Rich Dad Poor Dad

Peter. Michael.
What do you know about a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad?

So I haven't read the book, but I do know that the only difference between a rich dad

and a poor dad is that one of them invested in GameStop.

so rich dad poor dad is a book by robertiyosaki, which was self-published in 1997 and then published, published in the year 2000. This book is on numerous lists as the best-selling personal finance book of all time.
So this is not ancient history. I looked at the personal finance bestsellers on Amazon today.
Of the top 10, four of them are rich dad, poor dad. Paperback, hardback, audiobook, whatever.
He has 3 million subscribers on YouTube. He has 6 million subscribers on Facebook.
That's that rich dad mentality. I know almost nothing about this book other than it's like a sort of weirdly conservative personal finance book, which is that's almost redundant because yes, the I don't I almost I almost said the field of personal finance, but that's not that's not really what it is.
It's more of a convention center parking lot where people are selling pizzas out of the trunk of their car. They have to go into sort of weird bootstrap energy places very quickly because actually good personal finance advice is super boring, right? It's like, yes, make a budget, invest in mutual funds and ETFs, like diversify.
Yeah, you can't write a bestselling book based on that. You need to bring a truly dark demonic energy into it to get people going.
Yeah. It's very similar to health advice where it's like eat fruits and vegetables, try to exercise every day.
Right. It's like the actual retirement advice you've heard a million times, like try to save some percentage of your money, put it in early, get compound interest.
Like, the books that, like, actually make a ton of valid points never sell 30 million copies. Yeah, no shit.
Invest in low-cost mutual funds, the book. That's in zero airports.
That's the foundation of our podcast. So I want to get into the book as fast as possible because I feel like I really have to, like like give you a portrait of what it is like to spend 200 pages with this man the worst thing that i can say about this book and i mean this in the most derogatory way possible is that it makes men are from mars women are from venus look good there was a period with mars and venus there's like a chapter or two where i was like, maybe this isn't so bad.
This book was like a sentence or two.

Right.

He starts out with just like the basic premise of the book.

He says, I had two fathers, a rich one and a poor one.

One was highly educated and intelligent.

He had a PhD and completed four years of undergraduate work in less than two years.

The other father never finished the eighth grade.

Both men were successful in their careers, working hard all their lives. Both earned substantial incomes, yet one struggled financially all his life.
The other would become one of the richest men in Hawaii. One died leaving tens of millions of dollars to his family, charities, and his church.
The other left bills to be paid. This was the part of the book where I thought he was like an ally and he like literally had two dads.
Oh. He doesn't make it clear.
I was like, this is kind of cool. He's got – Yeah.
It's 1997. He's writing about his gay fathers.
So poor dad is Robert's actual birth father. Rich dad is his neighbor's dad.
He says, my two dads had opposing attitudes in thought. One dad thought that the rich should pay more in taxes to take care of those less fortunate.
The other said taxes punish those who produce and reward those who don't produce. For one dad, the idea of job protection for life and job benefits seemed more important at times than the job.
He would often say, I've worked hard for the government and I'm entitled to these benefits. The other believed in total financial self-reliance.
He spoke out against the entitlement mentality and how it was creating weak and financially needy people. So already you're like, oh, we're not going to have to read between the lines for the like makers and takers shit.
Okay. It's just straight up in the text.
I'm also immediately quite convinced that these two people are not meaningfully real. He also, throughout the book, has a huge amount of just open contempt for his father, his real father.
Shocker. Who honestly seems like a really cool guy.
Just like a normal human being. Yeah, he's a school teacher for basically the entire time that robert is growing up oh poor dad job fuck this guy and then he eventually becomes the head of the department of education for the state of hawaii right he basically just like positions his father as just a total chump for working a full-time job his entire life whereas this rich dad who he's very vague on the details of is just like he's independent like he's not a slave to his wage and all this like weird philosophical shit like you know when you're growing up you kind of always think that other people's parents are better you know you're like well you can watch tv after 9 p.m or like whatever rule that your parents gave you that that your friend's parents didn't you you're just like wow this guy just carries that forward into a best-selling book we're we're like two pages into this book and i'm gonna send you the paragraph that like turned me against the book hell yeah hell yeah i remember in school being told the story of robin hood and his merry men my school teacher thought it was a wonderful story of a romantic hero a kevin costner type who robbed from the rich and gave the poor.
My rich dad did not see Robin Hood as a hero. He called Robin Hood a crook.
This war between the haves and have-nots has been going on for hundreds of years. It is the take from the rich crowd versus the rich.
Fuck this guy. Fuck this guy.
Hot take. Robin Hood sucks.
the early reveal that rich dad is just his like neighbor's dad is the makes this all so good because like i don't know you're just at your friend's house and his and his dad is like your robin hood is a piece of shit all right don't let anyone tell you that robin hood's a good guy also i got two editions of this book so from the library they had like the original self-published text and then i also from amazon got the like the sort of republished like once a major publisher got involved post oprah and they updated the text as you can imagine they cut from the later text a real Kevin Costner type. Why do you think he's a Kevin Costner type, Robert? Is it because he was played by Kevin Costner in a fucking movie? What do you mean a Kevin Costner type? He's literally the movie just came out, Robert.
Right. A Kevin Costner type.
It's literally just his neurons firing off basic associations, right? A paleobotanist, a real Laura Dern type. Yeah, that's what we associate with that.
Robert? This is like such a classic American capitalist sort of thing where poor people have the wrong mindset, right? Yeah. Then you zoom out.
Like you could look at a map and see that poor people live here and rich people live there. Are those maps reflecting like geographic mindset differences? Like that's what you have to believe to believe that this shit is meaningful.
Right. Also, Danish people are just like on a grind set mentality.
Has nothing to do with like unemployment benefits or pensions. And anyone who's ever met a Dane knows that that's not true.
All that hygge has made them soft. So, okay.
Now, once we learn that Robin Hood is bad, we then get to like the sort of the origin story, like the mythos of the rich dad throughout this book. So Robert says that he's growing up in this middle-class household where his dad is a humble school teacher and he's going to school with a bunch of the rich kids.
This is in Honolulu in the 1950s. He's born in 1947.
Okay. So he's nine years old.
He comes home and he tells his father that he bumped into his friend Jimmy from school driving a Cadillac and he's like, hey, Jimmy, where are you going? And Jimmy told him, I'm going to the beach, but you can't come because you're too poor. Hell yeah.
Get his ass, Jimmy. Yeah.
One of the first of many just flagrantly fake anecdotes that we're going to get in this book. He then goes home and he asks his dad, dad, how can I be rich? And his dad, of course, doesn't know how to be rich because

he's like a wage slave. Yeah.
So he says, well, son, he began slowly. If you want to be rich, you have to learn to make money.
How do I make money? I asked. Well, use your head, son, he said, smiling, which really meant that's all I'm going to tell you.
Or I don't know the answer. So don't embarrass me.
So then we get a long sequence where Robert and his friend Mike go around the neighborhood asking for everybody's toothpaste tubes. So they knock on the door.
Hey, do you have any used toothpaste tubes? And they're gathering them up. And this is like a long sequence of them going around.
They go to grocery stores and go through the dumpsters and get the used toothpaste tubes. Okay.
They go in the backyard. These children are nine, by the way.
They go in the backyard, they build a furnace and they start melting down the toothpaste tubes because in the 1950s, toothpaste tubes were made of lead. Okay.
And so when his poor dad comes out into the backyard, he finds his son and Mike melting down the toothpaste tubes and pouring them into molds. And he says, I put the steel pot down and smiled at my dad.
What are you boys doing? He asked with a cautious smile. Watch, I said.
With a small hammer, I tapped at the seal that divided the cube in half.

