even people who know nothing about personal finance or self-development will have heard of Rich Dad Poor Dad and its author Robert kiyosaki the enigmatic businessman was the original Financial influencer building a huge and loyal audience decades before the internet made it possible for anybody with a webcam and a Robin Hood account to grow a following there are just two problems his advice was never that good to begin with and it's only gotten worse over time in one of your uh your currently $600 million in debt .2 billion this seminar was free but speakers spend most
of their time trying to convince us to attend another seminar I think it cost us about $15,000 $995 for 3 Days of training if you could say something to Robert kiyosaki what would you say can my 500 bucks back if you're watching a video like this then there's a very good chance that you have a better understanding of personal finance business and the economy than the average person on the street and even then it can be hard to find the answers to simple questions that can have a big imp impact on your livelihood the lack
of financial education combined with the fact that a lot of personal finance is unnecessarily complicated and jargony is a great opportunity for people to sell a simple guide on how to fix all your money problems the problem with these lessons is that it's impossible to make a book course YouTube video or live seminar that appeals to a wide audience while simultaneously considering each individual audience member's personal financial situation it's also really hard to make constructive Financial advice marketable because most of the time it's simply boring if you want to make lots of money providing desperately
needed Financial education you have two options make something for a niche group of people who you can give tailored unexciting yet productive advice to or you could make big exciting promises that appeal to everyone but don't really consider anyone kiyosaki is the king of making extremely basic and often questionable Financial advice sound extremely profound to a novice audience just as prior to the F War was illegal to educate a slave we're not allowed to learn about money in school it might sound stupid to you and I but there's a big audience for it especially from
those who are down on their luck kiyosaki has made millions of dollars over the past four decades by selling a personal financial strategy that denigrates a formal education and a stable career while advocating for lots of debt aggressive investments in entrepreneurship as ways to achieve financial success or at least that was his advice before he really went off the rails but we'll get into that later kiyosaki is best known for his book Rich Dad Poor Dad but he is an absolutely prolific author having published no less than 26 individual books all related to money real
estate and personal finance his first book while not a successful perfectly encapsulates how he would go on to sell his own brand of financial advice it's titled if you want to be rich and happy don't go to school and as the name suggests it outlines how a traditional education is is designed to just direct people into getting traditional jobs that will make them miserable and poor now like all good sales pitches there is an element of truth to this wages haven't kept up with Rising asset prices and the college degree route has only become more
expensive and more competitive since this book was published but it is conveniently also good at casting a very wide net over a group of people who either never got a college degree regret getting their college degree or are considering whether they should get a college degree the only people who won't find a book like this compelling are people who went to college and turned that into a successful career but that doesn't matter because those people don't make for good customers anyway his much more successful book Rich Dad Poor Dad takes the same lessons and repackages
them into a simple narrative with a more intriguing title the man has his problems but he optimized thumbnails and content creation decades before YouTube even existed so um respect I guess anyway most of you probably already know the basics of the book If you haven't already read it he talks about his actual father his Poor Dad who went to school and got a stable job and tried to stay out of debt to his friend's father who becomes a mentor and is referred to as his Rich Dad according to most investigations into the subject this Rich
Dad never really existed now most exposes on the topic leave it at that but to be fair to Robert the made-up character is hardly The Smoking Gun people think it is even if the rich dad was just a figment of kiyosaki's imagination used as a stand in for his own advice that would wouldn't matter if the advice was good now some of the stuff he teaches is so generic that it's really Beyond criticism don't go into debt to buy dumb stuff don't spend money you don't have accumulate assets not liabilities and keep track of your
money that's all perfectly reasonable and if that's all you take away from him that's fine but that would be like picking up a personal fitness book from an Olympic Athlete to read about the health benefits of drinking water it's not wrong but it's not what the book sells and that's where his lessons can really hurt people the most dangerous aspect of kiyosaki's teachings is how much he advocates for using debt going so far as to say you can never get rich if you don't Master the art of using other people's money utilizing leverage to buy
a house or even Investments can generate huge returns if you really know what you're doing and have the facilities in place to manage the risk debt can increase your returns but it also increases the risk and if you take on debt at the wrong time it can put your financial life back decades like it would have if you attended his real estate investment seminars in 2007 months before the global financial crisis if that wasn't bad enough he also teaches something called Cash Flow quadrant which outlines the different ways people can produce an income there are
employees and self-employed people the suckers and then there are investors and business owners the winners according to his books the difference between a self-employed person and a business owner is that the self-employed person needs to work in their own business to keep it running whereas a business owner can step away from their business at any time and leave it to employees to handle everything without them in addition to leveraging other people's money Kiyosaki refers to this as using other people's time this means that any profit from the business is passive income which is obviously great
