They’re Lying To You About Debt... Here's How To Get Rich | Robert Kiyosaki

The School of Hard Knocks hosts said Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad directly influenced them to become entrepreneurs. James, Jack and Josh said the book helped change the lives of three founders aged 23, 25 and 27 who went on to build a multimillion-dollar business and an audience of about 18 million followers. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"}

Kiyosaki said his message is not literally “don’t go to school”; it is “choose your teachers wisely.” His first book was titled If You Want to Be Rich and Happy, Don’t Go to School, which he joked did not sell very well, but he said the real argument was that people should carefully choose whose thinking they absorb.

He argued that teachers’ own economic circumstances inevitably shape the advice they give. He described most schoolteachers as well-meaning employees who value job security and pensions, and argued that this naturally produces a different outlook from that of entrepreneurs and investors.

Kiyosaki traced his “choose your teachers” philosophy to a Sunday-school lesson when he was about seven. Asked why the biblical wise men were wise, he first answered that they were rich because they carried gold, frankincense and myrrh; the teacher’s intended answer was that they sought the best teacher, Jesus Christ, which made a lasting impression on him.

His biological father—the “poor dad” of his framework—was highly educated but, according to Kiyosaki, financially unsuccessful. Kiyosaki described him as having studied at institutions including Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern and holding a PhD, yet recalled his family repeatedly struggling for money.

Kiyosaki said the contradiction between his father’s education and financial condition made him distrust the standard education-to-employment formula at an early age. His father encouraged him to stay in school and obtain a PhD, while Kiyosaki remembered his mother crying because the family did not have enough money.

Around age 10, Kiyosaki’s father directed him to learn from his best friend’s father, who became the “rich dad.” Kiyosaki presents this as the moment he deliberately selected a different financial teacher rather than simply adopting his own father’s beliefs.

He described the mind as a person’s greatest asset because teachers determine much of what enters it. His broader point was that education is not merely about attending an institution; choosing whose ideas and habits to absorb can shape an entire life.

Kiyosaki said a change in U.S. coinage in 1965 helped trigger his interest in money. At about 18, he noticed that a half-dollar no longer contained the silver he associated with the previous year and later connected the experience to Gresham’s law—the idea that “bad” money drives “good” money out of circulation.

As a young golf caddy, Kiyosaki began converting his small earnings into older silver coins. He said he earned roughly $1 for nine holes, went to the bank, exchanged his earnings for coins and kept those that appeared to contain silver rather than copper.

His mother later spent the bag of silver coins he had accumulated, which Kiyosaki interpreted as another lesson about financial literacy. He emphasized that both his mother, a registered nurse, and his highly educated father were intelligent people but, in his view, knew little about money.

Kiyosaki attributes a fundamental change in the monetary system to President Richard Nixon ending dollar convertibility into gold in 1971. He characterizes the post-1971 dollar as fiat or debt-based money and argues that this change helped widen the economic divide between asset owners and people dependent on wages and savings.

His core “Rich Dad” rules reject several conventional personal-finance assumptions. He repeatedly said the rich do not work primarily for money, should not simply save currency, and should not automatically regard their own home as an asset.

For Kiyosaki, whether something is an asset depends principally on cash flow rather than its conventional label. His argument that “your house is not an asset” means that an asset should put money into the owner’s pocket rather than continuously consume it.

Kiyosaki said he created the Cashflow board game because he believes financial concepts are learned better through action than lectures. He linked the approach to his childhood experience playing Monopoly with his “rich dad.”

Monopoly gave Kiyosaki a simple model for scaling real estate: acquire smaller properties and trade upward into larger ones. He repeatedly invoked the game’s “four green houses, one red hotel” progression and connected it with tax-deferred real-estate exchanges.

His “rich dad” reinforced the Monopoly lesson by showing him actual properties. Kiyosaki said his mentor explained that small houses could ultimately become a hotel and described a Waikiki property where, in his telling, the family eventually retained ownership of the underlying land rather than the hotel itself.

Kiyosaki sees ownership of land and other enduring cash-producing assets as a route to intergenerational wealth. He described such property being held for descendants through a trust, although he added that he did not agree with children simply being able to live without working.

He cited Maria Montessori’s idea that “what the hand does, the mind remembers” to support experiential learning. His recurring argument was that a person becomes competent by performing a task repeatedly rather than merely hearing someone explain it.

Kiyosaki considers mistakes essential to learning and says conventional schooling trains people to fear them. Using Tiger Woods as an example, he argued that elite performers become skilled partly by making enormous numbers of mistakes during actual practice.

He deliberately reframed what schools call “cheating” as collaboration in real life. Kiyosaki said he surrounds himself with accountants, attorneys and specialists and approaches investing as a team activity rather than trying to solve every problem alone.

