Robert Kiyosaki discusses his new book, The Capitalist Manifesto, and the "5 Gs" for recession survival, framing his work as a fight for freedom. He critiques public schools and the NEA as vehicles for Marxist indoctrination, blames the Federal Reserve for enabling communism, and warns that Biden's CBDC executive order makes America 100% communist. Kiyosaki advocates investing in gold, real estate, and firearms while supporting Florida's financial literacy efforts against California's perceived oppression, ultimately urging Americans to resist an encroaching authoritarian system. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I am glad to have you on because in my last book, I did one chapter on capitalism to try to save capitalism.
But your whole life has been about trying to save capitalism.
So before we get into capitalism itself, give me a little bit of your bio for the people that maybe have not read it, because it's quite extraordinary and pretty much explains exactly why you care about the things that you write about.
But that's the classic story of rich and poor, you know.
My 10, I take up the game of golf and I have to hitchhike to the country club, but I had to sit in the caddy shack and my classmates are in the country club and I keep asking myself again, you know, Kipasa, how come some people are rich and some people are poor?
And this kind of became my lifelong quest and question on that.
I did go to military school.
I mean, I was a horrible student, but I got congressional nominations at Naval Academy and U.S.
Merchant Marine Academy in New York.
I took Merchant Marine Academy.
And in 1965, when I went there, it's purely military.
It's one of the five federal academies with Air Force, Army, Navy, Coast Guard.
Anyway, this is the book they had me read.
So while my peers going to traditional snowflake U, Are studying Keynes and Adam Smith and my economics teacher at the Academy had us read Marx, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin.
So at 18 years old, Dave, I'm effed up.
Holy mackerel.
And that's when the kind of lights go on.
I'm 18 years old, military school, I'm being yelled at, screamed at.
And I realized that most of my friends were communists.
But they don't know it.
And let's say they're bad people.
It's like, can you be Hindu?
Can you be Christian?
Can you be Muslim?
Can you be Jewish?
Economics is basically a religion.
That's all it is.
So the moment my economics teacher at the military school is teaching me this stuff, I'm going, most school teachers are Marxists.
And that's kind of when the lights kept going on.
So I graduated in 1969.
My background is oil, so I do know what I'm talking about when it comes to oil.
So when that sucker Biden cut off the Keystone XL pipeline, I said, that man's a communist because I know what he was up to.
You know what I mean?
I'm an oil guy.
I sell for Standard Oil.
My first port of call was Valdez, Alaska, the Alaska pipeline in 1969.
I'm going, holy mackerel that I could see communism seeping into our country.
Plus, I'm so old, Columbia University was one of the first ones that had the riots in the 60s, and the riots then spread through all the colleges throughout the United States.
So that when you read this book here, you'll find out that in 1930, communism came into America from the Frankfurt School, and they embedded themselves in Columbia University Teachers College.
And so I was in the 1930s and as a student, as a baby boomer, you know, I go to Vietnam twice, 65, 66 and 72.
All right, so you've given me a lot of avenues to go there.
So first, I love that you started by connecting capitalism to freedom, because we seem to be losing both right now.
So to connect this a little bit directly to capitalism at the moment, How do you think capitalism, or why do you think perhaps, that capitalism didn't sell itself well enough right now?
Like, the salespeople for capitalism maybe are failing, and that seemingly is why the ideas of the book that you keep holding up, Communist Manifesto, for our audio listeners, seems to be taking off.
Well, I'll tell you what, in my, I didn't do well in school, you know, I mean, I went, I, only reason I got into Naval Academy and Merge Marine Academy is I played football.
I had high SATs.
My grades are terrible.
I just hated school.
I just hated it.
But I got through it.
But teachers live in a different world, as you know.
There's one guy and whoever's talking to you at that moment is the real Donald Trump.
He and I used to speak at these massive real estate conventions and one day I got up on stage with him and I made the mistake of saying, There was a person, Leona Helmsley, they called her the Queen of Mean.
Was it purely both of your love of capitalism that brought you guys together?
I mean, you're doing, you're speaking at these events and things, but like when you really sort of meshed and thought, okay, I can write a book with this guy.
You know, it's interesting, because I can tell you as somebody that lived the last eight years in California, I now live in the free state of Florida.
Your facial reaction was just right.
You know, now, obviously, I'm not paying any income tax.
And it's like, man, you know what?
This state is still running, and actually it's running quite efficiently, and freedom is flourishing, and business is flourishing, and everyone's moving here, and I have two businesses here.
And it's like, everyone's fleeing California, because they're just taking 10% at the end of the year.
To teach financial statements, income, expense, cash flow.
But most people, they leave school, they have a high GPA, grade point average, but they don't have a financial statement.
Strange, isn't it?
What's more important, your grade point average or your financial statement?
