Robert Kiyosaki has a teaser pitch running for what he calls “P.I.P.,” for “Patriot Income Program” — so what’s this pitch, and what is he really talking about?  Let’s dig in.

Here’s a little taste of the intro, which compares “P.I.P.” to :

“P.I.P.

“America’s solution to universal basic income.

“Now paying 10% a year….

“$3,600 a month.

“That’s what a Saudi family of five collects from their government — every single month — just for existing.

“No work. No applications. No strings.

“11 million people. Paid like clockwork. Funded entirely by oil.

“Now here’s a fact that should keep you up at night:

“America has 40% more oil than Saudi Arabia.

“We have more recoverable oil than any other nation on earth. Enough to last us another 200 years, at least.

“But while the Saudis are getting checks, you’re getting nothing.

“That’s about to change — for you, at least.”

From what I can tell, that’s not particularly accurate. You can smush the numbers to tell you pretty much whatever you want, and the indirect benefits of being a Saudi citizen are higher becasue of free healthcare and education and other indirect benefits, but Saudi Arabia’s cash payments to lower-income citizens average something more like $500/month per family. And they were designed to offset the impact of the country’s new sales taxes (VAT) several years ago, when they started trying to diversify the economy and wean themselves off of oil to some degree.

And, of course, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia controls (and owns more than 90% of) state oil company, Saudi Aramco, which owns the rights to all of the oil… while in the United States, about 85% of oil and gas is produced from privately owned land, so the government’s only share is really whatever it charges in taxes, plus a little bit from the production that comes from offshore leases and royalties for oil produced on federal land (usually ends up being around 12.5% these days, I think, though that has fluctuated a lot over the years).

But anyway, back to the pitch — Kiyosaki is essentially making his hard assets/need to own income-producing assets spiel, which is part of his “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” thesis.

“… when I was a kid, I had two dads.

“My real dad — Poor Dad — was highly educated. PhD. Government job. He told me to go to school, get good grades, find a job and invest in stocks.

“My best friend’s dad — Rich Dad — never finished eighth grade. But it didn’t matter. He bought assets that put cash in his pocket every month and became one of the wealthiest men in Hawaii.

“Poor Dad died broke.

“Rich Dad left a fortune.

“What I’m about to show you is something Rich Dad would have loved. A way to collect cashflow from America’s energy infrastructure — the same way the Saudis collect from theirs.

“Only better. Because there’s no income limit. The Saudis cut you off if you make more than $5,300 a month.

“With P.I.P. there’s no limits.

“Whether you have $10,000 or $10 million in the bank, you can enroll.

“Once you do, if historical performance continues, you can expect to get paid 10% a year on your money.”

And there is that “Universal Basic Income” comparison:

“There are zero requirements on your end:

“You don’t have to be an accredited investor.
“You don’t need level two clearance from your broker.
“You don’t even have to be a U.S. citizen.
“All you need is a photo ID, bank account, social security number, and permanent address. That’s it.

“If you have those things, you can enroll in what I believe is the closest thing to universal basic income that exists, and will ever exist. I call it the Patriot Income Plan, or P.I.P. for short.”

The good thing? Although there are parts of this tease that give off the same “free money” vibe as some similar-sounding “government checks coming your way” ads, Kiyosaki does at least make clear that this is an investment you make to earn a 10% return. Maybe exaggerated, depending on how you look at it, but roughly true.

He goes on…

“We all know there are certain things in life that America’s upper echelon would rather you not know about…

“This – this is one of those things.

“It’s a way for you to tap directly into the $300+ billion we generate from oil and gas every year…

“…through receiving regular payouts directly from the coffers of America’s richest energy conglomerates.”

And apparently this plan comes with some tax benefits:

“P.I.P. is not a gov’t program or long-term deposit.

“It is not a congressional stimulus check.

“It’s ownership in critical infrastructure that touches every molecule of energy moving through America.

“And even though past results are not an assurance of future results

“More than 70% of the money you receive through owning this infrastructure is tax-deferred thanks to sections 851-855 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.

“That’s not a loophole. It’s the U.S. tax code working exactly as it should.”

So what’s the investment, and what’s the story?

Well, you’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that Kiyosaki is just talking about building a portfolio of master limited partnerships (MLPs), most of which are in the energy business and own energy infrastructure, like pipelines and oil and gas storage or processing facilities.

We’ve talked about MLPs quite a lot over the years — they were created in the 1980s and became a shady way of creating tax shelters, but then were restructured and reformed and they now exist as pass-through entities. The general idea is that they put capital to work building and acquiring energy infrastructure assets, and they don’t have to pay federal taxes because the tax liabilities are passed through to their unitholders. And in actuality, these kinds of assets have such enormous depreciation costs that the partnerships usually have limited real taxable income anyway… but they do generate enormous cash flows, since depreciation is a non-cash charge. Because these partnerships exist to generate cash returns, they typically pay out 50-100% of their operating cash flow to unitholders in the form of distributions… but only a small percentage of that cash is actually taxable income.

