2024-05-06_Financially_Productive_Characteristics_to_Look_for_In_a_Potential

00:00:00.000 | You're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad.

00:00:04.020 | Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lips and Ads.

00:00:08.100 | Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a reproduced ad like

00:00:12.600 | this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lips and Ads.

00:00:16.980 | Go to LipsAndAds.com now, that's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

00:00:22.780 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:25.420 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:29.260 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:31.940 | My name is Joshua Sheets.

00:00:32.940 | I'm your host and on today's podcast, I want to explore some of the traits, characteristics,

00:00:38.980 | and attributes that a wise and thoughtful and strategic young man or young woman could

00:00:46.580 | and should look for in a prospective spouse that are likely to be highly correlated with

00:00:54.300 | long-term financial productivity.

00:00:57.700 | In fact, I think highly causative of long-term financial productivity.

00:01:02.300 | One of the things that's most interesting to me as we look at personal finance and we

00:01:07.260 | look at the world that we live in is we all understand that the person that you choose

00:01:13.820 | to marry makes an enormous difference in the quality of your life as well as objective

00:01:20.300 | long-term outcomes.

00:01:21.620 | How long you live, how much wealth you have, we know that's true.

00:01:26.980 | We know that marriage is highly correlated with positive financial outcomes.

00:01:31.920 | Married people accumulate significantly more wealth than non-married people.

00:01:36.220 | They earn higher incomes.

00:01:38.660 | Basically every factor across society is higher for married people and significantly higher

00:01:45.580 | and this confounds even cohabitating couples who are not married.

00:01:50.860 | They are not nearly as productive at creating and accumulating wealth as married people.

00:01:55.940 | So we understand that marriage is going to dramatically impact the long-term outcomes

00:02:01.500 | that you have in life and we understand that those outcomes are going to be financially

00:02:08.540 | measurable.

00:02:09.540 | On the most recent podcast, I shared with you some ideas on how to find and attract

00:02:14.100 | the spouse of your dreams and in a moment I'll tell you exactly why.

00:02:17.560 | But there's a piece of content or advice that I myself have never come across in the world

00:02:25.580 | of personal finance and financial literature.

00:02:28.660 | And that line of thinking is simply what should you look for in a potential spouse that is

00:02:35.340 | likely to lead to your becoming wealthy together as a couple.

00:02:42.100 | Now it may exist out there.

00:02:43.580 | I've not gone specifically looking for it.

00:02:46.100 | What I'm saying is that after a lifetime and a career of consuming personal finance literature

00:02:51.020 | and discussions, I've not come across anybody who's talked about this.

00:02:55.180 | And so I want to open the conversation up with some ideas on this.

00:02:58.700 | To me, it seems obvious that we should talk about this.

00:03:01.700 | And I think I understand why we don't.

00:03:04.460 | After all, very few of us are strategic in pursuing marriage.

00:03:09.940 | It would be very unusual to have a handsome young 20-year-old guy who has a list of all

00:03:16.140 | of the things that if I just pursue these things and if my potential marriage candidate,

00:03:23.020 | the woman that I'm pursuing has these factors, then I'm definitely going to marry her.

00:03:27.620 | But if she doesn't, I'm not.

00:03:29.100 | And it's very unusual for, first of all, any young person to be strategic about marriage

00:03:34.100 | and even more unusual for that person to be strategic in financial terms.

00:03:39.220 | After all, we would quickly, those of us with experience, we would quickly rush to diminish

00:03:44.980 | the importance of financial productivity in favor of other more compelling metrics of

00:03:51.060 | life satisfaction, such as happiness and contentment and peacefulness and other things.

00:03:57.140 | And after all, we all recognize that it's probably better to be happy and content and

00:04:02.420 | satisfied with life and not financially wealthy than to be financially wealthy and not happy

00:04:08.540 | and content and satisfied with life.

00:04:10.780 | And there is a train of debate and discussion that happens on this.

00:04:14.340 | Simply does earning ability predict happiness and satisfaction?

00:04:19.660 | Well, I think that these things are highly correlated and I don't think you have to choose

00:04:25.900 | one or the other.

00:04:27.820 | I think that you can be rich and be happy.

00:04:31.140 | It's not impossible.

00:04:33.380 | And so to say that would you choose to be rich or to be happy is a false dilemma.

00:04:39.540 | And similarly to say would you choose a marriage that is financially productive or that leads

00:04:44.500 | to happiness and long-term success in life is a false dilemma.

00:04:48.940 | There's no reason to pull these things apart.

00:04:51.180 | We can recognize that both of them are important and we can recognize it while keeping priority.

00:04:59.100 | So it would be similar to say is it possible to be virtuous or righteous and rich.

00:05:06.260 | It would be silly to say that you couldn't accomplish both of those things, but each

00:05:10.780 | man is going to have a different priority.

00:05:13.780 | You will say I'm going to choose to do the right thing regardless of whether it costs

00:05:18.300 | me because I believe that it's more important for me to be morally righteous than for me

00:05:22.500 | to be rich.

00:05:23.500 | Another man would say I'm going to prioritize being rich because I'd rather be a rich scoundrel

00:05:29.460 | than a righteous pauper.

00:05:32.060 | So similarly it's a false choice to say that we can choose between a marriage relationship

00:05:38.020 | that is likely to lead to financial productivity or that's likely to lead to happiness.

00:05:42.500 | Why not have a marriage relationship that is optimized for both of those things?

00:05:48.140 | And we can optimize and say that happiness is more important to me than financial productivity

00:05:53.900 | without saying that financial productivity is unimportant.

00:05:57.480 | And so if we're going to talk in the context of finance, we ought to at least start the

00:06:01.620 | conversation and discuss what are the factors that you should look for in a high quality,

00:06:07.900 | high value potential spouse that are likely to lead to the long-term outcome.

00:06:14.940 | I think we know intuitively what some of those qualities are.

00:06:19.640 | It would be very unusual to find a beautiful, smart, attractive young woman who is not attracted

00:06:26.980 | to a man who has a high earning capacity.

00:06:30.820 | That would be a normal thing that happens in society that we all kind of naturally understand.

00:06:36.860 | But there's a lot more to it than just well he makes a lot of money.

00:06:40.580 | And so I think we should talk about these factors and consider them and consider what

00:06:46.480 | we should optimize for and how we should go about it.

00:06:50.180 | And I understand that most people are not strategic in pursuing a developing marriage.

00:06:55.980 | I wasn't.

00:06:56.980 | Most of us aren't.

00:06:58.060 | Most of us kind of just end up in a situation that we're in and sometimes we're happy with

00:07:02.500 | it, sometimes we're not.

00:07:04.020 | But just because people in the past weren't strategic doesn't mean that no one was strategic.

00:07:10.700 | And just because perhaps many people were not strategic in the past doesn't mean that

00:07:15.420 | you shouldn't be strategic today or that your children shouldn't be strategic.

00:07:21.220 | After all, one of the great challenges that is different in this year than perhaps some

00:07:25.060 | decades back is that we formerly had a strong marriage culture, at least in the culture

00:07:31.180 | that I'm from, the Western tradition from the United States of America personally but

00:07:34.660 | across broadly Western culture.

00:07:37.180 | We formerly had a strong marriage culture that made strategy unnecessary for most people.

00:07:45.540 | But that culture is gone.

00:07:48.300 | The culture that we live in is not facilitating marriage.

00:07:51.980 | Young people are not connecting with one another, they're not dating one another, they're not

00:07:55.900 | having sexual relationships with one another.

00:07:58.380 | And when they are having sexual relationships and dating one another, those relationships

00:08:03.020 | are not automatically leading to marriage.

00:08:05.300 | The relationships that do lead to marriage are not automatically leading to children.

00:08:09.460 | So those of us who are older have to roll up our sleeves and get involved and try to

00:08:13.800 | figure out what do we do differently.

00:08:16.380 | And even if it's hopeless for, let's say, a 30-year-old guy or gal today, it's not hopeless

00:08:23.260 | for my children, and it's not hopeless for your children, and it's not hopeless for the

00:08:27.060 | 30-year-old guy or gal today either.

00:08:29.540 | So just because our culture is gone doesn't mean that you and I can't employ strategy

00:08:34.780 | in the face of cultural opposition to get the long-term outcomes that stable marriages

00:08:41.260 | and productive marriages entail.

00:08:44.220 | And what I'm trying to do in this series is I'm trying to bring open the discussion in

00:08:48.780 | your own mind so that you can think about what you agree with, what you appreciate,

00:08:54.140 | what you don't, as always, take what's useful, discard the rest.

00:08:57.760 | But I want you to make you think about what you want and what you envision, and I want

00:09:01.180 | you to think long-term so that you have strategic foundation for your decisions, not just being

00:09:06.940 | ruled by your emotions.

00:09:09.060 | And I want you to develop options.

00:09:10.380 | One of the reasons I spent so much time in the previous episode talking about a framework

00:09:14.740 | to develop your own attractiveness, basically, is to help you develop options.

00:09:20.060 | One reason very few young men and women are strategic in who they would pursue for marriage

00:09:30.180 | is that most people just don't have that many options.

00:09:33.260 | It's very unusual for a young man or woman to be sitting back with five potential marriage

00:09:38.220 | candidates and be strategically assessing, "Well, let's see.

00:09:42.660 | Candidate number one has a cumulative score of 87 points, and candidate number two is

00:09:47.900 | 84.3 points.

00:09:49.980 | What kind of tiebreaker could I employ between candidates one and two?"

00:09:53.100 | That's not how life works.

00:09:54.580 | Normally, you just have an option that comes along at a point in your life in which you're

00:09:58.620 | thinking about it, and you're open to it, and boom, you move forward.

00:10:02.540 | And I'm not opposed to that.

00:10:04.380 | I think that's okay.

00:10:06.100 | But for a young man or woman who has options, is that the best way to go about it?

00:10:12.980 | Now we can find this most effectively in literature, usually from the female perspective.

00:10:18.860 | If we go back and we read many works of literature, and we find a very attractive woman, or in

00:10:23.980 | some cases a very attractive man with an annual income of $19,000, if we find an attractive

00:10:29.660 | man or woman, there will be a variety of people who are interested in that man or woman.

00:10:36.140 | And of course, there's some love story that ensues to where the person finds ultimately

00:10:40.060 | true love.

00:10:41.380 | And so my point is to articulate that, because when I was a teenager, nobody spoke to me

00:10:46.220 | seriously in the way that I will speak to my sons and sons seriously and say, "Listen,

00:10:52.660 | you need to maximize your attractiveness and your value in all dimensions in order for

00:10:58.460 | you to have the chance of attracting a high-quality spouse."

00:11:03.420 | Nobody did that.

00:11:04.420 | And so I just didn't...

00:11:05.420 | I never thought about it.

00:11:06.420 | And it seems obvious to say it, but I never thought about it.

00:11:09.020 | And so if I never thought about it, I figure there's probably two or three other guys in

00:11:11.820 | the world who haven't thought about it, two or three other girls in the world that haven't

00:11:14.460 | thought about it.

00:11:15.460 | And in today's world, what I see is that a lot of people aren't thinking about it even

00:11:20.500 | in terms of spousal attraction.

00:11:23.300 | There's an enormous conflict happening among young people today who are not married, where

00:11:29.420 | they're optimizing for sexual appeal and sexual activity and relationships that are not leading

00:11:36.380 | to marriage rather than optimizing for marriage.

00:11:39.620 | And we see clearly where that goes and the toxic culture that it creates for young men

00:11:44.860 | and women.

00:11:45.980 | And so we have to find other strategies.

00:11:48.900 | So forgive me for a very long intro, but this really, really matters.

00:11:52.380 | And I want to provide you...

00:11:54.140 | I want to at least stimulate your thinking to think about, "If I want to be rich and

00:11:58.900 | if I'm going to get married, then what should I look for?"

00:12:02.980 | The spouse that you marry will do three important things, will have three important impacts

00:12:09.140 | on your financial future.

00:12:12.300 | First, your spousal selection will enormously impact your immediate and long-term financial

00:12:20.220 | future on the positive side, meaning your income, the money that you make, the investments

00:12:26.700 | that you earn, the trajectory of your career.

00:12:30.580 | Your spousal selection can make a huge difference on that.

00:12:33.980 | Let's go through those for just a moment.

00:12:35.940 | Obviously, the most glaring example is what income does my spouse earn?

00:12:43.100 | If you are a young woman and you marry a man who is earning $50,000 a year and doesn't

00:12:49.900 | have much potential beyond cost of living raises in his life, as compared to a man who

00:12:56.780 | is in a highly paid career or on a highly paid career trajectory and has a potential

00:13:02.900 | to earn $500,000 a year, there's going to be an obvious difference in your long-term

00:13:07.820 | wealth based upon that selection between those potential husbands.

00:13:14.100 | So the income is direct and clear.

00:13:17.140 | But there's a more important in terms of a career trajectory for all of us.

00:13:21.240 | Let's say that you're a young man and you're married to a woman who complements your career

00:13:28.420 | choice or a woman who you're constantly fighting with in your career choice.

00:13:33.140 | This can take many different expressions.

00:13:34.820 | It can take an expression in terms of where you need to live for your couple, for both

00:13:40.100 | of your incomes, how you need to approach it, how much she wants you to come home from

00:13:45.900 | work early because that's where she is versus how much she supports you working late, working

00:13:50.420 | on the weekends, going for it, taking risks, living small and frugally so that you can

00:13:56.160 | accumulate investment capital.

00:13:58.260 | These things are enormously impactful long-term and it's the relational dynamics that make

00:14:02.440 | a big, big difference.

00:14:04.300 | So enormously impact to your short and long-term financial future on the positive side is going

00:14:09.720 | to be determined based upon the specific person that you marry.

00:14:13.540 | Now we can flip it to the negative side.

00:14:15.780 | The spouse that you marry is going to enormously impact your long-term financial future on

00:14:20.500 | the negative side.

00:14:21.980 | The big one is risk of divorce.

00:14:24.480 | You may lose a decade of financial productivity.

00:14:26.900 | If you marry somebody, you're in it for a decade and then there's a divorce and all

00:14:31.180 | of a sudden your net worth is destroyed.

00:14:33.360 | You lose several years of productive work that are now spent fighting in divorce court.

00:14:40.260 | It's enormously disruptive.

00:14:41.940 | But also then on the expense side, the expenses that are associated with this particular person

00:14:46.480 | that you marry are going to be enormously impactful.

00:14:50.220 | And then the third aspect is the really long-term financial future of your descendants in terms

00:14:55.200 | of genetics, of your children, the way that your children are brought up, the culture

00:14:59.940 | that your children have, they're enormously important.

00:15:03.820 | And careful spousal selection is the magic key to solving all three of these things because

00:15:09.020 | none of these are random factors that just happen to you.

00:15:12.620 | In a moment or in the middle of this show, I will relate to you some stories of a marriage

00:15:17.620 | researcher and his story is that he can predict divorce with 91% reliability, whether a couple

00:15:24.300 | will stay married or whether a couple will divorce.

00:15:27.340 | And it's just an example to show that there are things that you can look for in any situation

00:15:31.060 | to know how likely you are to divorce.

00:15:34.220 | All the signs are there as to is this person that I'm likely to marry or that I want to

00:15:38.700 | marry, is this person likely to be a dog walker or a doctor?

00:15:44.740 | The signs are all there from an early age and so you're not wrong to look for these

00:15:48.860 | things.

00:15:49.860 | Remember, I think you can and should be extremely picky prior to marriage.

00:15:55.820 | Once you're married, then you're all in on marriage, but you should be very picky prior

00:15:59.700 | to marriage.

00:16:00.700 | And you, with this decision of the person that you're going to marry, you, as in no

00:16:07.040 | other decision, you deserve to be entirely selfish about your decisions.

00:16:11.940 | Now, why don't people do that?

00:16:13.820 | Well, they don't think about it and they don't develop themselves to be able to attract a

00:16:18.420 | very high quality spouse and it's not surprising.

00:16:21.420 | Most people who are unmarried, it's not surprising that they're unmarried if you have a little

00:16:25.140 | bit of experience in life and you just look and understand, well, it's not, duh, of course

00:16:29.460 | this person's not married.

00:16:31.000 | What does he bring to the table?

00:16:32.140 | What does she bring to the table?

00:16:33.260 | What is he doing?

00:16:34.260 | What is she doing with her time?

00:16:35.260 | Who is she meeting?

00:16:36.460 | And as I described in detail in the previous episode, it's a function of what are you looking

00:16:41.380 | for?

00:16:42.380 | Do you know that?

00:16:43.380 | Have you optimized your personal traits of attractiveness so that you can attract the

00:16:47.660 | people that you want to attract and repel the people that you want to repel?

00:16:50.900 | And then have you been invested into going and finding the kinds of places where people

00:16:55.740 | are that are likely to be in a relationship with you?

00:16:59.180 | It's not magic.

00:17:02.500 | It's a math formula based upon what you're looking for and it should be relatively normal

00:17:08.780 | for an attractive young man or an attractive young woman to have a few options.

00:17:14.900 | And that's not abnormal where you see the proof, the evidence of this most starkly in

00:17:21.380 | today's world is just look at the options that a beautiful woman or a very highly developed,

00:17:27.700 | high value man has in the dating marketplace.

00:17:30.960 | This young man or woman has many options to choose among and it's that balance between

00:17:36.820 | recognizing okay, some things are innate but not everything is innate and a young man or

00:17:41.820 | woman can develop himself or herself to be attractive, to have multiple options and that

00:17:47.900 | puts you in a different situation.

00:17:50.020 | And you should be very picky about what you are looking for in a prospective partner.

00:17:56.260 | Then when you marry, be all in on marriage.

00:17:59.600 | So I'm trying to help you to think about what I want you to have options by engaging in

00:18:05.220 | sufficient levels of personal development, developing your own attractive qualities that

00:18:10.420 | would be attractive to your ideal spouse and then doing that young enough so you don't

00:18:14.860 | have your back up against the wall.

00:18:16.260 | You're 30 years old, now all of a sudden you're going to get serious about life, well that's

00:18:19.540 | probably not the best time to do it.

00:18:21.780 | You don't want to have your back up against the wall, you want to really be doing this

00:18:25.180 | early so that you have time and you can patiently look and think beyond just the short term,

00:18:30.780 | you know, I feel good when I'm with him or whatever the short term things are.

00:18:35.400 | You need to become a person of value who brings something to the table so that you can attract

00:18:41.620 | a high quality, high value spouse.

00:18:44.740 | Now what should you look for?

00:18:45.740 | Well, I'd like to characterize what you should look for into three different categories because

00:18:51.300 | I think it's useful for analysis and I'm not going to give you a comprehensive list.

00:18:55.380 | I just want to stimulate your thinking so that you can make your own list.

00:18:58.620 | But I think if we characterize these things on different levels, then we'll understand,

00:19:05.440 | we'll be able to develop in the fullness of time a more comprehensive list.

00:19:09.200 | Some of the traits that you should look for in a potential marriage partner are genetic

00:19:15.840 | and they're genuinely physically genetic traits.

00:19:20.280 | Some are long term traits that are not quite genetic but that are very, very enduring in

00:19:29.580 | terms of their impact.

00:19:31.460 | The kind of childhood that somebody had is not necessarily a genetic trait on the physical

00:19:37.940 | level.

00:19:38.940 | But yet it has enduring influence and will probably affect this person's view and outlook

00:19:43.980 | on life for the rest of his or her life.

00:19:46.420 | And then some traits are relatively easily changed and they're skills that can be attracted

00:19:52.500 | and developed.

00:19:53.500 | For example, let's say that your initial response to when I say what should you look for in

00:19:58.060 | a spouse to enhance your financial future, you might say something like, "I want to marry

00:20:01.660 | someone who's good with money."

00:20:02.660 | Okay, great.

00:20:05.800 | But what does that mean?

00:20:07.540 | Does that mean skilled at budgeting?

00:20:09.540 | You want to marry somebody who's skilled at budgeting?

00:20:12.140 | I don't think much of that because that's a skill that can be learned in six weeks to

00:20:16.580 | six months.

00:20:17.580 | It's not that hard to develop a skill at budgeting.

00:20:19.420 | You can be done with that in six weeks to six months.

00:20:22.460 | Or do you mean by I want to marry someone who's good with money, I want to marry someone

00:20:25.500 | who earns a million dollars a year?

00:20:27.660 | Well, earning a million dollars a year is a skill that is usually going to take, I would

00:20:32.660 | say, at least a minimum of a decade to develop.

00:20:35.580 | I don't know anybody who's done it in less than a decade and often much, much longer.

00:20:40.980 | Sometimes that's multiple decades and there's so many underlying skills that are necessary

00:20:45.660 | to earn a million dollars a year.

00:20:47.660 | So which of those things do you mean when you say I want to marry someone who's good

00:20:51.780 | with money?

00:20:53.100 | Again, I would be happy if I'm going to choose somebody – if I clearly recognize that earning

00:20:58.740 | a million dollars a year is more important than being good at budgeting $40,000 a year,

00:21:04.260 | then I need to figure out what's the environment, what are the skill sets that put someone on

00:21:07.940 | the 10-year path to earning a million dollars a year.

00:21:10.580 | That's the key thing to optimize for.

00:21:12.300 | The budgeting can be fixed pretty easily.

00:21:14.700 | So we'll look at some positive traits to look for.

00:21:18.820 | Now, there's one more question I want to talk through and the question is should this

00:21:22.160 | be a conversation that is sex specific?

00:21:26.020 | Should this be a conversation where I say husbands, here's what you should look for

00:21:30.940 | in potential wives and potential wives, here's what you should look for in potential husbands,

00:21:34.780 | or should I use the inclusive term of spouse?

00:21:38.180 | I'm not opposed to sexism generally.

00:21:41.420 | I'm a man.

00:21:42.420 | I enjoy spending my time with men.

00:21:44.140 | I don't really spend time with women.

00:21:46.420 | I'm a five-woman man.

00:21:47.560 | I've got a wife, I've got a daughter, I've got a mother, and I've got two sisters.

00:21:51.900 | That's about most of the women that I spend time with in my life.

00:21:56.780 | And I enjoy my life that way.

00:21:58.420 | And the audience of Radical Personal Finance is predominantly male.

00:22:03.180 | But I don't think that this conversation is one where we should automatically be sex-specific

00:22:11.820 | in how we talk about and what we do and how we deal with things.

00:22:15.940 | I think that it's hard in our current very androgynous age, it's hard to determine where

00:22:21.980 | the lines should be drawn, but there are lines that need to be drawn.

00:22:26.060 | And I think that some marriage strategies are the same for men and women and some are

00:22:30.020 | different.

00:22:31.820 | In addition though, we need to go beyond marriage and recognize that your strategy will be different

00:22:37.500 | depending on whether you're optimizing for marriage or whether you're optimizing for

00:22:43.820 | reproduction and long-term family vitality, as in children and grandchildren.

00:22:50.480 | Because these things are two different things.