And my rich dad always said to me, because he never went to school, because my poor dad was a PhD, you know, poor, helpless, desperate, and my rich dad said, I'm like 12 years old.
He says, my bankers never asked me for my report card yet.
So I wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, and now I wrote this book here, The Capitalist Manifesto, because capitalism starts with a financial statement.
Think about it.
How much income, how many expenses, assets and liabilities.
And what most people don't realize, the US dollar is a liability against the taxpayer.
That's why in 1913 the Fed was created and so was the IRS.
I think that would be an understatement coming from you, probably was.
I mean, it really is amazing that we don't teach in public schools in the United States.
We basically teach no financial literacy.
I don't know if you've seen this, but Ron DeSantis in Florida just signed something where they will start making sure that you have basic financial literacy.
And it's like, oh, okay, we're going to actually teach young people something rather than gender.
I wanna ask you, so because you talk about your rich dad, poor dad, obviously, do you think it was something beyond just the education that defined them in that regard?
Do you think it was a personality trait or nature versus nurture that a certain type of person becomes more interested in relying on a system and a certain type of person is wired to say, hey, I'm gonna go get mine?
Those SOBs, they were yelling and screaming at me 24-7.
But when we got to Vietnam, we were a fighting machine.
You know, I flew the helicopter gunship, and my crew chiefs were just as important as the pilots.
You know, we couldn't function without a team.
And we killed a lot of people, unfortunately.
But we also had a lot of atrocities against us, too.
When I realized I was in Vietnam for the second time, I went there in 66 and then 72, and we were fighting for freedom.
That's what we were fighting for, not capitalism.
Then I come back and I land at Norton Air Force Base in California, January 10th, 1973, and I get spit on, get hit by eggs by all those hippies from the Woodstock generation.
I saw this book, which I read in 1965, coming true.
I said, we're going, we're becoming a communist nation.
So my wife and I in 1996 first created the cash flow board game to teach the financial statement.
The single most boring subject in school was accounting.
It's horrible.
So we made it fun.
We made a game and all this income, expense, assets, liabilities, cash flow.
Those are three main financial statements in a financial statement.
Inco-statement, which is income expense, balance sheet, asset liability, and thirds of statement of cash flow.
That's what the game is called, cash flow.
So I think he hasn't agreed to it, but the DeSantis is considering using our board game to teach financial education because kids like to play with games.
And so the cash flow board game, rich dad, poor dad, the only book that covered the three financial statements, income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flow.
Those are the three things that count.
And so when I walk into my banker today, like in 2008, when the whole thing collapsed with Lehman, and by the way, I was on CNN speaking to Wolf Blitzer saying Lehman was going down.
You know, so I called that one because I could see it coming, you know.
And so I was on Lima and I called it coming down and all this stuff, but it's just a matter of teaching.
You know, all we have to do is teach, but the teachers unions are in the way and my poor dad, guess what he was head of?
Teachers union.
And if you study Marx, his words were workers of the world unite.
And my father, And my rich dad, you know, I was like 15 or 16, his workers were going on strike in Hawaii.
And rich dad called me and said, would you mind coming to manage, you know, maintain one of our desks for us at night?
So I said, sure.
So I went down and I helped my rich dad out by just being a kid, managing the desk so tourists could check in and out.
So what do you think the first step in reversing that is?
If there's a 21-year-old watching this show that's on the fence, maybe they just got out of school, although I know you would say they don't have to go to school in the first place, but let's say they're 21, they're trying to figure out what they're gonna do, where they're gonna live, what kind of life they want, but they've been indoctrinated with a certain amount of that stuff.
What's the first way we can get these people, do you think?
I think the first thing to do is question the indoctrination.
As Thomas Sowell from Stanford says, It's not education.
It's indoctrination.
Go to school.
What do you learn about money?
Nothing.
Get a job.
Who pays the highest taxes?
Workers.
Pay your taxes.
Rich don't pay taxes.
Get out of debt.
I'm a billion dollars in debt because in 1971 when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, I said, thank you, Jesus.
I'm going to borrow my ass off now and invest in the stock market.
I don't invest in the stock market.
I'm not saying you shouldn't.
But having a rich dad and having financial education, understanding financial statements, understanding cash flow gave me freedom that most people will never have because they've been indoctrinated.
Go to school, get a job, work hard, save money, pay taxes, get out of debt and invest in the stock market.
I don't do any of those things because I don't have to.
You know, this iPhone here is the most powerful entrepreneur tool I ever saw in my whole life.
I can text anybody in the world today.
You know, I can go on YouTube, you can have your own podcast.
It's so powerful.
But if your brain isn't a capitalist brain, you use it to watch kiddie porn or whatever people do today.
You know what I mean?
It's like, it's also destroying our society, this iPhone.
That's my concern.
So that's why, you know, I like Trump and DeSantis and I'm voting for financial education because that's where capitalism begins.
Capitalism gives us more freedom, and that's all I fight for, freedom.