Which means that MLP unitholders receive a high cash yield on their investment (generally in the 7-9% neighborhood these days, though some pay much higher and you could at least theoretically get up to a 10% average), but much of that is in the form of a “return on capital” payment, which doesn’t generate income tax liabilities for you — it just lowers your cost basis in the shares, so when you sell someday, if you sell, you’d owe capital gains taxes from a lower cost basis.

The downside? Tax rules discourage holding MLPs in tax-deferred accounts, because if the income from the partnership reaches $1,000 it will be taxable even if it’s in your IRA or 401(k) — it might take a lot to get to that $1,000 level, since, again, that’s income, not cash flow, and these partnerships don’t often generate a lot of real income… but still, it adds some complexity, and owning in a 401(k) or IRA might also be a little silly, just because it would also negate the tax advantages of the partnership structure (the fact that you can already defer most of the taxation until you sell, thanks to that return on capital — and if you pass along those MLP shares to your heirs, who can reset the value at that time, taxes might never be paid on that return of capital at all). Do note that I’m not a tax expert, and it’s entirely possible that I could be off on some of these details, or that the tax laws might change in the future, but that’s how I think of the tax benefits vs. liabilities.

So the general idea is that Kiyosaki calls these MLPs a “Patriot Income Plan,” and says he will recommend a portfolio of them to offer a 10% yield on your investment. He says there are 14 of these “P.I.P.’s,” and they’ve been hugely profitable…

“Since 2020, these 14 entities have produced over 20% annual gains.

“P.I.P. Entities: 20% Annual Gains

“Not a single one has lost value.

“This doesn’t mean they’re not susceptible to losses in the future. Anything that’s publicly traded can go down in value.

“But if history is any indication, these entities will continue to pay participants year after year after year…

“Let’s say back in 2020, when everyone else was running for the hills…

“You put $250,000 into the 14 entities that comprise P.I.P.

“At 10% a year, you’d have since received $108,000 in distribution payouts alone, or around $1,900 a month.

“That’s the average size of a social security check in America.”

That’s roughly true, but the “2020” part is a huge part of that — as you might recall, oil prices collapsed in 2020 when the COVID shutdowns began, since so much economic activity ground to a halt and everyone stopped driving, and that led to a collapse in the prices of most MLPs, too — most of these partnerships are not directly tied to commodity prices, they are processors and pipeline owners, so they are really more lke toll-takers than energy producers, but still, when activity dries up in the oil patch, the pipelines are used less, the distributions from MLPs often decline (though not always), and the prices of MLPs almost always collapse if oil and gas prices collapse.

And over time, those crashes in oil and gas prices, like we saw in 2015 and 2020, tend to be the most opportune time to invest in MLPs — so yes, 2020 was an unusually good opportunity to buy MLPs. I started buying an ETF of these pipeline MLPs that year, the Alerian MLP ETF (AMLP), in the Spring of 2020, and that position has now generated an average return of about 23%/year, including reinvested dividends, so that’s a pretty fair measure of the group (some have done much worse, some much better). The current dividend yield from that ETF is about 7.5% (the ETF short-circuits the tax liabilities and benefits, for the most part, and is imperfect and inefficient in some ways, since they charge a relatively high expense ratio and turn often tax-deferred cash flow into taxable dividends — I use it because it’s a way to get the returns from a diversified group of pipeline MLPs without dealing with K-1 partnership tax returns or UBTI liabilities, but other folks might find direct MLP ownership better, or prefer other ETFs like MLPX, which includes non-MLP pipeline stocks and has outperformed AMLP over the past couple years).

So that’s the cautionary tale: MLPs in general have beaten the S&P 500 handily over the past five or six years… but they also had a terrible run from 2015-2021, if you bought before the collapse in oil prices in 2015 you would have had to wait 6-7 years just to break even on most MLP investments, including those large distributions. So over the past 10-11 years, if you go back to include the collapse in oil in 2020, they have trailed well behind the broader stock market indices. If oil drops sharply again someday, as is entirely possible, that could happen again.

I remain relatively optimistic about the pipeline companies, both because I expect natural gas demand to continue to be strong in the US, largely because of increased demand, and because I expect oil prices to probably remain above last year’s ~$50 lows for a long time, largely because of geopolitical stress. And Kiyosaki ties his argument to natural gas demand from AI, which is certainly part of the story:

“By now, we all know that AI is reshaping every industry… Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok…

“You can’t go a single day without hearing about these platforms.

“In 2025, half of all venture capital on the planet went into AI.

“Funding jumped 75% in a single year. This isn’t a trend. It’s a tidal wave that’s rising every day….

