If Books Could Kill - Rich Dad Poor Dad

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

In 1997, Robert Kiyosaki revealed the secret to lifelong success: Deliver grifty seminars and hire child slaves.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPodWhere to find us: TwitterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry‘Rich Dad Poor Dad' Robert Kiyosaki ExposedStupid Investment of the WeekRobert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Education on Real Estate Investing ReviewThe Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the LotteryWhy the Myth of the Miserable Lottery Winner Just Won’t DieWork Centrality and Post-Award Work Behavior of Lottery Winners"The best way to get even with A-grade students was to make them employees of mine"Ohio real estate investor’s warning statement on Robert Kiyosaki and Bill Gatten’s complex PACtrust for real estate investingAcademic Discipline and Personal Finance Instruction in High SchoolThanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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 Ported is a book by Robert Kiyosaki, 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 best sellers on Amazon today of the top 10 four of them are Rich Dad Ported. Wow. Paperback, Hardback, Audio Book, whatever. He has three million subscribers on YouTube. Okay. He has six million subscribers on Facebook. That's that 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 the, I don't, I almost, I almost had 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 make a budget, invest in mutual funds and ETFs like diversify. You can't write a best-selling 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. 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 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 or for Mars women or for 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 with Mars and Venus. There's like a chapter or two, or 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. He doesn't, he doesn't make it clear.

I was like, cool, this is kind of cool. He's got, 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 and 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. Ooh, before that job. Fuck this guy. Just like a normal human being. Yeah, he's a schoolteacher 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 your friends' parents didn't, you're just like, wow. This guy just carries that forward into a best-selling book. We're like two pages into this book, and I'm going to send you to paragraph that 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 schoolteacher thought it was a wonderful story of a romantic hero, a Kevin Costner type who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. My rich dad did not see Robinhood as a hero. He called Robinhood 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. Hahaha.

Fuck this guy, fuck this guy. Hot take, Robinhood sucks. The earlier 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 dad is like, your Robinhood is a piece of shit. All right, don't let anyone tell you that Robinhood's a good guy.

Also, I got two editions of this book. 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 Kossner type. Why do you think he's a Kevin Kossner type, Robert? Is it because he was played by Kevin Kossner in the fucking movie? What do you mean a Kevin Kossner type?

He's literally, the movie just came out, Robert. Right, a Kevin Kossner type. It's literally just his, like, neurons firing off basic associations, right? A paleo botanist, a real Laura Dern type. Yeah, that's what we associate with that. literally just his neurons firing off basic associations, right? A paleo-botnist, 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? 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? That's what you have to believe, to believe that this shit is meaningful. Right. Also, Danish people are just like on a grindset mentality.

Has nothing you would like unemployment benefits or pensions. And anyone who's ever met a day knows that that's not true. Yeah. All that Hugga has made them soft. So, okay, now, once we learn that Robinhood 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 schoolteacher, 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 gonna 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. So he says, well, son, he begins 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 him to 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. Consciously, 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, Anakin? What? How is that the story you make up? Like, it's obviously made up, but it's also so bizarre. Like, the basic dad joke I get, making money, LOL.

LOL, got it. Gotta 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 gonna have to fucking look this up, aren't I? Like, what the fuck? So 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 this. First of all, by the 1950s, they put lead back in the toothpaste tubes, but they were like one to five percent lead. Got it. 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 two. 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 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. May I ask a 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 ask 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 super ret 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. Well, you could have done that with your voice, Peter. You never read it. Okay, fair enough. I think I did do it with my voice. FYI. And 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. Oh, okay. I love, I love the way he's talking. Oh, you want to learn how to make money? Well, I gotta 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 kind of glingarry, glen-ros vision of what rich people are like and the kind of person you have to be wealthy where it's like this weird alpha bullshit, where it's like ticket or leave it. Right. Most dads are just like nicer than this and just like calmly walking 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 poultry 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, he doesn't realize you get rich off of child labor. Ha ha ha ha. 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 give him more money, only get into more debt. So that's why the ten 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 ten 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. But 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 him not to do that. It's like, wow, wisdom. Wow, you're going to be even shittier to a child. Lesson number three, you pay me 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 full of all this wisdom and he just comes off as such a prick. Such a piece of shit. You talk like this to a child. 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?

