I listened to Dave Ramsey for a few minutes yesterday, first time in probably a year or two. I noticed how he's now calling it just "The Ramsey Show" as opposed to the "The Dave Ramsey Show". I suppose so he can start pulling himself out to have his kids or other folks eventually take over.
It's been a multi-year plan to try to set the company up to continue without him. The company changed its name to Ramsey Solutions a couple years back, and he's been grooming all of his "Ramsey personalities," including letting them do segments on his show to get them some traction. As far as I can tell, it hasn't worked too well. That's the problem when a company is built around one personality. Shifting away isn't easy.
I don't see this succeeding if I'm honest.
I enjoy listening to Dave Ramsey, because it's great entertainment. But the "it" part is almost exclusively the "Dave" part.
Almost none of the Ramsey personalities are remotely as interesting to listen to, as hard as they try to be.
Any clip with Christy Wright or the pastor guy is boring.
But forget about the "get-out-of-debt-show" being what it is on the surface, and let's dig down to the heart of it. Dave traded in the integrity of his brand when he (as a guy who won't ride an elevator alone with a lady so as to protect both of their virtue) backed up Chris Hogan when it was known that he slept with a relative, a co-worker, and a fan. The co-worker was let go, and Mrs. Hogan, who wanted leadership within the corp to help, was accused of trying to hurt the company.
Sorry, is it a company? Or are they doing the work of a great God? If the latter, then a jezebel like Chris Hogan can't come in like a whore of Babylon and slut it up all over the place. He needs to meet the corp standard or go back to being a banker where he can raw-dog to his heart's content.
One thing I like about Dave is that he did make a positive change or two as a result of listening to people on his team. For example, he used to say (regarding a son or daughter at college) that you can't support Little Johnny if he's a weed head or Little Suzy if she's sleeping around. It was a common example and one time on air you could almost hear Rachel Cruz miming to him not to criticize Suzy for her sexuality, and I don't think he has since. Another time he had on-air a blogger who criticized him, and Ramsey got nailed on his investment return percentage, and while he acted like a baby about it in the moment, he actually did adjust his percentages after.
But in the end, you need to graduate from the elementary school called Ramsey University so you can live your life. If you do it without ever getting a credit car again, that's fine, but at some point you should be able to stop saying "Dave says" and move on to "I choose."
