What 'School of Hard Knocks' Gets Right About Money, and the Two Lessons That Do Not Travel
10 min read
Loading...
10 min read
In 2025, 80.51% of Indonesian adults used a formal financial product. Only 66.46% understood the products they were using.
Those two numbers come from the same OJK survey, released together, and the gap between them is the whole story. Fourteen points of the adult population is holding something, a loan, an investment account, a paylater balance, that nobody ever explained to them.
That gap is why street interviews about money get tens of millions of views. Channels like School of Hard Knocks did not invent a new subject. They walked into the space school left empty.
It is a street interview channel started in 2021 by James Dumoulin, working with his brother Jack Dumoulin and Joshua Smith. The format is simple to the point of being blunt: stop someone on the street, ask what they do and what they earn, and let the answer run.
Clips routinely average more than ten million views. The channel has interviewed business owners, tradespeople, and at the top end figures like Robert Kiyosaki, real estate investor Ken McElroy, and Matt Ishbia of UWM.
The reason the format works is not the celebrities. It is that most people have never once heard another person answer the question "how much do you actually make, and how" out loud. School does not cover it. Families often will not discuss it. So a stranger on a sidewalk becomes the first honest source someone encounters.
This is the strongest idea in the whole genre, and the OJK data supports it directly.
Indonesian financial inclusion reached 80.51% in 2025, up from 75.02% the year before. Financial literacy reached 66.46%, up from 65.43%. Inclusion grew by more than five points. Literacy grew by one.
Read that as a sequence rather than two statistics. Products arrived. Apps arrived. Instant credit arrived. Understanding did not arrive at the same speed, because nothing in the standard curriculum was ever responsible for delivering it.
The government has acknowledged this explicitly. Perpres 12/2025 sets national targets of 69.35% literacy and 93.00% inclusion by 2029, and the follow-up SNLIK survey is being run across 38 provinces and 514 districts with 75,000 respondents, jointly by OJK, BPS and LPS. You do not build measurement infrastructure that size for a problem you think is individual.
So if you have ever felt behind on money, the honest reading is that you were handed the tools before anyone handed you the manual.
Every high earner in these interviews eventually says a version of the same thing. Not "I found a secret asset." Something closer to: I learned to explain value to another human being.
School grades you on producing correct answers alone, silently, under time pressure. Almost no adult income works that way. Income comes from persuading someone that what you can do is worth paying for, whether that is a client, an employer, or a landlord.
This is not a trick and it is not manipulation. It is the observation that technical ability and the ability to communicate technical ability are two separate skills, and only one of them is examined.
The recurring surprise in these clips is that the person earning the most is often doing something nobody posts about. Plumbing. Waste. Logistics. Industrial cleaning. Scaffolding.
The mechanism behind this is not mysterious. Work that is unglamorous attracts fewer entrants. Fewer entrants means less price competition. Less price competition means the margin survives.
Glamour is priced in. When a field is desirable to be seen in, people accept less money to be in it, and that acceptance shows up in wages.
Two businesses can earn the same amount and end up in completely different places a decade later, based on one decision made repeatedly: what happens to the money after it comes in.
One group converts profit into visible consumption. The other converts profit into things that produce more profit. Neither looks dramatic in any single month. Over ten years the difference is not close.
This is the one lesson from the genre that transfers cleanly to someone who does not own a business, because the same choice exists on a salary. It is also the lesson that is hardest to see happening, which is a problem we will come back to.
Now the part where the imported advice becomes dangerous, and it becomes dangerous specifically here.
The claim, as usually delivered, is that saving money is for losers because inflation erodes cash. The erosion half is true. The conclusion is not.
Cash held long term does lose purchasing power, and we have written about exactly how much idle cash costs you. But the person delivering this line on camera already has an emergency buffer, several income streams, and access to credit at institutional rates. The viewer usually has none of those.
