This book is the bestselling personal finance book of all time. It sold 32 million copies. It spent six years on the New York Times bestseller list. And guys, this is the worst freaking book I've ever read. I'm not being dramatic. I lost sleep over this book. I read 286 pages of this thing so that you don't have to. So, buckle up cuz I have a lot to say. I'm Ben and this is Sketchy Advice. Money advice that actually flipping works. This book makes no sense, so I don't have to either. Now, if you're not familiar with this book, you might be wondering, why is it called Rich Dad Poor Dad? Did Robert Kiasaki have two dads? No. This book is about how Robert Kiyosaki's biological dad, a Stanford educated school teacher, was poor. and how Robert Kiasaki basically adopts his neighbor's dad who's a billionaire as his rich dad. Yeah, the whole conceit of this book is jacked up from the get-go. Thankfully, poor dad died before Robert Kiasaki published this book. Otherwise, um I cannot imagine the emotional damage from having 32 million people only know you as poor dad. This provides the whole structure of the book. Rich dad represents how the rich think about money and poor dad represents how the poor and middle class think about money. And at first it kind of seems like maybe there's going to be value from both viewpoints. If I had had only one dad, I would have had to accept or reject his advice, having two dads offered me the choice of contrasting points of view. One of a rich man and one of a poor man. Yeah, he's going to spend the entire book just dunking on his poor dad. Like I said, his poor dad went to Stanford on a full ride scholarship, became a school teacher, became, I think, the head of the education department in Hawaii, went on to run for public office, became head of the teachers union, and generally seems to be a really wellrespected member of his community. But Rich Dad is something else. Let's talk about the very first lesson that Rich Dad teaches Robert. In the first chapter, Robert, who is 9 years old, goes to Rich Dad asking him how to be rich. And Rich Dad says, "I'll teach you, but not like they teach you in school." Robert Kiyosaki hates school. The biggest criminals in the world school teachers. I really don't like school. He tells them they're going to learn a practical way by working for him for 10 cents an hour. Assuming this happened, which I kind of doubt it did because it seems like almost every story in this book is made up. This was in the 1950s. The minimum wage at the time was around 25. And yes, child labor laws existed. After a couple of weeks, Robert gets tired of doing this job. He can't hang out with his friends. He's missing baseball games. And he's getting paid almost nothing. So, he goes to his friend Mike, Rich Dad's son, and tells him he wants to quit. And Mike says, "Dad said you would say that. He said to send you to him when you decided you wanted to quit." Whoa. What kind of 40 chess is Rich Dad playing here? So, Robert goes to Rich Dad and blows up at him. He's like, "Hey, you can't exploit me as child labor. You're paying me 10 cents an hour. What you're doing is illegal." He says, "Everyone in town thinks you're a crook, and they're right." So, apparently, everyone in town hates Rich Dad. And this is where Rich Dad reveals himself as a true Yoda. I'm glad you got angry about working for 10 cents an hour. If you hadn't gotten angry and had simply accepted it, I would have to tell you that I could not teach you. When it comes to money, most people want to play it safe and feel secure. So, passion does not direct them. Fear does. So, is that why they'll take jobs with low pay? I asked. Yes, said Rich Dad. Some people say I exploit people because I don't pay as much as the sugar plantation. Wow, what a thing to say. Because I don't pay as much as the sugar plantation or the government. I say the people exploit themselves. It's their fear, not mine. To which Robert says, "But don't you feel you should pay them more?" To which Rich Dad says, "I don't have to. And besides, more money will not solve their problems. Just look at your dad." Yeah, dude. The guy who's paying a child 10 cents an hour says, "I'm not exploiting people. If I gave them money, they would just spend it all anyway. Look at your dumb poor dad." This is the thing. This is held up as a profound lesson in the book. The dad who pays less money than the sugar plantation is seen as a mentor, while the dad who is a pillar in his community is seen as some big dumb dumb. Over and over again, this book is telling you to think like rich dad, to be like rich dad. But Rich Dad is a freaking jerk that exploits people. And you know what else? Poor dad wasn't even that poor. When Robert gets older, he starts a business selling Velcro surfer wallets. and he gets the money to start his business from his poor dad. His poor dad takes out a second mortgage and fronts Robert $100,000 in the 1970s. The poor dad isn't even poor, but maybe the advice in the book is really good. No, there's like almost no concrete advice in this book. This man will take 50 pages to say like one thing and it will be the vaguest piece of financial advice you've ever heard in your life. Failure inspires winners and failure defeats losers. It is the biggest secret of winners. It's the secret that losers do not know. The greatest secret of winners is that failure inspires winning. Thus, they're not afraid of losing. Repeating Fran Tarkin's quote, "Winning means being unafraid to lose." People like Fran Tarkin are not afraid of losing because they know who they are. They hate losing. So, they know that losing will only inspire them to become better. There is a big difference between hating losing and being afraid to lose. Most people are so afraid of losing money that they lose. Like dude, hire an editor. This