Cautiously, I pulled up the top half of the plaster mold and a lead nickel fell out. Oh my God, my dad said.
You're casting nickels out of lead. That's right, Mike said.
We're doing as you told us. We're making money.
What the fuck is that, Anik? What? How is that the story you make up? Like, it's obviously made up, but it's also so bizarre. Like, I know the basic dad joke I get making money.
LOL. LOL.
Got it. Got to be illegal, by the way, to have a mold for a coin.
Yeah, 100%. Wouldn't that nickel be half toothpaste? I read this and I was like, deep sigh.
I'm going to have to fucking look this up, aren't I? Like i like what the fuck so it turns out that it's true that toothpaste tubes were made out of lead before world war ii and then in world war ii because factories needed lead for the war effort yeah the toothpaste companies had to start making it out of like different metals and plastics and they started mixing it with other things and eventually after the war they started making them out of lead again. All of this is roughly true.
However, this thing of melting down lead toothpaste tubes to get like smelted metal out of them. This is essentially a urban legend.
Like the kind of thing that like your grandpa would say, like things were so scarce, we had to melt down our toothpaste tubes. I read various like academic articles about articles about this first of all by the 1950s they they put lead back in the toothpaste tubes but they were like one to five percent lead got it like it was nowhere near enough lead to actually get fucking lead out and also they had toothpaste in them yeah so you'd have to be separating the lead from the like burnt toothpaste go ahead and try to get toothpaste like all of the toothpaste out of your tooth and you can't fucking you can't like separate them chemically in this way so clearly this is just like an urban legend that he heard growing up and repeated as if it was true and nobody throughout the like publishing of this book or 42 million copies ever bothered to Google and be like, hey, dude, you're just very obviously making up this anecdote.
Two nine-year-olds smelting lead is guaranteed to end in the death of at least one nine-year-old. Exactly.
So then we learn that Mike, he says his dad understands money.

They sort of vaguely intimate that like he owns a construction company. He runs a chain of convenience stores.

He's just like doing deals and like running stuff.

And so he agrees to talk to them about money.

It's like 9 a.m. Saturday morning.

Like, come over and I'll like tell you about money.

Mike and Robert go over to the house.

And when they get there at 9, he's like on the phone, like doing come over and I'll, like, tell you about money. Mike and Robert go over to the house.
And when they get there at nine, he's, like, on the phone, like, doing deals or whatever.

Yeah.

And he makes them wait for an hour. Finally, he, like, comes into the living room.

So we're going to run through a script here. You're going to play Rich Dad.

Hell yeah.

I feel like you have Rich Dad energy.

Yeah, absolutely.

People say that about you.

Mike says you want to learn to make money. Is that correct, Robert? I nodded my head quickly, but with a little intimidation.
Okay, here's my offer. I'll teach you, but I won't do a classroom style.
You work for me, I'll teach you. You don't work for me, I won't teach you.
I can teach you faster if you work, and I'm wasting my time if you just want to sit and listen like you do in school. That's my offer.
Take it or leave it. Uh, may I ask a question first? No.
Take it or leave it. I've got too much work to do to waste my time.
If you can't make up your mind decisively, then you'll never learn to make money anyway. Opportunities come and go.
Being able to know when to make quick decisions is an important skill. You have an opportunity that you asked for.
School is beginning or it's over in 10 seconds. Take it.
Good. Mrs.
Martin will be by in 10 minutes. After I'm through with her, you ride with her to my superette and you can begin working.
I'll pay you 10 cents an hour and you will work for three hours every Saturday. But I have a softball game today.
Mike's dad lowered his voice in a stern tone. Take it or leave it.
Wow, you could have done that with your voice, Peter. You didn't have to read it.
Okay, fair enough. I think I did do it with my voice, FYI.
This is my favorite stage direction. He says, I'll take it.
I replied, choosing to work and learn instead of playing softball. Oh, thank you for that illustration.
That's what happened in the scene that we just read. Ah, OK.
I love I love the way he's talking. Oh, you want to learn how to make money? Well, I got a I got a plan for you.
It's called work at my store in exchange for wages. Wow.
Rich dad. How do you do it? I know he's doing this this kind of Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross vision of like what rich people are like and like the kind of person you have to be to be wealthy where it's like this weird alpha bullshit.

We're like, take it or leave it.

Right.

Most dads are just like nicer than this.

And just like calmly walk you through.

Also, I feel like if a nine year old was like, how do I get rich?

It's like, go play outside.

Yeah, exactly.

I have a real life.

So Robert stresses that even in 1956, 10 cents an hour is like a very paltry wage.

That's a great lesson. Here's how you get rich.
Slave wages to children at your stores. There is a section where his dad is like, that's child labor.
And he's like, my dad just didn't get it. My dad's such a fucking loser.
He doesn't realize you get rich off of child labor. Okay, so then Robert works for a couple weeks, three hours every Saturday.
He does this for a while. He's not earning enough money.
And so he sort of storms into rich dad's house to confront him. And we have another scene.
This one starts with me. You said you would teach me if I worked for you.
Well, I have worked for you. I've worked hard.
I've given up baseball games and you haven't taught me anything. You're a crook like everyone in town thinks you are.
I'm glad you got angry about working for 10 cents an hour. If you had not gotten angry and had gladly accepted it, I would have to tell you that I could not teach you.
You see, true learning takes energy, passion, a burning desire. When it comes to money, most people want to play it safe and feel secure.
Passion does not direct them. Fear does.
So is that why they'll take a job with low pay? Yes. Some people say I exploit people because I don't pay as much as the sugar plantation or the government.
The sugar plantation. I pay less than the sugar plantation.
Great sign. I say that people exploit themselves.
It's their fear, not mine. But don't you feel you should pay them more? I don't have to.
And besides, more money will not solve the problem. Just look at your dad.
He makes a lot of money and he still can't pay his bills. Most people, given more money, only get into more debt.
So that's why the 10 cents an hour, it's part of the lesson. So do you still have the passion to learn?

Of course.

Good. Now get back to work.
This time, I will pay you nothing.

What?

You heard me. You will work the same three hours every Saturday,

but this time you will not be paid 10 cents per hour.

That's not fair. You've got to pay something.

You said you wanted to learn. If you don't learn this now,

you'll grow up to be like your dad, earning lots of money only to be in debt up to his eyeballs,

hoping more money will solve the problem.

Boom.

What?

Lessons.