but it's incredibly hard for most businesses to get to the scale where they can offload all operations to hire the staff while still generating enough profit for Robert this didn't matter because L investigations into his backstory have all found the same thing he got rich by selling books on how to get rich not by following the advice in those books today Kiyosaki is a very wealthy man and he's since made a lot of investments into real estate and reportedly taken on a scary amount of debt but that is all a lot easier and safer to
do when there are millions of dollars coming in from Book Sales every year now the thing with this strategy is that it will work for some people and those people are are more likely to go and publicly sing the Praises of kiyosaki and his teachings than people who levered up on a rental property in 2007 and went bankrupt when the market turned against them people that end up in situations like that are embarrassed and tend to keep quiet even if the lessons are far more valuable than someone who just got lucky on a risky bet
now even that wouldn't be worth making a video about person becomes rich by giving out questionable untailored Financial advice and then uses that wealth to justify their strategies that's basically half the internet at this point and old Bob here doesn't get any special mentions just because he did it first what does warrant further digging though is how bad advice is just the first step in the Rich Dad Poor Dad funnel one of kiyosaki's lesser known books is probably the one that's done the most damage and it's called The Business of the 21st century in it
he makes the same points about moving away from a role where you're working for money and trying to build up Investments and businesses that generate passive income but the problem is that starting a business is hard and even if the average person had enough money to open a business for themselves most fail the solution that kiyosaki pitches in the book is to avoid traditional businesses and instead start a network marketing business instead if you don't know network marketing multi-level marketing and direct selling are all corporate euphemisms for businesses like herbal lifee Amway Avon and USANA
I'm sure by now you know what these companies are but if you don't just think of them as pyramid schemes that are just legal thanks to some clever loopholes those businesses all have terrible track records of making money from their members through ridiculously overpriced products the only thing that keeps people coming back to buy more is the dream that companies sell of making millions of dollars by roping more people into the scheme and becoming an Elite member at the top of the pyramid in his book kiyosaki says he isn't directly involved in any particular company
but that's actually a genius move on his part this book is given out as almost required reading to any new new people entering the bottom of the pyramid through these companies the Rich Dad Poor Dad brand adds an element of legitimacy to a business that people have become very wary of and by not claiming direct involvement in any particular business kiyosaki can sell the book to Amway distributors just as easily as Herbalife Distributors that's where the money actually is in these businesses according to mandatory disclosures even the people in the top percentile of these companies
makes very little money from the bonus structure itself certainly not enough to live the lavish life style they show off to new recruits the real money comes from selling books CDs and tickets to seminars that promise the secrets to unlocking wealth by running a multi-level marketing company it's a grift inside a grift and Kiyosaki has put his hat right in the middle of the scheme with his book The ubiquity of this book amongst multi-level marketing pundits also means that he can charge a lot of money in speaking fees at the conferences these companies hold you
know so when people say Network marketing is like Ponzi or pyramid scheme they don't know what they're talking about Corporate America is a pyramid scheme goes like this having arguably the most famous Financial Guru in the world telling a room full of people they're suckers for having a stable job is a great way to get people to sign up to sell Vitamins out of the back of their car kiyosaki's business strategy of casting a wide net with his books and then profiting off specific groups doesn't just work on the MLM crowd in addition to seminars
on real estate which is arguably what he's best known for he's also started claiming to be an expert on cryptocurrency precious metals and Drop Shipping basically if there's market for selling advice on sketchy businesses with the promises of riches Kiyosaki will be there with a seminar to sell now just for a bit of fun it's worth looking at the absolutely wild ways in which he tries to build Authority in these spaces when a market is oversaturated with people trying to sell a course it takes some crazy sound bites to stand out for crypto it was
the prediction that Bitcoin will hit $10 million and for precious metals it was the claim that he owned the biggest gold mine in America I bought the biggest gold mine in America last yearly it's in Utah so you're literally mining your own gold hey so this was just like verifiably untrue according to the firm global data the biggest gold mine in the USA is the Carin mine which is in Nevada it's owned primarily by the Newmont Corporation and Kiyosaki is not listed on company filings as a major shareholder although it's possible he's a minor non-listed
shareholder on his website he clarifies that he actually has an interest in an ex copper mine that he and his team have prospected to have 2.9 Million ounces of gold in it if this is true it would be a major Discovery to be sure but it would still only be around 2 years production of the actual largest gold mine in America that's still impressive but doesn't sell as well to his target audience in the same article he talks about why he's buying gold and the headline issue is because he doesn't trust the academic Elites at
the FED it's a popular and almost understandable sentiment but curiously the only way you can buy his courses or attend his seminars is by paying with that dirty academic Elite paper money that's completely worthless
