2024-08-15_Earn_More_Money_by_Growing

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00:00:29.920 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:32.720 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:36.800 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets,

00:00:40.720 | and today on the show, I want to dig into one of those extremely esoteric personal finance topics

00:00:48.720 | that interests me enormously, and I hope that you also will find it interesting.

00:00:55.280 | What topic is that, you say? It's the topic of how to grow tall, or put more accurately as to

00:01:03.040 | most of what I'm going to discuss, how to help your children to grow tall. What does this have

00:01:09.760 | to do with personal finance, you ask? Well, we've been aware for quite a while that there's pretty

00:01:15.680 | good documentation that indicates that tall people, most especially tall men, tend to earn

00:01:23.600 | more money over their careers. This has been documented in various countries and in various

00:01:30.720 | sectors. How much? Well, I've seen evidence that claims that it's either a little bit below or a

00:01:37.680 | little bit above about 2% of an increase in earnings for each inch of height. If a man is

00:01:44.080 | an inch taller, you can increase his earnings by something like around 2%. That's pretty significant.

00:01:51.520 | It adds up over time. I would say also that that's not the only thing. I think that generally,

00:01:57.840 | tall men have an easier time gaining leadership positions, gaining promotions. This is often

00:02:03.280 | talked about as the height premium. Taller individuals are more likely to be CEOs of

00:02:07.440 | companies and hold other high-level positions. There's a positive correlation between

00:02:14.080 | tall individuals and prestigious occupations, high-status occupations.

00:02:19.200 | In addition, being tall can positively influence a lot of social perceptions and relationships.

00:02:25.520 | Generally, if you're taller, you enjoy greater social dominance, higher status. It makes the

00:02:31.920 | dating and marriage market a lot easier to be a tall man as compared to being a short man.

00:02:37.120 | And in general, school goes better. Height has been positively correlated with better academic

00:02:44.160 | outcomes. So, in general, being tall is one of those cheat codes in life, and it makes a big

00:02:51.040 | difference. Now, naturally, you might ask, "Why? Why does it make a difference?" Well, we don't

00:02:56.480 | know for certain. Some researchers are trying to demonstrate academic research that would tell us,

00:03:03.120 | but there seem to be a couple of basic theories. One theory is referred to as the human capital

00:03:09.920 | theory, that height is not directly the key factor that is causing greater levels of success,

00:03:17.120 | but we can use height as a convenient proxy for overall human capital, especially during

00:03:23.920 | childhood. A child is likely taller because he receives better nutrition or better health care

00:03:31.120 | and therefore is also getting better cognitive development, getting better educational outcomes

00:03:36.640 | because he's in an environment where he's properly cared for. So, his genetic capacity is enhanced,

00:03:43.920 | and those early advantages turn out to stay with him for life. Think of this in the context of

00:03:52.000 | some of the idea that if your child is one of the oldest ones in his grade, he has a built-in

00:03:58.000 | advantage, a built-in social privilege that will endure and cause him to be a standout person all

00:04:03.440 | along the way. That would be the human capital theory. Other people theorize that it just has

00:04:08.320 | to do with bias and discrimination against people who are not tall, some form of height

00:04:13.600 | discrimination or heightism that taller individuals get positive biases, psychological things, and

00:04:22.080 | short people face subtle or overt discrimination that causes problems for them, and that bias is

00:04:28.960 | continually present throughout their life. Now, which of those theories is true? I don't know.

00:04:34.000 | I would guess that they're probably both true. I could believe both of them. I think that height

00:04:40.160 | probably is a pretty decent proxy for other aspects of health, and I'll give some evidence

00:04:45.520 | for that in a moment. I also think that there is probably just some of these psychosocial factors

00:04:50.640 | that are relevant, that it's just kind of a basic bias that we have in favor of tall people,

00:04:56.960 | and it's probably not a bad thing in the same way that beauty is probably a pretty decent

00:05:01.280 | predictor of overall health. That's why we're attracted to beauty. Height is also a pretty

00:05:06.240 | decent predictor of overall health, and that's why we're attracted to it. But as always, I don't

00:05:11.200 | think that we should judge people by outward experiences or outward characteristics exclusively.

00:05:16.960 | We should judge people by the content of their character and their expressed character,

00:05:22.640 | their character qualities, rather than based upon some innate characteristic that that individual

00:05:28.640 | almost certainly had no impact over. But in life, we're always looking to get as much benefits and

00:05:34.320 | advantage and privilege as we're able to get, and we want our children to have as many benefits and

00:05:38.880 | advantages and privilege as we can pass along to them. Height is not free. It's not exclusively

00:05:46.480 | a good thing. I tell you, as a very tall man, there are many times when I have envied short

00:05:52.400 | people. There are a whole list of frustrations and annoyances that I have experienced.

00:05:57.360 | When I was a teenager, I found it quite annoying that my mom had to buy me a special bed and

00:06:03.600 | special bedding, an extra long mattress so that I could fit on it. To this day, it's quite annoying

00:06:08.640 | to me to go to hotel beds where they put the sheets really tight because the first thing I

00:06:12.960 | have to do is kick out the sheets because my feet always hang off of the end of a bed. It's annoying.

00:06:17.120 | I've many times been envious of my small friends when we're on an airplane flight,

00:06:22.560 | and they can just sit down in an economy class airplane seat and sit down and be

00:06:25.920 | totally fine or curl up in the corner of a car or sometimes stretch out in something short.

00:06:30.080 | A number of years ago, my wife and I had a motorhome where we slept crossways on the vehicle,

00:06:35.360 | and I never slept well in that motorhome because I had to go diagonal on the bed

00:06:40.400 | because I can't fit just across the vehicle, whereas short people don't have those problems.

00:06:45.200 | It's annoying to have shoes. I have this thing. Ever since I was probably about 14 years old,

00:06:49.280 | I can never get shoes in a shoe store. It's enormously annoying because the way that I shop

00:06:56.240 | for shoes in real life is I walk into a shoe store and say, "Do you have any size 16 shoes?"

00:07:00.800 | And they say, "No, we don't." And I walk out again. I don't even bother to look at what I like. I look

00:07:05.200 | at what's available. Thank God for the internet because the internet came along and I was able

00:07:09.200 | to finally find shoes for myself. But even now, I am petrified about having a pair of shoes break

00:07:15.440 | on me when traveling because I can't just go into a store and get a pair of shoes. I'm forever stuck

00:07:20.080 | with whatever I can bring. And so these are just a bunch of dumb little annoyances. On the whole,

00:07:26.320 | though, none of them are a big deal. And I don't think I would ever trade out these annoyances for

00:07:32.240 | being shorter, and I don't think there's many short men out there that wouldn't be happy to

00:07:36.800 | take on those annoyances in exchange for being tall. By the way, there are some arguments that

00:07:43.040 | tall people experience certain diseases that other people don't, so maybe it's not all free.

00:07:48.640 | And there are some arguments that tall people have less of certain diseases than others. So

00:07:54.160 | on the whole, I'm happy to be the height that I'm happy that I am, and I don't have any complaints

00:07:59.440 | about it. And I want to help you and others experience those benefits if we possibly can.

00:08:05.120 | So the question comes back to, is height something that can be adjusted?

00:08:09.520 | Is height something that can be influenced? And I'm here to tell you that I believe it is.

00:08:14.480 | And I'll give a scientific disclaimer here in a moment, but what inspired me to do this show was

00:08:18.960 | I realized when I was doing that Genius show on Monday that there's so many aspects of life that

00:08:24.080 | we consider to be immutable, so many things that we think we can't change. And in reality,

00:08:28.960 | they can be influenced and they can be changed. And yet, you know, we don't—if we could change it,

00:08:35.680 | if we could positively affect it, why wouldn't we? And one of the benefits of wealth, meaning

00:08:40.480 | having a high income where you can afford to do certain things for yourself or for your children,

00:08:44.720 | you should spend money on changing these things. So I'm going to tell you how to spend money

00:08:49.680 | to help yourself or your children be tall on today's podcast, and I'm going to give you a

00:08:54.720 | broad overview of it. I think at its core, the most important thing is to just simply observe that

00:09:01.040 | height can change. All of us do have a certain genetic potential in our basic genes, but that

00:09:09.360 | genetic potential is kind of a dormant guide that will vary significantly based upon our outward

00:09:17.600 | experience in life. And perhaps one of the most important factors is something like nutrition.