“Poor Dad is out there frantically looking at which AI stocks he should buy – Taiwan Semiconductor… Marvell… Micron…Broadcom.. Lumentum… Coreweave.

“Rich Dad is asking: What does AI actually need to function? What are its ‘essential ingredients’ and who supplies those ingredients?

“The answer of course is electricity, which comes from our power grid…”

And yes, more than 40% of the electricity in the US is generated by burning natural gas, mostly in pretty efficient combined cycle turbine plants. And yes, data centers are a growing consumer of electricity — that has grown fast over the past decade or so, going from about 2% of electricity consumption to probably about 5% today, and there are a lot of forecasts that this might double again in the next few years. More from Kiyosaki:

“4,000 data centers in America consuming 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.

“Another 3,000 are currently being built…

“But you can’t use AI without a reliable source of uninterrupted power.

“Solar and wind can’t provide that kind of power, but natural gas can….

“And of course, who is going to provide all this gas.

“The pipeline operators, that’s who.

“The same ones behind the Patriot Income Plan.”

And then we get to pitches about a few of the specific “P.I.P.” investments that Kiyosaki likes, so we’ll ID those for you…

“PARTNERSHIP #1 ‘The Pipeline King’

“Based out of Texas, this partnership went from having 200 miles of pipeline in 1996 to 140,000 miles of pipeline today.

“They’re not waiting for the AI boom either. They just inked a deal to power one of the largest data center campuses in the country…

“They’ve already received 90 requests from data centers that want to connect to their energy grid.

“And for good reason. This MLP is based in Texas where 442 AI data centers are now being built.

“As one of its investors said online recently: This is a “systematically important” firm. “It is an operation that cannot be allowed to fail or even be disrupted.”

“He’s right…

“If this MLP shutdown tomorrow, roughly 65-70 million Americans would be affected. That’s about 20% of the U.S. population.

“Had you put $10k into the Pipeline King back in 2006 – and reinvested your distributions – you’d have $123,000 today. Plus you’d be collecting $8,600 a year in distributions on top of that.”

That one is Energy Transfer (ET), which has been one of the largest and best-performing MLPs for many years… and has also historically been the most volatile. They are very natural gas-driven, though they do own some crude oil pipelines, too, and the gas focus is going to persist — about 90% of their capital spending is going into expansions related to natural gas or natural gas liquids (NGLs), including more gathering systems (pulling gas from producing fields into the pipeline system) and more delivery pipelines and compression to feed new power generation plants.

The current yield from ET units is just under 7%, so they’re on the low end when it comes to current yield, but have also provided pretty strong distribution growth and a very good total return over time. You can get a good overview of the business from their latest investor presentation.

Next?

“PARTNERSHIP #2 ‘The HOA of American Energy’

“It’s a partnership that’s raised its payouts to its unitholders every single year for 28 years straight.

“28 years of uninterrupted payouts through Dotcom Crash, Recession, Oil Crash, and COVID Pandemic

“The reason for that is because they own:

“50,000 miles of pipelines
“300 million barrels of storage capacity
“29 natural gas processing plants
“26 fractionation facilities
“82% of their cash flow comes from fees they collect on these assets

“That’s why I call them the HOA of American Energy. They charge mandatory dues to companies.”

Energy Transfer is big, but this one’s even bigger — #2 is the largest publicly traded MLP, Enterprise Product Partners (EPD)… and yes, one of their strongest arguments is that EPD, unlike almost all the other MLPs, did not slash its distributions in 2020 when the COVID panic hit. They slowed the distribution to a crawl in those years, but a lot of MLPs were forced to pause or cancel or reduce their payouts during that brief crisis, and EPD did not (their cash flow per share did fall both in the 2015-16 collapse and in 2020, but they were still able to maintain the distribution growth).

I’d say EPD is a little more conservative than ET, and has a less ambitious capital spending plan, with a little more focus on shareholder returns, though those distinctions are not all that dramatic. They are also the most NGL-focused of the big MLPs, and historically that tends to mean they’re a little more exposed to oil prices than natural gas prices, since propane, ethane, butane and the others tend to be priced more like oil than “dry” gas.

Investors have noticed that relative safety for EPD compared to many of its peers, so they have been willing to accept a somewhat lower yield, and EPD now offers up roughly a 5.7% distribution yield. That’s the lowest of the major pipeline MLPs, though still much higher than the pipeline companies that converted to corporations a few years back, like Kinder Morgan (KMI, yield under 4%) and OneOK (OKE, yield ~4.7%). You can check out their investor deck here if you want more of an overview of their assets and strategy.