00:22:52.020 | I'm going to be talking about marriage, but in the back of your mind, because that's what

00:22:55.840 | I've titled my show, but in the back of your mind you need to distinguish between marriage

00:22:59.980 | and long-term family formation.

00:23:03.740 | And it's important that you understand that there is a somewhat robust circle of social

00:23:10.060 | -- I hate to use the word "science" for social science, but I don't know another word -- social

00:23:14.140 | science that we can look at.

00:23:15.580 | We can look at some data, we can look at some studies, some analysis, and try to form some

00:23:19.820 | opinions that are informed by data and research in this area.

00:23:23.180 | But you probably don't need the research.

00:23:25.480 | What you probably need to do is just simply be willing to confirm your bias, be willing

00:23:32.560 | to confirm your natural knowledge of the world.

00:23:35.760 | Because we've all seen how relationships naturally function in our life.

00:23:40.860 | So let's talk about, for example, a male doctor marrying versus a female doctor.

00:23:46.980 | And with this we'll introduce a couple of terms that are important to think about.

00:23:51.580 | So first, let's say you have an equally qualified male doctor, female doctor, high income earning,

00:23:59.180 | high status profession, huge amounts of intelligence needed, huge amounts of grit, some of the

00:24:04.340 | factors that are highly correlated with positive financial expectativity.

00:24:10.420 | So we could see that a male doctor can be attracted to and happily marry a female doctor.

00:24:18.500 | This happens all the time.

00:24:20.180 | A male doctor can be attracted to and happily marry a female doctor.

00:24:24.980 | The male doctor can be attracted to and happily marry a female school teacher.

00:24:31.580 | But it's unlikely that a female doctor, it's unlikely for a female doctor to marry a male

00:24:38.240 | school teacher.

00:24:39.700 | And it's not just in terms of exposure.

00:24:42.860 | It's not just in terms of, well, they didn't meet each other because they were in different

00:24:45.900 | schools.

00:24:46.900 | There is an element of that.

00:24:47.900 | But there's something deeper related to it.

00:24:50.160 | The first trend that we clearly see across society is the trend of homogamy.

00:24:56.220 | Homogamy is defined in the social sciences, the marriage between individuals who are in

00:25:00.960 | some culturally important way similar to each other.

00:25:06.540 | It's a form of assortative mating.

00:25:10.180 | And the marriage union can be based on similarity of socioeconomic status, class, gender, caste,

00:25:17.020 | ethnicity, or religion, or age in age homogamy.

00:25:22.540 | So these are all expressions of homogamy.

00:25:23.940 | I'm reading directly from the Wikipedia article on homogamy here.

00:25:27.700 | Now we would contrast homogamy with heterogamy.

00:25:32.520 | So homogamy, similarities, and heterogamy, differences from one another.

00:25:37.100 | So in sociology, heterogamy refers to a marriage between two individuals that differ in a certain

00:25:42.980 | criterion, including all of those that I just listed.

00:25:47.260 | Very common expressions of heterogamy in today's world would be age heterogamy, so partners

00:25:52.580 | marrying at disparate ages, ethnic heterogamy, partners of different ethnicities marrying,

00:25:59.060 | and of course social class and all of these things are relevant to it.

00:26:03.700 | You have, what was that old movie, The Businessman Marries the Prostitute.

00:26:07.820 | These kinds of things are always the substance of literature and discussion and we love them.

00:26:14.740 | And so what you see if you think about homogamy and heterogamy is you can see that we're simultaneously

00:26:19.260 | attracted to both of these things.

00:26:21.720 | There's a reason that in, again, if you don't have this in your life, you can find it in

00:26:26.940 | literature.

00:26:27.940 | There's a reason why people marry someone of our class or of our culture or of our religion.

00:26:32.660 | There's a reason also that we simultaneously have an appreciation and a fixation with the

00:26:39.180 | wealthy guy marrying the poor girl, the prince marrying the servant girl, the businessman

00:26:48.740 | marrying the prostitute, the people of Romeo and Juliet from different families.

00:26:54.740 | There's all this fascination with this integration with people similar to each other and different

00:27:01.860 | from each other.

00:27:03.420 | And these are important because some people and some factors are very important to marriage.

00:27:10.640 | Some factors are less important to marriage.

00:27:12.820 | Some factors are very important to reproduction and some factors are less important to reproduction.

00:27:17.660 | Now we have our first our discussion of homogamy.

00:27:20.420 | Now similarly we can then move to a different term and the term is hypergamy.

00:27:26.640 | Hypergamy, what we would refer to in non-clinical terms as dating up or marrying up, is a term

00:27:34.300 | that is used for a person who dates or marries a spouse of a higher social status or sexual

00:27:41.900 | capital than that individual person.

00:27:44.580 | And the antonym for hypergamy would be hypogamy and these are the basic balancing between

00:27:51.420 | them.

00:27:52.420 | The experience that men and women have for hypergamy or hypogamy is different.

00:28:00.180 | I can demonstrate this to you by just looking at popular cultures.

00:28:04.300 | What is usually the case is that men are not particularly concerned with the social class

00:28:12.660 | or the earning ability or some external feature of a woman that they're attracted to.

00:28:20.780 | Men tend to not necessarily be hypergamous.

00:28:24.740 | That doesn't mean that they want to be married to a woman who is very dissimilar to them.

00:28:31.100 | So that's why we don't talk about hypogamy.

00:28:33.260 | Nobody really wants to be married to somebody who is dissimilar.

00:28:36.820 | What it means is that men aren't generally pursuing somebody of a higher class or status

00:28:42.980 | as a very important part of their life.

00:28:45.260 | And again I would go back to pretty woman.

00:28:47.220 | Here you have the wealthy successful businessman who is attracted to the prostitute who has

00:28:52.940 | made a series of unfortunate decisions but at her inner being she has a heart of gold

00:28:58.700 | and of course somehow she's going to make him mad, make him happy because of who she

00:29:03.260 | is and so he pursues her and attracts her and marries her.

00:29:07.980 | That would be pretty woman.

00:29:10.300 | What you don't generally see is the opposite.

00:29:12.500 | You don't generally see any, I couldn't name any movies, where there's an incredibly attractive,

00:29:20.180 | successful, beautiful woman who then goes and marries a male dud with no prospects.

00:29:27.660 | When you see this reflected in popular culture you wind up with movies that are more like

00:29:33.220 | the movie The Proposal.

00:29:35.100 | So in The Proposal you have Sandra Bullock who is a high-powered editor and high-powered

00:29:40.460 | businesswoman and all of a sudden she decides, she finds out she's going to be kicked out

00:29:46.300 | of the United States and be deported to Canada unless she has a relationship.

00:29:50.420 | So in a fit of desperation she goes after her poorly paid assistant and says, "Well

00:29:55.940 | actually, you're going to be my fiancé."

00:29:57.980 | And basically she manipulates and coerces him into being her fiancé.

00:30:05.300 | But then of course in the long run they wind up madly in love and together.

00:30:09.140 | Well why?

00:30:10.140 | Well what it turns out that her fiancé, though he had a low-paying job, was actually

00:30:15.300 | from a wealthy elite family in Alaska where they basically owned half of the Alaskan town

00:30:20.220 | that they were from.

00:30:21.220 | And you know he's actually a really high-quality guy.

00:30:23.300 | So even though the initial indications of her status in life were different, even though

00:30:29.340 | he was her assistant and a lowly paid lackey, in reality he's actually this really fabulous

00:30:35.340 | amazing guy and this temporary and wealthy and sophisticated and accomplished, but in

00:30:40.940 | this temporary low point in his life of being an assistant was just part of a strategic

00:30:45.120 | desire to find himself.

00:30:47.100 | And so you can see this throughout our culture and there's good data done on this.

00:30:51.820 | You're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad.

00:30:55.620 | Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipsyn ads.

00:30:59.580 | Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a reproduced ad like

00:31:04.300 | this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipsyn ads.

00:31:08.660 | Go to Lipsyn ads dot com now.

00:31:11.060 | That's L I B S Y N ads dot com.

00:31:14.700 | There's been various studies in the social studies that across people, across culture,

00:31:19.700 | men and women approach relationships differently and they look for different things.

00:31:24.860 | And so there is an element of sex specificity that is necessary because the competitive

00:31:30.500 | strategies for men are different than the competitive strategies for women.

00:31:35.620 | Women can optimize for features such as high income, high status, high power, but they're

00:31:43.140 | less important than optimizing for other features because men are looking for different things

00:31:47.520 | than wives and wives are looking for husbands.

00:31:50.180 | And so some of the big problems that we face though in our current society is that the

00:31:54.900 | traditional ways in which these were facilitated for and structured for, some of them are working

00:32:03.580 | better than ever designed and some of them are working worse than ever designed.

00:32:07.560 | So homogamy as an example, right now in our current culture we have more and more homogamous

00:32:13.620 | relationships than ever before.

00:32:15.980 | And the homogamy though is primarily related to intellectual ability and which for which

00:32:21.340 | we can use education as the proxy.

00:32:24.700 | I first started thinking about this maybe a decade ago when I read Charles Murray's

00:32:28.540 | book called Coming Apart and that was where I first met the word homogamy.

00:32:34.060 | And what we see is simply that our society, the whole thesis of coming apart which I think

00:32:40.060 | is continuing as best I can tell, is simply that the rich are getting richer and the poor

00:32:45.420 | are getting poorer but it's not just in financial terms, it's basically in every terms.

00:32:49.640 | Our societies are becoming more and more intensely segregated, not based upon skin color necessarily,

00:32:55.800 | not based upon wealth necessarily, but based upon all of the features related to it.

00:33:01.040 | And a big one is intelligence and in terms of relationships, intelligence is an enormous

00:33:09.040 | element of the long-term future of our society as well as your own children.

00:33:17.960 | So let me read a short passage from my copy of Coming Apart.

00:33:22.880 | Before the age – this is from a section titled The Increase in Cognitive Homogamy.

00:33:28.200 | Before the age of mobility, people commonly married someone from the same town or from

00:33:32.080 | the same neighborhood of an urban area.

00:33:34.440 | The events that threw people together seldom had anything to do specifically with cognitive

00:33:38.480 | ability.

00:33:40.000 | Similar cognitive ability was a source of compatibility between a young man and a young

00:33:43.840 | woman and some degree of cognitive homogamy existed, but it was a haphazard process.

00:33:49.720 | Meanwhile, educational homogamy was high because hardly anyone went to college.

00:33:54.560 | In large proportions of married couples, both had less than a high school education or both

00:33:59.160 | had a high school diploma.

00:34:01.160 | As the proportion of college graduates increased, so did the possibilities for greater educational

00:34:06.040 | homogamy at the top.

00:34:07.840 | As college graduates found, they had more potential marriage partners who were also

00:34:11.600 | college graduates.

00:34:13.320 | Drawing on the extensive technical literature and the CPS, sociologists Christine Schwartz

00:34:18.560 | and Robert Marr examined trends in assortative marriage as it was known in the jargon from

00:34:26.080 | 1940 to 2003.

00:34:28.400 | They found that homogamy has increased at both ends of the educational scale.

00:34:32.840 | College graduates grew more likely to marry college graduates and high school dropouts

00:34:36.440 | grew more likely to marry other high school dropouts.

00:34:39.560 | For our purposes, trying to understand how the new upper class came to be, the effects

00:34:44.040 | of increased educational attainment may be seen in a simple measure.

00:34:48.000 | In 1960, just 3% of American couples both had a college degree.

00:34:52.800 | By 2010, that proportion stood at 25%.

00:34:56.640 | The change was so large that it was a major contributor to the creation of a new class

00:35:00.720 | all by itself.

00:35:03.360 | But increased educational homogamy had another consequence that the academic literature on

00:35:07.520 | homogamy avoids mentioning.

00:35:09.920 | Increased educational homogamy inevitably means increased cognitive homogamy.

00:35:15.240 | A college education starting with admission and continuing through to graduation is a

00:35:19.080 | series of cognitive tests.

00:35:21.300 | To be able even to begin a major in engineering or the hard sciences, students have to be

00:35:26.520 | able to do advanced calculus and that in turn requires logical mathematical ability and

00:35:31.080 | roughly the top decile of the population.

00:35:33.840 | To be able to cope with genuine college level material in the social sciences and humanities

00:35:38.140 | requires good linguistic ability and the top quartile of the distribution, if you're content

00:35:42.660 | with scraping by, closer to the top decile if you want to get good grades in a moderately

00:35:47.000 | demanding college.

00:35:48.520 | To graduate means passing all these tests plus a general test for perseverance.

00:35:52.680 | We'll call that grit.

00:35:53.680 | We'll come back to grit later.

00:35:55.200 | The result is that each level of educational attainment, high school diploma, AA, BA, MA,

00:36:00.360 | and professional degree or PhD, implies a mean IQ for people attaining that level that

00:36:05.040 | has been remarkably stable among whites at least since the beginning of the 1980s.

00:36:10.400 | I must limit the numbers to whites as I present these data because aggressive affirmative

00:36:13.880 | action has produced means for African Americans and Latinos at each level of educational attainment

00:36:18.960 | that are substantially lower and more variable than the white means.

00:36:22.440 | But since we are talking about the new upper class, there are good reasons to think in

00:36:25.800 | terms of the white means, partly because African Americans and Latinos who enter the new upper

00:36:30.280 | class have passed a number of career tests signifying that they approximate the white

00:36:34.640 | means on cognitive ability for each level of educational attainment.

00:36:38.720 | And partly because the new upper class is still overwhelmingly white.

00:36:42.320 | Table 2.1 shows the evidence for these stable means.

00:36:45.200 | And let me just read you table 2.1.

00:36:47.840 | And I'll use the 1982 to 1989 data.

00:36:52.060 | So the mean IQ for the table is titled mean white IQ for levels of degree attainment

00:36:57.500 | in the NLSY-79 and NLSY-97.

00:37:01.880 | So the mean IQ for persons completing no more than no degree is 88.

00:37:06.840 | For persons completing no more than a high school diploma or GED is 99.

00:37:10.880 | For persons completing no more than an associate's degree is 105.

00:37:14.960 | Bachelor's degree 113 IQ, master's degree 117, PhD, LLD, MD, DDS is 126.

00:37:24.040 | Now we'll come back to the transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation in

00:37:27.160 | a moment.

00:37:28.160 | The point, however, is that our society is sorting itself on many, many features.

00:37:34.840 | And these features are important.

00:37:36.880 | And this homogamy, that even though there is a tendency to say, "Oh, we don't care about

00:37:46.220 | being the same.

00:37:47.220 | After all, we don't care about ethnic differences among couples.

00:37:51.660 | We don't care necessarily about age disparities.

00:37:54.420 | You do you.

00:37:55.420 | You like who you like, etc."

00:37:56.860 | There's this intense homogamy that is happening in our society based upon the way that our

00:38:02.140 | society is now sorted and structured by educational institutions, careers, things like that.

00:38:08.020 | And then that's mixed with the natural hypergamy or lack of hypergamy between men and women

00:38:14.620 | that is creating enormous pressure on young people and their mate selection.

00:38:20.420 | And so these features and attributes need to be thought through, need to be understood

00:38:25.420 | if we're going to give people good advice.

00:38:27.540 | So let's get to the advice.

00:38:28.840 | What should you look for?

00:38:30.620 | Let's begin at the genetic level.

00:38:32.780 | Let's begin with those traits that you should look for in a potential partner that are going

00:38:38.140 | to impact your life, your wealth production, and your children.

00:38:43.860 | And let's start with those ones that are largely unalterable, which is what I'm calling the

00:38:49.220 | genetic traits.

00:38:50.460 | The first one that you need to look for is good health and longevity.

00:38:53.780 | And let me repeat for the 15th time.

00:38:58.700 | You're listening to me in the comfort of your own ears.

00:39:04.540 | That means, generally speaking, you're consuming my podcast in a private space.

00:39:11.620 | Don't let anyone shame you and say that somehow you shouldn't be looking for the highest quality

00:39:19.180 | spouse that you can attract.

00:39:23.420 | I'm saying this to you because I never would have believed it if I'd heard myself, if I've

00:39:27.780 | heard this advice when I was younger.

00:39:30.100 | I would have seen myself as some kind of white knight to say, "Oh no, you know, I shouldn't

00:39:34.500 | have high standards of the person that I want to marry.

00:39:37.620 | I shouldn't have requirements and even basic fundamental genetic requirements.

00:39:43.500 | I should accept all people the way that they are."

00:39:47.020 | The problem with that is that real life happens.

00:39:49.480 | And when real life happens, you start to understand that these basic features and characteristics

00:39:55.840 | that the partner that you marry has enormously impact your life.

00:40:00.580 | And so it sounds enormously selfish for me to say to a young unmarried man or a young

00:40:06.620 | unmarried woman, you should look for a potential marriage partner who has robust health.

00:40:14.340 | After all, all of us have friends who do not enjoy robust health.

00:40:18.420 | All of us know people who don't enjoy robust health and all of us want desperately to help

00:40:22.460 | those people.

00:40:23.560 | We want our friends who are unhealthy to get healthy.

00:40:27.260 | We don't want to express the concept that I'm just going to not pick you because you're

00:40:31.500 | unhealthy.

00:40:32.700 | We would never say that out loud and you don't have to say it out loud.

00:40:35.760 | That's why the fact that you're listening to me in the comfort of your ears and the

00:40:38.660 | privacy of your own mind, you don't ever have to say any of this stuff to anybody out loud.

00:40:43.780 | Nobody can judge you for the decisions you make, although you'll feel the pressure.

00:40:48.780 | We live in a world in which, well, you can't judge me for whether I marry a man or a woman.

00:40:53.140 | You can't judge me for the kind of person that I'm attracted to or not attracted to,

00:40:57.100 | but yet you are facing enormous judgment if you say, "I'm only going to marry somebody

00:41:01.980 | who is healthy."

00:41:02.980 | And yet what I'm telling you is that these things, if you're young, they matter.

00:41:08.780 | And this is a cumulative set of factors.

00:41:13.180 | These are a cumulative set of factors that you will have to choose.

00:41:18.060 | But for every factor that you, what I'll call compromise on, what I mean is for every factor

00:41:25.300 | that on a scale of one to 10, you choose somebody who scores low on this factor, it's going

00:41:29.900 | to impact your life enormously.

00:41:32.740 | If you marry somebody who is healthy, then the ease of your marriage, the ease of your

00:41:37.420 | finances are likely to be enormous.

00:41:41.220 | Someone has a strong immune system, they're not susceptible to chronic diseases, they've

00:41:45.260 | got good overall physical fitness.

00:41:47.140 | Just everything's easy and simple in that element of your married life.

00:41:52.900 | On the other hand, you marry someone who's sick all the time, and now the pressure that

00:41:59.220 | puts upon your marriage is significant.

00:42:02.580 | If you marry someone, you make a vow to be with them in sickness and in health, for better

00:42:09.640 | or worse, for richer and for poorer.

00:42:12.820 | So once you are married to someone, you come to me and you say, "Hey, Joshua, you know,

00:42:18.420 | my husband or wife is sick all the time.

00:42:20.380 | What do I do?"

00:42:21.380 | I'm going to be standing in front of you saying, "You absolutely have to support this person.

00:42:26.140 | This is your wife.

00:42:27.140 | This is your husband that we're dealing with.

00:42:28.940 | You owe this person a duty of care."

00:42:31.740 | And though that duty of care bankrupts you because you are paying for medical care, though

00:42:36.820 | you can't work because you're a full-time caregiver or whatever the situation is, I'm

00:42:40.760 | going to honor you for your faithfulness to your husband or wife in their time of sickness.

00:42:49.240 | But prior to marriage, you have a choice, and it is smart for you to be as discriminating

00:42:56.760 | as you possibly can with your choices prior to marriage.

00:43:01.800 | Now the flip side of this is simply the fact that there is a limit to the kind of person

00:43:07.920 | that you are going to be able to attract into a marriage relationship with you.

00:43:12.960 | If you are a 2, you're going to have a very difficult time attracting a 10 into a relationship

00:43:19.380 | with you.

00:43:20.520 | So if health is a component of what you would rate someone on, then, and you're a 2, you're

00:43:27.000 | probably going to be marrying a 1, a 2, or a 4.

00:43:30.580 | You're not going to be marrying a 10.

00:43:32.400 | So you have a choice.

00:43:33.400 | Either I'm willing to transform myself from a 2 to a 10 and do everything I can in other

00:43:40.020 | factors that I can control in order to attract a very high-quality spouse, or I'm going to

00:43:46.880 | settle for somebody who is closer to my age.

00:43:50.520 | Settling is not a negative concept.

00:43:53.840 | Everyone settles at some point in time for some reason.

00:43:56.760 | People who don't settle are single for the rest of their life.

00:43:59.840 | But there's a lot you can do to prepare yourself.

00:44:02.440 | That's why I spent so much energy in the previous episode to try to make this point, that you

00:44:06.600 | can change yourself.

00:44:07.600 | You can go from a 2 to a 7, and then you'll have access to people who are a good match

00:44:12.580 | for you.

00:44:13.700 | And so you want to change those things that you can change.

00:44:16.720 | You may be able to change your health, but even if you can't change your health, there's

00:44:20.840 | a lot of other things that you can change, and what you'll see is that people who don't

00:44:24.180 | have robust health, if they'll give attention and focus to developing their other qualities,

00:44:29.580 | they can still attract a very, very high-quality prospective spouse.

00:44:34.260 | You see this all the time with people who are profoundly handicapped and yet have attracted

00:44:38.780 | a very high-quality spouse because they've developed other qualities.

00:44:43.980 | So I'm sorry it's so long, but I think of myself at a younger age when I make my podcasts,

00:44:53.500 | and I would have been, in my own mind, a guy who was willing to be a white knight.

00:45:00.140 | I would have been a guy who was willing to say, "Oh, well, here's this wonderful girl,

00:45:05.300 | and after all, if I marry her, I can help her," right?

00:45:08.780 | And in hindsight, with the perspective of more than a decade of marriage and five children

00:45:17.460 | and everything that that involves, while I'm still young enough to remember being that

00:45:21.740 | guy, I look at it now and I realize no one ever told me how important it was to be entirely

00:45:28.420 | selfish with my selection of a spouse.

00:45:33.340 | And I owe a good amount of the success and happiness of my marriage to me having some

00:45:40.140 | filters that were cultural filters built in, as well as just to God's providence, His blessings

00:45:49.440 | on my life.

00:45:50.580 | I wasn't as strategic as I could have been and probably should have been, but once you're

00:45:54.380 | in it, you're in it.

00:45:55.780 | So you deserve to be selfish in your thinking and write down exactly what you want, but

00:46:00.180 | then you also have to develop and cultivate the traits and attributes that are going to

00:46:03.660 | be able to attract someone.

00:46:05.380 | So forgive the lengthy sidebar there, but it's really important that young people understand

00:46:13.380 | you can be selfish and you should be selfish about this as much as anything else.

00:46:17.900 | You should be selfish about working in the kind of career that you want to work in, about

00:46:21.380 | marrying the kind of person that you want to marry.