00:09:24.080 | We can see this in populations. We can see that in populations of different countries,

00:09:29.040 | that as people have access to more food and better nutrition, people's height increases.

00:09:35.280 | And if we can tap into that, while it's certainly clear that we do have a genetic potential for all

00:09:41.600 | of us, we can maximize whatever the potential that we have is. I've even seen this in my own

00:09:47.200 | family, which is rather interesting. My father is not tall. I think he's, I'm guessing, 5'10".

00:09:54.080 | By the way, if I sound cavalier about height, I sounds ridiculous, but I'll just tell you honestly

00:09:59.520 | how it is. I'm like 6'5", 6'6", something like that. I haven't measured my height since high

00:10:04.400 | school. At the time, I was 6'5" and 3/4". Usually, I shoot down and say 6'5", but 6'5" or 6'6",

00:10:10.400 | something like that. I should measure myself, but I just don't care. When you're tall at a

00:10:14.800 | certain point, it doesn't matter, but it matters a lot to some shorter guys. When you're tall,

00:10:20.000 | though, the experience that you have in life is that basically height is irrelevant to you.

00:10:24.640 | You don't notice how tall anybody is. They're just kind of all below you somewhere, and that's

00:10:29.600 | normal. You don't even think about it. It's only when you actually meet someone who's your height

00:10:34.800 | or taller that you notice it. A couple months ago, I was talking with a guy who was 7'4",

00:10:40.480 | and I'm 6'6". He's 7'4". He's less than a foot taller than me, but it was a very unusual and

00:10:46.800 | awkward experience for me, and it was a profoundly great reminder of how I appear to a lot of other

00:10:53.200 | people. By the way, this is something that you have to learn to manage. One of the things that

00:10:58.080 | I learned to do over the years being tall is I developed a habit of stepping back slightly from

00:11:05.280 | a lot of people. Generally, if you're in a conversation with me, unless I can't hear,

00:11:09.040 | because sometimes you can't hear people when your head is up high, so I'll usually step back,

00:11:13.440 | and then I spread my legs out to be a little less threatening, less overpowering to people.

00:11:17.840 | There are downsides to being super tall, or tall. I don't consider myself super tall,

00:11:23.360 | but there are downsides to being tall, and you have to learn to deal with them.

00:11:27.520 | Back to my family history. It's interesting. My father, I think he's something like 5'10".

00:11:31.280 | My mom is shorter than him. I don't know how tall she is, but my dad is the shortest man

00:11:35.840 | in my family. In my family, there are four sons, and our height increases on each and every child.

00:11:46.320 | So my eldest brother is taller than my father is, but he's the shortest of all of my dad's sons.

00:11:52.080 | Then my next eldest brother is a little taller, then my next eldest brother is a little taller,

00:11:58.000 | and then I'm the youngest, and I am the tallest. I've always found this a fascinating

00:12:03.680 | anecdotal demonstration of the importance of nutrition. My parents always cared about

00:12:10.640 | nutrition. My grandfather was an early adopter of vitamins, and he was a chemist, and so he was

00:12:15.920 | super interested in health when he was younger and took vitamins. My mom was always interested

00:12:21.280 | in health food and trying to serve the healthiest food. I would say over the years, my family's

00:12:26.800 | nutrition improved, and my parents' nutrition improved, so they probably gave their children

00:12:33.040 | different genetic and epigenetic material to work with, and then the nutrition improved with their

00:12:39.360 | actual children. You see this kind of perfect stair step of height as my family's wealth

00:12:44.560 | increased, and they probably could afford more food and better expressions of food.

00:12:50.000 | This is anecdotal, but just as an example, I noticed with my parents that when I was a boy,

00:12:55.760 | when I was very young, we could never afford things like orange juice. We would have frozen

00:13:00.320 | from concentrate orange juice. Then as I got older, then my mom started to buy the real orange

00:13:06.400 | juice. When I was younger, we could never afford maple syrup, and so my mom would make maple syrup

00:13:11.840 | using maple flavoring and a little bit of corn syrup, and she would make her own syrup for

00:13:15.840 | pancakes. As we got older, though, then real maple syrup appeared on the table.

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00:14:23.360 | And so these are just expressions of wealth. As it increases over time,

00:14:27.040 | then you can spend more money on groceries. And that undoubtedly had an impact on me reaching

00:14:34.240 | the highest of all of my brothers and of being significantly above the average height of the

00:14:41.600 | male population. My point in all this is just to demonstrate that while we all have to acknowledge

00:14:46.960 | the role that human genetics play in our height, we know that genetics are not... We can enhance

00:14:53.760 | our genetic potential. We see that in cultures. We see that as people go from societies of poverty

00:14:59.840 | to rich societies, and they can gain more. One of my favorite... Empty America,

00:15:06.160 | VB Knives. I have no idea. I forget what his name is. Just my favorite Twitter follower is

00:15:10.960 | Empty America. He always makes the point, if you look at the United States and you see this,

00:15:15.360 | you'll find a Mexican kid whose dad is 5'6" and mom is 5'5". Mexican kid will move to the United

00:15:21.360 | States, eat Big Macs every day because now he has enough proper protein. The kid is 6'1" and

00:15:28.080 | massively taller than dad and mom because of the access to high-quality food sources.

00:15:32.800 | The United States produces amazing levels of athletes probably because of Big Macs,

00:15:36.960 | because the fact that high-protein food like McDonald's is so cheap, comparatively speaking,

00:15:43.280 | that a teenager who has this kind of locked-in genetic potential can produce these huge

00:15:50.320 | young people. There's kind of the classic Nebraska Cornhusker football player,

00:15:55.760 | is that if you go out to a Nebraska football team, you find all these boys that grew up eating

00:16:02.160 | nothing but nonstop beef and corn, and they're huge. The United States is one of the few countries

00:16:07.520 | in the world that something like the NFL can actually work because of the basic size that

00:16:12.880 | is necessary for the athletes. Non-Americans like to make fun, I think rightly so, at the

00:16:18.320 | United States calling something like the Super Bowl the world champions of football, American

00:16:24.960 | football. They like to make fun, "Well, you're the only people in the world that call yourselves the

00:16:28.880 | world champions when you're the only country in the world that is participating in this sport."

00:16:32.880 | I think that's a good joke and a proper thing to make fun of. I think that in addition to that,

00:16:38.160 | if the NFL were open to teams from all around the world, it wouldn't make a lick of difference

00:16:43.120 | because, at least in my travels, I've never seen another place with a wealthy enough country

00:16:51.040 | where you can build thousands and thousands of big men that wind up filling something like

00:16:59.920 | the National Football League. If you just look at the sheer meat that is necessary for that league

00:17:05.600 | to work, probably the United States is the only country in the world that's wealthy enough to

00:17:10.320 | produce that kind of size with tens of thousands of participants that wind up making it to a

00:17:15.440 | professional sports league. So, obviously, you can have all kinds of genetic outliers in many

00:17:22.560 | other countries. One of my favorite athletes is a Siberian Russian wrestler named Alexander

00:17:27.920 | Karolin, the Russian bear. Dude was just an absolute monster, incredible guy, incredible

00:17:36.000 | wrestler, probably one of the – I'm not a sports guy, but certainly one of the greatest of all time

00:17:41.840 | in terms of his absolute prowess. So, he's a good example of how you can have a monster of a man in

00:17:48.720 | a sport, but you only need one of him to compete in a single sport like that. A sport like the NFL,