Just not the saying. That's not the saying. What the fuck is that saying? What is that saying even me? 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 in his money is one big party. Which doesn't make any fucking sense. The saying we all know in love. That makes it sound like it's that makes it sound like it rocks to be dumb with money. So another thing that I mean because this this book is thoughtingly repetitive. He basically just says the same thing like 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, a 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, 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 in 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, uh, we've never said this and it appears to originate with somebody who was like on a panel that we hosted.

Hmm, but it's basically just some random guy who said this thing. Uh-huh. 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. Right. And so that ends up in the paper. 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. And 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 before them And it does 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 ride 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 bankruptcy among lottery winners is really rare. And the overwhelming finding from studies of lottery winners is that they're just happier.

Like you look 10 years out and they're just like, yep, they're wealthier and happier. Only around 3% of people kind of retire, You look 10 years out and they're just like, yep, they're wealthier and happier. Right. Only around 3% of people kind of retire, quit their jobs and just do nothing for the rest of their lives. Most people, 2-thirds of lottery winners keep working the same job. And this thing of people blow their winnings really quickly.

Yeah, they give money to relatives or they buy a two-thingancy 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. Are your child workers? They're just gonna, they're just gonna fucking get into debt or something. I'm actually helping them. Like the fuck? I'm just gonna assume that if they're just gonna fucking get into debt or something. I'm actually helping them.

Like the fucking- I'm just gonna assume one. But 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. That honestly seems to be it. It's like, it's 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's slave. He's working there and the rich dad shows up on like a random afternoon and the rich dad is like, okay, I'm gonna 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, even better, great. It's like, what about a cents an hour? And he's like, that sounds great. What about 25 cents an hour? And he's like, even better, great. It's like, what about a dollar an hour? What about 25 dollars an hour? Is the lesson don't take the first offer? It's significantly dumber than that, Peter. Okay. Don't worry, this book is not gonna 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 desire is 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 there's 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 5 cent pieces out of lead, thinking we were making money, we were very close to thinking the way they're 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 the 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 next time. 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, quote 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 I know 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 dollars? Like what if I paid you more what what are you 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? Right. What is going on? What is... There's 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 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 school should teach that, but the main reason that school 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 DC, 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. 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.

Right. 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. Hellane Olin in this book traces all of his 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 basic stuff in there about compound interest and don't fall behind. Some of it is kind of fine. But these are companies that are basically pushing the idea that doing spending on your credit card is totally fine and student debt is something that's really important and normal.

Please step onto the floor that is made of leaves and sticks, please. Exactly. And this paragraph, Jeremy Nutz, 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 of 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.

I dump a load in my mutual fund, it doesn't follow me around for a week. Awww. Awww. Awww. Awww. Awww. Oh God. But also 22% of Americans can't even name one sitcom character.

I know that seems low to me. Like 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. That's not like 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 the mutual funds is obscene. And in fact, sort of signals that maybe something is wrong with the financial system, or 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 years ago where they were going to be forced to provide

like plain vanilla products. I'm just like, here's a, here's a normy ass bank account and you must provide people with super basic information 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. Yeah, 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, childcare, 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 various

other like bi-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 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 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 him. Well, do you want to talk about Rich Dad? 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's slavery. He was like, I'm working you for 10 cents true lesson of the child's 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. Oh, dude. You know, throw that in there. 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 it's like, well, there's a finite number of billionaires in Hawaii. They look around and 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 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 grew up in Hawaii, as he says, he goes to school to become a boat driver, boat captain, and works for standard oil.