00:46:23.740 | You should be selfish about these things.

00:46:26.060 | But you can't be selfish in a non-deserving way.

00:46:30.900 | You can't say, "Well, I deserve to be a doctor," and not be willing to put in the really, really

00:46:36.140 | long years of work to develop yourself and the really long road to build the skills and

00:46:41.580 | pass the exams and pass the classes and get the degrees.

00:46:44.140 | If you want to be a doctor, go for it.

00:46:47.360 | But you prove that you deserve being a doctor with your work.

00:46:50.860 | Similarly, you can't say, "Well, I just want to marry a 10, and I'm a 2, but I just deserve

00:46:55.700 | a 10."

00:46:56.700 | Okay, well, if you're going to deserve a 10, you're going to have to transform yourself

00:46:59.700 | from a 2 to a 7, and you're going to have to work really, really hard to market yourself

00:47:04.900 | effectively until you convince the 10 to be with you.

00:47:08.500 | And that's going to take you some time and a whole lot of work.

00:47:11.660 | So I hope that's helpful.

00:47:14.220 | Back to the list, what are the genetic traits that we should be screening for?

00:47:18.240 | Well, big one is good health and separately longevity, which is related to health but

00:47:22.280 | not determinative of it.

00:47:24.480 | You want to look for a partner with a robust genetic predisposition to good health, and

00:47:30.800 | you should assess that and look for something that is likely to... and screen for somebody

00:47:39.880 | who is healthy.

00:47:41.960 | If your partner is healthy, then he or she is going to be able to enjoy a more active

00:47:49.980 | lifestyle with you, you're going to have lower healthcare costs, you're going to be able

00:47:54.120 | to earn more money because you can work consistently.

00:47:57.760 | If you ever get sick, you have understood, especially if you're sick for more than a

00:48:01.880 | few days, you understand how impossible it is to be financially productive when you're

00:48:06.960 | sick all the time.

00:48:08.280 | A huge portion of our ability to earn money just comes from just the natural attribute

00:48:12.160 | of feeling good, feeling strong, being able to go to work and be effective on a day to

00:48:16.280 | day basis.

00:48:17.360 | And when somebody gets sick, mentally sick, physically sick, everything falls apart.

00:48:21.720 | And a lot of that stuff is predetermined by genetics.

00:48:24.640 | And so you want to screen for that.

00:48:26.720 | How do you screen for health?

00:48:27.920 | Well, I think first you should screen for what you know about, just knowledge of health

00:48:32.320 | conditions.

00:48:33.380 | If you are, let's say, getting to know somebody and that person, you find out that person

00:48:38.300 | has some significant illness or chronic disease, then you should take that into account.

00:48:43.220 | And that might be something that you say, "Okay, this is not for me because of this

00:48:47.940 | chronic disease."

00:48:49.280 | You should trust your own basic instincts related to health as well.

00:48:53.780 | I think that one thing that Dr. Katherine Shanahan, the author of the book Deep Nutrition

00:48:59.020 | convinced me of is that various aspects of what we call beauty can be considered as markers

00:49:08.360 | for health.

00:49:10.020 | Beauty, which is often related to symmetry, has a strong genetic component related to

00:49:18.060 | it.

00:49:19.060 | And if you're interested in that discussion, read Dr. Katherine Shanahan's book called

00:49:22.340 | Deep Nutrition where she discusses it extensively.

00:49:26.220 | She may have published other things on it.

00:49:27.620 | That's just where I came up with it.

00:49:30.220 | But in general, we are attracted to various markers of beauty as being related to someone

00:49:36.380 | who is healthy.

00:49:37.800 | For example, let's say that somebody has a highly symmetrical face and body.

00:49:44.340 | We're likely to say, "Hey, that person is really beautiful because of the symmetry of

00:49:49.500 | his or her face and his or her body.

00:49:52.180 | That person is really beautiful."

00:49:53.620 | That's related, however, to genetic health.

00:49:55.980 | We can go more to that.

00:49:56.980 | Let's say that somebody has beautiful skin.

00:49:59.460 | Open up any advertisement for a skincare product and you'll see a model with beautiful skin.

00:50:04.400 | Beautiful skin, clear skin, skin that is not encumbered by acne or other issues and I don't

00:50:13.340 | even know what words to say because I'm not knowledgeable enough.

00:50:16.460 | But clear and beautiful skin, a healthy complexion, these are markers of good health.

00:50:20.740 | If you see a sick person, if you see somebody that has boils or a rash or pustules of some

00:50:26.660 | kind or acne or white skin or a wand complexion or kind of greasiness or sliminess or something

00:50:35.220 | like that, these are expressions of sickness.

00:50:37.840 | This is the way that sick people look.

00:50:39.660 | So the beauty of someone's skin is related to health and most of it has to come from

00:50:44.860 | inside.

00:50:45.860 | And so if someone is constantly covering up, I think women are prone to this, someone's

00:50:49.900 | constantly covering up her skin, make sure you get a chance to see your skin au naturel

00:50:54.500 | rather than constantly covered with beauty products that may be concealing some expression

00:50:59.140 | of sickness.

00:51:00.340 | If you are, let's say you're dealing with a sick and ailing actor or public person,

00:51:05.940 | maybe someone has been sick, a politician is sick and you've got to go on television

00:51:10.300 | to show how strong and competent he is, he's going to be spending a lot of time in front

00:51:17.780 | of the makeup artist before being put on TV.

00:51:20.300 | And so makeup can be used to hide things and you should be filtering and saying is this

00:51:24.180 | person physically beautiful, have physical attraction.

00:51:28.060 | Similarly, the way that somebody moves is an indication of health.

00:51:32.180 | Somebody who's athletic, athleticism is related and correlated to health and balanced movement,

00:51:40.140 | strong muscles, strong bones, functional joints, coordination.

00:51:44.500 | Athletes generally are athletes because they're healthy and so you can screen for health based

00:51:50.580 | upon athleticism and expression of athleticism.

00:51:56.700 | Back to family history, you should also think about the longevity that somebody has related

00:52:03.980 | to family history.

00:52:05.420 | I always came from a long-lived parents and it wasn't until I was older I started doing

00:52:10.000 | financial counseling and I had clients who told me they didn't expect to live past 60

00:52:15.660 | and I never understood it because all my ancestors died at a hundred or at least in mid to late

00:52:20.420 | nineties and so the idea in my mind is always okay I'm going to live to a hundred, it's

00:52:23.880 | just how old we are.

00:52:25.540 | And then I met people and I understood, wait a second, this person, like this is not, this

00:52:31.980 | was not me saying somehow well you're going to die soon.

00:52:35.180 | This is an unbidden, unprompted expression that as to a man's financial planner that

00:52:41.700 | yeah I'm probably not going to live past 60 because in my family we all die in our fifties

00:52:46.420 | and sixties.

00:52:48.420 | Think about the difference in wealth and expectations of life of marrying somebody whose family

00:52:55.540 | history would indicate that this person is unlikely to live past 60 as compared to someone

00:53:00.460 | who's likely to live to a hundred.

00:53:03.060 | Think about the extra 20 or 30 decades of earning that perhaps a man who's likely lived

00:53:08.460 | to a hundred has over somebody who's likely to live to 50.

00:53:11.880 | Think about your position as a wife who is marrying this man and think about him saying

00:53:18.060 | I'm not going to live past 60 so I'm going to retire at 45 and I'm going to start spending

00:53:22.380 | money because after all I want to spend money.

00:53:24.620 | And he's going to die at 60 and you might be, you know, a woman coming in likely to

00:53:28.060 | die at 90 statistically speaking when you're going to live a lot longer than men.

00:53:31.880 | So how do you plan for that financially as compared to a husband who expects to die at

00:53:37.020 | a hundred and he's going to work and earn income until he's say 80 and then he's going

00:53:41.740 | to retire for 10 or 15, 20 years and just the amount of money earned in a lifetime is

00:53:47.620 | enormous and also the long-term thinking that someone can have when he or she is investing

00:53:52.880 | say an extra decade of his life at an early age to have a high earning ability knowing

00:53:57.500 | that he has plenty of time to earn it out.

00:53:59.980 | Think about your wife dying at 50 years old and now all of a sudden what do you do as

00:54:05.160 | a man?

00:54:06.160 | Are you going to go and marry someone else?

00:54:07.300 | Are you going to be single for the rest of your life?

00:54:09.140 | That's really hard as compared to growing old with the wife of your youth and not having

00:54:13.320 | to worry about that and think about that.

00:54:15.820 | So longevity of family history is something to think about and understand what it is.

00:54:21.100 | Important to both of these though we shouldn't just focus on what is inherited because things

00:54:25.540 | that are inherited can be overcome.

00:54:27.520 | So think about the propensity that your proposed marriage candidate has to correct health weaknesses.

00:54:34.100 | All right well my parents all died of heart attacks but is this the kind of guy who is

00:54:37.860 | likely to say well my parents all died of heart attacks so I'm just going to never see

00:54:41.680 | a cardiologist or is this the kind of guy who says my parents all died of heart attacks

00:54:46.900 | so I'm going to be seeing a cardiologist every six months.

00:54:49.980 | You understand the point that just because you may have gotten a bad genetic inheritance

00:54:55.180 | from your family doesn't mean that you're stuck with that bad genetic inheritance for

00:55:00.460 | life.

00:55:01.460 | Is this person someone who's eating differently, exercising differently to develop the athletic

00:55:06.280 | ability to develop these things?

00:55:08.260 | Is this a person who's interested in topics that are related to health and longevity?

00:55:14.440 | No individual factor that I'm talking about should be seen as necessarily disqualifying.

00:55:20.500 | There are only a few factors that I would say if one of my children came to me and said

00:55:25.300 | hey dad you know I'm considering this person as a husband or a wife, what do you think?

00:55:30.580 | There are only a few basic factors that I would say absolutely not.

00:55:34.700 | On the other hand most of these are kind of a mushy gooey let's think about this and let's

00:55:40.140 | analyze all right here's a negative factor, you know here's a positive factor, this is

00:55:45.540 | highly correlated to success, this is highly correlated to failure.

00:55:48.900 | Let's dig into these factors on a deeper level in order to understand how to respond to them

00:55:54.740 | and then each for each factor you look for the response.

00:55:58.300 | So okay well this girl you know she's not the most beautiful and the reason for her

00:56:05.020 | beauty is ABC but you know what, she's adapted to that and she's figured out how to dress

00:56:11.200 | in a way that is really enhances her beauty and she has really dialed in on a lifestyle

00:56:17.180 | that leads to this being her incredibly robust health and man she's healthier than anyone

00:56:24.360 | I know even if she's not the most beautiful.

00:56:28.420 | And that kind of girl would probably be much more attractive than the girl who's just quote

00:56:32.580 | unquote naturally beautiful, never worked for it, never tried for it, just automatically

00:56:37.340 | received it but yet shows no interest in maintaining her health, stuffing her face with bad food

00:56:42.620 | all the time, not enhancing what basic characteristics she has because we know that in 20 years the

00:56:50.380 | direction that that girl is on is going to be very different than the direction that

00:56:53.660 | the girl who didn't have the natural advantages and had to work to develop her advantages.

00:57:01.420 | And so we're looking to see does this person have a propensity to correct health weaknesses,

00:57:06.460 | does this person have an interest in topics related to health and longevity but you need

00:57:10.180 | to screen for health because health is a big big deal.

00:57:14.460 | Similarly big genetic trait to look for is going to be intelligence.

00:57:17.820 | I think you need to seek a spouse who has a strong basis for intelligence, a strong

00:57:24.660 | genetic basis for intelligence and with someone with whom you share a similar level of intelligence.

00:57:33.380 | I have a hard time being with the idea even of being married to somebody who is not my

00:57:40.540 | equal in terms of intelligence and intellectual ability.

00:57:45.540 | That would be very unfulfilling and I think that people dramatically underestimate this.

00:57:53.340 | Now I don't know how to solve basically the long-term cultural problem of homogamy in

00:57:58.300 | terms of separation among our classes, I don't know how to solve that.

00:58:02.860 | All I know is that when you're going into marriage you want to be with somebody who

00:58:06.780 | is your intellectual equal, you want to be with somebody that you respect, you don't

00:58:10.980 | want to marry somebody who is dumb and he can't understand you.

00:58:16.180 | Intelligence is highly correlated with earning potential, long-term career prospects, the

00:58:23.180 | ability to engage in wise financial decision-making, it's highly correlated with all of these

00:58:30.900 | things and with just long-term success and so if you are an intelligent man or intelligent

00:58:38.700 | woman you should be looking to marry an intelligent man or an intelligent woman and that will

00:58:44.420 | make everything easier.

00:58:48.340 | I have a hard time knowing how, I don't interact very much with people of low intelligence

00:58:55.660 | and most of our societies result in the fact that most of us don't interact with people

00:59:03.420 | of differing intelligence from us because we kind of get funneled into schools, we get

00:59:08.300 | funneled into colleges, we get funneled into jobs and professions that are good equal for

00:59:12.540 | us.

00:59:13.540 | Unless you have a business or the kind of profession that enables you to interact with

00:59:18.220 | people of differing intellectual ability, you just spend your time with people who are

00:59:23.520 | like you, we all do and people who can understand what you have to talk about because after

00:59:28.300 | all one of the basics of good human relationships is that you enjoy spending time with people

00:59:33.500 | who like to talk about the kinds of things you like to talk about.

00:59:36.780 | And so I just didn't ever go out of my way, I never spent much time with people who were

00:59:41.580 | not very smart and as I got older I realized this accounts for a lot of the frustration

00:59:47.620 | that you have.

00:59:48.660 | You try to explain something and I generally expect that if I'm going to, if someone's

00:59:52.540 | going to explain something to me I get one time and I better understand it and I take

00:59:58.300 | the same thing the other way.

00:59:59.300 | If I'm going to take my time to explain something to you, I'm going to explain it one time and

01:00:03.140 | you need to get it.

01:00:04.140 | Well, people who are not very smart don't generally function that way.

01:00:09.020 | They need something to be explained multiple times.

01:00:12.500 | That's enormously frustrating for me and I don't know when it was but my eyes were open

01:00:18.580 | a number of years ago and I realized, wait a second Joshua, sometimes you're judging

01:00:22.180 | people for character deficiencies and in reality that's an entirely wrong judgment.

01:00:27.740 | Just understand that not all people have the same basic ability and we need to respect

01:00:33.340 | that and understand that and what happens is that we do a pretty decent job of this

01:00:39.300 | from the physical perspective.

01:00:41.060 | If we see that someone is old or infirm or handicapped in some physical way then we automatically

01:00:49.260 | adapt and adjust to that person.

01:00:50.860 | I'm going to walk a little slower, I'm going to offer you my arm, I'm going to do something

01:00:54.160 | to adapt and we do it with proper respect.

01:00:58.260 | We don't look down on somebody because this person has a differing physical capacity than

01:01:02.900 | I do.

01:01:04.060 | We don't look down on them, we just naturally adapt to one another and it's going to result

01:01:08.900 | in... our lives are going to result in segregation in some contexts.

01:01:16.700 | If somebody is physically handicapped sitting in a wheelchair then he's going to be sitting

01:01:20.620 | on the side of the sports field while those who are not physically handicapped are playing

01:01:25.580 | on the sports field but that doesn't mean that there's not a place for that person in

01:01:30.460 | society.

01:01:31.460 | We're going to respect and appreciate that person, we're going to celebrate him for what

01:01:34.820 | he can do, for the things that he can contribute.

01:01:38.260 | One of the great problems that we're facing in our society though is we don't know how

01:01:41.780 | to do that with intellectual ability.

01:01:44.300 | We're sorting people and segregating people based upon intellectual ability but we don't

01:01:49.620 | know how to identify it, we don't know how to talk about it, we don't know how to esteem

01:01:53.740 | people for their ontological value that is not based upon intelligence while simultaneously

01:01:59.640 | segregating people for intelligence.

01:02:02.460 | I don't have any solution to that, all I know is it matters.

01:02:06.500 | So how do you screen for intelligence?

01:02:08.380 | Well I think academic ability is the most obvious useful screen that we have for that.

01:02:14.500 | Academic ability and academic achievement is a useful proxy for IQ.

01:02:19.640 | So you want to understand what kind of grades is the person... what kind of grades does

01:02:24.000 | someone that you're interested in marrying get when they were young and how far does

01:02:28.060 | this person's academic education go.

01:02:31.260 | Now if the result of educational attainment is high, let's say that you are highly educated,

01:02:38.480 | you have a master's degree, a PhD, a college degree of some kind, then almost certainly

01:02:43.540 | you're going to be attracted to people who are also highly educated.

01:02:47.660 | If you are younger and let's say you're 20 years old and you are trying to assess somebody,

01:02:55.180 | you can't assess somebody based upon whether or not this person has a PhD, obviously, you

01:03:01.820 | know, you're 20 years old.

01:03:03.360 | So then your filter is going to be based upon grades.

01:03:07.660 | What kinds of grades does somebody get when young?

01:03:13.180 | People who do well in school are likely to do well in school and doing well in school

01:03:20.140 | is a useful and productive proxy that other people can use to measure intelligence, the

01:03:28.500 | components of intelligence that relate to academic ability at least.

01:03:32.500 | IQ is not the only important component of intelligence and if you dig into the IQ debates

01:03:38.700 | you can see that it seems like a useful metric that is able to be measured but not a complete

01:03:46.940 | metric.

01:03:47.940 | So hopefully in a decade or a couple of decades we'll know how to deal with it but for now

01:03:53.080 | you should be generally attracted to somebody who gets grades kind of like you do and does

01:03:58.060 | well in school and that should be a component that you use to filter prospective marriage

01:04:05.740 | candidates by.

01:04:06.740 | Now in a moment I'm going to talk about the heritability of intelligence.

01:04:11.420 | One of the challenges though is we need to be careful.

01:04:15.260 | I think that your basic filter here should be how well does somebody do in school.

01:04:22.500 | The filter should not necessarily be how many advanced degrees does a person have because

01:04:28.980 | there may be a negative effect to somebody having a lot of advanced degrees.

01:04:34.460 | Remember earlier I tried to make the distinction I want to put in your mind there's a difference

01:04:37.520 | between marrying well and reproducing and marrying well you could have two academics

01:04:46.280 | right, two PhD holders that come together and they both have just this passionate academic

01:04:53.000 | career and he studies advanced I don't know cosmology and she studies advanced biological

01:05:01.240 | science and they can have the happiest most fulfilling marriage in the history of mankind.

01:05:09.080 | Statistically they probably aren't going to reproduce very well, they're probably not

01:05:12.880 | going to have children.

01:05:14.240 | If they do have children they're probably not going to have many children.

01:05:17.700 | There's going to be some challenge here and the challenge is that in our current relatively

01:05:23.680 | antenatal age higher levels of educational achievement don't always correlate to having

01:05:31.520 | more children because of the investment into attaining higher levels of achievement.

01:05:38.160 | This is different for men and for women but I think educational achievement and income

01:05:42.980 | need to be measured.

01:05:44.400 | What we know is men who earn higher incomes, the higher a man's income goes the more children

01:05:51.300 | he tends to have.

01:05:53.480 | Women who earn higher income, the higher her income goes the fewer children she tends to

01:05:58.000 | have.

01:05:59.280 | That's not true when it's related to wealth.

01:06:02.520 | So as I understand the data women who are wealthy or who earn income in forms other

01:06:08.120 | than wages they tend to have more children.

01:06:13.000 | But it's women who earn a lot of money don't tend to, in wages don't tend to have very

01:06:20.000 | many children.

01:06:21.000 | So this can be a real challenge.

01:06:23.060 | Imagine that you are a man and you're trying to filter for a woman and you want to have

01:06:28.120 | a happy marriage where you have good compatibility between you and you also want to have five

01:06:34.040 | children.

01:06:36.160 | Statistically if you marry a woman who is very invested into her academic career and

01:06:42.000 | she's pursuing a PhD and she's going to go and get a job she's not going to have many

01:06:47.600 | children.

01:06:48.900 | Quite simply she's going to run out of time to have children.

01:06:51.800 | So unless she is developing some kind of creative – sorry, she's going to run out of time

01:06:58.300 | to have children and she probably is going to be so devoted to her career that she's

01:07:02.520 | just not that interested in having children.

01:07:05.200 | So unless we can figure out how to develop a new model for young women that allows them

01:07:11.080 | to maximize their educational accomplishments and career prospects while also allowing them

01:07:17.240 | to have children when they are young and have their children fit around their career then

01:07:24.280 | we need to be really careful here of what you're actually filtering for.

01:07:28.840 | Because you marry a girl because she's got a PhD and a great career, well that's wonderful.

01:07:33.600 | She's probably going to be phenomenally intelligent, hard-working, have enormous amounts of grit,

01:07:39.480 | perseverance.

01:07:40.480 | Those are great traits that you would love your children to inherit and you're probably

01:07:44.320 | not going to have many children.

01:07:46.320 | So if we can filter and figure out how to help her to have children and express those

01:07:53.120 | traits in the future that's one of the things that we need to filter for.

01:07:59.080 | So let's talk about transmission.

01:08:00.700 | So your proxy, especially if you're a man, can't just be educational attainment.

01:08:07.120 | It has to be something prior to that which is going to be grades and I'm just going

01:08:11.840 | to say educational potential.

01:08:14.000 | Let's talk just for a moment about the transmission of intelligence to the next generation.

01:08:18.840 | Back to Coming Apart by Charles Murray from his section on homogamy.

01:08:24.920 | This section is entitled Transmission of Cognitive Ability to the Next Generation.

01:08:28.120 | You're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad.

01:08:31.920 | Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from lips and ads.

01:08:36.000 | Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a reproduced ad like

01:08:40.480 | this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with lips and ads.

01:08:44.840 | Go to lipsandads.com now that's l-i-b-s-y-n ads.com.

01:08:51.240 | Another consequence of increased educational and cognitive homogamy is the increased tenacity

01:08:56.020 | of the elite in maintaining its status across generations.

01:08:59.960 | The adage "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations" grew out of an observed

01:09:05.000 | reality.

01:09:06.200 | If the children and grandchildren are only average in their own abilities, money from

01:09:10.200 | a fortune won in the first generation won't keep them at the top of the heap.

01:09:15.160 | When the parents are passing cognitive ability along with the money, the staying power of

01:09:19.760 | the elite across generations increases.

01:09:23.480 | Specific numbers can be attached to such statements.

01:09:26.200 | The stability of the average IQs for different levels of educational attainment over time

01:09:30.560 | means that we can predict the average IQs of children of parents with different combinations

01:09:35.020 | of education.

01:09:36.440 | And we can also predict where the next generation of the smartest children is going to come

01:09:40.040 | from.

01:09:41.240 | On average, children are neither as smart nor as dumb as their parents.

01:09:45.440 | They are closer to the middle.

01:09:47.220 | This tendency is called regression to the mean.

01:09:49.800 | It exists independently of genes.