Let's go. Boom.
Lessons. What the fuck is the lesson here? What the fuck is going on? He just said that it was good that he complained because most people exploit themselves.
And then he's like, I want you to work for less. And the kid agrees and he says that's good too.
He just told them not to do that. It's like, wow're gonna be even shittier to a child lesson number three you pay me uh and do three hours of work every saturday what the fuck is going on here it's also very funny to me that throughout the book he keeps presenting rich dad as this like gandalf figure who's of all this wisdom.
And he just comes off as such a prick.

Such a piece of shit.

Can you talk like this to a child?

Imagine being, imagine talking to a kid and being like, look at your stupid fucking dad.

Yeah, look at your fucking chump of a dad.

Your dad makes money, but he's in debt, which I know because I know your father's finances.

Anyway, now I'm enslaving his child. So that's Rich dad energy, kid.
Either have it or you don't. So I want to pause here.
Like we're sort of going to debunk this as we go along. So one of the things that rich dad says here, which is kind of a rich text, Robert says, don't you feel you should pay them more? And rich dad says, I don't have to.
And besides, more money will not solve the problem. This is like actually fairly common messaging among conservatives.
Poor people think that money will get them out of their problem, but all it does is exacerbate the poverty if they don't have the right mindset. Yeah.
I mean, he says most people given more money only get into more debt. Later in the book, he says more money will often not solve the problem.
In fact, it may actually accelerate the problem. Money only worsens the cash flow pattern running in your head.
If your pattern is to spend everything you get, most likely an increase in cash will just result in increase in spending. Thus the saying, a fool and his money is one big party.
What? Which saying what the fuck is that saying what does that saying even mean he clearly misheard a fool and his money are soon parted which actually makes sense in this context exactly and then my favorite thing about this is they didn't update this for later editions of the book it still says a fool and his money is one big party a fool and his money is one big party which doesn't make any fucking sense the same we all know and love that makes it sound like it makes it sound like it rocks to be dumb with money so another thing that i mean because this this book is thuddingly repetitive he basically just says the same thing, in 50 different ways. The only evidence that he points to about this is that a lot of lottery winners end up bankrupt.
They win the lottery or they get this big, you know, relative dies and they get this big financial windfall. And then, like, five years later, they're broke again.
Right. So it doesn't work.
Anyway, that's why I pay super low wages to my convenience store workers. That's why I don't pay children enough.
Less than my main competition, the sugar plantation. So, you know, to the extent that there are any fucking statistics in this book, this appears to be a misreading of a weird zombie statistic.
Have you heard this? That 70% of lottery winners end up bankrupt? I don't know that I've heard the 70% number, but I've heard some variation on this. You know, lottery winners go bankrupt at exceedingly high rates.
You see it packaged different ways, but this narrative is actually quite common. This 70% statistic is typically traced back to something called the National Endowment for Financial Education.
This zombie statistic is so common that the actual, this think tank had to put out a statement being like, we've never said this. And it appears to originate with somebody who was like on a panel that we hosted.
But it's basically just some random guy who said this thing that is not true. I looked into this.
It's actually really interesting. This myth reflects, I think, Americans like deep ambivalence about people who, quote unquote, don't work for their money.
Yeah. If people are getting money unjustly, it's much more comforting to be like, ah, well, you know, they end up really sad and poor.
And it reinforces this idea that there are people who deserve the money they earn and there are people who don't. There's also a really interesting journalistic thing happening here where anecdotes where somebody wins a million dollars and they just like are happy for the rest of their lives and are fine.
That's not really news. That doesn't get into the paper, right? Whereas every once in a while you have these weird outlier cases where somebody wins the lottery.
Apparently it actually happened once where somebody won the lottery and had a heart attack when they heard the news.

So that ends up in the paper.

There's a guy whose kids kill him almost immediately. That's the downside to being a rich dad, by the way.
These are outlier rare cases. And the reason they end up in the newspaper is that they are rare.
Right. But the fact that these are the only stories of lottery winners that end up in the newspaper makes people think that like, oh, well, most lottery winners must have some sort of disaster befall them.
And it does make some sense that like a lottery winner would have a heightened risk of like bankruptcy, for example, relative to other people with the same amount of money because like they probably don't have experience managing that much money. There's actually a really interesting study of this where they tracked lottery winners for five years.
And for the first two years, obviously they were much less likely to declare bankruptcy. But then in years three and four, they were much more likely than the average to declare bankruptcy.
Some people end up blowing all of their winnings really quickly. And then by years three and four, like maybe they own a boat, right? Or they bought a house that they can't maintain.
But then by year five, it basically just goes back to the baseline. Kind of average rates of bankruptcy.
And then, you know, bankruptcy among lottery winners is really rare. And like the overwhelming finding from studies of lottery winners is that they're just happier.
Yeah. Like you look 10 years out and they're just like, yep, they're wealthier and happier.
Right. Only around 3% of people like kind of retire, you know, quit their jobs and just like do nothing for the rest of their lives.
Most people, two thirds of lottery winners keep working the same job. And this thing of like people blow their winnings really quickly or yeah, they give money to relatives or they buy a too fancy car or something like that.
It seems people tend to blow like some portion of their winnings, but most people are really prudent about it and just like invest in retirement. Right.
So he's playing on this like really widespread myth that it's like getting more money won't help you. But all of the data seems to be that like, no, the solution to poverty is just very straightforwardly money.
There's really not like a grind set angle to this. He's like trying to make it more complicated than it is.
This is also very funny as a justification for paying your workers very little money. Your child workers.
They're just going to fucking get into debt or something. I'm actually helping them.
Like, get the fuck out of fuck. I'm just going to assume that if they're making not enough money, they must have a bad mindset.
Because if they had a good mindset, they wouldn't be working for me. And that honestly seems to be it.
It's like just a total lack of respect for the common worker. So then we get a really weird scene where it's now like three months later.
He's still working at the convenience store. As a slave.
A child slave. He's working there and the rich dad shows up on like a random afternoon.
And the rich dad is like, OK, I'm going to start paying you again. How's 15 cents an hour? And he's like, that sounds great.
What about 25 cents an hour? And he's like, uh, even better. Great.
It's like, what about a dollar an hour? What about $25 an hour? Is the lesson don't, don't take the first offer. Uh, it's significantly dumber than that, Peter.
Okay. Don't worry.
This book is not going to take a turn into like actual useful advice. Okay.
And then that leads to another scene. How did you feel when I tempted you with a pay raise? Did you notice your desires rising? We nodded our heads.
Most people use fear and greed against themselves. That's the start of ignorance.
Most people live their lives chasing paychecks, pay raises, and job security because of the emotions of desire and fear, not really questioning where those emotion-driven thoughts are leading them. So what's the answer? What intensifies fear and desire is ignorance.
That is why rich people with lots of money often have more fear the richer they get. Money is the carrot, the illusion.
I've seen how money runs people's lives. Don't let that happen to you.
So what does ignorance have to do with greed and fear? Because it is ignorance about money that causes so much greed and so much fear. As we headed back to the store, Rich Dad explained that the rich really did, quote, make money.
They did not work for it. He went on to explain that when Mike and I were casting five cent pieces out of lead, thinking we were making money, we were very close to thinking the way the rich think.
The problem was that it was illegal for us to do it. It was legal for the government and banks to do it, but not us.
He explained that there are legal ways to make money and illegal ways. He talked about the gold standard that America was on and that each dollar bill was actually a silver certificate.
What concerned him was the rumor that we would someday go off the gold standard and our dollars would no longer be silver certificates. When that happens, boys, all hell is going to break loose.
The poor, the middle class, and the ignorant will have their lives ruined simply because they will continue to believe that money is real and that the company they work for, or government will look after them. We really did not understand what he was saying that day, but over the years, it made more and more sense.
Oh my God. So I feel like our listeners might not understand what is happening here.
I know. But there is a widespread crank libertarian theory that our departure in the 70s, was it? Yeah, it was Nixon.
From the gold standard was the beginning of the decline of the American economy. Because when the dollar was pegged to gold, it was pegged to something unquote, real.
And we are now in a place where money is a fiction.