Grind set, grind set, grind set. Yeah, 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. Okay. 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 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 having fun at work and a month later I came back and productivity increased by 350%. Like Robert, you're just gilding the lily, dude. Like no one say 10%. Man, it's not 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 was no factory.

This is in his previous book, He pretends there was a factory, but then in Rich Dad Portad, he admits that he 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 work. I love this because he's getting, he gets the various speeches about greed and fear. The implication is you want to be 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 gonna buy cheap merchandise and then I'm gonna 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, stands up and gives you a motivational speech. And then you subscribe to some sort of service to get the next level of knowledge. 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 for the weekend seminar. There's a good exposé of this that the CBC ran in 2010 where they went in Roberts seminars for this CBC exposé and literally like 905, like the first thing that they say on the $500 seminar day is like, you didn't think you were gonna learn everything in three days, did you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's always an 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. Hell yeah. Get them to up your limit. Hell yeah. 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. Yeah. And there, there's reviews and complaints and stuff on like better business bureau by people who spent like $40,000. Jesus Christ. There's this poor woman. I mean, it's 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 and 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 Zeno is... Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha In the CBC expose, they talked to somebody who falls for this and it's like, they don't say where she's from, but she's an immigrant in Canada. She seems to be from somewhere in Eastern Europe. She's been doing these low level, poorly paid service jobs for years. And 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. 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. And people who believe you, when you tell them, like, hey, 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? If you're a millennial and your parents are comfortable, it's probably because they bought a house in 1985. Right. So 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, he's still a sea 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 M.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 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 elbow dolls are out of stock, but I just happen to have one in back and another customer has not come buy for it yet. What? Okay, so let's put the tickle me Elmo one aside for a moment. Every other thing in there is a solid piece of financial advice that he is saying is in fact a misconception.

Save money. Save money is bad advice. 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. But 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 $ 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 grew comes on, and he says, 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 the kind of 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 he was going to get to this place. There's a section on like retirement savings where he says, like, 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-level marketing. Yeah. It's like, okay, I did, this is where I did a control effort time share. joining a network marketing company, also known as multi-level marketing. Yeah. Okay, I did. This is where I did a control effort timeshare. Where, where, 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 in 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 by 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. He gives it to you in like these like vague terms. He's

like an asset puts money into your pocket, but a liability takes it away. And it'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 parts, Peter. Oh, finally, he finally gives it to us. Ultimately, an asset is something that earns passive income for you. Okay. He finally gives us a list.

He says, one, businesses that do not require my presence. Two, stocks, three, bonds, four mutual funds, five, income generating real estate, 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, sure that's the catch all. So it's like stocks, bonds, real estate, and everything. Tickle me elbows. Great. Robert, he then literally goes into a whole thing about tickle me elbows. I was gonna say, should we circle back to tickle me elbows? So I'm glad we got there.

So he basically says that that, you know, talks about the run on Tickle Mielmo'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 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. So I didn't know this. So great, great tip. Don't buy houses by 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 your W2 taxes. 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? Yeah. Yeah. 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 the when this child is like, is this illegal? He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I never said I don't pay them. Wink, wink, wink, wink, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

I am like going easy on him and I'm cutting a lot of the stuff where he like talks about how much he fucking hates, hates taxes. Huge portions of this book. Shocker. 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. Yeah. 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's 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. Most restaurant meals are partial expenses, but do it legally with pre-tax dollars. Transparently tax fraud. I love, this is like the third time that he has described something that's patently illegal,

and then just put it a line at the end of it that's like, but not in an illegal way. It's, he also, he's got these 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 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 people who actually make money investing in real estate and 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 write a book on how to try to sneak weird deceptive language into contracts. I don't, it's not. 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'm not really going to 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 $65,000 for it. And he's like, I'll give you 45,000. And the guys like, I'm desperate to sell. I'm moving to California. You can have it.