book should have been three pages long. Probably the most enduring lesson from this book is to buy assets, not liabilities. The rich buy assets. The poor middle class buy liabilities that they think are assets. It takes him forever to actually define what an asset is. And it's basically just anything that makes you money. And the main thing that he talks about in this book is real estate. This book makes it sound like basically any chump can get into real estate, become a rich dad, and just crush it. But as a millennial living in 2025, uh, I don't know about that. Throughout this book, he just describes risky deal after risky deal, buying houses that were foreclosed, putting a bunch of money into a single stock. But he says that that's okay if you're financially intelligent. It is not gambling if you know what you're doing. It is gambling if you're just throwing money into a deal and praying. Of course, there is always risk. It is financial intelligence that improves the odds. Thus, what is risky for one person is less risky to someone else. The smarter you are, the better chance you have of beating the odds. But the stories that Robert tells are not about him being intelligent. the way he tells it, if any of these anecdotes are true, he locks himself into finding a bunch of incredible deals. There's one story where he's jogging through a neighborhood in Portland and he comes up to a guy who's in front of his house, which is for sale, and he asks him, "What are you asking for your house?" The owner turned and smiled weakly. Make me an offer. When has that ever happened? Supposedly, this house is worth $65,000, but he gets it for $45,000 because he's financially intelligent. He only puts $5,000 down. And then one year later, he sells it for $95,000. He tells another story in this book about how he bought a foreclosed house for way less than it was worth, put up a billboard advertising it, and then sold it for multiple times its value in five hours. He bought and sold a house. Just 10xed the house in five hours. I mean, there's some helpful mindset stuff in here. He talks about how rich dad says rather than saying I can't afford it, you should think of it as how could I afford it? Which I do think is somewhat similar to what we talk about at WAB. Rather than simply saying, well, there's no way I could buy that. You can instead ask the question of like, well, what would I need to give up to buy that? Would I need to give up more hours in the office? Would I need to take on more risk by doing something entrepreneurial? Would I need to shift money from here? Would I need to dig into my savings? Like, that's a perfectly valid question. That's a perfectly fine mindset to think in terms of opportunities and be looking for opportunities. But like, he gives you no advice about how to find opportunities except for like buying foreclosed houses and like doing insider trading. Really, all of his actual practical advice winds up being super scammy stuff. I mean, it's pretty telling. At one point in the book, Robert literally says that the top three things he hears when he teaches these things to people are, "You can't do that here, that's against the law, or you're lying." Like, if those are the top three objections you get everywhere you go, maybe you're giving sketchy advice. And this is the thing, man. Robert is talking about how you need to get educated. you need to raise your financial intelligence. And then the whole last chapter of this book is him advertising buying more of his books, buying his board game, which we're going to have a video about uh next week where Hannah and I are actually going to sit down and play his board game. So, you can check that. There'll be a card here once we have that video recorded. When you look at the Rich Dad Empire, um Robert Kiasaki sold these seminars and it's a pretty standard kind of scam structure. The first seminar is free. The next seminar cost I think $250. That seminar was basically a huge ad for this massive like this is where all the good stuff is seminar. This is by the way advanced training curriculum and big bold letters. On the first page I want you guys to write advanced training investment from 12 to $45,000. You got to do your credit card to buy things that will make you money. Muso says we'll need lots of room on our credit cards for things like renovations, even down payments. So, he orders us to call our credit card companies right away and get our limits raised, then challenges us to go big. Ask for 100,000. Who's willing to ask for $100,000 this year? Some people paid $45,000 for these seminars. And once you know that Robert Kiyosaki was deeply involved in scammy seminars both before and after the publishing of this book, some of the excerpts make a little more sense. For instance, if failure inspires you to win, maybe you should go for it. But only maybe. If failure makes you weak or causes you to throw temper tantrums like spoiled brats who call attorneys to file lawsuits every time something doesn't go their way, then play it safe. Can't imagine who he's talking about. And then too, I think the really insidious thing in this book is like one thing this book does well is it actually points out a lot of things that a lot of people feel very acutely. A lot of people do feel really frustrated with how much they're being paid versus how much they work. A lot of people do feel afraid of losing their job or feel like they're constantly working for money and it's not bringing them any satisfaction. And Robert's whole solution to that is to become rich. But he has virtually no practical advice about how to become rich. Instead, he tells you all of the reasons that you're poor, and guess what? All of them are your fault. The real world is simply waiting for you to get rich. Only a person's doubts keep them