You could do a thousand podcasts diving into this topic in and of itself. But I think the only thing I will say about the validity of that theory is that the value of gold is also a fiction.
It's all fake. Yes.
And so what this is, is this guy in the 90s pretending that the rich dad in the 50s was doing the gold standard conspiracy theorizing 20 years before we were off the gold standard. He predicted it all.
And also that he would hear this as a nine-year-old and remember it. Also, what was the point of being like, what about a dollar? What about $25? Like, what if I paid you more? What are you talking about? Yes, I want the larger amount of money.
Why did you just make me work for three months for no money at all? What is going on? There was a big section in the middle that I cut where he's lecturing them about greed. But it's like, you're also going to lecture me about greed in a book? Right.
Scamming me into get rich quick schemes. Oh, you want you want more money? I just gave you 15 cents the last hour you worked and you want another 15 cents this hour.
Greed. One of the main threads throughout this book is this idea of like ignorance.
The reason why people are poor is because they don't know anything about money. I think one of the things that explains the bizarre popularity of this book is this overall narrative that kids aren't learning about financial literacy in schools.
And it's kind of up to these gurus to teach people about money as they get older. You can argue that like schools should teach that.
But the main reason that schools should teach that is so people like this don't become the ones who are in charge of teaching it to our children. What's really frustrating about this is that as soon as you start Googling around about like financial literacy, you find out that financial literacy programs in schools are like nearly universal.
I mean, first of all, as a general rule, whenever anybody says they don't teach that in school, that's never being said by somebody who knows what they teach in school. And what they teach in school varies widely state to state.
But I found a report on this by the Council for Economic Education that found all 51 states, 50 states plus D.C., they all have requirements for kids to learn financial literacy. In 1998, when he's writing this book, it was 39 states.
The idea that kids are not learning personal finance in school is just false. This is like as close to a universal lesson in American schools as like the three branches of government.
I think the reason that people are always saying like you need to be taught taxes and shit like that. People say that because you hit like your first tax season and you're like, I don't know what to fucking do.
Right. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. But here's the thing.
You can't just teach that to a 16 year old and then have it stick with them for the next several years. Right.
A lot of people are probably learning this and then forgetting that they did. It is true that American adults do not have super great financial literacy.
It's not that bad either. It depends on how you measure it.
But it's like we're kind of middle of the pack compared to other rich countries. But like that does not mean we're not learning it in school.
American adults also do not know what mitochondria are. And we all fucking learn that in school.
So for this episode, I read a really interesting book called Pound Foolish, Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helene Olin, who talks about this like drive for financial literacy as basically like a 40-year propaganda campaign, mostly funded by credit card companies, banks, other financial institutions who have a stake in this, as proposing as an explanation for America's higher rates of poverty that people here lack financial literacy. Right.
It's not the fucking 20% interest rates that credit card companies are charging. It's the fact that poor people don't understand how to manage their credit.
Helene Olin in this book traces all of this back basically to like the 1980s when the credit card companies and other financial institutions started pushing this idea and actually started supplying financial literacy curricula to schools. Jesus.
Some of it has, you know, some of it has like basic stuff in there about like compound interest and like don't fall behind. Like some of it is kind of fine.
Right. But these are companies that are basically pushing the idea that like doing spending on your credit card is totally fine.
And like student debt is something that's really important and normal. Please, please step onto that, onto the floor that is made of leaves and sticks, please, right over there.
And this paragraph drove me nuts. She's talking about the 1990s.
She says, others were jumping into the fray, including the National Association of Securities Dealers, which released a survey in 1997 demonstrating that 78% of us could name at least one character in a TV sitcom, but only 12% knew the difference between a load and no load mutual fund. Wow.
Really? That says a lot about society. People watch TV.
But they don't know about whether a mutual fund has a load or not. When I dump a load in my mutual fund, it doesn't follow me around for a week oh god but also 22 percent of americans can't even name one sitcom character i know that seems low to me like the the juxtaposition of the two numbers is just so disingenuous but also like yeah people watch tv and don't know the technical details of retirement funds.

Right. That's not like a some sort of societal catastrophe.
That's just like, yeah, people like things that are fun and they don't like things that are technical and horrible to think about. I mean, to even imply that the average person should have to understand like every minute detail of different types of fucking mutual funds is obscene.
And in fact, sort of signals that maybe something is wrong with the financial system more broadly if people need to understand these sorts of minute details in order to control their financial future. What she points out in this book is that the credit card companies, as they are entrenching this idea of like the importance of financial literacy, they're also lobbying against any effort to make their own products simpler and easier to understand, right? There was this initiative a couple of years ago where they were going to be forced to provide like plain vanilla products of just like, here's a normie ass bank account and you must provide people with super basic information in in plain words what they are signing up for and what the risks are.
And they push back against it successfully. So we don't have that.
She also points out that this is the beginning of this myth of like, you know, if you didn't drink so many lattes, you'd be able to afford a house. This is a big part of this propaganda push that if you restricted your personal spending, right, if you didn't if you didn't eat out so much, if you didn't take so many weekend trips, then you would be financially healthy.

But people in the 1970s spent significantly more of their disposable income on like personal stuff like food, restaurants, all this like, quote unquote, frivolous spending was actually higher in the 1970s. But people had higher savings rates because housing, health care, child care and education had not exploded in price.
That's all because we left the gold standard. Let me go get my nickel mold, my illegal black market nickel mold that I have.
But then what is also really interesting about this financial literacy stuff is that there's no evidence that having more financial literacy makes you better at spending or like more financially well off, right? Your financial fortune is much more closely related to like how much money you earn and stuff. It's really not about knowledge.
And then financial literacy is also associated with being more susceptible to scams. I went to Robert Kiyosaki's Facebook page, which is all like crypto grifters and like various other like buy gold grifters.
And one of the most common messages is like, you're a savvy investor. You're above the crowd.
You're not one of these sheep. They're pumping you up as somebody who's smarter than everybody else and isn't just going to follow the crowd and put your money in a mutual fund.
This is key to the messaging. Yeah.
And I don't like that's not really an argument that like no one should understand retirement savings at all. But it's like it's it's not clear that the lack of financial literacy in school is a problem.
And it's also not clear that financial literacy is like the solution to this stuff. I love the idea that his friend's father took him under his wing at like nine years old because he he could tell he's like, this kid is a real piece of shit.
Just a real fucking sociopath. This kid fucking sucks.
So I am going to I'm going to mentor. Well, do you want to talk about Rich Dad? Let's talk.
Let's talk about Rich Dad. We're like a third of the way into the book.
This is where he totally abandons the chronological narrative. The rest of the book is just like grifty like lists and advice and it basically just becomes like a long Facebook post.
I like that we never learned the true lesson of the child slavery. He was like, I'm working you for 10 cents an hour.