One host said he had been a straight-A college freshman headed toward a conventional corporate career until reading Rich Dad Poor Dad. He said the book changed his view of cash flow, employment and wealth and convinced him that he needed different teachers.

Kiyosaki said people should examine whether the voices directing their financial lives are simply repeating inherited advice. He listed parents and financial planners as common sources of the conventional formula: study, obtain a job, work hard, save, eliminate debt and buy a diversified portfolio.

He did not argue that everyone should use debt. Kiyosaki explicitly said that someone unable to manage debt should remain debt-free; his alternative for financially skilled investors is to learn how debt and outside capital can be used to purchase productive assets.

He said aspiring real-estate investors should learn real estate itself, capital raising and how to deal with bankers. In his model, borrowed money is justified when it helps acquire property that produces reliable cash flow.

Kiyosaki claimed to own roughly 15,000 rental properties. Using a hypothetical $200 of monthly cash flow from each, he illustrated approximately $3 million in monthly cash flow rather than focusing on salary or earned income.

He said he was selling a nearby house and planned to redeploy the proceeds into two surgery centers in Indiana. He estimated that the centers would collectively put about $20,000 per month into his pocket, presenting the transaction as an example of continuously converting capital into additional cash-producing assets.

Kiyosaki repeatedly presented his own academic weakness as evidence that financial success does not require exceptional classroom performance. He described struggling badly in high school while emphasizing that his advantage is building a team containing people more technically skilled than he is.

He defined “hard knocks” as learning by falling, recovering and understanding what the failure taught you. In his view, avoiding failure altogether deprives a person of the experience needed to improve.

The three hosts said they had begun investing in real estate and were in the process of acquiring their second property. They described a purchase price of about $4.1 million, a $1.2 million down payment and roughly $3 million of financing; Kiyosaki initially called the debt-to-equity relationship a good ratio.

Kiyosaki’s reaction changed when the hosts said the property would probably lose money for its first few years. They described it as a value-add project requiring work such as facade improvements, but Kiyosaki warned them strongly against relying on future appreciation or improvements to justify present negative cash flow.

His real-estate rule was simple: if the property does not make money, do not buy it yet. He advised negotiating until the transaction produces acceptable cash flow instead of accepting an agent’s assurance that losses will eventually be recovered.

Kiyosaki suggested challenging optimistic real-estate projections by asking whether the person making them will guarantee them in writing. His point was that the investor ultimately bears the economic risk, not the broker promising that a weak deal will improve later.

He said the fundamentals of borrowing and negotiating with banks have not changed as much as his own capabilities have. He attributed his improvement primarily to greater experience and surrounding himself with more knowledgeable people.

Kiyosaki identified a trusted real-estate partner named Ken as one of the smartest real-estate people he knows. He used that relationship to reinforce his broader principle that investors should operate alongside specialists who understand the same “game.”

He used rugby and soccer as an analogy for choosing partners and advisers who understand the rules you intend to play by. His argument was not that one game is universally superior, but that combining people operating under incompatible assumptions can create problems.

Kiyosaki described Donald Trump as a real-estate colleague and partner and said one difficulty with Trump is that he can “open his mouth and put his foot in it.” At the same time, he said he values Trump’s willingness to tell people things directly to their faces.

Kiyosaki connected his preference for directness with his military background. He said his father attended West Point, while he attended Kings Point and later served as a U.S. Marine, experiences he believes produced a more confrontational and direct communication style.

The central military lesson Kiyosaki carried into business was knowing and trusting his “wingmen.” He said that under fire a pilot cannot simply abandon course; survival depends on the surrounding team performing its assigned role.

Kiyosaki said he spoke with Trump in Milwaukee shortly after Trump had been shot in Pennsylvania. He recalled Trump asking what being shot at in Vietnam had been like, and Kiyosaki said his answer was essentially that incoming fire cannot be theatrically dodged—you must hold course and depend on the people around you.

He described combat flying as an intensely coordinated team exercise. Kiyosaki recalled aircraft and gunners protecting one another during turns and attacks, contrasting that with educational environments where receiving help may be treated as cheating.

Kiyosaki made sweeping and strongly political claims about education and Marxism. He asserted that many teachers are Marxists and said that when he and Charlie Kirk spoke at Arizona State University, 39 professors threatened students with failing grades if they listened to them; the transcript supplies Kiyosaki’s account but no independent evidence for the allegation.

Trust and relevant experience are Kiyosaki’s first tests for a business partner. He said he trusted his real-estate partner “with my life” and similarly described his tax specialists and accountants as highly capable people with whom he operates as a team.