00:17:54.720 | you need thousands and thousands of monster men to feed it at the college level – thousands

00:18:00.480 | and thousands is probably – I don't know what exact number to use. The point is you need a huge

00:18:06.320 | participation at the high school level to feed a college level, to feed a professional sports

00:18:12.000 | franchise. And when size is king in something like that, then you need a rich country in order to

00:18:20.160 | feed people enough to make them grow large. So, how do you actually get large? And more

00:18:26.080 | appropriately, how do you actually get your children large? If you want your children to

00:18:30.800 | be tall, what can you actually do? What I'm about to say in this section is the most proven

00:18:38.000 | of this show. So, I'm going to give you kind of the things that I think are – we know for

00:18:43.200 | pretty certain, and then we'll get into kind of some of the more questionable stuff. And I'll

00:18:47.680 | make a brief – before we get into the questionable stuff, I'll indicate where we'd make the turn from

00:18:52.400 | what we know to bro science, which I have a high respect for, but we'll talk about that in a

00:18:58.480 | moment. What are the core foundations? Well, when I give people this speech on how to help your

00:19:03.280 | children grow large, here are some things that we know are absolutely essential. The first one

00:19:10.000 | is in order for your children to grow large, they must have access to enough calories.

00:19:17.200 | When children grow up in a starvation environment where they don't have access to enough calories,

00:19:23.040 | they don't grow large. But when children have access to enough food, then they can reach their

00:19:30.960 | genetic potential. So, as a parent, I believe that your basic rule for children should be,

00:19:38.400 | "My children have unlimited access to unlimited calories. All children who are growing up should

00:19:47.040 | have access to unlimited quantities of calories." That statement, I believe, is true with regard to

00:19:57.600 | height generation. But obviously, if you're anything like me, it probably struck some fear

00:20:04.320 | in your heart. How do I make sure that I don't have a bunch of fat slobs for children? How do

00:20:09.600 | I avoid this? If I'm going to give children access to unlimited quantities of calories,

00:20:14.160 | how do I make sure they don't just, again, turn into fat slobs? I don't want that. That's not the

00:20:18.960 | goal. Well, I think here your defensive strategy is to make certain that your house is empty of

00:20:25.920 | all junk calories. I believe that children should have access to unlimited quantities of calories,

00:20:32.000 | but only in certain forms. And so, what I do my very best to do and what I think is the right way

00:20:38.160 | is keep a house that is empty of junk food. So, your house should be full of all kinds of options,

00:20:44.960 | and they should be primarily centered around whole food, but there should be no junk food

00:20:50.480 | in your house, no empty garbage junk food. Children should never have access to that stuff

00:20:56.480 | on a regular basis. I think it's fine if every couple of months you go to some kind of birthday

00:21:06.480 | party and there's Doritos there. Great. But don't have that garbage in your house. It's fine if you

00:21:11.120 | go to a pizza party at school. Great. But don't have pizza in your house, and don't ever have

00:21:16.240 | that kind of stuff as a natural part of it. If you have unlimited access to high-quality calories of

00:21:23.440 | real food, then your children can satisfy their hunger, reach their genetic potential,

00:21:29.600 | and that will be the key factor for them. A huge component of the calories that are

00:21:37.600 | available to your children should be protein. So, one of the most important nutrients to maximize

00:21:43.920 | is protein. So, the perfect diet, as far as I'm concerned with my knowledge, and I probably should

00:21:50.080 | have given more disclaimers. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a doctor. I'll undoubtedly make

00:21:54.640 | mistakes in everything I'm going to tell you. I'm just doing my best as a layman to say, based upon

00:21:59.280 | my research, here are the things that I think are probably true. You check with all of the relevant

00:22:03.680 | experts, and please, experts, if I get any of this wrong, correct me on it, because I am not

00:22:07.680 | a biology guy. I just listen, and this is the best I've got. So, the key nutrient to overemphasize on

00:22:15.040 | is protein. The bulk of your child's diet should be made up of protein, and the most important

00:22:24.480 | forms of protein are animal proteins. So, the perfect diet for a teenager, a 12-year-old boy,

00:22:35.760 | or a 14-year-old boy, or a 16-year-old boy would be eggs for breakfast, five, six, eight eggs,

00:22:41.920 | whatever he'll eat for breakfast, with several glasses of raw milk. Lunch, ideally, would be

00:22:49.600 | a form of protein, maybe two or three hamburgers and some vegetables or fruit on the side,

00:22:55.600 | and then dinner should be steaks. Dinner should be as much red meat as possible. Steak, burgers,

00:23:02.320 | whatever you have access to, lamb, whatever you have, but as much access to as much meat as

00:23:08.320 | possible. That should form the basic foundation of the diet. And by having access to huge quantities

00:23:15.360 | of protein, then your child will have the necessary building blocks of his body.

00:23:21.760 | Now, related to this is also fat. You want to emphasize a high-fat diet, so especially animal

00:23:30.400 | fats and naturally-occurring oils fats, naturally-occurring oils like olive oil, coconut

00:23:36.640 | oil, things like that. You need to avoid all seed oils and all vegetable oils. All of that needs to

00:23:42.320 | be completely stripped from the diet, but emphasize high quantities of fat. I never hear of fat as a

00:23:48.720 | nutrient coming into play as a recommendation for height. There, it's always protein, when you hear

00:23:55.760 | people talk about the research that we know about it, but fat is really, really important for

00:24:00.160 | cognition, for brain development, for cognition, and for satiation, for having the body properly

00:24:06.480 | regulate everything. I don't think that a zero-carbohydrate or a low-carbohydrate diet is

00:24:12.880 | necessarily the best choice for a teenager, a person who's metabolically healthy. In fact,

00:24:20.880 | when you actually get to the hormone level of human growth hormone, HGH and IGF, and these

00:24:26.160 | actual hormones that drive the creation of height, although I can't explain the actual metabolic

00:24:32.480 | process sufficiently here in this format, that insulin production and having a spike in insulin

00:24:40.160 | actually enhances some of those hormones. So, carbohydrates, I don't think, are the enemy

00:24:45.760 | for metabolically normal children and teens, but in general, the carbohydrates should be consumed

00:24:53.680 | in the morning and at lunchtime and not consumed in the evening, if possible, for the best hormonal

00:25:00.880 | response, and they should be healthy carbohydrates. So, it should never be sugar. Sugar is a poison.

00:25:07.920 | It shouldn't be bread. It should be potatoes and other carbohydrate vegetables to the extent that

00:25:13.840 | you're going to have carbohydrates. But the key thing to overemphasize is going to be protein.

00:25:20.240 | So, let me summarize the formula for you so far. Number one, unlimited quantities of calories,

00:25:26.960 | primarily focused on protein, heavy amounts of protein, supplemented by significant amounts of

00:25:33.040 | fat, and you should eliminate all of the junk, especially all of the junk that can mess all the

00:25:40.960 | signals of satiety up. The primary way to avoid a young person being fat is to avoid eating the

00:25:51.120 | kinds of junk food that mess up his ability to know when he is satisfied. And so, if you're only

00:25:57.920 | eating healthy food, and healthy food is the food that is available to you, then you're going to eat

00:26:04.400 | until you're full, and then you're going to stop. And when you're hungry, you're going to eat again

00:26:07.680 | until you're full, and then you're going to stop. It's only when you get into all the fake chemicals

00:26:10.720 | and all the garbage that messes all that system up that then we worry about people just dramatically

00:26:15.600 | overeating beyond their normal capacity. The next thing that is absolutely necessary

00:26:23.200 | after huge amounts of calories, unlimited calories and lots of protein is sleep. After that,

00:26:31.200 | the second most important thing that a young person can do in order to reach his maximum height

00:26:36.320 | potential is to sleep. It is my strong conviction that if at all possible, children and young people

00:26:45.440 | should always sleep naturally with no artificial awakening. I understand that our entire society

00:26:53.760 | has screwed this entire thing up. Everything in our modern society is an enemy to sleep.