poor. It just smacks of like hustle and grind and that's you're not hustling hard enough and that's why you don't have as much money as you want. And then this one really takes the cake. This is a conversation between Rich Dad and Robert. When does your dad pay his bills? Rich Dad asked. the first of the month. I said, "Does he have anything left over?" He said, "Very little," I said. "That's the main reason he struggles," said Rich Dad. "He has bad habits. Your dad pays everyone else first. He pays himself last, but only if he has anything left over." So, if you didn't catch that, the bad habit here is paying your bills. If you pay your bills first, that's a bad habit. He literally says in this book like I still pay myself first even if I'm short of money. My asset column is far more important to me than the government. And he says the reason he does this is because when creditors come knocking on his door, that's what gives him motivation to hustle even harder, which by the way, this book totally recommends like take out debts in order to pursue assets. Well, in one of your uh YouTube videos, you actually said that you're currently $600 million in debt. No, 1.2 billion. 1.2 billion. Okay. But that's fine because if you take his seminars, if you read his books, you'll have enough financial intelligence to spot opportunities. And when you take out that debt to buy those assets and the creditors come knocking on your door, well, that's just going to give you motivation to hustle even harder and find better assets and deals until you strike it rich and then all your problems go away. Like I am sure that this exact way of thinking has absolutely destroyed people's lives. It's actually no surprise to me that the reason this book hit the bestseller list in the first place was because Amway, a very prominent multi-level marketing company, basically pumped it out there. Because this is all multi-level marketing stuff. It's like, go be your own boss. You're going to be able to do it. Don't think about the numbers. Don't think about the risk. Just do it. Give us your money and that's going to come back to you. And here's the thing. He has this whole book where he says basically nothing except vague platitudes and scammy stuff. Do you know what he never talks about? How to actually spend your money. This whole thing is just like get money, get money, get money. And then there is absolutely no advice on what to do with it once you have it. There's no talk about budgeting. There's no talk about how to save or how to prioritize. It's just get as much money as possible because this book is playing into this idea that the only way to get ahead, the only way for you to live a fulfilled life is to get so much money that you never have to think about money again. When I reviewed Die with Zero, I was kind of on the fence about whether that book was spendful. But with this book, I am I am not on the fence. I The fence and I are on two different planes of existence. This book says, "The only way to find peace of mind, the only way to live a truly fulfilling life with regards to money is to take wildly irresponsible gamles until you hit it big. Don't work for someone else. Don't be an employee. That means you're a chump. Just just hustle and grind, hustle and grind until you have 12 condos and you're living on nothing but passive income." A lot of us just can't do that. And a lot of us don't want to do that. I don't want to be an entrepreneur and I don't want to live in a world where everyone else is also trying to be an entrepreneur. Like this guy is telling you that he has secret knowledge to raise your financial intelligence so that you can kind of see through the matrix and become insanely rich. And what I'm telling you and what everybody on the WAB team will tell you is you don't need this. You already have so much financial intelligence. If you were to sat down, look at every dollar you have right now and give those dollars specific jobs based on the things that you and your family care about, you're going to do a good job. You can do this. It's not as hard as a lot of people make it sound. It's not as hard as Rich Dad Poor Dad would like you to believe. What a lot of people don't have is like a clear process for walking through that. And if you would like that, we have five simple questions that you can use anytime you get money to help you figure out what those dollars need to do. You can check it out at this video up here. Totally free to watch. And hey, if you'd like a tool that helps you apply those questions and keep track of your money, you can go to wab.com/sketchy for a free month of the WAB app. I promise we're not going to ask you to raise your credit card limit. So many people, I think, feel so much despair about money because it just feels like too much or it feels like there's never enough. And this guy comes along and tells you it's easy. You just need to keep giving it to me so that eventually I'll cough up some profound magical secret that that that every rich person knows and you just haven't learned it yet. And that's just not how it works. And honestly, if it turns you into someone like Rich Dad or Robert here, do you even want it? Like, if you follow this book to the letter, you're going to turn into an exploitative, scammy, tax frauding jerk. And one of the things I love about the five questions and about spendfulness is here at WEAB, we're not trying to turn you into someone we're not. We believe that by working through the five questions and developing your mindset around how you spend and save your money, you're just making your spending look more like you. You're making it so that more of you is out there in the world. You don't need to become some rich you in order to be successful with money. Maybe you just need a new mindset and not a new grindet. Bye.