And the kid's like, damn, that's almost nothing.

And he's like, that's a good point.

Now you're working for nothing.

And then he starts talking about the gold standard.

And that's it.

There's no lesson.

He does mention, he's like, the lessons continued until we both went to college, which rich dad did not pay for.

Like, oh, dude, you know, throw that in there. Fuck this guy.
Oh, my God. That's so good.
It's so good. So I want to take a little detour and talk about what we know about Rich Dad and what we know about Robert Kiyosaki.
Okay. After this book comes out, the very obvious question is like, well, who's this rich dad? And he mentions various little clues.

He says he's one of the biggest landowners in Hawaii.

At one point, he refers to a, quote, billion dollar empire.

The Honolulu advertiser looks around and is like, well, you know, there's a finite number of billionaires in Hawaii.

They look around and like they can't find anything.

And over the years, Robert will say that like rich dad is dead, but then he'll also say that he's like still alive, but he's a recluse. Okay.
In later editions of the book, they add a disclaimer that says, although based on a true story, certain events in this book have been fictionalized for educational content and impact. And in 2002, when he's pressed, he says, why don't you treat Rich Dad like Harry Potter? Rich Dad is an idea.
He's a concept, an ethereal entity that hates the fact that we left the gold standard. We should also mention there's no evidence that Robert Kiyosaki had money before he wrote this book.
He grows up in Hawaii. As he says, he goes to school to become a boat driver, boat captain and works for Standard Oil.
Grindset, grindset, grindset. Yeah.
He ends up leaving to become a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, which sounds fake, but is actually true. People have found his military record.
The only business that we know he had is in 1977, he starts a company importing Velcro wallets. Like in the surfer craze, Velcro wallets were cool, I guess, or something like Endless Summer, Beach Boys, whatever.
Yeah, yeah. And so he starts importing these wallets.
He has an extremely fake story, not in this book, but in his previous book, which I looked for more biographical details in. He talks about how he's like walking the factory floor and he's like, the workers weren't having fun.
And I told them that they should be be having fun at work and a month later i came back and productivity increased by 350 percent like robert you're just gilding the lily dude like no one say 10 man it's still fake but like it's not as insultingly fake if i were on a factory floor making velcro wallets and the boss was like, you guys aren't having fun, I would just kill him on the spot. But also there there was no factory.
This is in his previous book. He pretends there was a factory.
But then in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he admits he's just importing the wallets from South Korea. He's not like it doesn't make any sense to manufacture wallets in Hawaii at this time when they're selling for like a buck or two, right? The wallet one is like the only kind of specific one that we know about, but it goes bankrupt.
It appears very quickly, like within a year. And then there's this period where like in various interviews and books, he sort of intimates that like I was selling merchandise.
I was selling t-shirts. I was, he's never really specific, but it's very clear that none of these ideas worked.
I love this because he's getting he gets the the various speeches about like greed and fear. Yeah.
The implication is like you want to be like a different kind of person so that you can get rich. You're not one of the sheep.
And then he's racking his brain for three decades. the only idea he can come up with is like, all right, I'm going to buy cheap merchandise and then I'm going to sell it for a little bit more.
But he like can't get the shipping costs to work. But then after like 10 years of various failed ventures, he then kind of pops back up on the grid in 1984, basically delivering get rich quick seminars.

Are you familiar with this business model where it's like there's a free seminar? Yes. You hand out flyers for a get rich seminar.
A guy who you are told is rich. Yes.
stands up and gives you a motivational speech and then you subscribe to some sort of service

to get the next level of knowledge, right? I will teach you my system. It's exactly the same business model as Trump U, where there's a free seminar, you then pay 500 bucks for the weekend seminar.
There's a good expose of this that the CBC ran in 2010, where they went in Robert's seminars for this CBC expose. And literally like 905, like the first thing that they say on the $500 seminar day is like, you didn't think you were going to learn everything in three days, did you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's always a next step. Exactly.
And so then they get you into like the elite model, whatever. So this makes me so mad.
They tell you you're going to be buying real estate, right? And it's all this mindset stuff. And so I need to know that you're serious.
So I need you to call your credit card company right now and get them to up your limit. You call your bank and you get them up your limit.
And then it's all this mindset stuff and blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, they're trying to sell you on the next stage like the elite gold plan whatever and then when you ask well how much is the elite gold plan they say well how much did you increase your credit card limit to yeah and there there's reviews and complaints and stuff on like better business bureau by people who spent like forty thousand dollars jesus christ there's this poor woman i mean just an internet comment.
I don't know if this is real. But there's this poor woman who talks about like the years long effort to get her money back that she goes to like the municipal authorities.
They're like, oh, we don't really do white collar crime. She goes to the state AG.
He's like, well, technically you signed up for it. She tries her bank.
That doesn't work. And she's like, I spent $18,000 and I got nothing.
Just a full on scam. I guess technically there's like lessons and you get like a mentor.
Like they do provide something. If you get to the top level, they teach you that Xenu is...
I can't remember it exactly. In the CBC expose, they talk to somebody who falls for this.
And it's like, they don't say where she's from, but she's a immigrant in Canada. She seems to be from somewhere in Eastern Europe.
She's been doing these like low level, poorly paid service jobs for years. And she's sort of she's in her 50s.
And she starts looking at her bank account. And she's like, I don't have anything saved for retirement.
And so she gets a flyer or whatever for this, you know, how to invest in real estate sort of seminar. And she goes thinking like, hey, maybe this is a solution.
And I don't think she ended up getting scammed out of too much money. Luckily, I don't think she had enough, honestly, to get scammed out of too much.
But it's like, these are the people that they're going after with this business model, right? It's people who have a real need. Right.
And people who believe you when you tell them like, hey, you can you can get rich, you know, nights and weekends. You can see something real, right? Like they're like investing in real estate.
That is something that normal people do and get wealthy, right? Yeah. If you're a millennial and your parents are comfortable, it's probably because they bought a house in like 1985.
Yeah, no shit. Yeah.
So like this sounds real. It sounds like a way that normal people get rich because it kind of is.
Yeah. I also think this whole thing that there's kind of there's something rich people know that you don't.
Yeah. I think that's also a very tempting message because like, yeah, you look around America at how unequal things are and you're like, there must be some secret to this.
Yeah. I just like I struggle to convey like how much contempt I have for the people that do this.
Oh, yeah. They're disgusting.
This is what really frustrates me about the rise of this book into popular culture. So this guy's a total nobody.
The only thing he's ever made money on is these seminars so this is a scammy seminar as a book right it's it's a natural extension this is basically how like oprah plucks him from obscurity without oprah god he's still a c-list motivational speaker she's doing the same thing at scale right she's she's selling bullshit to her audience in the same exact way yeah right i oprah am a billionaire and how did i do it vibes mindset right that's that's her pitch so to get back to the book we're we're now on page roughly 80 of a 200-page book. We finally get to something resembling actionable advice.
So he starts by giving you some of the worst fucking advice I've ever seen. He lists a bunch of, like, myths.
He's like, these are, like, these are common misconceptions that a lot of Americans have, right? So this is the list of them.