00:26:59.280 | We have artificial lights that allow us to stay up and be productive and be stimulated until

00:27:05.360 | late into the night. We have artificial devices that stimulate us. They stimulate us with blue

00:27:10.640 | light late at night. They stimulate us with constant kind of things that keep our brains engaged.

00:27:15.840 | We're engaged with constant and never-ending controversies and stresses that keep our brains

00:27:20.800 | awake. So we go to bed late, especially teens. They're up half the night. They go to bed late,

00:27:26.240 | doing all kinds of crazy stuff all through the night, going to bed at one o'clock in the morning.

00:27:30.160 | And then our entire school system, at least in the standard model in the United States,

00:27:34.960 | starts far too early, and teens are dragged out of bed early in the morning to be at school at

00:27:40.560 | seven o'clock in the morning. And all of this is unnatural, and all of it is destructive for

00:27:45.280 | a young person's success. This is not only destructive for height, by the way. This is

00:27:50.720 | also destructive for learning. All of the learning science that we're aware of indicates that

00:27:56.160 | memories are processed, and learning happens during sleep. Learning doesn't happen when you

00:28:00.880 | listen to a tape where you're just going to learn French in your sleep. That does not work.

00:28:04.960 | But all of the learning is cemented during the nightly flushing that happens in the brain,

00:28:09.760 | and all of your actual learning is consolidated. And so, basically, the standard model for teens

00:28:15.760 | where they stay up really late, get very little, small amounts of sleep, get up way too early and

00:28:22.560 | go to school way too early, it destroys all of the cognitive benefit of learning during the daytime

00:28:29.760 | because the memories are never processed. They never actually learn. But that's the academic

00:28:34.240 | side. What about the physical side? Well, the body grows during sleep, and it grows during sleep both

00:28:39.280 | literally, physically, but also during the production of certain hormones. So, the bulk

00:28:44.640 | of your human growth hormone is produced in a healthy body during sleep, and the most important

00:28:50.320 | sleep is the first hour. That's when all of the hormones are produced. So, if you have a teenager,

00:28:56.480 | and you want your teenager to grow tall, the single cornerstone habit that you can instill

00:29:01.120 | is to go to bed at the same exact time every single day, ideally as early as is reasonable.

00:29:10.320 | Now, I have not raised teenagers myself. It is my understanding from listening to other people with

00:29:16.480 | their stories of their teenagers, as well as a little cursory awareness of some of the studies

00:29:21.600 | on it, that the circadian rhythm of a teen naturally changes basically regardless of the

00:29:26.720 | environment. I'm skeptical that it has to be that way, but I'm willing to acknowledge that

00:29:32.720 | your teenager is probably going to stay up later. That's what every parent of teens tells me is the

00:29:38.480 | case, and so I'm willing to acknowledge that that's probably the case, even though I fight against it.

00:29:44.480 | And I'm going to fight against it until I'm forced by outward circumstances to change.

00:29:50.240 | So, maybe it is the case that bedtime has to move from 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock, right? That's fine.

00:29:58.240 | But the bedtime for a teenager should certainly not be 12 o'clock midnight, should certainly not

00:30:03.840 | be 2 o'clock in the morning. The bedtime for a teenager should be as early as possible in the

00:30:10.560 | evening and as much of a wind down as possible, and he should get to bed early and prioritize

00:30:18.240 | sleep. Now, obviously, I can remember being a teen. Teens are often not enthusiastic about

00:30:24.720 | a "early bedtime." But if you want your teen to have maximum success in life, in academic outcomes,

00:30:32.320 | as well as in physical outcomes, you have to prioritize sleep. And perhaps this will help

00:30:38.240 | you if you're the parent of teens and you're fighting with your teens. Dig into the literature

00:30:42.320 | a little bit and understand how important sleep is to both physical growth, physical development,

00:30:47.520 | athletic performance, as well as proper just hormonal regulation and long-term academic

00:30:55.200 | outcomes. I can't overstate how comprehensively consistent the literature is on this. There is no

00:31:02.640 | literature that I have ever found that indicates that sleep should not be a cornerstone habit.

00:31:08.320 | So my suggestion for you with a teen is engage your teen with it and use height as potentially

00:31:14.640 | that thing, a motivator. I think a lot of teens are simply unaware, probably less now than when

00:31:21.280 | I was younger. But I was a teenager. Nobody ever talked about this stuff. Today, with bro science

00:31:26.560 | and YouTube and social networks and whatnot, all this kind of information comes across a teenager's

00:31:31.920 | screen much more effectively, and then teenagers who are motivated can dig into it. But if you're

00:31:36.960 | a parent, dig into it yourself so that you can help your teenager to be motivated and to be

00:31:41.120 | knowledgeable about it. If you have a young man that you're raising as a teenager and he wants

00:31:46.640 | to grow tall, then a cornerstone habit for him after eating enough and only eating high-quality

00:31:53.120 | food, a cornerstone habit needs to be sleep. And hopefully, this will give you an extra tool

00:31:58.480 | to motivate him. And if you want the best outcome, let me tell you what I think is the best. How do

00:32:04.160 | you get great sleep? Number one is you should try to arrange so that whenever possible,

00:32:09.120 | your evening schedule involves some kind of early-ish wind down, so not a lot of high

00:32:14.960 | stimulation activities in the evening. Now, you choose whatever time is appropriate for your

00:32:19.920 | functioning of your community. This will probably change between summer and winter and at different

00:32:24.560 | seasons of life, but try to arrange for some kind of wind down. Try to make certain that your home

00:32:29.600 | is not excessively bright, so making certain that your home is populated with yellow lights and that

00:32:35.120 | you can dim the lights as the evening goes on will make a big difference. I have a very hard time

00:32:40.240 | believing that if we were to go back 200 years and we're all living by candlelight, that somehow

00:32:46.480 | teens are going to have that much of a hard time falling asleep at 8 o'clock when the sun goes down

00:32:51.440 | like everyone else does. Now, I don't know that. I can't prove that. I'm just skeptical of that

00:32:56.960 | stuff. But regardless, we know that pulling down the light is a big deal, especially we know that

00:33:03.520 | if at all possible, we want dim lights. That's the most important thing as compared to bright lights.

00:33:08.320 | We want to get rid of blue lights if at all possible. So if it's possible, we want to

00:33:13.280 | eliminate the use of screens and bulbs that give off blue light. You can do this using night mode

00:33:20.240 | on devices, night modes on TVs, night modes on phones, night modes on computers, and you can also

00:33:25.280 | use blue light blocking glasses. These are quite popular. I have no experience myself with them,

00:33:29.600 | but these are quite popular for a lot of people. And so get a pair of blue light blocking glasses

00:33:37.040 | and start wearing those after dinner if you require doing some homework on the computer or

00:33:41.680 | things like that, and use night mode. And then have a consistent early bedtime. And so what I

00:33:48.880 | would suggest for teens not having ever fathered a teen, so maybe I'm mistaken about this, but I

00:33:55.520 | really believe this is a good foundation, is have your teen consistently go to bed at an early time.

00:34:01.840 | Something like in most cultures, something like 9 to 10 o'clock I think would be ideal,

00:34:05.760 | maybe earlier if possible. And then if your teen can't fall asleep due to that kind of natural

00:34:12.960 | circadian rhythm change, then have him read with a physical book, not a fake book, not an e-reader,

00:34:24.000 | have him read with a physical book, and have him read with a very dim yellow light. So just a soft

00:34:29.840 | artificial candle, that's what I like, is just kind of a soft artificial candle, or get a yellow

00:34:34.880 | book light for the purposes of reading in bed. So if a teen is lying down in bed, horizontal,

00:34:41.760 | in a completely dark room, reading for an hour or two, then he should naturally fall asleep

00:34:48.240 | when his body is ready and prepared to go to sleep. The sleeping room should be as dark as

00:34:53.520 | possible. You should use blackout curtains, or the teen should use an eye mask if necessary,

00:34:59.200 | but the room should be as dark as possible. It should be very cool, as cool as possible.

