Excerpt from a Ramit Sethi YouTube video (recorded April 8, 2023) in which Ramit questions DJ about paying off credit card debt. DJ reveals she owes $15,000 and admits she has never calculated how long it would take to pay it off. Ramit urges curiosity about personal finances and explains he intentionally raised his voice to push DJ out of automatic responses.
Questions this video answers
15,000
April 8, 2023
So what do you want to do?
Pay off my credit card debt.
How much do you owe?
15,000.
How long would it take you to pay it off?
I don't know. Yeah, I guess I've never actually done that math of how quick I could pay it off.
You've done all this other math. Why is that?
I don't know. I don't know why I haven't done this.
Get curious. Get curious, please, for the love of God, about yourself.
Because I don't care. Because I don't care. I haven't done the math because I don't care.
I want to take you behind the scenes of what just happened there because I thought it was very interesting. I didn't just lose my temper. I intentionally raise my voice to shake DJ out of her automatic responses. She has a lot of automatic responses. She automatically tries to redirect our conversations to the spreadsheet. She automatically says, I don't know when I ask her about her own behavior. And my job isn't to simply sit here and accept these responses. I'm not a transcriptionist. It's my job to push her, sometimes uncomfortably, to realize what's really going on here.