01:09:52.660 | Regression to the mean is a function of the empirically observed statistical relationships

01:09:56.440 | between the tested IQs of parents and children.

01:09:59.840 | Given the parameters in a previous note, the expected value of the IQ of a grown-up offspring

01:10:03.920 | is 40% toward the population mean from the parent's midpoint IQ.

01:10:09.160 | Suppose we have four white couples with the same level of education.

01:10:12.320 | Plugging in the average IQs for those levels of education as given in a previous table,

01:10:17.360 | I add a fifth couple who both have degrees from elite colleges with a midpoint IQ of

01:10:21.520 | 135.

01:10:23.120 | Here is what we can expect as mean IQs of the children of these couples.

01:10:27.200 | So we have the parents' educations and the expected IQ of the child.

01:10:31.320 | If the parents' educational level is that they are two high school dropouts, the expected

01:10:35.760 | IQ of the child is 94.

01:10:38.820 | If parents' education is two high school diplomas, the expected IQ of the child is 101.

01:10:44.960 | If parents have two college degrees and no more, the expected IQ of the child is 109.

01:10:50.680 | If the parents' education is two graduate degrees, the expected IQ of the child is 116.

01:10:56.040 | And then if the parents' education is two degrees from an elite college, the expected

01:11:02.640 | IQ of the child is 121.

01:11:06.860 | These represent important differences in the resources that members of the next generation

01:11:10.600 | take to the preservation of their legacy.

01:11:13.520 | Consider first a college graduate who marries a high school graduate, each with the average

01:11:17.160 | cognitive ability for their educational level, 113 and 99 respectively.

01:11:22.160 | Their expected midpoint IQ is 106.

01:11:25.400 | Suppose they built a small business, been highly successful, and leave five million

01:11:28.460 | dollars to their son.

01:11:30.140 | If their son has the expected IQ of a little less than 105, he will have only about a 50%

01:11:35.800 | chance of completing college, even assuming that he tries to go to college.

01:11:39.800 | Maybe he inherited extraordinary energy and determination from his parents, which would

01:11:43.320 | help, but those qualities regress to the mean as well.

01:11:46.880 | Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generation is a likely scenario for the progeny of that

01:11:50.800 | successful example.

01:11:52.840 | Compare that situation with the one facing the son of two parents who both graduated

01:11:56.520 | from elite schools.

01:11:58.180 | If he has exactly the expected IQ of 121, he has more than an 80% chance of getting

01:12:03.800 | a degree if he goes to college.

01:12:05.860 | These percentages are not a matter of statistical theory.

01:12:08.520 | They are based on the empirical experience of both the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National

01:12:14.280 | Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

01:12:16.480 | If you had an IQ of 105 or one of 121 and entered college, those are the probabilities

01:12:21.700 | that you ever got a degree.

01:12:24.060 | In addition to those differing chances of graduation are qualitative differences between

01:12:28.400 | young people with IQs of 105 and 121.

01:12:32.560 | First the reasons that someone with an IQ of 105 doesn't finish college probably include

01:12:37.560 | serious academic difficulties with the work, whereas the reasons a person with an IQ of

01:12:42.240 | 121 doesn't finish college almost certainly involve motivation or self-discipline.

01:12:47.920 | No one with an IQ of 121 has to drop out of college because he can't pass the courses.

01:12:53.360 | Second there is a qualitative difference in the range of occupations open to those two

01:12:57.800 | young persons.

01:12:59.320 | The one with an accurately measured IQ of 105 cannot expect to be successful in any

01:13:04.560 | of the prestigious professions that are screened for IQ by their educational requirements,

01:13:09.280 | for example medicine, law, engineering, and academia.

01:13:12.560 | It is unlikely that he can even complete those educational requirements.

01:13:16.400 | Someone with an accurately measured IQ of 121 can succeed in any of them if his mathematical

01:13:22.040 | and verbal talents are both strong or succeed in the ones geared to his talents if there

01:13:26.260 | is an imbalance between mathematical and verbal ability.

01:13:29.840 | Now think in terms of an entire cohort of children.

01:13:34.040 | Where will the next generation of children with exceptional cognitive ability come from?

01:13:38.240 | For purposes of illustration let's say that exceptionally high cognitive ability means

01:13:42.840 | the top five centiles of the next generation of white children.

01:13:46.700 | More than a quarter of their parents may be expected to have a midpoint IQ of more than

01:13:50.360 | 125.

01:13:52.120 | Another quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 117 to 125.

01:13:57.280 | The third quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 108 to 117.

01:14:02.760 | That leaves one quarter who will be the children of parents with midpoint parental IQ of less

01:14:06.640 | than 108.

01:14:08.400 | Only about 14% of that top five centiles of children are expected to come from the entire

01:14:13.640 | bottom half of the distribution of white parents.

01:14:17.520 | Therein lies the explanation for that startling statistic I reported earlier about SAT scores.

01:14:23.480 | In 2010 87% of the students with 700 plus scores in critical reading or mathematics

01:14:29.860 | had a parent with a college degree and 57% had a parent with a graduate degree.

01:14:35.400 | Those percentages could have been predicted pretty closely just by knowing the facts about

01:14:39.040 | the IQs associated with different educational levels and the correlation between parental

01:14:43.800 | and child IQ.

01:14:45.360 | They could have been predicted without making any theoretical assumptions about the roles

01:14:48.780 | of nature and nurture in transmitting cognitive ability and without knowing anything about

01:14:53.560 | the family incomes of those SAT test takers, how many test preparation courses their children

01:14:58.280 | took, whether they went to private schools or how ingenious the educational toys in the

01:15:02.520 | household were when they were toddlers.

01:15:05.200 | In an age when the majority of parents in the top five centiles of cognitive ability

01:15:09.120 | worked as farmers, shopkeepers, blue-collar workers, and housewives, a situation that

01:15:14.840 | necessarily prevailed a century ago given the occupational and educational distributions

01:15:19.160 | during the early 1900s, these relationships between the cognitive ability of parents and

01:15:24.120 | children had no ominous implications.

01:15:26.640 | Today, when the exceptionally qualified have been so efficiently drawn into the ranks of

01:15:30.960 | the upper middle class and where they are so often married to people with the same ability

01:15:35.000 | and background, they do.

01:15:37.040 | In fact, the implications are even more ominous than I just described because none of the

01:15:40.840 | numbers I used to illustrate the transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation

01:15:45.600 | incorporated the effects of the increased educational homogamy of recent decades.

01:15:49.760 | In any case, the bottom line is not subject to refutation.

01:15:54.000 | Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will

01:15:58.160 | come from parents in the upper middle class and more specifically from parents who are

01:16:02.200 | already part of the broad elite.

01:16:05.880 | I want you to understand that intelligence is inherited and so you want to marry the

01:16:12.600 | most intelligent person that you can because you want your children to be smart, because

01:16:18.160 | intelligence makes everything easier in life, and so you want to marry the most intelligent

01:16:27.840 | person that you're able to.

01:16:29.600 | If you want your wealth to continue through the generations and you want to break that

01:16:33.920 | shirt-sleeves-to-shirt-sleeves problem, you clearly see that you need to account for intelligence.

01:16:39.280 | You want to marry the kind of person who is intelligent as best you're able to attract.

01:16:48.120 | Here's my message loud and clear.

01:16:49.760 | Let me pause for just a moment so you'll listen.

01:16:54.400 | Your future wife, who is intelligent, is almost certainly going to be enrolled in college.

01:17:06.200 | Right now, we have an enormous social problem brewing.

01:17:09.720 | It's already here.

01:17:11.720 | The big – there's many problems.

01:17:14.360 | I don't know how to solve – by the way, I don't know how to solve the social issues

01:17:17.400 | just described in what I have read.

01:17:19.400 | All I know is that for you as an individual, if you want to be wealthy, you want to marry

01:17:24.040 | a wealthy – excuse me.

01:17:25.480 | If you want to be wealthy, you want to marry an intelligent spouse and you want your children

01:17:29.320 | to be intelligent.

01:17:30.320 | So I don't know how to solve the social mixing problem.

01:17:32.640 | We'll figure out some solutions to it.

01:17:34.240 | I don't have any today.

01:17:35.360 | What I know is that you need to marry somebody who is smart.

01:17:38.800 | But men, right now, girls and women are going to college at a rate that is – I think it's

01:17:46.080 | like two-thirds female and one-third male.

01:17:51.400 | There is a strong movement of men to go away from college.

01:17:57.880 | Some of these reasons are valid.

01:18:01.120 | Some of these reasons are less valid.

01:18:04.080 | College probably has been broadly oversold to many people.

01:18:10.440 | The financial impact of college has resulted in more people going to college than should

01:18:14.520 | go to college.

01:18:17.680 | I don't know how to solve all these issues.

01:18:20.600 | But men and young women – this is a problem – sorry, it's both.

01:18:25.280 | Men and women are facing enormous problems.

01:18:27.280 | A lot of men right now are bitter about how many women have been funneled into the college

01:18:34.720 | pipeline.

01:18:36.160 | Women are handed constant and never-ending encouragement in our society that men never

01:18:42.520 | receive.

01:18:43.800 | And the underperformance of men in the current age is something that we've got to take seriously

01:18:48.280 | if we're going to save our civilization.

01:18:51.840 | Women receive constant affirmation and men receive almost constant confrontation.

01:18:59.440 | The school environment, starting in elementary school, is mostly toxic to men.

01:19:07.160 | It's very highly favored in favor of women.

01:19:11.360 | Everything in our society is structured around "you go, girl, you go, girl," and almost

01:19:16.680 | all of it is anti-male.

01:19:19.400 | As the father of four sons, I pay a lot of attention to this.

01:19:23.880 | I don't know how to solve all of those things, and I don't want to necessarily go down the

01:19:28.480 | rabbit trail of trying to figure out today what's right and what's wrong.

01:19:32.920 | Maybe everything was wrong with our previous civilization.

01:19:37.400 | Maybe our previous civilization was just cruel to women and froze them out of everything

01:19:43.400 | and imposed enormous ceilings on them, maybe.

01:19:47.040 | But in the wake of feminism, we've become very anti-male, and our boys are failing to

01:19:53.400 | thrive.

01:19:54.640 | One expression of that is that many of them are not going to college.

01:19:59.160 | And so maybe it was a bad thing that 100% of previous college attendees were men, and

01:20:05.600 | then it was 80%.

01:20:07.120 | Maybe that was a bad thing and it had to be corrected.

01:20:09.640 | But what we currently see in the current data is that 50% isn't working.

01:20:14.200 | So now it's gone lopsided in the other direction.

01:20:16.880 | And what is happening as a result of this?

01:20:19.360 | Well, women are generally desiring to have a relationship with men who are their equal

01:20:25.440 | or superior.

01:20:26.980 | Women tend to be more hypergamous than men are.

01:20:29.640 | They want to marry a man who is in a better station in life than they are, someone who's

01:20:34.360 | more successful, more sophisticated, more intelligent, more accomplished, whereas men

01:20:39.240 | don't have the same preference.

01:20:41.280 | Men want to marry a woman who makes them feel good, who gives them peace in their life,

01:20:45.120 | who compliments them, gives skills and things like that.

01:20:47.640 | Men don't go around wanting to marry women who are their superiors and who are better

01:20:51.620 | than them in some metric.

01:20:53.120 | It causes men to be frustrated and feel frustrated with their lives.

01:20:57.840 | So what is happening, though, is that so many women now are not able to find what they perceive

01:21:03.920 | to be high-quality marriage candidates.

01:21:06.080 | And so they're all competing desperately for this tiny cohort of college-age men.

01:21:11.420 | Most of them are having polygynous relationships with men, whether they know it or not.

01:21:17.040 | If you look at the data, it's clearly polygynous relationships, and in many cases they know

01:21:21.320 | it.

01:21:22.320 | And the extent of this is that they're not marrying, and so then those men that are in

01:21:28.200 | college are often—I don't want to go beyond what I can prove from the data, so I'll just

01:21:35.680 | pause and rather than say any more, it's a real problem.

01:21:39.440 | So for men, just recognize, though, that in this basically birth-to-college pipeline that

01:21:44.900 | most girls grow up in, if you are going to marry an intelligent woman, it's almost unthinkable

01:21:51.740 | to see why she wouldn't have a college degree or be enrolled in college.

01:21:56.880 | Our culture is pushing, pushing, pushing girls and young women to college at enormous rates.

01:22:03.280 | It supports them left, right, and center.

01:22:06.160 | It encourages them that you have to do this.

01:22:08.600 | You have to do this.

01:22:09.600 | It pours money into them, pours all kinds of special advantageous programs for them.

01:22:14.880 | And so as a man, there's a decent chance that if you're a young man, you're pretty annoyed

01:22:19.340 | about that, because you didn't get any of that.

01:22:23.000 | Nobody pushed you in that direction.

01:22:24.640 | You didn't get any of the money.

01:22:25.720 | You didn't get any of the support.

01:22:26.840 | You didn't get any of the extra tutoring, whatever.

01:22:29.480 | Suck it up.

01:22:30.480 | Life's not fair.

01:22:31.480 | The point is that if you're going to marry an intelligent woman, she's almost certainly

01:22:35.520 | going to be in college.

01:22:37.160 | In order for her not to be in college or not to have a college degree of some kind, she

01:22:41.400 | would have to be incredibly iconoclastic, incredibly anti-trend, et cetera.

01:22:48.520 | And that's just not a normal female trait.

01:22:52.560 | It's believable to think that a very highly educated, highly qualified, intelligent woman

01:22:59.760 | could find a man who just was so smart that he saw the stupidity of the college sorting

01:23:05.520 | mechanism.

01:23:06.520 | And he went out and he started – he's a high school dropout, but he started five businesses

01:23:10.640 | and he's got $10 million in net worth by the time he's 21 years old.

01:23:15.040 | And she could pick him, target him, attract him, seduce him, marry him, boom.

01:23:19.280 | That's entirely believable.

01:23:21.720 | Because we know that happens significantly.

01:23:24.160 | There are a lot of men who do that.

01:23:25.400 | Men are much more likely to be that kind of anti-authoritarian kind of guy.

01:23:33.620 | It doesn't work the other way.

01:23:35.160 | And so if you're a man and you're looking for a wife, almost certainly the best place

01:23:40.120 | to be looking is on a college campus.

01:23:43.060 | If you are remotely close in age to the kinds of women that you would find on a college

01:23:47.680 | campus.

01:23:49.120 | And I find this discussion incredibly funny and ironic.

01:23:53.760 | I believe that what I've described, though I have used more words than I would like,

01:23:58.160 | is absolutely logically true.

01:24:01.480 | But I find it ironic because years ago, not only would I have made fun of – when I was

01:24:06.360 | in college, I would have made fun of the idea that a useful reason to go to college is to

01:24:10.520 | find a wife or a husband.

01:24:13.200 | We all made fun of it because it was the MRS degree.

01:24:15.400 | And so men made fun of women for going to college to meet a husband.

01:24:20.360 | I never make fun of anyone today who has a strategy to land a husband or a wife.

01:24:25.080 | I never make fun of them because I've seen how those girls who have a strategy to land

01:24:29.520 | a husband, they get married and I wish them all the best.

01:24:32.600 | I don't make fun of anybody today for having a strategy to attract a high-quality spouse.

01:24:38.720 | What I find ironic and funny is that I now think that the tables have turned, that the

01:24:45.560 | women who go to college are going to have a hard time finding a husband in many cases,

01:24:51.280 | and that now going to college is going to be a reliable – a good reason for going

01:24:58.920 | to college is to find a great wife, and that going to college is going to be a more reliable

01:25:06.020 | way for a motivated young man who wants a wife to find and attract – to find, filter

01:25:12.040 | and attract her than many other types of strategies.

01:25:18.720 | And so I've counseled this repeatedly to young men who are of college age.

01:25:22.280 | If you are intelligent, for most intelligent people, academics are pretty easy.

01:25:27.260 | The only reason academics are not easy is because you get tired of them.

01:25:30.560 | So take a break or two, but if you're 25 years old and you've got a bachelor's degree,

01:25:35.560 | go get a master's degree because you're going to find it easier to be in contact with

01:25:40.280 | a lot of young women who are good candidates for marriage because that's where they're

01:25:48.880 | all been sorted into.

01:25:50.680 | And it's a perfectly reasonable, valid strategy that people don't appreciate to the degree

01:25:56.660 | that they ought to appreciate.

01:25:59.120 | Now for young women who are in college, I would say that I think there's probably still

01:26:04.040 | a competitive strategy that if you're trying to attract a man that you meet in college,

01:26:08.760 | I think that there are competitive strategies that you could employ to express femininity

01:26:17.880 | that would help you to attract a man, especially a man who is likely to be a good husband.

01:26:23.240 | One of the ironic things about the feminist revolution is that what today we refer to

01:26:28.520 | as feminism I think could equally be called masculinism.

01:26:32.500 | What I mean is simply that almost every trait that you'll hear a feminist talking about,

01:26:38.160 | about wanting to encourage in young girls and women, is actually a trait that men traditionally

01:26:45.080 | have.

01:26:46.080 | And it's not that feminists want to be more feminine and express their woman-ness to a

01:26:51.960 | stronger degree.

01:26:53.560 | On the contrary, feminists want to be less feminine and express their inner masculinity

01:26:59.140 | to a stronger degree.

01:27:00.820 | And so most feminist women tend to wind up looking and sounding a lot like men than like

01:27:08.720 | women.

01:27:09.720 | I think a good strategy for young women who are fighting, finding themselves in environments

01:27:15.600 | where they're fighting for a small pool of men to employ, is reject feminism and lean

01:27:21.220 | into femininity.

01:27:23.160 | So reject trying to be like a man and instead embrace being truly feminine.

01:27:29.120 | And I think that this kind of expression of femininity is your magic formula to attract

01:27:37.700 | a very high quality man.

01:27:40.200 | Because you will wind up creating for him the kind of environment that he is likely

01:27:44.940 | to really resonate with, regardless of whether he can explain it or not.

01:27:50.420 | And this doesn't in any degree mean that you have to sacrifice your intellectual ability,

01:27:57.320 | your academic ability, those kinds of things.

01:28:01.000 | Those things are important.

01:28:02.660 | And a smart man wants to marry a smart woman.

01:28:06.300 | But putting it crudely to make the point so that it will stick in your mind, imagine that

01:28:12.020 | you are a 20-year-old young lady and you're in college and you want to attract a really

01:28:22.100 | high quality husband.

01:28:23.980 | Let's assume that your plan is to become a medical doctor or to get a PhD in neuroscience.

01:28:30.500 | And what I'm trying to demonstrate is that you're a woman of ambition.

01:28:33.600 | You're a woman of ability and you have high ambitions for your intellect, for your career,

01:28:42.820 | things like that.

01:28:44.920 | If you dye your hair blue, if you chop all your hair off, dye your hair blue and go parading

01:28:50.080 | around in the streets at the next political march holding a cardboard sign, the chances

01:28:56.580 | of your being single five years from now are very, very high.

01:29:01.100 | On the other hand, if you grow your hair long, put on a cute sundress and learn how to cook

01:29:06.780 | amazing food, the chances of your being married to a doctor five years from now are very,

01:29:12.580 | very high.

01:29:14.540 | There is no difference whatsoever in your fundamental academic ability, career ambition,

01:29:22.340 | intelligence.

01:29:23.400 | There's no difference as to how serious a man will take you and respect you.

01:29:28.980 | A high quality husband is likely to appreciate and respect your intelligence.

01:29:34.100 | He's looking for those things.

01:29:36.020 | But there is an enormous difference in your attractiveness based upon how you express

01:29:41.480 | your femininity.

01:29:43.180 | So please, if you care about this stuff, don't be a feminist.

01:29:47.940 | Be feminine.

01:29:49.460 | And men are not looking for weak, stupid women who just happen to be hot.

01:29:58.820 | Men are looking for strong – the kind of man that you want to be married to are looking

01:30:03.360 | for strong, confident, intelligent women who are women.

01:30:11.180 | I hope that helps someone who's younger.

01:30:14.660 | Consider that college is an important strategy.

01:30:18.400 | So so far, genetic traits that we have to look for, I've talked about good health

01:30:21.220 | and longevity.

01:30:22.220 | I've talked about intelligence.

01:30:23.220 | I'm going to move a little faster because these other ones are important but they're

01:30:27.400 | more obvious and they're less easily measured.

01:30:29.460 | We don't necessarily have as much data.

01:30:32.300 | The next trait I think you want to look for that is probably genetic is the trait of resilience

01:30:37.440 | or what today we would probably call grit.

01:30:40.880 | Grit is a characteristic that we resonate with.

01:30:44.860 | We know it's important.

01:30:47.020 | And it's a characteristic that's increasingly being measured in the social science.

01:30:51.780 | It seems to be at least somewhat genetic.

01:30:56.960 | Marrying someone who is resilient and expresses strong stick-to-itiveness or strong grit means

01:31:06.300 | that you would be married to somebody who is able to overcome the challenges that life

01:31:10.860 | is going to throw at you.

01:31:13.180 | All of us face enormous setbacks and our ability to persevere through tough times is usually

01:31:21.220 | the key that leads to long-term success.

01:31:24.240 | If you study millionaires, what you see is that it's very common for millionaires to

01:31:27.500 | go bankrupt at least a couple of times on their pathway to success.

01:31:31.980 | It's very common for people to be laid off from work.

01:31:34.240 | Very common for people to lose their businesses, to lose their livelihoods.

01:31:38.960 | Many successful people face these things.

01:31:41.240 | The difference between somebody though who becomes a millionaire or a multi-millionaire

01:31:45.600 | has much more to do with his ability to dust off the failure and get up and keep going.

01:31:50.600 | A guy who goes bankrupt and rolls over and sits in the corner and sucks his thumb or

01:31:56.000 | says I'm depressed, I can't go on with my life just because I'm so depressed and sits

01:31:59.680 | around and whines about his condition in life is not likely to be wealthy.

01:32:03.880 | But the guy who dusts himself off says that sucked, I don't want to do that again and

01:32:07.400 | goes after it again is the guy who's likely to be wealthy.

01:32:10.500 | What you see as you get older is you see that so much of long-term success in anything,

01:32:14.680 | in learning, in academics, in business success, in marriage, in everything in life has more

01:32:21.420 | to do with your ability to get knocked down and get up and try again than it does to do

01:32:25.880 | with the actual impact of getting knocked down or what it says about you.

01:32:30.240 | Everyone gets knocked down.

01:32:31.680 | And so grit seems to be from what I can figure out to be at least somewhat genetic.

01:32:36.440 | I read one paper and let me just read you the initial abstract from it just so you get

01:32:41.320 | an idea that there's some people that are trying to understand this and find academic

01:32:49.040 | evidence for the heritability or non-heritability of a trait like grit.

01:32:58.360 | I'm reading here from a British publication.

01:33:01.480 | The paper is called "True Grit and Genetics, Predicting Academic Achievement from Personality"

01:33:07.400 | by four authors, Rimfield, Kovas, Dale and Plumman.