Cells the house for profit because, you you know Portland is undergoing a housing boom and then he buys An apartment complex in Phoenix It'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. That's business mindset. We're now gonna watch a clip. Fuck you.

This is from the Oprah episode. Okay. Okay, during the commercial break, you said what? Send up, say it again. You say that you can pay yourself first. How am I gonna 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 gotta 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, 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 are talking about. I was saying because we all have the mentality of this country, you work harder, you work harder, they will pay off in the end. It does not because the government always gets theirs. Right. And then real estate is the least tax income you can get. So when my wife and I were struggling, we saved $6,000.

We bought that house. Think went from $46,000 to $105. 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. So you start out buying something that you wouldn't necessarily want, and you use that to build more income. That's what she does.

She bought seven. Feel more income money. That's my idea. I want to buy a three-plat live in the basement, ran off the two top two apartments, and... Good. And thank you. You haven't paid my mortgage for me.

Good. But I still need to come up with the original capital with a buy-the-place. That starts with paying yourself first. I don't care. I don a crush. This interaction is like one of the bleakest things I've ever seen. 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. And then this poor guy who asked this super basic question, 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 flash the applause,

sign, and the entire audience erupts into applause. Ha, ha, ha. Also this poor salesman who's like asking the questions is like in a full suit, you could tell he was like, I'm gonna 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 bi-real estate and flip it. Yeah. Because like, you 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 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 a housing boom. Wow, thanks, 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. Uh, he was a person. What 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, I'm not a, 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 5,000% 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 okay, 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 like stock broken 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's 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? Yeah, yeah. And so three different people got in touch with me. I sent them all this 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. That doesn't mean that you have any 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. You haven't given me any stock tips? If you want to lose as much money as I have in the last four years, 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. He thinks that you're a huge fucking mark. Right, he's fucking Jordan Bell fording you. Yes.

And you're like, ooh, I have a cool, smart investment advisor. Yeah. 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. So 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 and 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. His previous book is called, if you want to be rich, don't go to school.

Is it originally published with a question mark? If you want to be rich, don't go to school. If they want to be reprinted, they think that the question mark is that's deranged. But so, then 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. 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. 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.

Yes. Yes. Because he is at his core, a mark. Yeah. He sort of herned 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, guess, 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 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 Monte. Yes.

Outside of Madness's work card, you should go, give those guys 20 bucks, find the red queen, great 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. He believes it, 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.

Then that's why he's this boomer mentality. Just like boil down into its essence, like it's dumbest form. It's incredible. He basically becomes the person he always thought he was. Right. He thought he was a millionaire. He made more than $9 million on this book.

He's still doing these seminars. Of course 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 like all of this feeds his self-conception as like someone who has knowledge. Yeah.

But it's just air. Yeah, there's something almost ethereal about his existence. Yes. 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.

Yeah. But okay, are you ready for the ending twist? Oh hell yeah. just like on air talking about returning to the gold standard. But okay, are you ready for the ending twist? Oh, hell yeah. I could not believe this. So since the book comes out, like he's not, he's a Trump guy. He's a fuck Fauci guy. He's shocker, distilling even more this like become a mark at every financial scam he is trying to sell you.

Yeah. In all that time, he's never really given any specifics. even more this like becoming 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. In 2019, we find out that rich dad was real. There is a guy named Richard Keeney, who dies in his 90s. Robert then says, this is rich dad. I mean, who knows if any of the stuff in the book is actually true, right? There's so much, he was never a billion dollar empire. 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 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 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. 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 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 Kimmy guy to not reveal his identity, and Robert stuck by it. Wow. This is like the one likable thing I've ever learned about it. Oh shit.

Probably because the it was in a gentleman's agreement and the guy was like, if you say that I'm the sociopath in rich dad porn, 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, 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 like that's what you're learning.

This is Dad ever read a response book, cool son, dumb son, my story of my two sons.