Your home is an asset.

Get a bill consolidation loan and get out of debt.

Work harder.

Save money.

When I get a raise, I'll buy a bigger house.

Mutual funds are safe.

And Tickle Me Elmo dolls are out of stock, but I just happen to have one in back and

another customer has not come by for it yet. What? What? Okay, so let's put the Tickle Me Elmo one aside for a moment.
Yeah, let's set that aside. Every other thing in there is a solid piece of financial advice that he is saying is in fact a misconception.
Save money. Saying that save money is bad advice? Mm-hmm.
Your home is not an asset. Your home is what? What does he think it is? A liability, Peter.
He has a whole tedious section about how you think your home is an asset, but it's actually a liability. Because you have to pay interest on your mortgage? Like, I don't get it.
He has this weird thing where he says friends of his had to pay a thousand dollars a month in property taxes and it like wiped out the value of their house or something i'm like how much is their fucking house worth he talks about living in phoenix in the 1990s and watching good morning america and some like financial guru comes on and he, his advice was to save money. Put $100 away every month, he said, and in 40 years, you'll be a millionaire.
Well, putting money away every month is a sound idea. It is one option, the option most people subscribe to.
The problem is this. It blinds the person from what is really going on.
They miss major opportunities for much more significant growth of their money. The world is passing them by.
Oh God. What is it blinds them from what's really going on? What the fuck does that mean? Let me show you the secret knowledge of running scam seminars.
This is like genuinely dangerous in a sort of obvious way. But like the best way to illustrate it, I think, is imagine a society where everyone follows this advice.
Society as we know it would collapse. He also you knew you knew he was going to get to this place.
There's a section on like retirement savings where he says, like, don't don't invest in mutual funds because like they're all scammers and they're trying to like the fund managers are trying to fuck you over what and then he says when i speak to adults who want to earn more money i suggest taking a long view of their life instead of simply working for the money and security which i admit are important i suggest they take a second job that will teach them a second skill often i recommend joining a network marketing company also known as multi- It's like, okay, this is where I did a control F for timeshare. I'm like, all right, where is he taking me next? What I would suggest is actually being scammed.
It's not just running scams. It's also being scammed.
The yin and the yang of being a rich dad. So after he gives you all of this atrocious advice, we finally get to the first piece of actual financial advice in the book.
This is when you find like subreddits and stuff where people talk about this book. A lot of people like defend this book by saying that like this is an actual genuine piece of wisdom.
So his number one rule for financial security in your life is buy assets, not liabilities. Okay.
He says rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities, but they think they're assets.
Okay. So then I'm not fucking kidding.
There's 40 pages go by before he tells you what a fucking asset is. Oh my God.
He gives it to you in like these like vague terms.'s like an asset puts money into your pocket but a liability takes it away and there's all these fucking charts and you're like right what specifically do you mean robert it seems to me like there's a very good shot that he doesn't actually have a coherent definition of what an asset is and what a liability is do you want to get to it it's eight, finally. He finally gives it to us.
Ultimately, an asset is something that earns passive income for you. OK.
He finally gives us a list. He says, one, businesses that do not require my presence to stocks, three bonds, four mutual funds, five income generating real.
Six, notes, parentheses IOUs. Seven, royalties from intellectual property such as music, scripts, patents.
Eight, this is the best one, and anything else that has value, produces income, or appreciates and has a ready market. Yeah.
Okay. So that's the catch all.
So it's like stocks, bonds, real estate and everything. Tickle me almost.
Great. Robert, he then literally goes into a whole thing about tickle me almost.
I was, I was going to say, should we circle back to tickle me almost? So I'm glad we got there. So he basically says that like, you know, talks about like the run on Tickle Me Elmo's.
And, you know, scalpers were selling these stupid toys for like, I don't know, $10,000 or something. It was like a big deal for one, whatever Christmas it was.
Yeah. You're again, just inviting people to get scammed, basically.
Right. He mentions baseball cards.
Like, I don't know if that's an investment, Robert. Well, the baseball card market notoriously collapsed in the 80s and like through the 80s and 90s and is now a tiny fraction of what it was.
Oh, I didn't know this. So great, great hot tip.
Don't buy houses, buy baseball cards. So his second money making tip is avoid paying taxes.
Hell yeah. That's what I'm fucking talking about.
It's not really like a money