01:33:11.640 | Here's the abstract.

01:33:12.640 | "Grit, perseverance and passion for long-term goals has been shown to be a significant predictor

01:33:18.160 | of academic success, even after controlling for other personality factors.

01:33:23.200 | Here for the first time, we use a UK representative sample and a genetically sensitive design

01:33:28.760 | to unpack the etiology of grit and its prediction of academic achievement in comparison to well-established

01:33:34.080 | personality traits.

01:33:35.760 | For 4,642 16-year-olds, 2,321 twin pairs, we use the GRIT-S scale, perseverance of effort

01:33:44.560 | and consistency of interest, along with the big five personality traits to predict scores

01:33:49.480 | on the General Certificate of Secondary Education, GCSE exams, which are administered UK-wide

01:33:54.760 | at the end of compulsory education.

01:33:57.320 | Twin analyses of grit perseverance yielded a heritability estimate of 37%, 20% for consistency

01:34:04.760 | of interest and no evidence for shared environmental influence."

01:34:09.000 | I repeat, "Heritability estimate of 37% and no evidence for shared environmental influence.

01:34:15.240 | Personality, primarily conscientiousness, predicts about 6% of the variance in GCSE

01:34:20.920 | scores, but grit adds little to this prediction.

01:34:24.040 | Moreover, multivariate twin analyses showed that roughly two-thirds of the GCSE prediction

01:34:29.680 | is mediated genetically.

01:34:31.800 | Grit perseverance of effort and big five conscientiousness are to a large extent the same trait, both

01:34:36.960 | phenotypically, R equals 0.53, and genetically, genetic correlation equals 0.86.

01:34:42.640 | We conclude that the etiology of grit is highly similar to other personality traits, not only

01:34:47.680 | in showing substantial genetic influence, but also in showing no influence of shared

01:34:52.240 | environmental factors.

01:34:54.500 | Personality significantly predicts academic achievement, but grit adds little, phenotypically

01:34:58.480 | or genetically, to the prediction of academic achievement beyond traditional personality

01:35:03.000 | factors, especially conscientiousness."

01:35:05.860 | So you see that basically there is -- grit seems to be at least somewhat heritable.

01:35:12.320 | So I think that, more importantly, this is something that we know makes a difference.

01:35:16.680 | So you're going to marry.

01:35:17.680 | You're going to, again, use my example, you're going to marry a man who flunks out of school.

01:35:24.020 | Do you want that man to get up and keep going or do you want him to curl up in the corner

01:35:27.160 | and suck his thumb?

01:35:29.700 | And if you're a man, think of what your wife wants.

01:35:32.520 | Let's say that you're a man and you're marrying a woman and she gets a demotion at work.

01:35:37.520 | Do you want her to curl up and whine and cry into her bottle of wine about how hard life

01:35:42.220 | is and how it's so entirely unfair or do you want her to say, "All right, well, I'll have

01:35:46.160 | to work harder next time"?

01:35:48.200 | Lack of grit is just flat-out annoying, if nothing else.

01:35:51.280 | You don't want to live with somebody who does this.

01:35:54.080 | And remember that you're going to be facing the challenge of supporting this person emotionally.

01:36:00.480 | And so one of the most valuable aspects that we get from marriage is emotional support.

01:36:05.720 | If I face a difficulty in my life, I want to be able to go home and cry on my wife's

01:36:12.700 | shoulder and for her to let me cry for a few minutes and then the next day say, "All right,

01:36:18.700 | get out there.

01:36:19.700 | I believe in you."

01:36:21.140 | And yet she can only do that so many times.

01:36:23.660 | It's fine for me to go and have a good cry one time, but if I turn into a blubbering

01:36:28.660 | mess and I do that a second time and a third time and a fifth time, it's going to be tough

01:36:32.500 | for her to continue that.

01:36:34.140 | Similarly, as a husband, if my wife faces difficulties, I'm going to be there for her.

01:36:38.540 | I'm going to be there to support her.

01:36:40.100 | I'm going to be there to build her up and hold her while she cries and say, "It's okay,

01:36:44.660 | girl.

01:36:45.660 | Let it go."

01:36:46.660 | And on the second day, all right, I'm going to do it.

01:36:48.500 | But on the third day, come on, suck it up.

01:36:50.900 | Life is tough.

01:36:51.900 | And so that's going to be super, super annoying if you're an achiever.

01:36:56.460 | And so this expression of grit, I think, gets at what we're looking for, is that we want

01:37:03.380 | to be married to somebody who's not going to just drag us down all the time into an

01:37:07.420 | emotional morass.

01:37:09.180 | And once you're married, now you've got to figure out how to build this person up.

01:37:11.860 | And marrying somebody who's emotionally handicapped and can't deal with setbacks in life is no

01:37:16.180 | formula for a happy life.

01:37:18.320 | So on what basis would you judge the grit that somebody is displaying in his or her

01:37:23.420 | life?

01:37:24.420 | I don't have as useful or as convenient of a proxy as I do for the previous one.

01:37:31.380 | So for health, we can use beauty and attractiveness and athletic ability as pretty decent markers

01:37:37.860 | for health, especially if you bring in family history and longevity of parents and grandparents

01:37:42.300 | as well.

01:37:43.580 | For intelligence, we can use academic ability and grades in academia as a pretty decent

01:37:50.260 | proxy for intelligence.

01:37:52.260 | How do you judge grit?

01:37:54.220 | I don't have a decent of a proxy.

01:37:56.300 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read to you a list of basically characteristics

01:38:01.420 | that are associated with grit.

01:38:03.460 | And I think these are things that you want to look for.

01:38:05.580 | So first, persistence in the face of challenges.

01:38:09.140 | You want to ask yourself, does this person that I'm interested in marrying demonstrate,

01:38:13.260 | has he or she demonstrated persistence in the face of challenges?

01:38:19.100 | Does this person demonstrate consistency and commitment, perseverance in pursuit of passion,

01:38:26.060 | resilience in adversity, the ability to delay gratification, effortful engagement, goal

01:38:34.260 | clarity and direction, seeking and embracing challenges, adaptability and learning from

01:38:40.860 | failure, and then long-term drive towards achievement and success.

01:38:45.300 | All of these are components of grit.

01:38:47.860 | So look for activities in which your potential spouse has faced disaster and failure and

01:38:57.300 | been overwhelmed and overcome, and then try to figure out what happened next.

01:39:02.460 | If those things aren't there, then I would say try to negotiate some kind of circumstance

01:39:10.420 | in which you could test for grit in some way.

01:39:13.900 | I'll get to that in a moment when I talk about testing for basically social intelligence

01:39:18.820 | and emotional stability that we want to just consider, does this person demonstrate grit?

01:39:25.020 | Next, drive and ambition.

01:39:26.980 | I think you want to seek a partner who demonstrates drive and ambition because there does seem

01:39:34.620 | to be a genetic component to drive and ambition, and they put our finger on something that

01:39:41.140 | just drives somebody.

01:39:42.340 | Now I don't know whether it's all genetic on a physical basis or whether it's more of

01:39:47.180 | what I'm going to get to in a moment of long-term environmental influence, but if you're married

01:39:52.380 | to a motivated spouse, then your marriage is more likely to have more opportunities

01:39:57.840 | for wealth creation and financial growth.

01:40:01.900 | Generally women seem to be much more attuned to this than men because I think women naturally

01:40:07.700 | sense their vulnerability if they marry a man who is of low ambition.

01:40:13.300 | A woman, a high-quality, motivated, ambitious woman will, I can't even conceive of a woman

01:40:20.620 | like that being married to a man of low ambition.

01:40:23.580 | Low ambition is an enormous turnoff for women, and again I think this is right, I think it

01:40:28.780 | should be.

01:40:29.780 | What I always notice is, especially with regard to bearing children, I notice how vulnerable

01:40:36.420 | what my wife is when she has children.

01:40:40.100 | It puts her in an enormous vulnerable place that if she couldn't trust me and know that

01:40:46.460 | I'm going to keep pressing forward, then it would be very difficult for her.

01:40:49.500 | It would bring an enormous emotional instability to her.

01:40:52.700 | So how do you filter for that?

01:40:54.060 | Well if she's going to marry one young, she's not going to filter for a man who is rich,

01:40:59.020 | doesn't have time to be rich, or earns a lot of money even, doesn't have time to earn a

01:41:03.860 | lot of money, just getting started in his career.

01:41:05.940 | So the filter is drive and ambition.

01:41:08.660 | Now men I don't think filter so much for this, but I think we should.

01:41:14.140 | Here's the problem with the filter, is that when I say drive and ambition, we're so indoctrinated

01:41:19.060 | into automatically thinking of that in a career perspective, that it causes us to ignore other

01:41:25.260 | expressions of drive and ambition.

01:41:27.700 | I'm not necessarily interested, as a primary thing, of marrying a woman who has huge career

01:41:34.660 | drive and ambition.

01:41:36.540 | I don't think that's a disqualifying factor, although in some cases it would be.

01:41:41.860 | If a man wants to have children, and if his wife is so driven to make a difference in

01:41:46.460 | a career that's going to require her to be a non-stop partner at her law firm, and she's

01:41:51.940 | just never ever going to be willing to have children because of the cost of her career,

01:41:55.940 | then that is a disqualifying factor for a man who wants to have children.

01:42:00.020 | Remember again, I said marriage as compared to having children.

01:42:02.780 | Two components that are related, but not synonymous.

01:42:06.100 | So I don't think that career ambition is necessarily a disqualifying factor, except in its extreme

01:42:13.420 | form.

01:42:14.420 | But what I observe is that I think career ambition can often, is a useful proxy, but

01:42:21.020 | it's not a complete proxy.

01:42:23.500 | I've known many women who had no specific career ambition of, "I really want to, again,

01:42:32.220 | get a PhD and get, I really wanted to win a Nobel Prize in physics," who had enormous

01:42:38.260 | drive and ambition on the domestic front.

01:42:41.420 | They really wanted to build a family and change the world with their family.

01:42:45.900 | Or on a cultural front, "We really need to change this community.

01:42:51.060 | We really need to adjust this political issue."

01:42:54.380 | And as I talked about on a recent Q&A with a young lady who was thinking about the pros

01:42:59.300 | and cons of becoming a mother and staying a stay-at-home mother versus otherwise, what

01:43:03.500 | I observe is that in our entirely career-focused, income-generating-focused society, as we've

01:43:10.940 | pushed all drive and ambition in that direction and said that it all has to be financially

01:43:17.420 | related, we've eliminated a lot of drive and ambition from a lot of our communities.

01:43:23.580 | And our parks are disgusting, and our roads are destroying the vitality of town life.

01:43:29.660 | And because we've centered everyone of drive and ambition into a focus of earning lots

01:43:37.740 | of money.

01:43:38.980 | This does apply equally to men and to women.

01:43:40.900 | I think that in many cases, a woman will be attracted to a man who has great drive and

01:43:45.100 | ambition, but his goal is not to make money.

01:43:49.020 | His goal is to make a difference.

01:43:50.860 | His goal is to change his community.

01:43:52.700 | His goal is to save the lost.

01:43:54.220 | His goal is to green the desert.

01:43:57.080 | And so drive and ambition are important components, and they will be correlated with financial

01:44:02.320 | pursuit, but not synonymous for it.

01:44:05.180 | Now, I think a good proxy for filtering for drive and ambition, since we can't predict

01:44:10.020 | all of the expressions of it, I think is growth mindset.

01:44:13.900 | So this is a term that we increasingly hear about.

01:44:15.700 | Carol Dweck, of course, famously pioneered it.

01:44:18.360 | What I think growth mindset is a core component of what I would look for, what I look for

01:44:23.480 | in a healthy marriage, and what I think most people should, is that, is this person committed

01:44:30.060 | to learning and growing and changing at every stage?

01:44:33.820 | People who don't have a growth mindset, I think, are going to just be bad spouses, because

01:44:38.440 | they're not likely to put away the things that they had before and embrace something

01:44:43.080 | new.

01:44:44.120 | And the whole growth of being married and having children is that you're going to have

01:44:48.080 | to grow and change, and there's going to be new skills required.

01:44:52.520 | I need to develop new skills as a husband, my wife needs to develop new skills as a wife,

01:44:56.560 | we need to develop new skills as father and mother, we need to develop new skills as grandfather

01:45:01.340 | and grandmother in the fullness of time, as uncle and aunt, as community members.

01:45:05.880 | And so what you're looking for is growth mindset.

01:45:07.960 | So I don't have a great way to do that, but I think that you should always be listening

01:45:12.840 | and filtering based upon, is the person that I'm attracted to demonstrating his or her

01:45:18.520 | ability to grow and to change, to set aside things that were perhaps useful before and

01:45:25.080 | commit himself to a growth mindset?

01:45:27.520 | Is he willing to say, you know what, I don't think what I used to believe, I'm willing

01:45:31.280 | to change my perspective, I'm willing to change my opinions, and I think this is a good expression

01:45:36.860 | of drive and ambition.

01:45:38.440 | And we should filter drive and ambition not exclusively based upon earning ability, but

01:45:44.800 | broadly bring it in as a basic human component and see its expression in other ways.

01:45:51.800 | I really appreciate that my wife has demonstrated growth mindset and has demonstrated drive

01:45:58.120 | and ambition towards my children.

01:46:00.440 | That makes me much, much more satisfied with her as a good wife than if she hadn't done

01:46:06.400 | that over the last 10 years.

01:46:08.200 | I believe that if she were asked, she would say the same thing about me, is that I've

01:46:11.500 | grown in my ambition towards my children over the years.

01:46:17.960 | So my drive and ambition is not exclusively represented in a money-earning aspect, but

01:46:24.160 | it's a core part of what I see as my overall growth mindset.

01:46:29.200 | The next characteristic is social intelligence.

01:46:33.400 | Here what I think we really want to filter for is sociopaths and people who just clearly,

01:46:41.440 | genetically or whatever, who are not capable.

01:46:44.340 | If you can marry a spouse who has strong social intelligence and has strong representation

01:46:50.200 | of traits like empathy and has good communication skills and shows that he or she can build

01:46:56.240 | and maintain relationships, then I think you're on the fast track to success.

01:47:01.600 | Intelligently intelligent individuals are good at networking and negotiation and collaboration.

01:47:07.480 | These are all core components not only of a good marriage, but just to good business

01:47:12.800 | success, good financial success, to career advancement and business partnerships and

01:47:17.520 | finding wealth and investment opportunities.

01:47:21.600 | Social ability and social or emotional intelligence and social intelligence is core, and so we

01:47:28.360 | need to filter for that.

01:47:30.120 | Don't marry somebody, especially don't ever marry or be in a relationship with someone

01:47:33.440 | who's a psychopath or has the negative stuff, doesn't treat you well, doesn't respect you,

01:47:38.680 | doesn't appreciate you, doesn't express those things verbally and in action.

01:47:43.980 | Filter out all the negative stuff, but then filter for people who express these things

01:47:46.940 | on a high degree.

01:47:48.480 | So I think some proxies, again imperfect, but does this person I'm interested in, does

01:47:54.460 | he or she demonstrate care for others?

01:47:57.400 | Are social situations smooth and easily navigated?

01:48:00.820 | Does he or she respect other people and demonstrate that respect?

01:48:04.960 | When I was thinking about this in preparation for the show, I thought of some of the aphorisms

01:48:11.040 | that I think are true and worth paying attention to.

01:48:13.920 | So one I like is how you do anything is how you do everything.

01:48:16.960 | How you do anything is how you do everything.

01:48:18.560 | It's not literally true, but it's metaphorically true that generally people who are good at

01:48:23.760 | business are probably going to be devoted to their marriage in many cases and by devoted

01:48:28.360 | to their business meaning because devotion is a feature that applies broadly.

01:48:32.540 | Someone who's devoted to his marriage is probably going to be likely to be devoted to his health.

01:48:37.880 | How you do anything is how you do everything.

01:48:39.960 | But in a social dimension, things like this, well if she'll cheat with you, then she'll

01:48:44.320 | cheat on you.

01:48:46.680 | There's an aphorism there.

01:48:47.880 | I think it's true.

01:48:49.000 | People who cheat on their partner to be with you are probably likely to cheat on you to

01:48:52.920 | be with someone else that comes along who's better than you.

01:48:56.600 | I always like things that are especially related to our appreciation of social elite such as

01:49:03.440 | judging a successful man or woman by how he or she treats servants or people who are not

01:49:09.360 | in the social class that he comes from.

01:49:14.200 | I find that the way that people treat people who can't do anything for them is a pretty

01:49:19.080 | decent way to understand how they're going to treat you.

01:49:23.120 | There are people who only treat other people as something they can get and there are people

01:49:26.800 | who just genuinely treat everyone with respect and appreciation.

01:49:31.040 | And sometimes, you know, we all appreciate the stories about how the president of the

01:49:35.040 | country or the CEO of the business comes in and is always careful of the staff and of

01:49:41.280 | his servants and treats everyone with respect.

01:49:44.600 | So look at the person and don't be in a relationship with somebody who treats other people poorly.

01:49:52.680 | If a man will belittle other people to you, then he'll belittle you to other people.

01:49:59.200 | Or if a woman will belittle other people, then she will belittle you once she has you.

01:50:04.640 | Now marriage is not as enduring as it once was, but frequently there's – I think it

01:50:09.840 | used to be that there was more of a disparity between how people acted to land a husband

01:50:14.340 | or land a wife and how they acted after they landed the husband or wife.

01:50:18.320 | But the point remains that if someone's going to talk poorly about other people to

01:50:23.120 | you or gossip about other people to you, then be careful because he or she is likely to

01:50:31.000 | betray your trust and your intimacy to other people.

01:50:36.200 | One note, there is a difference between things that are gossip and things that are private.

01:50:41.760 | It's not always wrong to speak about something that is private in a trusted relationship.

01:50:51.000 | I may be having a marriage problem and I may go to a trusted friend or trusted advisor

01:50:56.280 | and in confidence share about this particular problem that I'm having and I may even expose

01:51:01.600 | intimate personal details, private details to this person.

01:51:06.040 | However, I don't go and ever gossip about and just kind of say, "Oh, let me just tell

01:51:11.200 | you all the bad things and bad mouth my wife."

01:51:13.760 | I would never do that.

01:51:14.760 | And so be careful because you're not going to generally know what other people are saying

01:51:20.900 | about you to other people, but you can judge how people speak, how he or she is likely

01:51:27.240 | to speak about you to other people based upon how he or she speaks about other people with

01:51:32.840 | you.

01:51:33.840 | In the intimacy of a close relationship, you will speak about private affairs.

01:51:39.360 | I may speak about someone else's private affairs with my wife in the confidence and intimacy

01:51:44.980 | of a close relationship, but I would never and must never gossip or be frivolous or insulting

01:51:53.240 | about other people.

01:51:54.880 | If I'm going to speak about someone else's private affairs, it should only be done because

01:51:59.160 | of care and love for another person and a desire to genuinely help or explore something

01:52:06.120 | with my intimate spouse.

01:52:09.480 | Similarly, if someone's going to bad mouth others, if he's going to bad mouth others

01:52:13.520 | to you, he'll bad mouth you to other people.

01:52:16.360 | These things are congruent.

01:52:18.820 | People of high social intelligence are congruent.

01:52:22.260 | They behave consistently among classes, among situations, in public, in a private, they're

01:52:29.920 | congruent.

01:52:30.920 | There may be exceptions.

01:52:31.920 | We all have moments of weakness, moments of frustration, anger, but there is going to

01:52:37.200 | be a high degree of congruence.

01:52:39.200 | So don't think that somehow this person who is socially stupid and toxic is going to just

01:52:45.320 | magically turn into a great spouse.

01:52:47.200 | Nope!

01:52:48.200 | He's not.

01:52:49.200 | She's not.

01:52:50.200 | And then related to having moments, emotional stability.

01:52:53.160 | I think that you want to seek a partner who has a strong predisposition, which I think

01:52:59.320 | there's probably some genetic component towards it, but a strong predisposition towards emotional

01:53:04.840 | stability and resilience.

01:53:08.080 | Emotional stability helps people to navigate stress and uncertainty and interpersonal conflicts

01:53:14.840 | and to do these things effectively.

01:53:16.080 | It builds good relationships and it reduces the likelihood of impulsive financial decisions

01:53:22.880 | driven by emotional turbulence.

01:53:26.600 | People who go out and do retail therapy, avoid like the plague someone who does that.

01:53:33.240 | Don't do that.

01:53:36.160 | Somebody who thinks that going out and spending money frivolously is a substitute for a healthy

01:53:41.620 | activity is not going to treat your finances well.

01:53:45.080 | You can apply a little bit of judgment.

01:53:46.480 | If she calls at retail therapy and goes shopping with her best friend for five hours and buys

01:53:51.320 | a $5 latte and a $20 item that was 50% discounted, okay great.

01:53:57.080 | But if she calls it retail therapy and goes out and comes back with stacks and stacks

01:54:01.800 | of designer brands, don't marry this woman.

01:54:06.240 | You're doomed if you do.

01:54:08.120 | You want to choose somebody who is emotionally stable.

01:54:10.680 | Now I don't have a great proxy for this.

01:54:13.120 | I've considered, I've been learning about the big five personality test and it was alluded

01:54:17.920 | to in the abstract that I read, but I don't know what the great proxy is for emotional

01:54:24.560 | stability.

01:54:25.560 | I'd have to wait until one of you psychologists listeners can tell me what it is.

01:54:30.080 | My only thought is that you should observe the person you're interested in through times

01:54:35.160 | of emotional extremes.

01:54:37.840 | Is this man or is this woman emotionally, generally emotionally stable?

01:54:43.440 | I think there are a couple of things that should be generally obvious that are necessary

01:54:49.760 | of a productive courtship relationship.

01:54:54.200 | Let me explain for just a moment.

01:54:56.560 | Traditionally in our Western tradition, and I'll bring the recent tradition into it, we've

01:55:01.760 | generally brought in a phased approach to relationships.

01:55:08.000 | What are the phases of relationships?

01:55:12.040 | Generally a relationship would go quickly from acquaintance or knowledge of one another

01:55:17.280 | or friendship to courtship.

01:55:20.320 | In the past 50 years we added a phase of relationship called dating.

01:55:25.720 | So in the world that I grew up in, which is different from today's world, in the world

01:55:30.440 | that I grew up in you would have an acquaintance or a friendship, then you would move from

01:55:35.760 | an acquaintance relationship or a friendship relationship to a dating relationship and

01:55:41.400 | then a dating relationship was generally considered to be some form of committed monogamous relationship

01:55:50.560 | that in the healthiest of cases had marriage as a potential outcome, a potential positive

01:55:57.320 | outcome, but there was not a commitment to marriage yet.

01:56:01.120 | It was boyfriend/girlfriend exploring the relationship, exploring one another, getting

01:56:05.480 | to know one another with an idea that this would lead to marriage in the fullness of

01:56:11.360 | time.