His professional team holds a regular Thursday-morning study session at about 7:30. Kiyosaki said they examine a different subject together each week, suggesting that he views continuing group education as part of running the business rather than something that ends with formal schooling.

He criticized professors who continue teaching material learned decades earlier without current practical exposure. He used calculus as a personal example: he did not claim it was inherently useless, only that he had never needed it in his own career.

Asked what he learned from his “poor dad,” Kiyosaki focused first on the damage financial difficulty caused his family. He described his father as a very tall Japanese man who was professorial, intelligent and good-hearted but also, in Kiyosaki’s view, arrogant about education.

One of Kiyosaki’s strongest childhood memories was watching his mother cry over deteriorating bank balances. He remembered old paper bank statements showing progressively less black and more red, while his father continued recommending the education-and-employment path.

Kiyosaki said his father eventually became the head of education in Hawaii and also led a teachers union. Rather than making him trust his father’s educational advice more, those credentials reinforced Kiyosaki’s belief that institutional authority and practical financial competence are separate things.

He connected teachers unions with Marxist ideas about organized labor and blamed them for problems in American education. These were Kiyosaki’s political interpretations rather than conclusions established by evidence presented during the interview.

Kiyosaki suggested that practical vocational education may be better for many people than conventional academic education. He specifically mentioned becoming a mechanic or electrician, while acknowledging that strong academic students may pursue professions such as medicine or law.

He warned against selecting accountants, lawyers or other professional advisers mainly because they are inexpensive. His broader principle is that excellent advisers can create more value than their fees cost, although he acknowledged that inexperienced clients may not yet know how to identify who is genuinely excellent.

Kiyosaki said one apparently prominent Phoenix attorney betrayed him badly enough to cost him roughly $30 million. He said he discovered misconduct, the attorney subsequently sued him, and the episode taught him that professional credentials do not guarantee honesty.

The hosts raised Kiyosaki’s period of severe financial hardship in the 1980s, including homelessness and living from his car. Asked how he recovered, Kiyosaki said resilience may partly be something a person either has or does not, but he also credited the standards imposed by his military-academy peers and environment.

He strongly rejected what he calls a “victim mentality.” His position was that accepting a permanent identity as a victim makes recovery less likely, while demanding environments and strong peers can push someone to stand up again.

Kiyosaki then moved into explicit political criticism of socialist policies. Referring to a New York political figure he called Mamdani, he attacked proposals such as free buses and groceries and argued that promised government benefits would ultimately fail; those were his political claims and predictions.

His formal education at Kings Point included studying Marxism under an economics instructor he identified as Dr. Norton. Kiyosaki said Norton was a West Point graduate and former B-17 pilot who had been shot down, captured during World War II and escaped.

Norton’s war experience helped inspire Kiyosaki to seek direct experience rather than simply hearing about it. Kiyosaki recalled returning to ask what being shot down and captured was like and being told, in effect, to go find out for himself.

Kiyosaki said he graduated from Kings Point in 1969 at age 22 and had access to a starting job paying about $120,000 a year. He emphasized how large that income was at the time, then said he gave it up to join the Marine Corps and fly in Vietnam.

He said he went down three times while flying, with the third crash breaking his back. The first crash terrified him, the second was even more frightening, and after the third he said other people became reluctant to fly with him.

Kiyosaki said all 16 men he took with him to Vietnam ultimately returned home alive. He presented that outcome as central to his responsibility as a Marine lieutenant and to his lifelong emphasis on team loyalty.

For someone leaving a salaried job for entrepreneurship, Kiyosaki identified four core abilities: sell, use debt intelligently, raise capital and keep getting back up while maintaining integrity. He treated those practical capabilities as more important than simply acquiring another academic credential.

Kiyosaki said he was court-martialed three times during his military career and admitted that dishonesty was part of the problem. His most detailed account involved misconduct after returning from Vietnam while stationed in Hawaii.

He admitted using his military helicopter to take women on unauthorized trips to a deserted island. He described this as happening during a period when returning servicemen faced hostility in Hawaii and said he was eventually caught.

Kiyosaki also admitted stealing goods from a military retail facility by exploiting its entry-and-exit procedures. He said he took items without being properly checked and also confessed to falsifying government records and other misconduct.

Rather than continue lying, Kiyosaki eventually telephoned Marine prosecutor Captain Abrams and said he was coming in to confess. He said he then disclosed everything rather than limiting his admission to the offense investigators already knew about.

Kiyosaki said he expected that confession to send him to jail but instead received an honorable discharge. According to his account, Captain Abrams thanked him for finally telling the truth and told him to leave; Kiyosaki says the experience cemented his belief that “the truth will set you free.”