00:35:04.800 | And then there should be no non-natural waking time. So there should be no alarm clock. There

00:35:12.720 | should be no artificial awaking unless it's absolutely necessary. If you find that your teen

00:35:21.440 | has to get up to go to school at a certain time, then you have the only solution you have to that

00:35:26.560 | that's best for the health of the teen. If you're not going to pull him out and homeschool and say,

00:35:30.560 | "We can start school when you wake up," then you need to dial back the bedtime in order for him to

00:35:35.600 | get a full night's sleep. Food, protein, and sleep are the cornerstone factors that will influence

00:35:47.440 | height as well as everything else. All other performance and health and beauty and everything

00:35:53.760 | is influenced by those. Prioritize sleep and use the motivation that a young man may have to be

00:36:00.720 | tall or use the motivation that a young woman may have to be beautiful and tall and smart to

00:36:08.080 | prioritize sleep and motivate your teenagers to go to bed early. Because when we're talking about

00:36:14.000 | height, remember, you only get puberty once. The time to maximize your height is before and during

00:36:19.840 | puberty when you have the most potential. I'll briefly touch on post-puberty height

00:36:26.160 | at the end of the show, but don't miss puberty and don't consign your child who could grow to be

00:36:35.280 | 6'2" to have him be stuck at 5'8" and then whining around online that all the girls want

00:36:41.840 | a 6' boyfriend. Don't consign him to that just because he was goofing off all night on social

00:36:47.200 | media. End that and create a household that goes to bed early, which means, of course, that you,

00:36:52.240 | as a parent, you have to set the same solution. By the way, I think that's probably reasonable.

00:36:58.000 | Some people are night owls, but on the whole, there's good evidence that the most important

00:37:02.720 | sleep is the sleep that happens early. I forget if it's before midnight, but they can track it.

00:37:07.440 | The sleep researchers see it. All right, what's the next factor that we know absolutely improves

00:37:14.320 | height? Well, here it's athletics, it's movement, and most importantly, a special kind of movement.

00:37:21.520 | If you are parenting someone who wants to grow tall, you want to prioritize sprints.

00:37:29.200 | This is much more important than long, slow cardio. Sprinting has been demonstrated to

00:37:37.920 | enormously increase the production of human growth hormone, and basically what we're doing

00:37:43.360 | with these techniques is trying to maximize the hormonal potential of a body. And so,

00:37:49.760 | there should be lots and lots of sprinting in a teenager's life. That should be the cornerstone

00:37:56.640 | thing to emphasize, lots and lots of sprinting. If you have lots of sprinting, which stimulates

00:38:02.880 | human growth hormone, lots of sleep, which stimulates human growth hormone, especially

00:38:07.600 | the first hour, and lots of food, then your child should reach his genetic maximum fairly easily.

00:38:14.960 | But it needs to happen consistently from the beginning on.

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00:38:35.920 | Tell that taco to hit the trail, it's Take and Bake Tuesday's time to triumph.

00:38:39.840 | Time out, this is turning into a tongue twister.

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00:38:46.640 | Change the way you pizza.

00:38:47.840 | And so, this should be always kind of a primary thing that you are driving towards.

00:38:53.840 | So, develop a structure where your child is sprinting consistently,

00:38:59.600 | and that sprinting should be constant and built into life.

00:39:04.560 | Incidentally, this is also going to help with many of the other things that we know have a

00:39:09.840 | knock-on effect. I'm here trying to focus on the big things that are obvious and easy for you to

00:39:16.560 | take away from here. But sprinting will have a very natural effect on helping your child to

00:39:23.600 | maintain a low body fat percentage. Being lean is very important for HGH and IGF-1 production.

00:39:30.080 | So, you want to emphasize leanness. Well, if someone is eating a lot,

00:39:34.960 | even if it's all high quality, how do we make certain that he doesn't get fat?

00:39:39.520 | We have exercise, and so that's where sprinting comes in.

00:39:42.800 | By sprinting, you are going to stimulate high quantities of human growth hormone.

00:39:49.840 | Sprinting also should lead to a child being more athletic. I've become convinced that speed is

00:39:56.560 | trainable. When I was young, I always just thought, "Well, you're the speed that you are."

00:40:00.880 | But no, people can learn to be faster. Again, there's probably going to be genetic limitations,

00:40:05.600 | but most people can become faster. So, teaching your teenagers to be fast and getting them under

00:40:12.720 | a good sprint coach is going to help them to grow, but it's also going to help them in their

00:40:16.720 | athleticism. It's going to lead to their potentially having more success with things like sport.

00:40:24.080 | We know that this will significantly increase testosterone production,

00:40:27.680 | which is hugely important for long-term growth. When men are in highly competitive masculine

00:40:33.760 | environments, especially things like sports competition, then that environment itself

00:40:39.360 | stimulates testosterone production. So, we want to do everything possible to create these

00:40:44.400 | environmental factors to stimulate testosterone production. Now, sprinting has both the hormonal

00:40:51.200 | benefit as well as having the physical benefit, and by sprinting here, I'm referring to running,

00:40:58.800 | doing running sprints. We want to create an environment of as much physical activity as

00:41:05.360 | possible, and we want to create an environment with as much physical shock as possible.

00:41:11.680 | There are many, many important reasons why we also want to do weightlifting and build muscle.

00:41:16.240 | All of that is going to be super important, but it's not directly related to height,

00:41:20.640 | and in fact, it could have a negative effect on height due to compression of the bones.

00:41:27.360 | We should do it, but it could have a negative effect on height. So, somebody who is kind of

00:41:32.560 | in puberty or nearing the end of puberty and is very short, we would probably avoid heavy squats

00:41:38.080 | because we don't want to engage in anything that could be compressive on the skeletal system,

00:41:42.320 | and we would use other kinds of exercise. The kinds of exercise that we want to maximize

00:41:47.040 | in order to stimulate height are shock exercises and especially jumping exercises.

00:41:53.680 | We want to stimulate bone growth and we want to stimulate nerve response and basically stretching

00:42:00.320 | out. So, the perfect exercise is going to be sprinting and then jumping exercises like basketball

00:42:08.240 | or volleyball, especially not sand volleyball where there's less impact, but court volleyball.

00:42:14.640 | Anything where we're constantly jumping is going to send signals to the body

00:42:18.880 | to indicate that it should grow, and especially while those growth plates are open,

00:42:24.240 | we want every part of the nervous system to be focused on growing as tall as possible.

00:42:30.640 | So, do tall people play basketball or does basketball create tall people?

00:42:35.600 | Yes, both of those are true, but basketball and constant jumping and constant looking for height

00:42:45.680 | actually, as best I understand it, seems to stimulate growth in the body.

00:42:50.640 | There are other also interesting effects of this. Just the physical shock of this

00:42:55.040 | has an important impact on the bones. Now, bones grow, again, not a doctor,

00:43:01.280 | forgive me if I get this wrong, but it's my understanding, bones grow in basically two ways.

00:43:05.520 | The primary way that bones grow has to do with the growth plates. So, during puberty,

00:43:12.560 | while the growth plates are open, the bone is just growing naturally through that normal process,

00:43:19.120 | and we want to stimulate that with all of the proper nutrition and all of the proper impact.

00:43:23.920 | However, bones also grow, I think it's called Wolf's Law, something like that,

00:43:27.920 | bones also grow based upon tension. And so, we want to put as much tension and pressure

00:43:34.720 | on the bones of young people as possible so that the bones grow big and strong.

00:43:40.880 | And the bones grow big and strong both by bearing a heavy load, which is where weight-bearing

00:43:45.280 | exercises are important, and due to shock, that when you shock a bone, you create small

00:43:51.440 | micro-fractures in the bone, which in a way that's analogous to the way the body builds muscle,

00:43:57.440 | where we create small tears in the muscle and the body builds it back stronger.

