This podcast was recorded on July 27, 2016.
David Gardner: Next one up is No. 4 this month. We're going to have a shorter number. I think I'm going longer and deeper on a shorter number of Mailbag questions this month. This one comes from Leonardo Pozzobon, and Leonardo, you write me thus: "You spent a full podcast talking about your love for board games and whether they're good to teach people about investing. My question is about one particular game I remember that was invented specifically for that. I'm talking about Cashflow, created by the Rich Dad guy, Robert Kiyosaki. Have you tried it, and why did it not make your list?"
OK. Couple things there, first of all, Leonardo. I'm going to say, to Mr. Kiyosaki's credit, he generously sent me a gratis copy of his game. This was probably about 10 years ago. The actual name of the game is Cashflow 101. "Cashflow" is all one word in the title, so you can look it up on BoardGameGeek and you can see the page for that game.
I will tell you that as a gamer, in my opinion it is not a very good board game, just from a gaming standpoint. Any lessons it might teach about money, which is the real intent of that game, are aside. If you just look at how much time do you want to spend playing games in life, and if you have limited time which games you want to play, a game that grades out as a 4.9 on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is outstanding, that is the present rating that that game has.
It came out in 1996, I'll say, since that's about 20 years ago. Board games have advanced in lots of ways since 1996. So on the one hand, I certainly want to thank, again, Mr. Kiyosaki for thinking to include The Motley Fool on his comp list for a game. He sent it saying he knew I loved games -- this is, again, years ago -- and so sent me a free copy. At the same time, to be honest with you, I'd have to say it's not a great board game.
And then there's one other thing that I want to mention. Sometimes the subject of Rich Dad, Poor Dad comes up, and people say, 'What do you guys think about that at The Motley Fool?' I mean, he has very different advice and thinks about money very differently in some ways than we do. There's certainly some overlap. He's obviously financially concerned. He certainly prizes homeownership and the use of real estate to create wealth, which we would certainly agree with. Rule Breaker investing isn't about real estate, and we're not that real estate-focused as a company, but certainly for Kiyosaki, that's a big thing for him.
That said, sometimes he's ventured off, away from, I think, his core subject to start giving things like stock market advice, and in general, this is very different advice than you're going to hear from The Motley Fool. So because we had had enough people ask us about Kiyosaki -- about five or six years ago, he was coming through Washington, D.C., with one of his, I think was called "Rich Dad Stock Success Workshop." And Brian Richards, the very talented editor now helping running portions of Motley Fool International today, attended that and covered it for our membership.
It's one of the more recommended articles that came out in 2011 on the Fool.com site. It had more than 100 comments, more than a couple hundred recs, and I'll just leave it there by saying the title of the article, and you can Google it if you want to read it, is "Stock Advice So Bad It Will Make You Cringe." That is the title of Brian's article.