01:56:12.360 | Then you would go from a dating relationship to an engagement and usually of course dating

01:56:17.560 | would involve some more obvious expression of courtship, so you would have that engagement.

01:56:24.100 | Engagement was a time in which you were publicly committed to be married and in a time of public

01:56:27.840 | commitment to be married, then you were exploring compatibility, engaging in marital counseling,

01:56:35.640 | premarital counseling, exploring things and you were heading towards marriage.

01:56:39.840 | Then there was marriage and marriage was the final point, the final time.

01:56:43.400 | Now we're in it.

01:56:44.400 | We're in it for life, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, sickness and health,

01:56:48.680 | no matter what, we're in it till death do us part.

01:56:51.280 | That was the culture that I grew up in and before.

01:56:56.520 | Today most of those clear stages of relationship seem to have collapsed for most people who

01:57:08.120 | aren't coming from a strong subculture.

01:57:10.520 | By strong subculture I mean a strong religious community with clearly defined stages of relationship,

01:57:15.800 | a strong family community with clear expectations.

01:57:18.840 | Just speaking broadly in the general culture, it seems to me that young men and women who

01:57:24.360 | are interested in each other are navigating a morass of undefined relationships.

01:57:29.480 | You can be dating, but dating doesn't necessarily mean monogamy.

01:57:32.840 | You can be having sex with someone, but it's just a situationship.

01:57:36.240 | It's not a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.

01:57:38.600 | You can be – I mean basically about the only cultural rule that seems to be still

01:57:43.200 | somewhat valid is engagement, that okay, we're engaged.

01:57:46.520 | But then the problem with engagement is that engagement can last for a very long time and

01:57:54.000 | couples who aren't engaged are shacked up together for years and years and years and

01:57:57.680 | there may or may not lead to marriage.

01:57:59.040 | It's just enormously confusing.

01:58:01.440 | On the whole, this is enormously destructive.

01:58:03.960 | It's destructive for men, it's destructive for women, and it's causing young men and

01:58:07.200 | women to lose out on some of the best, most important years of their life to filter for

01:58:12.640 | a potential relationship.

01:58:15.600 | It's enormously, especially I think where it really happens is men are, generally speaking,

01:58:24.320 | harming young women by engaging in things that either are a relationship or could be

01:58:29.960 | called a relationship without a plan to move that relationship to marriage.

01:58:34.400 | There's a saying that I think is probably broadly true that women control access to

01:58:38.480 | sex and men control access to relationships.

01:58:42.540 | What has happened is in our current world, we have very high levels of sexual promiscuity

01:58:48.440 | and it seems to me that women have broadly lowered their demands, lowered the bar for

01:58:54.260 | access to sex.

01:58:55.840 | That seems that many young women have been trained or decided to give men free and easy

01:59:01.420 | access to sex with almost no strings attached.

01:59:05.440 | The quaint "put a ring on it" idea has broadly disappeared from much of popular culture.

01:59:15.580 | Men – I don't know whether they've lowered the bar on access to relationships but men

01:59:21.460 | have seemingly largely figured out that they can get whatever they want to get without

01:59:28.440 | ever having to provide a relationship.

01:59:30.940 | I consider this to be harmful.

01:59:33.060 | It's harmful to the men but it's very harmful for the women because women, in many cases,

01:59:38.580 | are giving their best, most fruitful, productive years to men who turn out to never actually

01:59:45.320 | have an ambition to a marriage and long-term relationship.

01:59:50.620 | So let's assume for the sake of argument that you see some problems with the current situation.

01:59:56.860 | There can be a great temptation to say, "Well, we're just getting rid of all of that.

01:59:59.820 | Let's just go to marriage as fast as possible.

02:00:01.900 | Let's just marry off our 18-year-olds and have 18-day engagements."

02:00:04.920 | No, that's also wrong.

02:00:08.140 | The flip side is not to be gone after.

02:00:11.140 | While you probably know, as I do, some people who met each other and just instantly fell

02:00:17.140 | in love, instantly knew they were forever and six weeks later they're married and their

02:00:20.420 | marriage has endured for 16 years.

02:00:22.260 | You probably know someone like that.

02:00:24.820 | Those people do not make the rule and we should not look to them as the rule.

02:00:32.020 | On the contrary, we need to think and say, "Why do we have stages of relationship?

02:00:37.500 | What are we looking for?"

02:00:38.820 | Well, things like emotional stability need to be sussed out.

02:00:42.980 | You need to know someone for long enough to be able to judge, "Is this person emotionally

02:00:48.900 | stable?" which means that you need to be in relationship for a significant amount of

02:00:54.700 | time in order to judge through a period of intense emotional height and intense emotional

02:01:02.140 | lows.

02:01:03.140 | It'd be really great if you could see someone that you're considering married get kicked

02:01:07.900 | in the teeth by life and go through something really difficult as well as be put on stage

02:01:13.420 | and have 15 minutes of fame.

02:01:15.460 | That would be fantastic because then you could judge how does this person respond in times

02:01:21.200 | of great distress and times of great jubilation.

02:01:24.540 | That's useful.

02:01:27.500 | That's why we have stages of relationship in a culture.

02:01:31.580 | That's why you have a courtship culture.

02:01:33.940 | The best way to observe somebody from afar is probably as a friend and so it's really

02:01:40.080 | healthy for young men and women to have friendships, broad numerous friendships with the opposite

02:01:47.580 | sex where there are friend interactions so you can see how people handle things.

02:01:52.580 | It's really wonderful if you have been able to be friends with somebody for a long enough

02:01:57.540 | period of time to observe him or her go through triumphs and defeats so that you can see how

02:02:04.900 | does this person handle those things.

02:02:07.220 | The problem with friendships is that a lot of times friendships don't move out into the

02:02:10.860 | romantic zone and you wind up getting friend zoned if you're a guy, similar men can't – I

02:02:17.660 | don't think men can be friends with women.

02:02:21.340 | Men are friends with women because they're hoping to get with women in some time.

02:02:25.380 | I know that's unpopular to say but I don't see the alternative ever being true.

02:02:29.660 | It's not true in my experience.

02:02:30.820 | I don't know any men who are genuinely friends with women on the long term who are not interested

02:02:35.220 | in a long term relationship.

02:02:37.120 | At least past a certain age.

02:02:38.500 | I think an exception could be that when you're put together possibly in a social dynamic,

02:02:44.340 | you're in school together, you have just a natural reason to be together.

02:02:47.500 | You can be very friendly and be friends with women in that context.

02:02:51.020 | But when your friendship becomes something that happens outside of the social dynamic,

02:02:55.620 | I don't see how men and women can be friends on an ongoing basis.

02:03:00.540 | The example I would use would just be this.

02:03:03.860 | As a married man, I enjoy friendships and interactions with women who are not my wife.

02:03:10.580 | But those interactions always happen in the context of a social environment in which the

02:03:16.740 | woman's husband is present or my wife is present and thus we have a group social environment.

02:03:23.620 | The reason for getting together is not so that I can go and see my friend, the woman

02:03:28.740 | who is not my wife.

02:03:29.920 | On the contrary, we're getting together as a group and in that group I can enjoy friendships

02:03:34.520 | and relationships and conversation and dialogue and debate with a woman who is not my wife.

02:03:42.120 | But the context has to be a group social environment and the woman's husband has to be part of

02:03:49.200 | it.

02:03:50.200 | So I am friends with women in the context of a group social environment.

02:03:54.440 | What I would never do is I would never be friends with a woman who is married to someone

02:03:58.320 | other man and say, "Hey, let's you and I go out to lunch together because we're friends."

02:04:02.480 | I would never do that because, and she wouldn't either, because there's not a friendship that

02:04:10.360 | can work outside of the group social environment.

02:04:15.200 | So if we look at young people, what you see is that friendships between young men and

02:04:20.540 | young women or boys and girls, these are very productive when there's a reason to be involved

02:04:27.640 | in the group dynamic.

02:04:29.080 | Going to school together, doing a play together, going on a trip, things like that where you

02:04:34.760 | get to know people in that environment, those are really good opportunities and they're

02:04:38.120 | genuine useful friendships where you care about the person.

02:04:43.040 | But when that friendship starts to go in the direction of spending individual time together

02:04:50.040 | outside of the context of the reason you came together and on a one-on-one basis, it's not

02:04:56.360 | possible for that to stay as just a friendship.

02:05:00.040 | The girl that was my friend in a group dynamic and then I started going out on a one-on-one

02:05:05.320 | basis as friends ultimately became my wife.

02:05:08.640 | So there's my experience with it.

02:05:11.600 | So the point being that if you have the opportunity to observe your potential spouse in a group

02:05:20.040 | dynamic, then that's really great because there's less emotional ties.

02:05:24.600 | This person's not putting on airs for you.

02:05:26.280 | You can judge emotional stability and social intelligence in that context.

02:05:32.880 | But that's not generally always a great pathway to marriage.

02:05:37.640 | You don't want to wind up just in the friend zone if you're looking for marriage.

02:05:41.080 | And so that's why dating exists.

02:05:44.000 | That's why we created the idea of dating to say there's a romantic attraction here.

02:05:48.680 | We're not just being friends and we're trying to spend some time in a relationship where

02:05:53.880 | we're not committed to marriage, but we're spending time in a relationship to where we

02:05:57.960 | can observe one another.

02:05:59.800 | One of the enormous problems of dating, however, comes if dating becomes a sexual relationship

02:06:05.200 | absent marriage.

02:06:07.280 | Sex complicates everything.

02:06:09.360 | It dials everything, every emotional involvement, every emotional engagement up to an absolute

02:06:14.360 | maximum.

02:06:15.800 | Sex is not emotionally neutral.

02:06:18.480 | It affects the relationship very, very deeply and it affects the interactions between a

02:06:23.280 | man and a woman.

02:06:25.040 | And so if you have a dating relationship where people are spending time together, and it

02:06:31.600 | can be in a group setting, it can be an individual component.

02:06:34.720 | If you can keep sex out of the relationship, you can have a much more objective observation

02:06:40.840 | of an individual for a continued period of time to be able to observe how is this person

02:06:47.000 | handling life.

02:06:49.640 | Sex is best introduced in the context of a publicly acknowledged clear commitment that

02:06:57.640 | eliminates all of the uncertainty involving matters of consent, matters of respect, matters

02:07:04.520 | of just everything related to it.

02:07:08.600 | And so that's why we have marriage.

02:07:11.000 | And so these phases of the relationship, my point is not to harangue you about sex, but

02:07:15.880 | to say that these phases of relationship are really important.

02:07:19.400 | And that dating and courtship, relationship leading to marriage, this is important because

02:07:24.240 | it gives a man and woman opportunity to observe one another and to have a romantic context

02:07:31.440 | that's different than friendship.

02:07:35.720 | But yet to not yet complicate matters with the heart, the emotions, the hormones, everything

02:07:42.600 | related to an intense sexual relationship.

02:07:47.240 | Then when you move to courtship, that's where you can, sorry, when you move to engagement,

02:07:51.040 | that's where you can get genuinely intimate.

02:07:53.920 | It's not safe to share the deepest desires of your heart, the deepest ambitions that

02:08:01.400 | you have without a publicly acknowledged commitment.

02:08:08.320 | I would never go if I weren't married, I would never go and share the deepest desires and

02:08:14.480 | the deepest thoughts that I have and the biggest conflicts and the controversies and things

02:08:18.280 | like that with a woman where I had no public commitment of relationship.

02:08:22.440 | And so engagement is designed to allow a couple to be safe enough to share with one another

02:08:30.680 | the most intimate secrets that they have because there is public commitment.

02:08:36.400 | But they do that sharing in the context in which it can still be terminated without excessive

02:08:44.560 | harm.

02:08:45.560 | I don't want to say without harm.

02:08:46.560 | Terminating an engagement is not easy, but it's without excessive harm.

02:08:51.000 | Terminating a relationship in which you have both emotional intimacy and physical intimacy

02:08:58.960 | is potentially life-destroying.

02:09:03.040 | It comes with enormous cost and so this gradation of relationships allows a couple to observe

02:09:10.560 | one another in various scenarios and environments, but yet to have the ability to end it without

02:09:19.280 | the heart-wrenching emotional and physical intensity that happens if they are fully engaged

02:09:25.360 | and if the relationship has been sexually consummated.

02:09:28.720 | That's reserved for marriage, which as we'll talk about in a moment, sees a couple through

02:09:32.840 | for the long term because the commitment carries you through the emotional instability.

02:09:36.360 | Now back to emotional stability.

02:09:38.640 | I don't have a great proxy for this, but what you want is enough time to observe the person

02:09:44.280 | through times of emotional extremes.

02:09:46.600 | Is this person stable?

02:09:48.480 | And then I think an intelligent person, an intelligent man or woman would seek to create

02:09:55.040 | external influences that are likely to demonstrate emotional stability or instability.

02:10:02.080 | Let me give an analogy first.

02:10:04.880 | When you're learning to shoot a gun, if you're in the military, first thing you do is you

02:10:08.840 | learn to stand at the firing line and you learn to shoot the gun and you shoot, shoot,

02:10:13.400 | shoot, shoot, shoot.

02:10:14.760 | Shooting a gun while standing at a firing line on a firing range is pretty easy.

02:10:17.680 | It doesn't require much.

02:10:20.320 | How do you simulate combat?

02:10:21.680 | Well, you can't simulate combat very effectively with troops safely if there's actually a risk

02:10:27.680 | of this person being injured.

02:10:30.680 | While some elite training and some training of your may actually have a live fire exercise

02:10:35.760 | where you could get killed while you're going under the barbed wire, generally no intelligent

02:10:41.140 | military commander is simulating combat in a scenario in which you are going to create

02:10:46.880 | the risk of death.

02:10:47.880 | You don't kill your soldiers by training if you can possibly avoid it.

02:10:52.500 | So what do they do?

02:10:53.500 | They find something else that simulates the basic conditions of combat.

02:10:58.700 | And in firearms training, that's something like exercise.

02:11:02.180 | And so what they'll do is to practice your marksmanship skills.

02:11:07.820 | You start with just cool, calm, collected, putting in your shots, then you start running

02:11:13.860 | 20 yards.

02:11:14.860 | So you sprint 20 yards down, sprint 20 yards back.

02:11:18.140 | Now your chest is heaving, your adrenaline's pumping, your body's all just going crazy.

02:11:22.760 | Now you got to shoot accurately with the adrenaline pumping.

02:11:25.620 | And that's analogous to a condition that you'll be in in combat.

02:11:29.980 | Similarly, a trainer will introduce other forms of stress.

02:11:33.420 | They'll introduce light.

02:11:34.420 | They'll introduce loud noises.

02:11:35.740 | They'll put a megaphone up your ear and yell at you and insult you and criticize you and

02:11:39.420 | tell you you're ugly and shoot off flashbangs all around you.

02:11:43.580 | And so the stress that you simulate in training is designed to cause the same physical reactions

02:11:50.140 | that you're going to experience in other times of life.

02:11:52.700 | To see how you respond and to learn mechanisms for responding to them.

02:11:56.480 | So what I would suggest to you that if you want to test emotional stability in someone

02:11:59.480 | that you're not married to, you need to have a period of time to observe the person in

02:12:04.220 | varying conditions.

02:12:06.040 | And it would be smart for you to introduce variability into that.

02:12:10.000 | Let's imagine that all of your dates with your prospective spouse are just lovely dates

02:12:16.880 | where we go out to eat together and we're just happy and we walk around and we hold

02:12:20.520 | hands and we talk and share and whatnot.

02:12:23.400 | Well, your date is putting on makeup every single time.

02:12:27.520 | He's putting on his best suit.

02:12:28.760 | You're constantly in nothing but idyllic circumstances.

02:12:31.560 | That's great.

02:12:32.560 | That's fun.

02:12:33.560 | It's also not a great test of emotional stability.

02:12:36.720 | What is a great test of emotional stability?

02:12:38.720 | Well, let's go out and let's take a long hike where we get hot, tired, and thirsty and see

02:12:44.040 | how do we do when we're hot, tired, and thirsty.

02:12:46.920 | Let's go and get ourselves involved in some intense emotional situation where all of a

02:12:52.320 | sudden the emotions are high.

02:12:54.120 | It could be exercise.

02:12:55.120 | It could be a game.

02:12:56.120 | How does this person respond in these environments?

02:12:58.280 | And you go ahead and put your creativity to play.

02:13:01.560 | But I think that if you have the ability, you want to see your prospective spouse tested

02:13:06.720 | in a variety of situations, not just, "Hey, that's great.

02:13:09.880 | This guy can walk up to the firing line and shoot a pistol."

02:13:12.420 | You want to insert uncertainty into the training mechanism so that there is a good evidence

02:13:20.380 | of long-term stability.

02:13:23.380 | This concludes the genetic traits that I think we should be looking for.

02:13:27.920 | And I want to move now to long-term family traits.

02:13:32.020 | So what I mean here is not things that can be changed quickly, but what are the cultural

02:13:37.660 | conditions, the environmental factors that somebody has been exposed to that are likely

02:13:43.020 | to have a deep and enduring influence on this person to relate to how he or she is going

02:13:52.800 | to work in the long term, and especially with a focus on how will this affect the financial

02:13:57.380 | outcomes of my marriage.

02:13:59.900 | So I don't think these are things that are physically genetic, but they're environmental,

02:14:03.740 | but they're not easily changed.

02:14:05.460 | I think one of the first ones, especially in the context of divorce proofing, remember

02:14:10.220 | that second factor.

02:14:11.220 | There's three factors.

02:14:12.220 | Factor number one is short and long-term financial income growth and basically ability to grow

02:14:18.100 | wealth.

02:14:19.100 | The second is expenses, high expense lifestyle, the highest expense lifestyle being divorce.

02:14:24.780 | And then the third factor is just long-term benefits for my children.

02:14:28.200 | Those are kind of my three organizing principles here.

02:14:31.020 | So what are these factors then that are long-term and there's going to be a significant amount

02:14:37.780 | of divorce proofing here that needs to be talked about.

02:14:41.420 | First one is the durability of marriage among parents and grandparents and extended family.

02:14:47.140 | Durability of marriage is an important metric to measure because it's the thing that you

02:14:52.260 | can see objectively that is not related to what someone says.

02:14:56.300 | It's related to what someone does.

02:14:58.340 | And it's something that you have to observe today because there's probably going to be

02:15:01.980 | a great discrepancy between what someone says and what someone does.

02:15:06.700 | If I understand the research right now, but again, I would cite here Brad Wilcox's recent

02:15:11.580 | book on marriage.

02:15:13.340 | But what he alleges in his, what he asserts in his book is that the data demonstrates

02:15:18.220 | that the elite among us, socially elite, are very likely to say anything goes.

02:15:27.780 | A social elite is very likely to say, "Hey, you do you.

02:15:30.780 | You live how you want to live.

02:15:31.940 | Marry who you want to marry.

02:15:32.940 | Love who you want to love.

02:15:34.380 | You do you.

02:15:35.380 | You just do whatever you want."

02:15:36.740 | But from a behavior perspective or from a cultural perspective, someone who is part

02:15:42.620 | of the current social elite is very likely to have very high standards of actual behavior.

02:15:49.220 | And so you're going to get married and you're going to stay married.

02:15:51.580 | You're going to marry someone that's appropriately suited to you.

02:15:54.180 | You're not going to marry a wacko.

02:15:56.580 | There's a strong family and social pressure for these things.

02:16:02.220 | Now that's different than other classes.

02:16:05.560 | So although other classes are also likely now in today's world to say, "Hey, you do

02:16:09.300 | you.

02:16:10.300 | You know, do whatever you live, how you want to live."

02:16:11.860 | And then they follow through on it.

02:16:12.860 | There's also people that profess to have standards like, "Oh, you've got to live this certain

02:16:16.740 | way."

02:16:17.740 | But in reality, their life doesn't match up to that.

02:16:19.460 | So what can you do?

02:16:20.460 | Well, I think you could judge someone by the durability of marriage among a person's parents

02:16:26.260 | or grandparents, siblings, extended family around.

02:16:29.860 | Is this person surrounded by long enduring marriages?

02:16:33.700 | Now this is not necessarily a purely disqualifying criteria.

02:16:38.500 | We know that people whose parents are married in long-term marriages with no divorce, they

02:16:43.860 | are statistically more likely to stay in marriages themselves.

02:16:47.440 | But there are the flip side as well.

02:16:49.180 | It's not necessarily disqualifying.

02:16:51.440 | But I think what you're really – meaning that parents divorce – if this person's

02:16:55.420 | parents are divorced, it's not, "Okay, that, out, done."

02:16:58.700 | But what you're looking for is to really understand the reasons.

02:17:02.440 | Because somebody's propensity to marry and divorce is very much going to be judged – is

02:17:08.180 | likely to be related to good decision-making.

02:17:10.980 | Is this person surrounded by people who make good decisions, focusing on the long-term,

02:17:17.140 | focusing on what's best for the group, focusing on what's best for the children, for the tribe?

02:17:22.060 | Or is it all about short-term gratification?

02:17:24.660 | What's best for me?

02:17:25.700 | How do I feel at the moment?

02:17:27.260 | What makes me happy?

02:17:28.980 | Is there a culture where bad decision-makers are just, "Oh, it's no big deal.

02:17:33.580 | So and so."

02:17:34.580 | "Oh, she was with this guy and she had another guy because she felt happy because she was

02:17:39.380 | with him because he just gave her the tickles."

02:17:42.180 | Or is there a culture where bad decision-makers are ostracized and shunned, or are they just

02:17:47.340 | accepted and it's no big deal?

02:17:49.460 | Is there a family pressure towards being smart, making good decisions, going to college, choosing

02:17:54.680 | your friend group carefully, and maintaining enduring relationships?

02:17:59.060 | Here's my current working theory on durability of marriage relationships.

02:18:04.220 | I'm guessing that there's about 20% of people in society who are just naturally inclined

02:18:11.220 | to easily enter into marriage relationships, have them last forever, no problems whatsoever.

02:18:17.380 | They never even struggle and try.

02:18:19.140 | It's just easy for them.

02:18:20.900 | I'm also guessing that there's probably 20% of people in society who are so hopelessly

02:18:25.660 | socially incompetent that they probably have no ability to ever form a long-term enduring

02:18:31.380 | relationship and it's just hopeless.

02:18:37.420 | They're never going to make it.

02:18:38.820 | So I'm guessing that there's those two extremes.

02:18:41.580 | What I care a lot about, though, is the middle 60%, because I think the middle 60% is where

02:18:48.580 | we need strong social pressure.

02:18:51.780 | And marriage is one of those things where that strong social pressure really, really

02:18:56.660 | helps.

02:18:57.780 | And formerly, it seems like we had that culture, broadly speaking.

02:19:02.300 | As a culture, we shunned and ostracized those who were divorced.

02:19:06.020 | We shunned and ostracized people who were unfaithful to their spouses.

02:19:09.840 | We shunned and ostracized people who made bad decisions.