00:44:01.120 | We create small, tiny little fractures, micro-fractures in the bone due to shock,

00:44:06.400 | and then the body grows those back a little bit bigger. And this is one of the techniques

00:44:10.880 | that the bros are trying to use to lengthen the bones after puberty. More on that in a moment.

00:44:15.920 | But the point remains that we want to stimulate the hormones and the growth of the bones as much

00:44:22.080 | as possible with lots and lots of high-impact exercise. So, lots of sprinting, lots of

00:44:28.480 | jumping, lots of plyometrics, lots of jumping down off of boxes from height, and especially

00:44:35.200 | jumping sports, such as basketball or volleyball or something else. And we want the highest-impact

00:44:41.200 | version of this to stimulate the maximum amount of growth. Now, when you put all this together,

00:44:46.320 | what I've said so far, this should sound like basically a fairly normal, healthy environment,

00:44:52.960 | which is clearly, I think, what most of us need. We know that the human body is going to have a

00:44:58.880 | certain genetic potential based upon its overall—your parents, your grandparents, and genetics

00:45:04.240 | going back forever. And then the human body is going to develop best with high amounts of

00:45:10.480 | nutrition, with very nutritious foods that have a proper kind of comprehensive nutritional makeup.

00:45:17.040 | We all know that junk food is doing nothing but harming us. And so, anything related to junk food,

00:45:21.280 | we can get rid of. We get rid of it. We all know that we need protein and fat and probably

00:45:24.800 | carbohydrates in order to reach our best potential. We all know that we need lots of sleep,

00:45:29.520 | good hydration, and lots of movement. And that's all pretty well acknowledged. But if you disrupt

00:45:35.040 | any of those things, then you're going to minimize the body's ability to grow large.

00:45:40.240 | And by the way, that disruption really can happen at any point in time with long-ranging effects.

00:45:45.200 | I have a friend of mine who is a man who is very short. And his reason for being short is that he

00:45:51.040 | was born, I think, with umbilical cord around his neck. I can't remember exactly. But he was born,

00:45:56.000 | he wasn't getting oxygen. He almost died as a baby. And his brothers are all tall,

00:45:59.760 | lots of genetic potential. But he himself is short because probably due to that trauma

00:46:04.720 | that he experienced as a baby. If you observe the cases of children who are malnourished,

00:46:09.520 | who are starved, they never grow to be large and strong. And so, this stuff is obvious.

00:46:13.840 | And if you are interacting with a teenager that's just experiencing a high-stress environment and

00:46:18.240 | not sleeping and all this stuff, then there's a good chance that that person is not going to grow.

00:46:22.960 | So far, what I've said, I don't believe is in any way uncontroversial.

00:46:27.120 | And if you maximize these things, I think you've done the things that there's really strong

00:46:32.400 | evidence for and that's kind of intuitive that you obviously should do. Now, I'm going to continue on

00:46:39.840 | and we're going to talk briefly a little bit about bro science. Now, I have a lot of respect

00:46:46.000 | for bro science. And the idea here is, it's kind of a slang term that we use for the bros,

00:46:53.280 | the guys online who want to accomplish something and they're talking around and studying this and

00:46:58.720 | theorizing that and testing this and trying that and documenting that and things like that.

00:47:04.480 | Generally, the bros are not people with a trained scientific background. They're

00:47:08.640 | usually not medical doctors, usually not statisticians, usually not researchers.

00:47:13.600 | But the bro science is, I have a high respect for because I think this is the foundation of

00:47:19.920 | good scientific research. And what has happened is before we could all connect on the internet,

00:47:24.400 | we were finding that the whole scientific community was strangled by the publishing process.

00:47:30.080 | Whereas dispersed knowledge and dispersed experts, especially people who have a high

00:47:34.320 | interest in going and finding other academic research to review, this is something that's

00:47:39.120 | really valuable. But we also need to take it with a significant grain of salt. Anything that we

00:47:44.080 | learn from something like bro science needs to be tested by a proper scientific verification,

00:47:49.920 | if at all possible. And we should hold bro science or whatever the girl version of that is,

00:47:55.280 | I haven't heard of girl science, probably out there, we should hold it loosely and say,

00:47:59.680 | "These things could be true, but I'm not certain they're true." And if you get into bro science,

00:48:06.240 | you get into two basic areas. Number one is, are there other things that you could do to stimulate

00:48:11.360 | growth before and during puberty? And then are there things that we could do after puberty?

00:48:18.960 | Let's begin with first, before and during puberty, when the growth plates are open,

00:48:23.840 | what are some of the things that we want to do? And by the way, if you want to gain access to

00:48:28.800 | what I'm about to talk about, remember, up till now, I've focused on things that I think are

00:48:34.240 | pretty well demonstrated, pretty well proven. I think that most doctors are going to agree with

00:48:37.680 | me. I don't think I've made a mistake so far. If I'm going to make a mistake, it's going to be in

00:48:42.560 | the second part here of the show where I dig into this bro science stuff, because I'm not an expert,

00:48:47.280 | I don't understand it well enough. I'm trying to give you a list of general guidelines that I think

00:48:52.000 | will be helpful to you. If you want to access bro science yourself, your best place is to start is

00:48:56.240 | YouTube. Go to YouTube, do a couple of searches, some things like how to grow taller, how to reach

00:49:01.600 | my maximum height, how guys can get taller, things like that. Watch a few videos, and then sit back

00:49:07.760 | and let the algorithm start feeding you some algorithmically chosen videos, and then start

00:49:12.400 | looking through and seeing what you learn from it. And the bros have dug a lot deeper into

00:49:18.560 | the science and understanding it because they're usually highly motivated. There's a guy who's 20

00:49:23.520 | years old and he's five foot eight, and he says, "I got to reach six foot," and so he's doing all

00:49:26.960 | kinds of stuff to try to do it. So I'm not that motivated, being tall, naturally, so I just have

00:49:33.040 | a cursory knowledge of it. But let's begin with, I'm going to pull together a few lists from the

00:49:38.240 | bros that I'm going to talk from now. So let's start with a list of mistakes that you want to

00:49:42.080 | avoid. Some of the things that are really important during puberty for guys is that you need to make

00:49:48.560 | certain that you avoid high estrogen levels. If your estrogen levels are high, then that can cause

00:49:56.080 | your growth plates to close prematurely, premature to what they otherwise would do. They close

00:50:02.720 | quickly. So you need to reduce estrogen levels in your body during the growth period. How do you do

00:50:10.160 | that? How do you reduce estrogen levels? Well, first, you need to make certain that you maintain

00:50:15.200 | a low, healthy body weight, that you're not fat. It's my understanding that fat tissue,

00:50:20.240 | especially visceral fat, can convert testosterone into estrogen through a process called

00:50:27.120 | aromatization. So by keeping your body fat percentage down, you're avoiding that process of

00:50:34.960 | creating high estrogen levels. I think of this one basically as man boobs,

00:50:41.600 | is that we want to avoid getting man boobs. Why does a guy get man boobs? Because he gets fat.

00:50:45.600 | So we want to avoid that. Incidentally, I'm going to say something. It's very strong.

00:50:49.840 | It'll be offensive to many people, but I really think it's an important

00:50:53.280 | message that we as parents adopt. I believe that for you to have fat children and fat teenagers

00:51:04.000 | is a form of child abuse. Allowing your children and teens to be fat is a form of child abuse.

00:51:13.520 | Now, obviously, it's not a severe form of child abuse in compared to the many horrific kinds of

00:51:20.240 | abuse that children face. But having been a fat teenager, I want to promise you that that life

00:51:27.040 | sucks and it's something that you want to avoid. And I don't see any reason why any child or any

00:51:35.360 | teen should be fat. And I see a whole host of things that parents can do and should do and

00:51:41.840 | must do to help their children unfat themselves. And all of this just involves lifestyle changes.