He said that episode produced a lasting personal commitment to remain as close to the truth as possible. It is notable because he placed integrity alongside sales, capital raising, debt management and resilience as a core entrepreneurial requirement.

The hosts introduced Kiyosaki as someone who eventually became a leading Xerox salesman and sold very large amounts of products, but Kiyosaki emphasized that he initially could barely sell anything. After leaving the Marine Corps and joining Xerox in 1974, he was sent from Hawaii to the company’s sales school in Virginia but still struggled badly when he returned.

After roughly three months at Xerox, Kiyosaki believed he was close to being fired because he was producing almost no sales. When his “rich dad” asked how many calls he made, Kiyosaki said that on a good day he made only about two.

His mentor told him he was failing because he was not “failing fast enough.” Rather than trying to avoid rejection, Kiyosaki was told to deliberately increase the number of attempts and therefore the number of failures.

Kiyosaki responded by volunteering for a nonprofit in downtown Honolulu where he could practice telephone solicitation after work. His nightly target was 30 conversations, and he said he remained at the phones until he had actually spoken with 30 people.

His Xerox sales subsequently rose, reinforcing his belief that deliberate exposure to rejection develops selling ability. Kiyosaki’s sales lesson was therefore not a script or closing technique but increasing the volume of attempts until failure itself becomes training.

He said fear of failure is one of the main reasons people never become successful. In his interpretation, school conditions people to avoid mistakes, while entrepreneurship rewards people capable of making mistakes, learning quickly and trying again.

Kiyosaki estimated that he has lost everything about 10 times. He described those experiences as horrifying rather than romanticizing failure, while insisting that recovery from them provided some of his most valuable education.

One early nylon-wallet business nearly collapsed while Kiyosaki was still employed by Xerox. His accountant told him the company needed approximately $100,000 to survive—a very large amount in the 1970s.

His “rich dad” refused to rescue the failing company financially, while his biological father mortgaged his own house to provide the $100,000. This complicates Kiyosaki’s harsh portrait of his “poor dad”: despite their differences, his father personally put his home at risk to help him.

The $100,000 rescue immediately became another disaster when the company accountant, Stanley, allegedly cashed the check and disappeared with the money. Kiyosaki was left with the failing business and the possibility that his father could lose his mortgaged home.

Kiyosaki said he then had to find a way to save his father’s house, and ultimately succeeded. He added that his father retained the house, turning what he described as one of his most devastating business failures into another example of recovering from a “hard knock.”

Asked what single message he would leave younger people, Kiyosaki recommended playing his Cashflow board game. He said its value is that people physically practice financial decisions and accounting concepts instead of passively listening to them.

Kiyosaki contrasted the board game with his experience in an MBA program at the University of Hawaii, which he found extremely boring. He recalled falling asleep in accounting classes and said the instructor was an accounting teacher rather than a practicing accountant.

That MBA experience returned the interview to its opening idea: choose teachers who actually practice what they teach. Kiyosaki framed the lesson not as an absolute rejection of school but as a warning against surrendering judgment merely because someone occupies an academic position.

By the end of the conversation, Kiyosaki broadened his definition of personal assets beyond money to the body, mind and spirit. He warned that allowing another person or institution to destroy one’s spirit can be more damaging than a financial setback.

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, Kiyosaki said he does not spend much time thinking about his legacy. He instead returned to the importance of the people he chooses to associate and work with.

He said some members of his family and organization dislike Donald Trump even though Kiyosaki has worked and written with him. Kiyosaki said he continues valuing that relationship because he admires what he sees as Trump’s willingness to take risks and confront people directly.

Kiyosaki ended with a broader criticism of young men, saying too many retreat into video games rather than developing courage, careers and responsibility. He cited an unnamed friend who became a Michigan congressman and who, according to Kiyosaki, said the Marine Corps was struggling to find suitable men.

The closing section also included disparaging political remarks about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Kiyosaki made an unsupported sexualized claim about Harris’s rise to prominence; no evidence for that allegation was presented in the conversation.

At the same time, Kiyosaki said he encounters increasing numbers of successful female entrepreneurs and thinks women are generally “doing a pretty good job.” His criticism in this section was aimed primarily at men whom he believes are failing to keep pace economically and personally.

Kiyosaki invoked “hypergamy” to claim that women generally seek male partners who earn or rank above them. His example was a woman earning $100,000 being unlikely to date a man earning $80,000; he presented the idea as a reason men need to improve their economic position, although the conversation offered no evidence establishing the generalization.

He jokingly connected his own wealth in old age with receiving more attention from younger women than he did when he was young. He ended the subject by describing women as wonderful and beautiful while warning men not to underestimate them.