You know, when COVID came out, they took away our freedom of speech.
Now they're going to take away our Second Amendment, the guns, disarm the police, whatever they're talking about, defund the police.
It's all Marx.
You know, as Mao says, politics comes from the barrel of a gun.
It's all there.
It's in this book here.
Let me read you what Nikita Khrushchev said in 1959.
Your children's children will live under communism.
You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won't accept communism overnight, but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find out you already have communism.
That's what we're finding out today, that we already are communists.
We will not have to fight you.
We will so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.
Nikita Khrushchev, September 29th, 1959.
And I don't know if Jim Rutgers just made an announcement that Biden just signed into executive order something that CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, we're now 100% communist.
Biden just signed it on March 6th, 2022.
We're officially communist now, because they took control of our money.
Central Bank digital currency is a spy system.
It's spyware.
It'll control our entire lives.
So I would check out Jim Rickards, he's a good friend of mine, one of the smartest guys I know.
But today we must be cautious who our sources of information are, as you know.
So is that where do you think all of the stuff of the last couple of years has led us, that it was all going to lead us to this central bank digital currency that we'd be tracked and monitored and spied on, they could turn us on, turn us off, decide who gets in the economy, who doesn't, who gets certain privileges, who doesn't, that that, it was all leading to this.
I mean, this was, as you keep saying, 10 years ago, we couldn't talk about this, five years ago, that was pure conspiracy stuff.
So, what do you think the answer, I mean, beyond, okay, so financial literacy, so we get some young people to start paying attention to this stuff.
We don't feed the system the way that we've been feeding the system.
Maybe in Florida we start, you know, doing some financial literacy stuff.
But has the ship sailed with the federal government at this point?
I mean, we're in so deep.
And money has been printed to such an extent, and as we're talking right now, inflation's 9.1%, which that's what they're telling us, which probably means it's more.
I mean, what do you do about all that if we're to have hope?
Are you surprised that so many corporations went woke and went with this communist ideology and everything else?
Because we know it is hurting their bottom line to an extent.
Disney lost something like $61 billion after fighting DeSantis.
We know that all of these companies, you know, they put all this product out there for Gay Pride Month and nobody buys any of it, or for Black Pride Month and nobody buys it, but they put it out there.
They have to be looking at the numbers at some point, but the ideology seems to have superseded the whole Well, that's one way of fighting back is boycott.
I mean, obviously you're concerned about what's been going on for this last 90 years, this march through the institutions and everything, but do you consider yourself hopeful that we can turn this around?
I mean, it seems almost impossible right now, especially when, My friend Jim Rickards announced what Biden signed into law, executive order, March 6, 2022.
It authorized CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, which is surveillance.
That's what every country in the world is doing it now.
China's way ahead of us.
So that's social credit scores and all those other things.
They're going, you know, it started with the little masks, which everybody knows doesn't work.
Or when I saw the doctors speaking out against COVID and they got taken down, that's our freedom.
So I don't care if you're a Marxist or this or communist or a capitalist, don't take my freedom away.
And if I wanna carry a gun, let me carry a gun.
Don't disarm me.
So that's kind of my, that's why I'm a US Marine.
unidentified
I mean, I fought for our freedom, not for capitalism.
Do you think we have better defenses here in the US?
that sort of will be the last stand where other countries, you know, Canada doesn't have the, well, they certainly don't have the Second Amendment, but they don't even have the defenses around speech.
I mean, we still have some firewalls left that a lot of Western nations don't have.
Well, I think, like I said, this tool, this little iPhone here, most powerful tool, but it's like a gun.
How do you use it to defend yourself or kill somebody with it?
And so that's why I'm honored to be on your program.
I commend you.
You have a lot of courage.
And, you know, I'm on Patrick Beck-David, and we're all speaking out.
But so are they speaking out on the other side.
This is what they used to take down Trump in the social media.
He probably deserved it for all the things he said.
It's a freedom of speech.
You know, that's what I care about.
We have to fight back.
I don't know when I'll lose, but I won't.
I'll go down fighting.
That's the difference.
U.S.
Marine, you know, that's the U.S.
military.
That's most of our police officers.
So we better fight back.
That's all I'm saying.
Stand up, fight back.
And it starts when, I don't know who labeled them terrorists, but when the teachers actually question, labeled terrorists for questioning the teachers.
That's what this book is about here, is it starts with the NEA.
Forbes called the NEA, not the National Education Association, National Extortion Association.
We spend more on education than any country in the world, and we get a kid who doesn't know who JFK was?
Robert, you're going to be very proud of me right now because not only am I a capitalist, but I've also started several businesses and I started a tech company called Locals.com.
We've since merged with Rumble.
I'm sure you're aware of Rumble.
And we're going to finish up this interview with two minutes exclusively for my Locals subscribers because I am a true capitalist.