making strategy. It's more like this is like advice to already rich people.
Right. Like there's no there's no like hot tip on how to avoid paying like your W-2 taxes.
You know? Yeah, exactly. If you're an employee, like your boss reports your income and you report your income.
Mr. IRS, I actually don't owe you any taxes because I was working for free for my friend's dad.
Okay. So this one starts with another little piece of dialogue.
When does your dad pay his bills? The first of the month. Does he have anything left over? Very little.
That's the main reason he struggles. He has bad habits.
Your dad pays everyone else first. He pays himself last, but only if he has anything left over.
But he has to pay his bills, doesn't he? You're saying he shouldn't pay his bills? Of course not. I firmly believe in paying my bills on time.
I just pay myself first, before I pay even the government. But what happens if you don't have enough money? The same.
I still pay myself first, even if I'm short of money. My asset column is far more important to me than the government.
But don't they come after you? Yes, if you don't pay. Look, I did not say not to pay.
I just said I pay myself first, even if I'm short of money. What is he saying? What the fuck is going on here? What the fuck? He keeps doing this weird thing where he's like pay yourself first but he doesn't say what the fuck that means what that means is like you are from time to time stiffing your employees or the government right but then when when the when this child is like is it this illegal he's like whoa i never said Wink, wink, wink, wink, wink.
I am like going easy on him and I'm cutting a lot of the stuff where he talks about how much he fucking hates taxes. Huge portions of this book.
Shocker. And he just like straight up lies.
He says over and over again, he's like, the more money you earn, the more the government takes. Right.
But we have marginal tax rates in the United States. He also says that when his dad died, like, I didn't even get any money because the government took it all.
America has an estate tax that kicks in at $12 million. Hawaii has an estate tax that kicks in at $6 million.
Right. I thought, yeah, I thought his dad was broke as hell.
And now he's complaining that the government took it. All of the actual advice in this is it just sort of like scammy advice for rich people.
So he says you should like set up a corporation for like legal liability stuff. And then you can write off your expenses.
So he says, by owning your own corporation, vacations are board meetings in Hawaii. Car payments, insurance, repairs are company expenses.
This is tax fraud. Health club membership is a company expense.
Tax fraud. Yeah.
Transparently tax fraud. I love this is like the third time that he has described something that's patently illegal and then just put a line at the end of it that's like, but not in an illegal way.
He also, also, he's got these like little tips. One of his little tips is, I always make offers with escape clauses.
In real estate, I make an offer with the words subject to approval of business partner. I never specify who the business partner is.
Most people don't know my business partner is my cat. Also fraud.
If they accept the offer and I don't want the deal, I call my home and speak to my cat. This is just also fraud.
And numerous like people who actually like make money investing in real estate and like flipping houses have been like, no one would accept a weird clause in a contract. That's just like, I need approval from my partner and I'm not going to specify who the partner is.
You know, look, I'm a lawyer. I could, uh, I could write a book on how to try to sneak weird deceptive language into contracts.
Uh, I don't, it's not, uh, I wouldn't say it's a way to get rich. I would say it's a way to be an awful person.
So his third piece of advice is flipping real estate, which like invest in real estate. I whatever really gonna go into this he has a whole probably fucking fake story about how he's like jogging through a neighborhood in oregon and he sees a house for sale by owner and the owner wants 65 thousand dollars for it and he's like i'll give you 45 000 and the guy's like i'm desperate to sell i'm moving to cal.
You can have it. He sells the house for profit because, you know, Portland is undergoing a housing boom.
And then he buys an apartment complex in Phoenix that's like owned by some Germans, and they're not even there. And they were desperate to sell.
And like, they wanted $450,000 and I only paid $300,000. Huge part of this book is just finding desperate people and taking advantage of them and then blaming them.
And also fundamentally, it's like, well, buy undervalued real estate. Yeah.
Yeah. You should all be jogging all the time.
Sure. And just be on the lookout for a house that's on sale and just kind of vibe out the desperation of the owner.
Right. That's business mindset.
We're now going to watch a clip. Fuck yeah.
This is from the Oprah episode. Okay.
Hey, during the commercial break, you said what? Stand up, say it again. You say that you can pay yourself first.
How am I going to get somebody to loan me the money to buy a house when I can't pay my and when I can't fully pay my bills as I'm paying them now one thing that Paul said right there he starts a home-based business the tax laws are written against tax laws are not equal and if you want what I'm saying is got to get educated here so the tax laws are not equal so if you're an employee and you work harder and harder the government's going to take 50% no matter what so by being a business owner this was which is Paul did he has tax advantages that the middle class and poor do not have just saving money and investing is not enough there is a complete mindset that goes on I think that's what these people can I was saying because we all have the mentality this country you work harder you work harder you they will pay off in the end. It does not because the government always gets theirs.
Right. And then real estate is the least taxed income you can get.
So when my wife and I were struggling, we saved $6,000, we bought that house. Thing went from $46,000 to $105,000.
We had $50,000. But I think when people think of real estate, they think about the house that they would want to live in.
you start out buying something that you would necessarily want and you use that to build more income that's what she does she bought seven bill more income that's my idea i want to buy a three-platin live in the basement ran off the two top two apartments and haven't paid my mortgage for me but i still need to come up with the original capital to buy the place that starts with a paying yourself first. Hey, Oprah.
All right. This interaction is like one of the bleakest things I've ever seen.
Yes. Oprah, who's at this point probably a billionaire.
I don't know what her status has been. But she talks earlier in the interview.
She's like, well, not having enough money used to be my problem, but now my problem is too much money. Kiyosaki is just like a straight up grifter.
Yeah. And then this poor guy who asked this super basic question.
Right. How do I come up with the money to buy a house? And then Robert's like, right.
That's why you pay yourself first. And they all just move on.
It was very clear that they then flashed the applause sign and the entire audience erupts into applause. Also, this poor salesman who's like asking the questions is like in a full suit.
You could tell he was like, I'm going to put on my finest business wear to impress the rich dad, poor dad guy. Yeah.
This guy took a day off to go to a taping of oprah oh god he clearly has the mindset but robert confronted with somebody who clearly has it has nothing to offer all of personal finance self-help grifting eventually just becomes buy real estate and flip it yeah because like know, historically, it's a relatively safe way to make money. If you have money already.
Right. You never get the step of how do I get enough money to buy like a fucking apartment complex or whatever they're doing.
Right. It's so fucking frustrating and and telling because a lot of what these guys

are doing is being like if you get your mindset set right you can achieve anything get your mind right and yet the quote-unquote anything that they all achieve is just buying an apartment complex renting it out for a few years and flipping it buy a house in a city that's about to experience It's a housing boom.

Right.

Wow.

Thanks, man.

Cool.

So his last piece of financial advice is to buy stocks. Very innovative stuff.
I'm going to send you some text. Poor people have poor habits.
A common bad habit is innocently called dipping into savings. The rich know that savings are only used to create more money, not to pay bills.
I know that sounds tough, but as I said, if you're not tough inside, the world will always push you around anyway. Focus on keeping liabilities and expenses down.
This will make more money available to continue pouring into the asset column. Soon, the asset base will be so deep that you can afford to look at more speculative investments.
Investments that may have returns of 100% to infinity. Investments that the middle class calls too risky.
The investment is not risky. It's the lack of simple financial intelligence, beginning with financial literacy, that causes the individual to be too risky.
You're too risky, Peter, because of your low financial literacy. You as a person.
A lot going on here. He specifically said that having savings was bad advice.
Yep. And now dipping into savings is bad? I think between the lines, he thinks every dollar you earn, you should pour into quote unquote assets.
Oh, look, I'm not a math genius, but investment returns of infinity, if I'm doing the math correctly, are not possible. He follows this with a fucking probably fake anecdote about how he notices that gas prices are going up.
So he invests in a company right before it strikes oil and then he gets like 5000 percent return or some shit. What the fuck? Right.
Invest in a company right before its value goes up. That's very good advice, Robert.
I agree. This is literally an episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia where they buy gasoline and then try to resell it.

But then, OK, this is the part of the book that like totally changed how I saw the rest of the book.

So he has a section where he talks about his stockbroker.

He says the really hot deals are not offered to people who are novices.

The best deals that make the rich

even richer are reserved for those who understand the game. I don't think that's how stockbroking

works. Then he says, frequently, my broker will call me and recommend I move a sizable amount of

money into the stock of a company that he feels is just about to make a move that will add value,

like announcing a new product.

Again, dancing around the edges of outright saying it here,

but it does appear that he is now advocating for insider trading.

