The biggest names draw the most clicks. Especially among the media. There is one name who has devoted his life to helping more people financially than any other talk radio host in history. And thus, he often finds himself popping up in videos and programs across the digital media landscape. It was hard to travel the interwebs this week without seeing videos lampooning, ridiculing, and lambasting one of talk radio and financial media’s biggest voices ever, Dave Ramsey.
Ramsey has made anti-Bitcoin statements and comments over the years, and plenty of crypto influencers took the opportunity this week – as digital assets are beginning their cyclical surge to new highs – to bring up Ramsey’s past comments and blast him publicly.
Some more fairly than others.
At least four YouTube programs featured thumbnail images or features of Ramsey this week, using the bait to attract eyeballs to their programs. And guess what? It worked!
Successful online broadcasters know that their material is useless unless they can maximize clicks, increase views, master the algorithms, and increase their material’s reach. Dave Ramsey, or other popular names and attention-grabbing images, help them accomplish the goal.
This week, Ramsey was featured on programs such as Altcoin Daily, Digital Asset News, Crypto Jebb, and Bitcoin University. While each of these programs are known to be part of the more rational, educational segment of the crypto and Bitcoin programming world, they each capitalized on Ramsey’s name – in the thumbnail or title – to attract viewers.
“Bitcoin is a currency on the internet. It has no value except to the extent that someone will take it from you as value. Bitcoin is the Iraqi Dinar of the internet,” Ramsey said in the clip included on these four programs.
And again, the hosts of these four programs are not considered to be bomb-throwing shysters. They generally come from the more conservative side of the crypto education world, and as a result, have educated and helped many viewers understand the burgeoning landscape of Bitcoin and other digital assets.
In their own right, these programs have helped countless viewers learn about Bitcoin and crypto assets and prepare to build an abundant economic future. Like Ramsey himself, many consider them to be positive influences, educating and assisting their audiences.
This week they highlighted the comments and opinions from Ramsey, which differ greatly from their own.
Perhaps the most vocal of the hosts this week regarding Ramsey was the thoughtful Matthew Kratter of Bitcoin University, who titled his episode, “Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome (Dave Ramsey).”
“So let me help you out with that one, Dave,” Kratter said. “The Iraqi Dinar is a form of fiat currency issued by the central bank of Iraq. And the Iraqi Dinar is not a decentralized, digital asset with a fixed supply and no committee of insiders who decide monetary policy.”
Kratter also mentioned notable anti-Bitcoin pundits, such as Paul Krugman, Peter Schiff, Charlie Munger, and Warren Buffett. He discussed the asset’s rise in price since 2010.
“So when Dave Ramsey says, ‘It has no value except to the extent someone will take it from you as value’, what I would respond to Dave is by saying, ‘Yeah, Dave that’s kind of how markets work’,” Kratter said.
The biggest problem many have had with the focus on Ramsey this week is that this main clip of the talk radio host was taken from a broadcast more than a decade ago. Yes, Ramsey has continued voicing anti-Bitcoin thoughts over the years, especially as the asset took its routine, cyclical drawdown in the past two years. However, the main clip getting the most airtime on these programs over the past week is from many years ago.
“It has no value because all of the sudden one of these computer nerds flips the switch and the whole freaking thing is gone,” Ramsey said on the years-old clip played by Altcoin Daily. In the years since he made the comments, the mainstream has been educated about Bitcoin, to understand that the asset is a worldwide, decentralized, transparent network that can neither be stopped or shut down by any singular entity. Governments and hackers have tried, and failed.
“Dave Ramsey, host of The Ramsey Show, just made the biggest financial mistake of his life,” the Altcoin Daily program began, with a salacious tone. “And this is shocking because he usually does offer such great financial perspective.”
Again, that particular Ramsey clip was from a decade ago. Additionally, Digital Asset News was forced to remove its video featuring the Ramsey videos.
And it doesn’t have so much to do with Ramsey’s age as it does his perspective. Ramsey is not a “get-off-my-lawn” boomer. In fact, he has spent much of the past decade preparing his organization for the future, by bringing a much younger slate of personalities to his team. His whip-smart daughter, Rachel Cruze, has become one of the brand’s more prominent voices, and she has shown an open mind to digital assets, electric vehicles, and other technological innovations.
Overall, Ramsey has demonstrated himself to be someone who can learn. He learned how to overcome his own financial mistakes and also learned how to educate others on how not to make those same mistakes in the first place. That’s not the attitude of someone with a closed mind, who refuses to see the facts as they are.
Ramsey has dedicated his adult life to helping millions of people get out of debt and build financial stability for the future. Many feel his wisdom, approach, and mission are laudable and second to none. And his organization’s results are incalculable.
So maybe for Dave Ramsey, the acceptance of Bitcoin is a matter of when, rather than if.
Ramsey has always preached the concept that “the only people who lose money on the roller coaster are those who jump off.” With that rationale, anyone who has held Bitcoin from its early days through its high value near $70,000 per coin – and then down to under $20k – has also not lost anything…unless they sold. The asset is now priced at approximately $37,000 per coin. Hardly the time to spike the football and celebrate its collapse. Many expect it to rise to six figures in the next couple of years, and more than $1M per coin in the future.
So it’s very possible, perhaps after sitting down with someone like Michael Saylor, Saifedean Ammous, Raoul Pal, or Anthony Scaramucci, that Dave Ramsey will one day voice an appreciation for the world’s emergent digital gold.
In fact, a quick YouTube search will locate a more recent clip of Ramsey, seeming to soften his stance on digital assets.
“It’s an unstable place to put money,” Ramsey told a caller in a video posted by The Ramsey Show Highlights nine months ago. “I don’t put money places that are unstable. Someday, crypto may stabilize. Someday, it may have a track record. But until it does, I won’t be putting any money in it. And I was saying that back when I got entire pages of Reddit devoted to hating me.
“And entire pages of Tik Tack (sic) hating me and everything, because I’m telling people not to put money into stupid-butt crypto. And now I’m a genius. But I also told them not to invest their money in Beanie Babies a few years ago, and people were believing in that too.”
So maybe someday Dave Ramsey will don the internet laser eyes and talk about securing wealth with a decentralized, non-confiscatable, immutable, un-inflatable, portable asset, like Bitcoin. Or perhaps the asset’s decade-long trend will revert and stagnate.
But until then, we can be assured that he will continue to help millions of listeners with his irreverent, straightforward wisdom. We can also be assured that these internet hosts, and many more like them, will continue to educate and assist as well.
And Ramsey will also continue serving as clickbait, regardless of what he does.