Without a cash buffer, a single unexpected expense becomes a loan. And in Indonesia right now, that loan has a known destination.
The honest version of this lesson is a sequence, not a slogan: build the emergency fund first, and only then worry about erosion. Cash is not an investment. It is what stops a bad month from becoming a debt spiral.
The distinction is real in accounting. Debt that finances a productive asset behaves differently from debt that finances consumption. The problem is what happens when that idea reaches a general audience as encouragement.
Here is what the Indonesian data looks like as of early 2026:
| Indicator | Figure |
|---|---|
| Pinjol default rate (TWP90), Feb 2026 | 4.54%, up from 2.78% a year earlier |
| Regulatory threshold OJK watches | 5% |
| Share of pinjol bad debt from ages 19 to 34, Mar 2026 | 48.65% |
| Total pinjol outstanding | Rp101.03 trillion |
| BNPL outstanding | Rp28.3 trillion across 30.81 million users |
Nearly half of all bad pinjol debt sits with people aged 19 to 34, and the default rate is approaching the level regulators treat as a red line. OJK is preparing restrictions on paylater products. The majority of this borrowing funds lifestyle spending, not emergencies and not assets.
A note on Robert Kiyosaki, since his ideas underpin most of the genre.
The "Rich Dad" of Rich Dad Poor Dad has never been identified, and Kiyosaki has acknowledged the character is a composite rather than a specific person. In 2012, his company Rich Global LLC filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after a roughly $24 million judgment over unpaid royalties to a seminar partner. The seminar business built around the books has been repeatedly criticised for upselling attendees into courses costing tens of thousands of dollars.
None of that makes every idea he has ever expressed wrong. It does mean the standard criticism, that he encourages leverage without regard to whether the individual listener can survive being wrong, is worth holding in mind while you watch.
Apply the same test to us. We build a portfolio tracker. That is why our recommendation at the end of this article is to measure something, and you should weigh it accordingly.
Four things, in order, and none of them require you to start a business.
Build the buffer before optimising anything. Enough cash to cover several months of fixed costs, held somewhere boring. This is the step that makes every later step survivable.
Write down what you owe, at what rate. Not a plan, just an inventory. Most people can name their monthly payment and not their interest rate, which is precisely how a manageable balance becomes an unmanageable one.
Find out what you actually have. Most people know their spending, roughly, because every transaction sends a notification. Almost nobody knows their total assets, because those sit in six different places that never talk to each other.
Then look at the direction, not the level. The number itself matters less than whether it moved up this quarter.
That last pair is the practical version of Lesson 4. Reinvestment compounds invisibly, which means the only way to stay motivated by it is to make it visible. Progress you cannot see is progress you will not continue.
Is financial literacy in Indonesia actually improving? Yes, but slowly, and slower than access. Literacy went from 65.43% to 66.46% between the 2024 and 2025 OJK surveys, while inclusion went from 75.02% to 80.51%. The gap widened rather than closed.
Is all debt bad, then? No. Debt that finances something which reliably produces more than it costs is genuinely different from debt that finances consumption. The point is that "reliably produces more than it costs" is a claim you have to verify, not assume, and that a cash buffer has to exist first.
Why do these street interview channels get so many views? Because they answer a question nobody else answers out loud. Salaries are not discussed at school, and often not at home. The format is not sophisticated, it is simply first.
Do I need a business to apply any of this? No. The reinvestment lesson, spend less than you earn and route the difference into things that produce more, works identically on a salary. The business examples just make the mechanism easier to see.
You already know roughly what you spend. The gap the OJK data describes is on the other side of the ledger.
Add what you hold, savings, deposits, gold, stocks, mutual funds, crypto, and let it total itself. Then open the Gains page to see how much of your result came from actual growth rather than from your own deposits, which is the single clearest picture of whether reinvestment is working for you.
For context on what your cash is doing while it sits still, see the real cost of holding cash, and how to separate deposits from genuine gains.