02:19:13.300 | And clearly, that culture looked and said, "Hey, wait.

02:19:17.660 | This is bad.

02:19:18.660 | This is painful."

02:19:19.900 | That was why we invented no-fault divorce.

02:19:22.380 | They said, "Well, we just, you know, people have irreconcilable differences and we just

02:19:26.580 | have to end this."

02:19:27.580 | Again, but I would say those are probably that bottom 20%.

02:19:29.940 | But what we've created in the wake of it is we've created a world in which there's not

02:19:35.300 | much support to get couples through the hard times.

02:19:40.020 | And hard times are as normal and as expected in marriage as they are in business or in

02:19:46.420 | school or in athletics or in any other domain of life.

02:19:50.900 | And so the top 20% have the grit to just naturally get themselves through the hard times just

02:19:57.820 | with their own courage.

02:19:59.780 | They face enormous difficulties and they just press through automatically because that's

02:20:03.020 | who I am.

02:20:04.420 | But in athletics, what we do is we coach that middle 60%.

02:20:07.480 | We say, "You can do it."

02:20:08.480 | In academics, we say, "If you fail, we're going to coach that middle 60%."

02:20:12.200 | And in life and in business, we coach that middle 60%.

02:20:15.700 | We say, "Dust yourself off but stick with the plan.

02:20:17.940 | Stick with the vision."

02:20:19.220 | But in marriage, we don't coach that.

02:20:21.780 | We've created a culture in which instead of coaching that, we just automatically throw

02:20:25.300 | in the towel and we say, "No problem."

02:20:27.840 | And so it seems to me that we need to have that strong social pressure to keep the middle

02:20:32.700 | 60% of marriages together.

02:20:35.320 | Now that pressure used to be legal and that was why no-fault divorce was such a disaster.

02:20:41.220 | Used to be understood that if I marry you and you marry me, if I don't commit adultery

02:20:45.860 | against you, I don't abandon you, I don't abuse you, that you got to stay married to

02:20:51.100 | me.

02:20:52.100 | And that was the social contract and that kept people going in when they were excited

02:20:55.320 | and it kept it through them when they were unexcited and it provided and protected both

02:21:00.260 | people.

02:21:01.260 | It protected men and women.

02:21:02.260 | And as I said recently, marriage is a contract between a man and a woman where they put in

02:21:08.940 | differing amounts at different times.

02:21:11.540 | If a couple marries young, the woman puts in her youth, her sexual attractiveness, her

02:21:16.340 | childbearing ability, her willingness to raise children when she's young and beautiful and

02:21:20.940 | every man in the world wants to be with her.

02:21:23.120 | And the man, and she chooses a man who has not yet achieved his potential.

02:21:27.620 | When she's older though, the man is high income earning, has things to offer her, has stability,

02:21:33.820 | has confidence, has all these things that he probably didn't have when he was younger

02:21:37.380 | and he still sees that through.

02:21:39.700 | And so now though, what we've done is we've destroyed that social pressure and we have

02:21:44.780 | pulled it apart so that men and women don't have, but they don't have the pressure.

02:21:51.600 | So the woman may invest into the relationship, her beauty, her fecundity, her years of raising

02:21:58.340 | children, then all of a sudden she's 40 years old and the man can toss her aside just because

02:22:03.020 | he feels like it.

02:22:04.780 | Or if the man comes along at an older age and he's wealthy and sophisticated and attractive

02:22:09.140 | and he marries a wonderful attractive woman, then she can just toss him aside because she

02:22:13.980 | wants half his money in divorce court with no moral error on his part.

02:22:20.140 | And so we need that social pressure.

02:22:21.860 | Now I don't think we're going to get any legal social pressure, at least in the United States

02:22:24.780 | anytime soon.

02:22:25.780 | So what makes up for it?

02:22:27.100 | Well, it's got to be a family culture, it's got to be a religious culture, there's got

02:22:32.020 | to be pressure there that is going to be brought to bear to keep that middle 60% of marriages

02:22:37.620 | really strong and flourishing and give the highest possible nature of it.

02:22:43.340 | And so there's got to be pressure that if I marry this woman and we have a big fight

02:22:49.380 | and she goes home crying to mama and she's telling mommy, "Oh, he said all these things

02:22:54.500 | mean things," and whatnot, you want to have the confidence to know that her mother is

02:22:58.580 | going to say, "All right, honey, cry, cry, cry, now go back and see your husband."

02:23:03.020 | Not that her mother is going to say to her, "Oh, honey, maybe you'd be better off with

02:23:06.860 | someone else."

02:23:08.260 | You got to have the confidence that.

02:23:10.000 | You got to have the confidence that if you're going to marry this man and you're going to

02:23:13.620 | turn 30, then he's going to go to his dad and he's going to say, "You know what?

02:23:17.860 | She didn't lose that last 10 pounds after having our third baby, maybe I should trade

02:23:21.860 | her in."

02:23:22.860 | You want to have the confidence that his dad's going to look him in the face and pull out

02:23:25.540 | a belt and say, "You idiot, don't ever let me hear you say something like that again."

02:23:29.740 | Not, "Well, after all, maybe you could go and find another young sexy something or other."

02:23:35.880 | I'm using garish stereotypes to try to demonstrate the point that you want to be marrying into

02:23:43.820 | a culture that's going to promote your marriage and so you need to look for those long-term

02:23:49.180 | family traits in order to divorce proof your relationship.

02:23:53.460 | What about the quality of relationships?

02:23:56.540 | I think you should look very carefully, what is the quality of parents' and grandparents'

02:24:00.540 | marriage relationships?

02:24:02.260 | I think in general, the natural inclination is the husbands are probably going to treat

02:24:05.740 | their wives about how they watch their fathers treat their mothers, at least to start with.

02:24:11.160 | If you're a woman and you're looking at a man, you should go and look and see how does

02:24:14.740 | his father treat his mother and observe and say, "Do I like that?"

02:24:19.140 | I think wives in general are probably going to treat their husbands about how they watch

02:24:22.580 | their mothers treat their fathers, at least to start with.

02:24:25.820 | If you're a man who's interested in a woman, go and spend some time watching how does her

02:24:29.380 | mother treat her father.

02:24:31.100 | Do you like that and do you want this person to treat you the way that you observe?

02:24:35.420 | If you see problems in that, not necessarily disqualifying, but does your prospective spouse

02:24:41.260 | also see those problems and does your spouse have a desire to change?

02:24:46.260 | Think about these things from the quality and durability of relationship.

02:24:49.940 | I think you should look carefully at what is the family history of financial success.

02:24:55.020 | I don't believe that financial success is a matter of genetic history, at least not

02:25:01.060 | currently, but I think that if you consider your potential spouse's history of financial

02:25:07.620 | success, it can provide insights into genetic and cultural predispositions toward wealth

02:25:13.460 | accumulation.

02:25:14.460 | What are you looking for?

02:25:16.740 | Responsible financial management, long-term thinking, people who have a strong locus of

02:25:21.340 | control, recognize that they're in charge of their situation rather than other people.

02:25:25.860 | Look for a history of entrepreneurial endeavors.

02:25:28.100 | Look for a high appreciation of academics and an honoring of people who are skilled

02:25:34.860 | and highly educated.

02:25:36.620 | Look for generational wealth.

02:25:38.720 | These all are related to cultural factors that are likely to lead to your family being

02:25:44.820 | a prodigious accumulator of wealth.

02:25:47.940 | On a very practical level, it all comes down to what's going to be the encouragement if

02:25:53.500 | you say I want to start a business?

02:25:55.780 | What are her parents going to say?

02:25:57.660 | Are they going to say absolutely you should start a business and let us be your first

02:26:00.860 | customer or are they going to say oh I think that's risky, you probably shouldn't.

02:26:05.460 | What if you say I'm learning about investing, do you have any tips for me?

02:26:09.380 | You don't want to sit around and talk about sports ball.

02:26:11.380 | You want a family that's going to talk about investing.

02:26:13.580 | You want a family where money is honored and appreciated and focused on as a topic of conversation.

02:26:19.340 | It would be much easier for you to be successful in business, to be a successful investor,

02:26:24.660 | to be successful in financial management, if you had a family culture in which you're

02:26:29.660 | lauded for your wise decisions and your frugality and your conscientiousness rather than where

02:26:36.220 | you're made fun of for those factors.

02:26:38.700 | And so recognize that the family history of financial success is going to be a big factor

02:26:43.500 | on you and it's going to be a factor on even just the nature of your relationship.

02:26:50.040 | If you're a man and you grew up and you're considering a woman who watched her father

02:26:55.300 | grow up working long hard hours and saw him struggle when he was young but now sees him

02:27:02.700 | as wealthy and accomplished and able to enjoy the fruit of his labors, she's going to really

02:27:08.080 | appreciate your long hard work much more than if she just never had any exposure to that

02:27:15.820 | and she's whining, "What's five o'clock?

02:27:17.460 | You need to be here."

02:27:18.460 | No, she understands that you're going to need to make a sacrifice to be successful

02:27:22.700 | in business.

02:27:23.980 | Conversely, let's say that your wife, your potential wife grew up watching a man who

02:27:29.140 | was just a lazy jerk and her whole life he just was a total loser.

02:27:36.300 | And so you don't want to be a loser.

02:27:38.000 | You want to make something of yourself but what if she doesn't expect you to make something

02:27:42.420 | of yourself?

02:27:43.760 | She doesn't think that's likely to be worth it.

02:27:46.520 | She's not going to push you.

02:27:47.520 | She's not going to encourage you.

02:27:48.720 | She's just going to assume, "Well, the man I'm married to is likely to be a lump just

02:27:52.400 | like my dad."

02:27:53.400 | You don't want that.

02:27:54.400 | You want a wife who's going to push you, who's going to encourage you, who's going to – if

02:27:58.020 | you're sitting around because you got laid off, you don't want a woman who's going to

02:28:02.500 | say, "Well, honey, why don't you just sit around on the house and the couch and mope?"

02:28:06.340 | You want a woman who says, "Get out the door and go find a job and here's a kick in the

02:28:11.700 | butt."

02:28:12.700 | That's what you're looking for is a woman who will drive you and push you on and a lot

02:28:16.100 | of that is going to be driven by what she observed.

02:28:18.860 | Let's say that you are interested in a woman whose father treated her mother very poorly,

02:28:26.380 | who committed adultery against her or who constantly didn't see to her needs, didn't

02:28:32.020 | see to her luxuries, never had enough money for anything.

02:28:35.300 | Well, now all of a sudden, there's a good chance that your wife is not going to be able

02:28:39.220 | to trust you and your willingness to provide for her and your ability.

02:28:43.100 | She's going to feel like, "I've always got to have my own reserve set aside.

02:28:46.020 | I can't trust him.

02:28:47.020 | I've got to make sure that I make money."

02:28:48.980 | All this stuff goes very deep is the point and so you want to look and see what is the

02:28:53.260 | family history related to finance and how is that going to impact our financial culture.

02:28:59.220 | What you're looking for is a culture of financial prudence and wise decision making.

02:29:04.620 | It's not about the actual dollar figures involved necessarily.

02:29:09.440 | That certainly helps.

02:29:10.860 | If you can marry a man whose dad earned, you know, eight figures instead of five figures,

02:29:16.420 | do it because there's a decent chance that the man that you're going to marry is more

02:29:19.940 | likely to earn eight figures instead of five figures.

02:29:22.260 | Go for it.

02:29:23.340 | But it's not so much about the dollar figures.

02:29:25.480 | It's more about how are decisions made.

02:29:30.260 | You can have somebody that you're interested in who's driving a very expensive car.

02:29:35.100 | Maybe it's a really high-end Mercedes.

02:29:37.580 | That really high-end Mercedes can represent every last bit of money that this person can

02:29:43.320 | scrape together out of his monthly budget to buy on payments, to pay the lease payment.

02:29:48.720 | Or it can represent just a completely negligible amount of financial wealth for the family

02:29:54.180 | and we just drive nice cars because it's a nice car and it doesn't even matter.

02:29:57.760 | So you can't judge it based upon the dollar figures of consumption.

02:30:01.060 | What you need to judge it based upon is what kind of consumption is rewarded and what kind

02:30:06.460 | of consumption is made fun of.

02:30:08.580 | In a wealthy family, if somebody goes out and buys in a truly wealthy family, not an

02:30:13.020 | aspirational, not someone who's trying to lie their way into wealth, somebody goes out

02:30:16.420 | and buys a really high-end car and can't afford easily to buy it five times over with a tiny

02:30:22.980 | percentage of this year's profit portfolio, the wealthy family is going to make fun of

02:30:26.460 | that guy.

02:30:27.460 | What are you doing?

02:30:28.460 | You're stupid.

02:30:29.460 | You don't do that.

02:30:30.460 | You don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

02:30:33.060 | You nurture the goose and you only spend the eggs.

02:30:36.040 | So a wealthy family is going to make fun of somebody who makes a dumb financial decision

02:30:40.980 | and you're going to feel a strong desire to make a smart financial decision to honor your

02:30:48.860 | parents.

02:30:49.860 | That's why many times you'll see wealthy people want to make sure their children are not born

02:30:54.580 | with a silver spoon in their mouth.

02:30:55.580 | They want to make sure they go out and experience life the hard way.

02:30:59.180 | And so if you say to a wealthy person, "I'm going to make this different choice because

02:31:03.500 | I'm saving my money," you're not going to lose face or lose status.

02:31:06.940 | You're going to gain face and gain status because you're willing to be assertive related

02:31:10.380 | to your money.

02:31:11.500 | On the other hand, if there's a family that is just flagrantly consuming every dollar

02:31:17.740 | in high consumption living and never building something, then you're going to be chained

02:31:22.620 | eternally to spending money that you don't have because there's going to be this pressure

02:31:27.620 | from your potential spouse to spend money, spend money non-stop on these things that

02:31:32.380 | you can't afford.

02:31:33.860 | So try to look and understand what these long-term features are in your potential relationship.

02:31:43.980 | Now not all of the traits are going to be financial.

02:31:46.860 | So it's not all just a function of money.

02:31:50.660 | What you really need to be thinking about is divorce proofing as well.

02:31:55.100 | The biggest financial problem that most people face that can just wipe them out is often

02:31:59.660 | going to be divorce.

02:32:01.300 | So how do you divorce proof a marriage?

02:32:05.300 | Obviously there's a whole show here and I'm already at two and a half hours in, but let's

02:32:10.060 | start with just a little establishment of vision.

02:32:14.900 | I'm pulling this from a book by relationship researcher and guru John Gottman called Seven

02:32:21.060 | Principles for Making Marriage Work.

02:32:23.220 | But here's what he says in the introduction to that book under a section titled The Purpose

02:32:27.980 | of Marriage.

02:32:28.980 | "In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning.

02:32:35.260 | They don't just get along.

02:32:36.740 | They also support each other's hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives

02:32:42.100 | together.

02:32:43.180 | That is really what I mean when I talk about honoring and respecting each other.

02:32:47.260 | Very often a marriage's failure to do this is what causes husband and wife to find themselves

02:32:53.420 | in endless, useless rounds of argument or to feel isolated and lonely in their marriage.

02:32:59.340 | After watching countless videotapes of couples fighting, I can guarantee you that most quarrels

02:33:04.420 | are really not about whether the toilet lid is up or down or whose turn it is to take

02:33:08.580 | out the trash.

02:33:09.940 | There are deeper hidden issues that fuel these superficial conflicts and make them far more

02:33:14.580 | intense and hurtful than they would otherwise be.

02:33:19.220 | Once you understand this, you will be ready to accept one of the most surprising truths

02:33:23.940 | about marriage.

02:33:25.820 | Most marital arguments cannot be resolved.

02:33:30.220 | Couples spend year after year trying to change each other's mind, but it can't be done.

02:33:34.980 | This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle,

02:33:39.940 | personality, or values.

02:33:42.060 | By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and

02:33:46.300 | harming their marriage.

02:33:47.820 | Instead, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict and

02:33:52.580 | to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other.

02:33:56.700 | Only then will they be able to build shared meaning and a sense of purpose into their

02:34:00.940 | marriage.

02:34:01.940 | So at its core, recognize that the quality of your relationship is largely determined

02:34:08.420 | by these factors of long-term vision and don't expect the person you're marrying to change.

02:34:15.340 | That's why you want to spend time prior to marriage observing and carefully concerned

02:34:22.660 | how is our relationship working out.

02:34:25.340 | That's why we have dating and courtship and engagement and then marriage.

02:34:29.840 | So judge your relationship and say, "Do I naturally have a high-quality relationship

02:34:35.140 | with good communication skills and mutual respect?

02:34:39.300 | Do we have good problem-solving ability?

02:34:41.540 | Do we have the ability to work on the relationship in a relatively easy way?"

02:34:46.140 | Divorce is fairly predictable.

02:34:48.220 | Let me read from the same book called, again, this is John Gottman, Seven Principles for

02:34:53.860 | Making Marriage Work, titled "Predicting Divorce with 91% Accuracy."

02:34:58.900 | "Thanks to decades of research, these questions can finally be answered.

02:35:02.780 | In fact, I can predict with great precision whether a couple will stay happily together

02:35:07.460 | or lose their way after listening to them interact for as little as 15 minutes.

02:35:12.780 | Over seven separate studies, my accuracy rate in making such predictions has averaged 91%.

02:35:18.380 | In other words, 91% of the cases where I predicted that a couple's marriage would eventually

02:35:23.300 | either fail or succeed, time proved me right.

02:35:26.980 | I don't think my success in foretelling divorce earns me any bragging rights because it isn't

02:35:31.720 | due to some superhuman perception or intuition.

02:35:34.340 | Instead, it rests solely on the science, the decades of data my colleagues and I accumulated."

02:35:41.860 | And then subsequently, "Emotionally intelligent marriages.

02:35:46.860 | What can make a marriage work is surprisingly simple.

02:35:50.580 | Happily married couples aren't smarter, richer, or more psychologically astute than others.

02:35:55.780 | But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts

02:36:00.180 | and feelings about each other, which all couples have, from overwhelming their positive ones.

02:36:06.300 | Rather than creating a climate of disagreement and resistance, they embrace each other's

02:36:10.620 | needs.

02:36:11.620 | When addressing a partner's request, their motto tends to be a helpful 'yes, and'

02:36:16.060 | rather than 'yes, but.'

02:36:18.340 | This positive attitude not only allows them to maintain, but also to increase the sense

02:36:23.220 | of romance, play, fun, adventure, and learning together that are at the heart of any long-lasting

02:36:29.740 | love affair.

02:36:31.020 | They have what I call an emotionally intelligent marriage."

02:36:35.820 | Emotional intelligence has become widely recognized as an important predictor of a child's success

02:36:41.020 | later in life.

02:36:42.460 | The more in touch with feelings and the better able a child is to understand and get along

02:36:46.340 | with others, the sunnier that child's future, whatever his or her academic IQ.

02:36:51.660 | The same is true for spouses.

02:36:53.580 | The more emotionally intelligent a couple, the better able they are to understand, honor,

02:36:59.380 | and respect each other and their marriage, the more likely that they will indeed live

02:37:03.660 | happily ever after.

02:37:05.660 | Just as parents can teach their children emotional intelligence, this is also a skill that couples

02:37:10.500 | can learn.

02:37:11.740 | As simple as it sounds, developing this ability can keep husband and wife on the positive

02:37:15.740 | side of the divorce odds.

02:37:18.660 | I was intending to go in and talk about divorce proofing.

02:37:21.620 | He has this great chapter in this book where he specifically goes through and says, "Okay,

02:37:26.060 | let's talk about it, but let's look for the signs of what causes a marriage to go bad,

02:37:32.740 | how I predict divorce."

02:37:33.980 | But it would probably take me about an hour to go through it.

02:37:36.460 | So let me just set that aside to you and just encourage you, spend some time reading about

02:37:41.380 | marriage, reading about divorce, and make sure you understand what you're looking for.

02:37:45.460 | Especially, and again, this episode is geared towards people who are not married.

02:37:51.820 | That's what I'm hoping to reach.

02:37:52.940 | So if you are married, then you need to teach this to your children.

02:37:56.020 | The great problem, one of the great problems that people face is in our culture is we don't

02:38:01.900 | talk enough about the simple things that lead to positive and negative outcomes related

02:38:06.600 | to marriage.

02:38:07.700 | And so because we're not talking about them enough, people are spending their time largely

02:38:11.860 | making decisions based upon emotional attraction.

02:38:18.420 | Emotions are a fundamentally important component of a high quality marriage relationship.

02:38:23.700 | They are not the only component.

02:38:27.020 | They are the sauce on top of the food that makes the food incredibly delicious and savory,

02:38:33.060 | but they're not what sticks to your ribs.

02:38:35.100 | They're not what keeps you going through to the next meal.

02:38:39.620 | Teach your children what to look for.

02:38:41.460 | If you're young, think about what to look for and be willing to have standards and important

02:38:49.620 | characteristics that you think are important that you're looking for.

02:38:53.100 | The next thing to look for is financial resilience and flexibility.

02:38:58.140 | And I repeat, I'm not trying to lay out all of the core components of a happy, healthy

02:39:02.780 | marriage.

02:39:03.780 | There are many, many things.

02:39:04.780 | I'm trying to focus on what are those things that are probably going to make a big difference

02:39:08.780 | to the finances of a marriage.

02:39:11.340 | And some of them are important to keep the marriage going, but then I'm just focusing

02:39:16.000 | on the things that are financial.

02:39:17.500 | You will have all kinds of other things that you appreciate and look for in marriage beyond

02:39:20.980 | these factors.

02:39:21.980 | But you want to look for financial resiliency and flexibility in your proposed spouse.

02:39:29.000 | For men, maintaining a wife in style is a very real goal for most men.

02:39:34.640 | It brings me enormous satisfaction to give my wife nice things, to spend money on her.

02:39:42.900 | I derive enormous amounts of pleasure out of it.

02:39:46.820 | Similarly to my children, it makes me happy to provide luxuries for her.

02:39:52.460 | So maintaining a wife in style is a very real and satisfying goal for most men.

02:39:58.300 | Having to maintain a wife in style will poison a relationship.

02:40:04.700 | Her expecting to be maintained in style would eliminate all of the pleasure from my relationship.

02:40:13.380 | And that's one of these interesting dichotomies that if you as a woman are generally low maintenance,

02:40:20.160 | you don't have a lot of needs, a lot of desires, your man is likely to do everything he can

02:40:28.780 | to provide every luxury and nicety that is within his ability, and he'll love doing it.

02:40:34.660 | But if you turn around and you start setting conditions and having requirements that this

02:40:39.540 | is how I have to be maintained, then it will poison your relationship.

02:40:45.980 | So be careful about people who have high standards.

02:40:49.900 | Make sure that the person that you are interested in is resilient and flexible, knows how to

02:40:56.140 | be abased and knows how to abound, knows how to live in luxury and in style, and knows

02:41:01.180 | how to live in simplicity and in a basic way, knows how to travel in luxury and knows how

02:41:08.980 | to travel in poverty.

