, did she say? $1,000 of debt. And that wasn't enough for her to be able to do a debt-free scream on the show because it was more conditional than that. That's not something that I want any part of. Oh, I forgot to ask what a debt-free scream even is. Oh, the debt-free scream. show because it was more conditional than that. That's not something I want any part of. Oh, I forgot to ask what a debt-free scream.

Oh, the debt-free scream. Yeah. If you pay off your debt in a Dave Ramsey approved way, you can come on his show and do like a victory, a victory scream, very cathartic thing. Oh, it's giving glossolalia. Yes, very much so. They're speaking in tongues on the Dave Ramsey show. So glad I followed up about that at long last. Great. Well, if you're a Dave Ramsey fan, you know, I wish you the best period, like live, laugh, love. I hope everyone either tolerated or delighted in this episode. Thanks to all of the many listeners who suggested it over the years. Thank you to you, Reese, for producing,

for just being who you are. And that is our show. Thank you for listening. Stick around for a new cult next week, but in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Sounds Like a Cult is hosted and produced by Amanda Montell and edited by Jordan Moore of the PodCabin. Our theme music is by Casey Cold.

This episode was co-hosted and co-produced by Reese Oliver. Thank you as well to Katie Epperson and to our partner All Things Comedy. And if you like the show, please feel free to check out my books, Word Slut, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism, and The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality. If you're a fan of Sounds Like a Cult, I'd really appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review on Spotify or Apple podcasts.