00:51:48.800 | So if you are a parent of a fat child, then I believe that you should take that as a

00:51:54.800 | responsibility and say, "I have to change this, and I have to do this while I can."

00:52:01.040 | Because coming from Joshua Sheets, remember, I have been a fat child and a fat teenager,

00:52:07.600 | and that sucks. And if you can change it as a parent, you must change it. And by the way,

00:52:13.120 | you can change it. It's totally changeable. But allowing your healthy young boys to be

00:52:18.880 | fat kids with estrogen producing man boobs in them, that is child abuse,

00:52:26.000 | and we should deal with it as such. Now, again, I acknowledge that I'm using a strong and very

00:52:30.720 | offensive term here, but that's how I think of it in my own mind, and I want us to change that.

00:52:36.960 | So we have to keep body weight down. How else do we keep estrogen low for boys? We need to

00:52:42.960 | avoid estrogenic foods. We need to limit soy products, especially. We need to avoid all

00:52:47.600 | processed foods. All processed foods should go away. Be thoughtful. If possible, consider things

00:52:53.360 | like organic produce. Avoiding pesticides, which may be endocrine disruptors, can be

00:52:58.880 | one strategy that I think is worth doing. So if you have money and you can afford to purchase

00:53:05.440 | organic food, then that's probably something that you should do. You need to reduce as much

00:53:09.920 | as possible other access to other endocrine disruptors. So plastics are a huge deal.

00:53:15.520 | We have to avoid BPA, BPS, because those substances can mimic estrogen. So you never

00:53:21.600 | heat food in plastic containers. You always use BPA-free products, and whenever possible,

00:53:26.400 | just reduce the use of plastic. Just completely cut it out. There's really no reason for plastic

00:53:31.360 | in your household. Be super, super careful with all kind of personal care products.

00:53:37.840 | Many cosmetics and shampoos and lotions and all of that stuff contains all kinds of junks,

00:53:44.320 | parabens and phthalates and all kinds of chemicals, and a lot of the stuff increases estrogen.

00:53:49.200 | So we need to get rid of all that stuff if at all possible and keep the skin products

00:53:57.040 | as pure as possible. You also want to eliminate cleaners and toxic cleaners and chemicals from

00:54:04.080 | your home, and go to super simple stuff. Clean with vinegar. Don't clean with the weird stuff

00:54:09.520 | that just had all the stuff. Eliminate all the fragrances. Eliminate all the cheap candles and

00:54:13.680 | all this crap that messes up our systems. Filter your water. So tap water, especially

00:54:18.960 | in a municipal system, tap water can contain trace amounts of estrogenic substances, BPA,

00:54:24.400 | pharmaceuticals like birth control residues in our water, and all kinds of other pollutants.

00:54:29.600 | So it's not going to kill you from drinking it, but it's going to screw up your system. So

00:54:33.920 | get a high-quality water filter in your house and make certain that you remove all of that stuff.

00:54:39.520 | And then be thoughtful about foods. I've read that there are foods that lower estrogen.

00:54:44.720 | Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, flax seeds may be useful.

00:54:50.960 | Citrus, things like that are the kinds of things that could help to reduce estrogen amounts.

00:54:58.400 | And then hopefully this isn't a big thing for teens, but reduce alcohol consumption.

00:55:02.240 | Alcohol can mess with the liver's ability to metabolize estrogen. And then just in and of

00:55:06.080 | itself, like beer, for example, is one of the worst, like most feminine things possible.

00:55:10.160 | I always think of it as beer gives you boobs. So make sure your teen isn't consuming beer.

00:55:14.800 | It's terrible. I hate the fact that men associate beer with like kind of a masculine drink.

00:55:20.640 | It's not. It's a terrible drink from the perspective of masculinity and femininity,

00:55:25.760 | and estrogen is a component of it. So however we do it, we want to do the best job possible

00:55:34.960 | of limiting estrogen levels, especially for your boys and your male teens.

00:55:40.080 | We want to avoid certain kinds of chemicals. We want to avoid accutane. Accutane is a brand

00:55:48.400 | name for isotretinoin, which is a medication that's used to treat severe acne. Be super,

00:55:54.240 | super careful about anything like that because it can cause premature closing of the growth plates

00:56:01.440 | because it speeds up the maturation of chondrocytes. So be careful of anything related to

00:56:07.760 | acne medications. I am no expert on acne, but I think that a huge portion of it can be cleared up

00:56:14.800 | with dietary influences. So if you got someone struggling with acne, put them on an all-beef

00:56:20.240 | diet and see what happens after a few months, and I'll bet you a significant part of it goes away.

00:56:24.720 | I don't know what your teen would rather have, acne scars when he's 20 years old or an extra

00:56:29.760 | few inches of height, but my guess is the height would probably be a priority.

00:56:34.560 | You have to absolutely make certain that there's no steroid use or artificial testosterone

00:56:40.080 | injections. This is deadly, and as anabolic steroids for muscle growth has become more

00:56:47.680 | common in our society, then these are filtering down to teens. And so steroid use and artificial

00:56:54.720 | testosterone can deplete your stem cells, and that leads to early closure of the growth plates.

00:56:59.360 | We want to avoid tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors. These are substances that,

00:57:06.800 | as I understand it, are intended to block the estrogen receptors. In theory, these could be

00:57:14.960 | used under careful supervision of a doctor to potentially do all that good stuff we were saying

00:57:21.040 | earlier about getting rid of the estrogen, but ironically, it seems as though they actually

00:57:27.520 | could lead to earlier closure of the growth plates if the hormonal balances are not maintained

00:57:34.160 | properly. So we want to be super careful about jumping on random drugs without understanding

00:57:39.120 | them, without being under a doctor's care. And then the obvious ones. Don't smoke, don't drink,

00:57:46.080 | don't do drugs, don't eat junk food in any form. No marijuana, no vaping, no Doritos,

00:57:55.280 | no junk food at all, because all of that stuff can reduce your human growth hormone production,

00:58:02.480 | mess with your blood flow, hinder your ability to produce IGF-1,

00:58:06.320 | and it's all the basic functioning of these hormones that actually creates the growth

00:58:10.960 | in a young body. Let's switch now. What about things like vitamins and supplements?

00:58:16.160 | I'm not really competent to advise on this, so I'm just going to list some names that I hear about

00:58:21.120 | and say that a lot of this stuff probably would have some impact, but it's unproven,

00:58:27.120 | and a lot of this stuff I'm guessing would be available in a good diet. But here's what people

00:58:32.480 | look at. First, a lot of the bros are supplementing with minerals to help with bone regulation and

00:58:38.160 | bone repair. Magnesium, zinc, boron, calcium, and phosphorus. The bros are also taking amino acids

00:58:44.080 | to try to help create necessary proteins like collagen and help with hormone regulation of HGH.

00:58:49.760 | So aminos like arginine, ornithine, lysine. Some guys are taking a little bit of creatine. I don't

00:58:56.400 | know much about creatine. I was always super skeptical about it, but now I hear more people

00:59:00.080 | talking about its positive benefits, and glutamine. Some people are taking proteins and peptides,

00:59:06.080 | collagen supplements, beef gelatin, colostrum powder, and then vitamins that support various

00:59:11.600 | bodily functions, especially vitamins A, B6, B7, B12, C, E, and K2, in addition to omega fatty

00:59:19.040 | acids from fish oil supplements and flaxseed supplements. Some of the bros are taking

00:59:25.280 | glucosamine sulfate with the goal of basically keeping their morning height before their body

00:59:31.200 | gets compressed and to support cartilage synthesis in order to get to sleep. Sometimes some bros are

00:59:37.680 | supplementing with melatonin, although that should not be done on an ongoing basis. Some of the bros

00:59:43.360 | are using something called GABA, which evidently reduces cortisol and can promote the release of

00:59:50.320 | human growth hormone, as well as various adaptogens such as ashwagandha, tribulus,

00:59:56.800 | and rhodiola rosea. And I don't myself have any idea what any of those are. I just hear about them

01:00:03.440 | in listening to what the bros are testing. Talk to a doctor. And then some of the supplements

01:00:08.720 | that are out there that generally you should never engage with unless you are speaking to a doctor.