02:41:11.700 | Just imagine that you're a woman and you're married to a man who, "I just can't eat.

02:41:17.100 | I just can't.

02:41:18.100 | I just can't," unless everything is just right, unless your house is exactly the way it's

02:41:22.220 | supposed to be, unless you maintain him exactly in style, or a wife, "I just can't sleep in

02:41:28.300 | that.

02:41:29.300 | I can't."

02:41:30.300 | What an obnoxious persnickety people are annoying to live with.

02:41:34.460 | And so you should develop a way of testing the financial resiliency and flexibility of

02:41:41.260 | your proposed spouse.

02:41:43.900 | I would recommend to you that you try to schedule something that is really high end, a black

02:41:51.260 | tie ball, a beautiful gala, an elaborate weekend away, and see, "How does my proposed spouse

02:42:00.020 | do in finery and luxury and sumptuous surroundings?

02:42:05.420 | Does he know his way around the dessert fork and the silverware?

02:42:09.500 | Does he understand how to be comfortable in high society?"

02:42:13.700 | I would also propose that you take a camping trip or a mission trip in an incredibly impoverished

02:42:20.420 | area, and you don't have access to a shower for three days, and you sleep on the ground,

02:42:26.180 | and see, "How does my proposed spouse do with these very basic and primitive conditions?"

02:42:34.660 | If you want your marriage to result in long-term wealth accumulation, then there will be times

02:42:42.060 | in which you can enjoy luxury as a family, and there will be times in which you will

02:42:47.580 | need to tighten your belts and enjoy lack.

02:42:51.140 | And you can, if you marry the right person and you have the right characteristics yourself,

02:42:55.840 | you can enjoy luxury and you can enjoy lack.

02:43:01.500 | That's what you're looking for.

02:43:02.940 | Next, look for someone who has an appreciation of financial reality.

02:43:08.620 | Notice I didn't say literacy yet.

02:43:10.860 | What I mean is reality.

02:43:12.740 | Your partner needs to be living in the real world.

02:43:15.460 | Imagine, your family is deep in debt.

02:43:17.660 | You're working day and night to get out of debt, and your wife is out getting multi-hundred

02:43:22.060 | dollar beauty treatments, or your family is deep in debt, and you're working day and night

02:43:26.820 | to get out, and your husband is out shopping for a new gun, or new three-hundred dollar

02:43:31.940 | hunting boots, or whatever it is.

02:43:34.140 | Just imagine, you want to marry someone who can understand reality.

02:43:39.860 | Your spouse needs to understand that finances are real and must be respected.

02:43:45.700 | You're not made of money.

02:43:47.000 | There are limits, and your finances are going to go up and down, and you need to be married

02:43:51.700 | to somebody who's willing to respect limits.

02:43:55.020 | In financial counseling, one of the things I've encountered time and time again is a

02:43:59.580 | couple who everything was going great until all of a sudden there were limits, and all

02:44:03.700 | of a sudden she went out and spent crazy amounts of money on the credit card, or he went out

02:44:07.860 | and bought a new truck, or just crazy things like that.

02:44:11.860 | You need to understand that reality and be able to communicate from a perspective of

02:44:16.660 | reality, marry somebody who has an appreciation of financial reality.

02:44:21.940 | Next, marry somebody who has good financial literacy, an understanding of the basics of

02:44:28.580 | financial literacy, and a willingness to learn.

02:44:35.380 | I started with the big genetic things that can't be overcome in someone's lifetime.

02:44:39.180 | Then I moved on to the things that probably were sewed into your prospective spouse for

02:44:42.660 | twenty years by his or her upbringing.

02:44:46.380 | Financial literacy, I would say, again, can be taught in six weeks to six months.

02:44:51.940 | Almost everything can be taught in weeks to months that's related to the day-to-day running

02:44:56.460 | of financial affairs.

02:45:01.140 | It's important, but this is the most easily overcomable thing, especially if you have

02:45:06.100 | willingness to learn.

02:45:07.820 | If the person that you are interested in is not good with money, whatever that means,

02:45:14.180 | I would not automatically disqualify that person.

02:45:18.420 | I don't think being good with money is a particularly difficult hurdle to overcome if all these

02:45:24.260 | other things are there.

02:45:26.940 | There are lots of people who are not good with money and a few years later they're multi-millionaires.

02:45:31.700 | These are the learnable, easily acquirable skills if somebody has a willingness to learn.

02:45:39.380 | Having a willingness to learn and an interest in financial topics is enormously helpful.

02:45:44.740 | Remember this.

02:45:45.980 | In order for you to become wealthy, your family is going to have to optimize at least something

02:45:53.680 | in order to make that happen, assuming that you're not inheriting wealth.

02:45:57.980 | You can optimize for income, you can optimize for low expenses, or you can optimize for

02:46:04.980 | investment, prowess, and knowledge.

02:46:07.620 | Any one of those things optimized will work.

02:46:10.940 | If you can optimize two of them, it'll work fast.

02:46:14.280 | And then if you can optimize three of them, you've got a slam-dunk, home-run, shortcut

02:46:18.100 | to wealth.

02:46:19.100 | How's that for a mixed metaphor, huh?

02:46:22.780 | The point is that you've got to optimize something.

02:46:26.140 | And so you want to think about where the interests are of each spouse and think about where would

02:46:33.440 | be the optimization.

02:46:34.440 | How are we going to work together as a team?

02:46:37.140 | And then is my spouse willing to learn?

02:46:40.500 | Is there an expression of willingness?

02:46:43.300 | I think it works really well in marriages for individualized to specialize in at least

02:46:49.180 | one of those dimensions, again, income, expenses, or investments.

02:46:57.460 | The most frustrating, almost guaranteed failure is this.

02:47:03.780 | How could you be married and probably not generate much wealth?

02:47:08.540 | I would say it's probably if you have a dual-income family who are earning average amounts of

02:47:16.040 | money at a W-2 job, spending most of their money on consumption, and if they're investing

02:47:23.220 | at all, investing poorly based upon hot stock tips.

02:47:27.740 | That's the worst.

02:47:29.100 | You have high taxes paid, you have no specialization.

02:47:32.660 | Spouse and wives are basically roommates that each contributes a little bit to the pot and

02:47:36.580 | each takes out of the pot and there's no function of this thing, this enterprise, this family

02:47:42.060 | enterprise isn't going anywhere.

02:47:45.300 | If we look at our surroundings, we can see many different models of success as to how

02:47:50.940 | a couple can build something that is truly successful.

02:47:55.220 | And there's not only one, there are many models.

02:47:58.380 | Here are some of the models that I see most of the time.

02:48:02.060 | The first model can be that one spouse optimizes income and the other spouse optimizes the

02:48:09.940 | lifestyle and expenses.

02:48:12.580 | Where you've seen this historically has been where a husband has optimized income, had

02:48:17.980 | a job, earned a lot of money, built a business, worked really hard at it, and his wife manages

02:48:23.100 | the house, manages the household and all of the expenses.

02:48:27.860 | Traditionally, in very patriarchal societies, it's very common, husband goes to work, brings

02:48:34.140 | home the paycheck, hands his wife the paycheck, she gives him the spending money that she

02:48:38.460 | has, and she maintains ironclad control of the family's finances, she invests, she runs

02:48:45.420 | the family household budget, she runs the finances, the investment things, she takes

02:48:50.180 | care of the children, she does all that stuff.

02:48:52.460 | And he works and provides the income.

02:48:54.540 | And that's a very traditional, very successful model that works all around the world.

02:48:59.040 | And it's a matter of one spouse optimizing income, the other spouse, usually the wife,

02:49:04.060 | optimizing the lifestyle for the family, and then running expenses and running investments.

02:49:09.020 | Now if both spouses are going to optimize income, what usually seems to be the case

02:49:14.620 | is that both spouses aren't optimizing jobs.

02:49:18.980 | On the contrary, if both spouses are optimizing income, it usually works well if one has flexibility,

02:49:25.260 | as in run my own business, have flexible hours.

02:49:29.220 | You can make it work if both spouses just have high incomes, but it can be really annoying.

02:49:34.300 | I worked a number of years ago with a couple, wonderful couple, wife was a pharmacist, husband

02:49:40.100 | was a physical therapist, they both were really good at what they did, but they both had jobs

02:49:44.980 | where they had to be in the office in a certain number of days.

02:49:47.460 | They had two or three children, and they were working really hard on raising their children,

02:49:52.820 | and basically they never had a day off together because they each had to have a day where

02:49:57.140 | they were working.

02:49:58.560 | And they had babysitters some of the times, but they were very devoted parents, and basically

02:50:02.340 | what they gave up is they almost never had a day off together because one of them was

02:50:06.540 | working each of the seven days per week.

02:50:09.180 | And that was a really frustrating lifestyle for them.

02:50:11.620 | And so what can work well, if both spouses are going to have a job or a career, then

02:50:16.280 | one builds more of a flexible business that with ability to adjust hours, the other has

02:50:22.060 | the job.

02:50:23.140 | That can work.

02:50:24.220 | Another one that works is where one spouse really focuses on investments.

02:50:28.820 | This is one I've seen very frequently profiled among wealthy families.

02:50:32.900 | Usually husband has a business, does pretty well with business, wife takes care of the

02:50:39.140 | home, but has something like a real estate investment business.

02:50:44.420 | It can be, it doesn't have to be real estate, it can be anything if she's got an interest

02:50:47.000 | in stocks, companies.

02:50:48.000 | I've known a couple of ladies who were into that, but it seems like a very male-dominated

02:50:51.360 | field.

02:50:52.360 | Real estate seems to really fit with what many women are interested in.

02:50:56.640 | My mom was always the queen of buying, getting deals.

02:50:59.600 | She loved getting deals.

02:51:00.600 | Well, maybe it's a, I don't know, maybe it's an innate female trait to shop for sales and

02:51:05.520 | things like that.

02:51:06.520 | Well, you can shop for sales on clothes that your family needs and food that your family

02:51:11.660 | needs and you can also shop for sales on investment houses that your family needs.

02:51:15.760 | Then it's the same basic instinct, the same basic skills just extrapolated out to a bigger

02:51:20.600 | level.

02:51:21.600 | So, having one spouse be really focused on optimizing the investments can work really

02:51:25.440 | well.

02:51:26.440 | I've seen this with husbands as well.

02:51:29.080 | Remember that with investing there's a point in time in which your income is the most important

02:51:32.760 | factor.

02:51:33.760 | Then as your wealth starts to grow, then now your investing prowess becomes the most important

02:51:37.720 | thing.

02:51:38.720 | So, the amount of money in your portfolio once you have a lot of assets is much more

02:51:41.300 | important than the amount of income that you're earning and contributing to the portfolio.

02:51:44.940 | So husband really takes a deep interest in the investment portfolio.

02:51:49.460 | Wife has a job.

02:51:50.460 | I've seen this a lot of times with people who have a passion jobs and like school teaching.

02:51:53.980 | Husband trades stocks every morning, spends his time at home trading stocks.

02:51:57.740 | Wife is a school teacher.

02:51:58.860 | They have a really great life together.

02:52:00.620 | She works for the social outlet of it and his investment work runs kind of the family

02:52:05.460 | enterprise.

02:52:06.860 | You can make many different models work.

02:52:09.900 | The key principle is this.

02:52:12.940 | Look for a spouse that complements you, not simply duplicates you.

02:52:20.900 | One of the things I learned that makes for a successful business partnership is that

02:52:25.700 | in order for a business partnership to work for the long term, the partners have to believe

02:52:31.420 | that they're better off together than apart.

02:52:36.100 | There has to be a synergy to their relationship where one plus one is more than two.

02:52:42.220 | If you have a partner who's really good at repairing and refinishing wooden floors and

02:52:50.140 | he's friends with someone else who's really good at repairing and refinishing wooden floors

02:52:54.300 | and they say, "Hey, tell you what, let's team up together and let's go out and build a business

02:52:59.580 | where we go and repair and refinish wooden floors just because we're both good at repairing

02:53:04.600 | and refinishing wooden floors," that's probably not a partnership that's destined for long

02:53:09.140 | term success.

02:53:10.820 | It's fun in the short term because we can do floors together.

02:53:14.140 | We like being together.

02:53:15.180 | It's fun.

02:53:16.380 | But then five years in, one of the partners wants to work six days a week and the other

02:53:19.920 | wants to work four days a week.

02:53:21.340 | One wants to start at six and go till six.

02:53:23.140 | The other wants to start at ten and go till four.

02:53:25.380 | And we start to have a frustration about, "Wait a second.

02:53:27.700 | Why don't you want to do as many floors as I do?"

02:53:30.260 | And unless there's just this amazingly strong compatibility of personality, they start to

02:53:34.500 | suspect that they're probably better off by themselves because after all, why are we splitting

02:53:38.440 | the profit when in reality I could be making more and keeping more if I just did it on

02:53:43.080 | my own.

02:53:44.080 | We don't add to each other.

02:53:45.720 | Those partnerships don't work.

02:53:48.080 | What does work is if you really like refinishing wooden floors and I really like selling and

02:53:54.760 | finding clients, then we have a match made in heaven because I can go out and I can spend

02:54:00.120 | my time selling and having clients.

02:54:02.760 | You can spend your time running the floor polisher or the floor polishing crews and

02:54:06.640 | both of us do what we like and we don't have to do what we don't like.

02:54:09.520 | And if I manage all the books for you and I manage the sales and all you got to do is

02:54:12.900 | show up and do floors, then you're happy.

02:54:14.960 | And on the other hand, if I don't ever have to do floors but I get to do what I like,

02:54:18.160 | then we're happy and we realize we're better off together.

02:54:21.080 | I think the same principle applies to spousal relationships.

02:54:25.040 | Husbands and wives that complement one another, that bring different skill sets, different

02:54:28.600 | personalities, a hardness, a softness, a skill here that complements that skill there.

02:54:34.200 | And from a financial perspective, brings a different variety.

02:54:38.560 | These couples seem to, I think, really work because they provide what each other provides.

02:54:47.240 | There's no magic formula for this.

02:54:49.760 | I think here is where you're going to, I would revert to say, you'll know how someone makes

02:54:54.760 | you feel.

02:54:55.760 | I think that some couples, when I listen to them, they love to talk about work at the

02:54:58.400 | dinner table because they work in the same field and they work amazingly well together.

02:55:02.440 | I always think about Will Durant and his wife who he married very young and they just were

02:55:06.640 | this lifetime team duo of incredibly publishing.

02:55:10.200 | They just love their work together and they seem to have a productive marriage.

02:55:13.920 | But then there's people who just don't ever want to talk about business with my wife because

02:55:17.760 | that's not what she's into.

02:55:18.760 | It's not what I'm into.

02:55:19.760 | I talk about business with other people but they also have really productive relationships.

02:55:23.160 | I don't know of any rule that is the best key.

02:55:26.520 | I just think that you want to have complementary skill sets.

02:55:31.100 | Any success model can work.

02:55:33.120 | The ones I see work most frequently are the ones where the husband optimizes the income

02:55:38.380 | and the income generation and the wife optimizes the expense management, the lifestyle management,

02:55:45.160 | making sure the children are doing their homework so they're going to go to the elite schools

02:55:48.240 | where they're going to meet smart women and all of the stuff and super hardcore on that.

02:55:54.040 | And then investment knowledge can go either way based on interest.

02:55:57.080 | I've seen it where wives just are wizards with investments.

02:56:01.000 | I've seen it the other way around.

02:56:02.320 | So meaning where the husband's that's totally their deal.

02:56:06.120 | You're going to at the end of the day there are no rules in this stuff.

02:56:08.400 | You work it out with your spouse and that's where a good relationship is important.

02:56:14.040 | Finally I would say look for values that are related to financial productivity, cultural

02:56:19.000 | values.

02:56:20.000 | Seeing hard work as a virtue, not as a vice, is probably a good sign to look for.

02:56:27.440 | Imagine you're a young woman and you see a man who just sees that his goal in life is

02:56:33.280 | to escape from hard work and he's doing everything he can to get out of hard work and to shirk

02:56:37.720 | it.

02:56:38.720 | Probably not a good marker of long term success.

02:56:41.720 | Seeing hard work as a virtue, not a vice, is a good thing.

02:56:44.960 | Same thing for a man looking for a woman.

02:56:47.000 | Seeing a woman who embraces hard work as something to be appreciated and to be enjoyed, that's

02:56:53.520 | a good indicator.

02:56:56.640 | Being employed as a sign of good health is a good indicator.

02:56:58.960 | A guy who's running from employment just doesn't want to work, it's probably not going to work

02:57:03.400 | out so well in the long term.

02:57:04.560 | He'll make just enough money to make it for a few weeks and then be done.

02:57:08.100 | On the other hand, a guy who sees being employed as a fundamentally healthy thing to do, probably

02:57:13.880 | going to make more money and be more employed.

02:57:16.440 | Seeing frugality as a healthy discipline, not something to be run from, is good.

02:57:20.600 | Most historically successful cultures have some expression of asceticism.

02:57:26.600 | It can be fasting, it can be some way where you're denying yourself and I think that frugality

02:57:31.600 | can express some of those aspects of fasting that are really healthy for us, that we spend

02:57:38.120 | less than we could spend.

02:57:39.220 | It's a good and useful discipline.

02:57:41.440 | Seeing risk-taking as something to be admired is something that could result in great wins,

02:57:47.180 | could result in great losses.

02:57:48.580 | You be the choice.

02:57:49.620 | The choice is yours.

02:57:50.620 | What do you want?

02:57:51.620 | But a culture of that.

02:57:52.620 | And there's many, many other things, but look for values that are related to financial productivity.

02:58:00.280 | On the whole, as you are considering somebody that you're interested in marrying, recognize

02:58:07.460 | that you're getting the whole package.

02:58:12.800 | There's a good chance that the person that you're marrying is not going to change much.

02:58:17.540 | Your children are kind of going to be like this person that you're marrying.

02:58:21.840 | So think about that.

02:58:23.640 | When you're looking for a wife, what are the qualities that you want in your sons and daughters?

02:58:28.140 | Because that's what you're going to get.

02:58:30.140 | So make sure that you're marrying someone of those qualities.

02:58:32.380 | If you're looking for a husband, what are the qualities that you want in your sons and

02:58:36.640 | daughters?

02:58:37.780 | Guess what?

02:58:38.780 | You're going to get them.

02:58:40.260 | They're going to be like the person that you're marrying.

02:58:43.300 | People don't change that much.

02:58:45.200 | And so look at the family, look at the circumstances, and recognize that there's a good chance statistically

02:58:51.400 | speaking that the results that I get are probably going to be something like this, like what

02:58:57.060 | I see, and people probably aren't going to change very much.

02:59:01.220 | So if you like these qualities that this person is expressing, great.

02:59:05.720 | Nail them down.

02:59:06.720 | Nail her down.

02:59:07.720 | Get to marriage as quickly as you can.

02:59:10.020 | If you don't like these qualities, look for another option.

02:59:13.940 | If you don't have another better option, then either continue to look, figure out how can

02:59:22.360 | I bring more potential candidates into my life?

02:59:24.820 | How can I create a better sales funnel with more prospects?

02:59:28.660 | Or how can I upgrade myself in order to be more attractive to the kind of person that

02:59:34.540 | I want to attract?

02:59:37.260 | If you want to attract as a man, if you want to attract a 10 out of 10, a woman who is

02:59:43.420 | going to be just drop dead gorgeous, she's going to fit in in every social situation,

02:59:48.420 | she's going to look phenomenal in a ball gown, and just as cute when she wakes up sleeping

02:59:52.540 | on the dirt next to you on the Appalachian Trail, and she's going to bear you 10 children,

02:59:57.220 | and they're all going to go to Ivy League education, and she's going to teach them French

03:00:01.960 | and Latin and history and mathematics and calculus, and she's incredibly smart, and

03:00:07.020 | she's got two advanced degrees, but she's going to give it all up for you to be your

03:00:11.820 | doting loving wife, guess what?

03:00:15.660 | She's out there, and you got to be a 10 out of 10 to attract her, because she's got every

03:00:20.220 | option in the world.

03:00:21.660 | So you're going to have to be mega focused on being as attractive as you possibly can,

03:00:27.140 | working as diligently as possible to meet her, and to meet her young before she takes

03:00:31.220 | the cream of the crop from somewhere else.

03:00:34.340 | If you're a woman, and you're trying to tie down a man, and you just want a guy who's

03:00:39.360 | going to make a million dollars a year, and he's six foot four, and he's got a ripped

03:00:43.800 | six pack, and he loves you and wants to spend many, many hours a week with you, and all

03:00:49.500 | the – you make your list, recognize you're going to have to figure out what he wants,

03:00:56.880 | and you're going to have to figure out how to develop that and offer that to him.

03:01:01.300 | And anywhere in the middle, you can't change the other person, but you can change yourself.

03:01:06.940 | You can change yourself and what you have to offer, what you bring to the table, and

03:01:10.740 | you can change the environments you put yourself in where you're most likely to meet this person.

03:01:18.420 | Every single aspect of this is a skill.

03:01:22.480 | Social things, skills.

03:01:23.940 | Money management, skills.

03:01:25.580 | Academic abilities, skills.

03:01:27.540 | There certainly seem to be basic inborn differences among us.

03:01:32.980 | Some of us are smarter, some of us are stronger, some of us are bigger, some of us are smaller,

03:01:36.740 | some of us are prettier, some of us are not.

03:01:39.880 | You work with what you got, and you enhance it to the absolute maximum.

03:01:44.400 | But don't be scared to set standards for what you're looking for.

03:01:50.200 | If you want to be wealthy in the long term, marry a spouse that is going to make it probable

03:01:57.200 | that you are wealthy.

03:01:58.880 | So go ahead, set your standards.

03:02:01.180 | Marry somebody who's going to make it happen, who's going to make that likely.

03:02:04.920 | But you're going to have to step up and develop yourself if you're just not naturally, innately

03:02:11.800 | gifted on those levels.

03:02:13.200 | I hope this has been useful for you.

03:02:15.020 | Take whatever is useful, discard the rest.

03:02:17.520 | Take it and talk about it.

03:02:19.040 | We've got a lot of work to do within our families, within our local cultures, and more broadly,

03:02:26.000 | because it's our responsibility to help younger people to think.

03:02:31.080 | We've got to cultivate and fix some of the problems that our society has created.

03:02:34.880 | And if you're younger, just know I'm doing my best to fulfill my responsibility to give

03:02:38.420 | you useful thoughts.

03:02:39.420 | Again, take what's useful, discard the rest.

03:02:42.140 | You can do it.

03:02:43.140 | You can find somebody if you'll work on these things, and you can find someone that's going

03:02:46.380 | to result in your having long-term financial success in addition to all of the other important

03:02:51.200 | areas of success.

03:02:52.200 | I'll be back with you very soon.

2024-05-06_Financially_Productive_Characteristics_to_Look_for_In_a_Potential_Spouse