This was my thought too. I was like, I don't think that's like real advice.
And so I put

out a call on Twitter. I was like, do I have any followers who are like stockbrokers or do

securities law? And so three different people got in touch with me. I sent them all this like entire kind of section, like paragraph.
All three of them said it's something that could be insider trading potentially, but insider trading is extremely hard to prove. People who have like, I have a hunch about this stock.
Like that doesn't mean that you have any like private information necessarily.. So it's hard to say if this is really insider trading.
I once did securities law. Did you? As a baby lawyer.
Yeah. You haven't given me any stock tips? If you want to lose as much money as I have in the last four years, then you let me know.
You basically have one of two situations happening. One, your investment advisor is doing some basic analysis that anyone can do.
Any information that he has, the market would also have. Two, he has information that the market does not have.
That would be material, non-public information. And him telling you to trade based on it is illegal.
The other scenario that the stockbroker securities law people told me is that either your stockbroker is like some weird dude who just thinks that he's smarter than the market, in which case, like, you should probably get a different stockbroker. For sure.
Or he thinks that you're a huge fucking mark. Right.
He's fucking Jordan Belforting you. Yes.
And you're like, ooh, I have a cool, smart investment advisor. So at one point, Robert says, I invest in companies whose products are like about to get FDA approval and I get the stocks cheap and they explode.
And it's like, that is the scam from the movie Boiler Room. The reason this like made everything click into my brain was one thing that he comes back to a lot in this book is like he tells you to get educated right financial literacy is like his big thing but what he describes as learning is like reading other get rich quick books and attending seminars So he says, what do I do? I go to seminars.
I like it when they're at least two days long because I like to immerse myself in a subject. In 1973, I was watching TV and this guy came on advertising a three-day seminar on how to buy real estate for nothing down.
I spent $385 and that course has made me at least $2 million, if not more. I don't have to work for the rest of my life because of that one course.
I go to at least two such courses every year. So this is a guy who basically like didn't do well in school and had a huge amount of resentment about the fact that like teachers were telling him to do better.
He had to repeat a grade. It seems like his dad was pretty disappointed in him.
Yeah. His previous book is called, if you want to be rich, don't go to school, which is originally published with a question mark.
If you want to be rich, don't go to school. But then when it's reprinted, they take that question mark because that's deranged.
But so then he, he gets very, he kind of bounces around to jobs. He goes to Vietnam and comes back.
Nothing is really clicking. And then he finds these grifty fucking seminars.
And it seems like he was like believing them. Right.
Like he seems like someone who thinks that he found this like secret knowledge, but he's never actually done anything. All he's doing is repackaging the bullshit that he's been getting in these seminars and pretending that he did it when actually all that really happened was he absorbed all this grind set bullshit from these seminars.
He tried to implement it in companies. All of his companies failed because this isn't real advice.
And then he just became one of these seminar get rich quick grifters. This is interesting for two reasons.
One is like, again, like Rhonda Byrne and The Secret. The bullshit is what makes them rich, right? Yeah.
Pretending that they know how to get rich makes them rich. The other part of this is that this is the first guy who I've seen basically say that you should get scammed.
Yes. Join MLMs.
Do these seminars. Be a mark.
Yes. And this is why I almost think that he's doing this in something resembling good faith.
Oh, totally. I think he's 100% earnest.
Right. Because he is at his core a mark.
Yeah. He sort of turned being a mark into scamming other people, maybe not quite realizing what was happening.
Like he had been the mark and he can't perceive himself as such. And so he starts doing what the scammers are doing to other people.
Writes a book with this convoluted nonsensical advice. Gets rich off that proof of concept in his own mind.
Right. Of course.
I was right all along. Yeah.
Because he still doesn't understand. Yes.
That it's a scam. I wanted to say he's like a Shakespearean figure, like this tragic figure but he's never really had a fall he's not a shakespearean figure i think he's more of like a character in like a christopher guest movie it's like he's going around telling you like if you really want to get rich you should play three card monty yes outside of madison square garden you should go give those guys 20 bucks find the red investment idea.
And you're like, you really believe this, don't you? This is like the boomer id, because the entire generation basically bumbled their way into financial success, just like born into an era where a basic job got you a house, a pension, the markets grow, houses quadruple in value over the span of a few decades. And there you are, a 70-year-old sitting on millions of dollars, despite having done nothing spectacular in your life, right? Just sort of like following the basic advice.
And then you look at millennials and you see that they are struggling. It was so easy for you that the only way that you can make sense of it is to think they are doing something fundamentally wrong.
They don't really get it. Their problem is they don't believe it enough because you believe it.
Right. He believes it because if you're selling grifty fucking seminars, then like, yeah, it is all about the mindset because everything is about being a charismatic speaker.
That's the only thing you need to demonstrate. There's no actual skill.
Right. Then that's why he's this boomer mentality, just like boiled down into its essence, like its dumbest form.
It's incredible. He basically becomes the person he always thought he was.
He thought he was a millionaire. He made more than $9 million on this book.
He's still doing these seminars. Of course, he doesn't actually give the seminars anymore.
They're now licensed to this extremely scammy company. There's been a series of lawsuits.
He's just delivering the same old bullshit and raking in millions. And all of this feeds his self-conception as someone who has knowledge, but it's just air.
Yeah. There's something almost ethereal about his existence.
Layers of scams, a place to top one another until he hits Oprah. Totally.
I would love to see Oprah just like on air talking about returning to the gold standard. But OK, are you ready for the ending twist? Oh, hell yeah.
I could not believe this. So since the book comes out, like he's now he's a Trump guy.
He's a fuck Fauci guy. He's shocker distilling even more.
This like become a mark. Every financial scam he is trying to sell you.

Yeah. In all that time, he's never really given any specifics about who this rich dad is.
Right. He avoids the question.
He blows up at people when they try to get basic confirmation of this. Alludes to Harry Potter.
Yes, exactly. In 2019, we find out that rich dad was real.
There is a guy named Richard Kimi who dies in his 90s. Robert then says, this is Rich Dad.
Wow. I mean, who knows if any of the stuff in the book is actually true, right? There's so much.
You know, he was never a billion dollar empire. Yeah.
It doesn't appear he ever owned convenience stores. I mean, he's still doing a ton of exaggerating and misrepresenting.
That's good because if the convenience store thing was true, then that makes it more likely that the child slave thing was true. Yeah, that's sort of what I'm hoping.
And also, this Richard Kimi guy actually seems kind of okay. He's like a Japanese American guy growing up in Hawaii.
And he basically realizes that all of the tourism industry in Hawaii is geared toward the high end. It's all rich people.
Somehow he scrapes together enough money to buy some land or buy a building or something. And he opens a hotel for like middle class people.
And he works like he's the front desk person doing baggage, working his ass off. And he basically creates the like middle class tourism industry in Honolulu.
And eventually he sort of that becomes like a larger hotel and then becomes a chain of hotels. And, you know, he just sort of kind of goes from there.
Right. It's sort of like an actual American success story.
Right. Like identified an underserved market, created a product and executes and it works.
He actually did the thing that Robert never did. And right.
The other weird thing about this is that apparently there was I don't know if this was ever written, but there was a gentleman's agreement between Robert and this Richard Kimi guy to not reveal his identity. And Robert stuck by it.
Wow. This is like the one likable thing I've ever learned ever learned about oh shit probably because the it wasn't a gentleman's agreement and the guy was like if you say that i'm the sociopath in rich dad poor dad i will sue you into the fucking ground and robert was like all right yeah i do wonder if that's what's really going on because he is a huge piece of shit in the book oh my god God, I can't, I cannot believe that he had a real successful mentor

and he's just like, okay, don't pay your taxes.

That's what you're learning.

Did his dad ever write a response book?

Cool son, dumb son.