So ET and EPD are usually the two largest MLPs, with market caps well above $50 billion, but there are a dozen or so other pipeline MLPs, too — most of them are pretty diversified across natural gas, NGLs and crude oil, but the large ones that are most weighted to crude oil transportation, as opposed to natural gas, are Plains All American (PAA), which has a current yield of about 7.3%, and MPLX (MPLX, 7.5%), which has provided far better investor returns than PAA and rivals EPD and ET for the best long-term performers in the space… and the one most tied into liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports is Cheniere Energy Partners (CQP, yields about 5% now).

And he highlights one more:

“PARTNERSHIP #3 ‘The Big Landlord’

“The third MLP in P.I.P. owns 20 million acres of land across 41 states… and they’re still buying more.

“They’ve been accumulating land since 1876 – the year America turned 100 and Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone.

“They’ve since accumulated 20 million acres of land.

“That’s more land than what’s inside the state of West Virginia.

“Every time a driller punches a hole in the ground anywhere on these 20 million acres — they get paid.

“They don’t pay for equipment.
“They don’t pay workers.
“They don’t deal with spills or regulations.
“They just collect checks anytime someone starts drilling on their land.

“And right now, according to their 10-K report they have over 71,000 wells pumping on their property.”

More from Kiyosaki:

“Rich Dad would call them the ultimate passive income machine….

“They’ve locked in three massive development agreements that equates to 20 years of drilling inventory.

“They’re looking to increase their distributions to over $2 per unit – which is almost double the current payout.

“And even though they already own 20 million acres of natural gas reserves – the same fuel that powers the data centers running ChatGPT and every other AI model.

“They’re still buying more…

“$160 million of new land acquisitions since 2023.”

So this is a very different kind of MLP — not a pipeline or infrastructure owner, but a mineral rights owner that actually profits from the production of oil and gas from its land. Here Kiyosaki is teasing Black Stone Minerals (BSM), which is a huge mineral rights land bank, with assets in 41 states, including some exposure to pretty much all the meaningful oil and gas basins in the US.

Their biggest single area of focus is on the Haynesville Shale and surrounding area in East Texas and Louisiana, including the Shelby Trough — that’s where more than a quarter of their revenue comes from, and where they expect most of their growth. And that has also been the challenge in recent years, because very low natural gas prices have generally depressed drilling activity in the region, and kept their royalties and net profits interest lower, which has led to their distribution falling by about a third since 2023. No idea whether that will change in the near future, to a large degree that depends on what natural gas pricing is like in the coming years, but they do expect meaningful production increases.

BSM was one of the higher-yielding MLPs a few years ago, before those distribution cuts they had a payout which was often close to 15%, but it is now offering roughly an 8% yield. Their investor relations page is here if you’d like to dig more into their strategy, but the story is mostly, “we’ll benefit from rising natural gas demand.”

And just as a reminder that these investments often generate high income… but also go through long periods of low relative returns, particularly when the oil and gas business is suffering, here’s the 10-year chart for those three teased MLPs, all of which have trailed meaningfully behind the S&P 500 during that period of time. That might not be how the future unrolls, but it is always true that commodity exposure is a double-edged sword:

There are other producing MLPs, too, and they mostly try to behave more like royalty companies than actual producing oil and gas companies, though they are also often exposed to operating costs through net profits interest (NPI) production deals (as opposed to net revenue interest, which is how the most appealing royalties work). That list includes Kimbell Royalty Partners (KRP), TXO Partners, L.P. (TXO), Mach Natural Resources LP (MNR) and Dorchester Minerals (DMLP).

So there you have it, three of what Kiyosaki says are 14 “Patriot Income Plan” investments — I assume that the list he monitors is really just the list of the largest remaining MLPs in the energy space, which is probably just the same as the current holdings of the AMLP ETF, though there are also some MLPs which are in slightly different businesses, including Alliance Resource Partners (ARLP) and Natural Resource Partners (NRP) in coal, and CVR Partners (UAN) in fertilizer, but there are also some oddball ones like Icahn Enterprise Partners (IEP), which is just in whatever Carl Icahn wants to do, Greystone Housing (GHI), which is kind of like a mortgage REIT that’s structured as a partnership for reasons I don’t understand, as well as the investment firm AllianceBernstein (AB).

I’m generally fond of the high-yield MLPs as a source for high current income and indirect “real assets” inflation protection, though they do subject us to a fair amount of commodity price volatility, and they also tend to be sensitive to shifting interest rates (both because investors buy them for income, so they compete with things like bonds and REITs, and because most MLPs are very asset-intensive and carry a substantial amount of debt, which can pressure margins if interest rates rise over time). Any of that sound good to you as part of a “passive income” portfolio?

Have favorites in the space, or a preference either to avoid or embrace the tax complications of the MLP structure? Other high-yield investments that you think are more sustainable? Let us know with a comment below… thanks for reading!

Disclosure: Of the investments mentioned above, I own shares of the Alerian MLP ETF. Other than any automated dividend reinvestment, I will not trade in any covered stock for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.