01:00:15.280 | One is MK-677, which is ibutamorin, which, as I understand it, has been

01:00:21.600 | proven to make teens taller but can cause all kinds of problems. Obviously, human growth hormone

01:00:27.760 | injections, which may lead to growth of height but can cause other health problems. And then

01:00:34.880 | anabolic steroids, which are likely to speed up the closure of the natural growth plates.

01:00:43.280 | So, in general, I think be super careful with anything that is chemical and medical and just

01:00:49.440 | focus on those proven things that I said, and that's probably going to be enough for what

01:00:54.400 | anybody needs. I think the reason the guys are short is their sleeping, probably sleeping and

01:01:02.080 | nutrition. And if you just fix nutrition and sleep and movement, you've probably fixed a

01:01:06.160 | whole lot of problems. Now, in conclusion, let's turn to kind of a wacky and interesting world

01:01:13.680 | of the question of can you grow taller after puberty? The idea is after the growth plates

01:01:20.480 | on your bones close, can you grow taller? Now, the interesting answer is absolutely yes.

01:01:26.480 | Before you think I've lost my mind, I would say absolutely yes with regard to surgery. There are

01:01:33.520 | clinics around the world that you can find people telling their stories where basically a dude will

01:01:37.440 | go in and they perform this procedure where basically they cut the bones in their legs,

01:01:42.560 | stretch the bones out, and after this very long and painful procedure, literally they're adding

01:01:47.040 | several heights, several inches of height to people. And evidently, growing taller is such

01:01:51.920 | a big deal that people are willing to pay huge amounts of money and undergo enormous amounts of

01:01:55.600 | pain to grow taller after puberty through the use of surgery. So, I'm hoping to help you avoid that,

01:02:01.760 | help your children avoid that, but just trying to remind you of some basic things that are going to

01:02:05.200 | help them reach their genetic potential when they're younger, but basically not stunting their

01:02:09.120 | growth. But that is the case. Now, short of that, it's kind of interesting to try to understand

01:02:15.920 | could this make a difference. If you go on YouTube or you start listening to people, you'll find a

01:02:21.120 | whole lot of guys in their early 20s and late teens who are really focused on this. And again,

01:02:26.320 | they're doing the bro science thing where they're looking and looking and trying to figure out

01:02:30.160 | is this possible because they want to grow. The answer is probably not much, meaning that would

01:02:37.440 | be the medical answer as I understand it. Most doctors would say, "Can you grow after the growth

01:02:41.680 | plates are closed?" As I understand it, the responsible answer would be to say, "Well,

01:02:45.840 | probably not. No, you can't." Some would be probably very certain, "No, you can't," or,

01:02:50.560 | "Probably not," or it would be very unreliable. But the guys are testing it. And as I understand

01:02:56.480 | it, there are a couple of things that they are testing. First and foremost, it's that it's a

01:03:01.600 | little bit uncertain. Unless you've had an actual x-ray, I guess it would show you if the growth

01:03:05.520 | plates... Unless you've had a full x-ray that says definitively, "Your growth plates are certainly

01:03:10.640 | closed," then there's a bit of a wiggle room at the end of puberty as to how long a guy can grow.

01:03:16.960 | There have been some people who stopped growing when they were 15 years old, and there are some

01:03:20.960 | people who were still growing at 25 without doing anything unusual. But the normal thing is by the

01:03:25.760 | time you're out of your teenage years, your growth plates are probably closing over.

01:03:30.080 | So, there are a couple of things that guys are trying to do. Number one, they're trying to do

01:03:36.160 | everything possible with their hormones to do everything possible to try to get any growth that

01:03:42.400 | is left from a hormonal perspective. So, it's not uncommon that a teenage young man will go through

01:03:49.440 | and eat like junk and not exercise and not sleep, and all of a sudden he's 17 years old and he's

01:03:55.200 | super short, and he's like, "Well, maybe I could do something." So, if he cleans up his diet and

01:03:59.440 | he cleans up his sleep and cleans up his habits, then maybe he could still grow a little bit.

01:04:03.920 | In theory, there's some interesting theories about possibly if hormonal changes were significant

01:04:10.160 | enough that maybe there would be some kind of change that could actually happen with the

01:04:15.040 | hormones. You see this with... There's been some documented medical cases of people who've had a

01:04:19.920 | dysfunction in their pituitary gland, and I think there was one guy I was reading about that went

01:04:28.160 | from like dwarfism to giantism based upon this change in his pituitary gland. So, I don't

01:04:35.440 | understand it enough, and I'm not interested enough to dig into it enough to understand it,

01:04:38.880 | but that would be kind of the hormonal aspect of it. And then a lot of them are also focusing

01:04:44.560 | on trying to say, "Is there something physical that we could do?" And this physicality to me

01:04:50.320 | makes sense, but it is hard work. And so, there are two elements to the physicality. The first

01:04:56.800 | one is basically stretching, and stretching doesn't seem to have the greatest long-term

01:05:03.040 | effect, but it's not nothing. So, as I understand it, our height changes based upon the work that

01:05:08.640 | gravity affects on our bodies. So, if you measure yourself in the morning, right after you get up,

01:05:14.400 | after you've been lying in a bed all night, then that's when you're going to be the absolute

01:05:18.480 | tallest. And then it's not uncommon to lose a not insignificant amount of height throughout the day

01:05:25.440 | so that at the end of the day, when gravity has been pulling you down, you are the shortest at

01:05:30.480 | that point in time. So, there's people that are experimenting with various things to stretch

01:05:35.680 | themselves out, and they do hanging on a bar and stretch out and decompress their spine. And

01:05:42.720 | sometimes they hang upside down using something like gravity boots or an inversion table.

01:05:47.040 | And that kind of stretching activity does seem to have some impact on height, but it doesn't seem

01:05:51.680 | to be anything that is long-lasting or permanent. It's basically just stretching out all the

01:05:55.760 | ligaments and the vertebrae and the bones. And that's probably not a bad thing, just like—by

01:06:00.720 | the way, I didn't even talk about fixing posture—but you can fix your posture and express

01:06:06.000 | yourself as a taller person. The more long-lasting thing would be to say, "Can you grow the bones?"

01:06:11.600 | And this is what some of the bros are trying to test. There's some documented history. There was

01:06:17.760 | a Russian guy who was a high jumper that grew when he was in his 20s because he wanted to be a better

01:06:23.200 | high jumper. And one of the things that he pioneered was basically he slept with—he set up

01:06:30.400 | a system of like an elastic band bed, and while he was sleeping, he would have these bands stretch

01:06:38.640 | him. And this, in addition to basically law of attraction exercises where he just visualized

01:06:46.000 | himself growing taller, he was able to allegedly, documentedly, extend his height by several inches

01:06:53.040 | from this. And so what the bros are trying to do is to test this and say, "If we get a lot of high

01:06:59.440 | impact activity for our bones, which creates small micro fractures in the bone," again, as I said

01:07:05.280 | earlier, that's analogous to the small micro tears of a muscle when you're exercising, "and then we

01:07:10.960 | sleep or we spend significant amounts of time in kind of a stretched-out position,

01:07:16.720 | then as our bones grow, they regrow and they rebuild the basic bone material

01:07:22.000 | in a stretched-out way. And could this help us to lengthen our bones, lengthen the bones of our legs

01:07:26.720 | so that we are actually taller?" And there's people that are claiming to get that experience.

01:07:33.120 | They're documenting it. I don't know how true it is. It's just interesting to observe.

01:07:38.080 | I find it fascinating from a purely scientific perspective to see people informing themselves,

01:07:44.400 | see us sharing research around the world, and then seeing people documenting their experiments.

01:07:48.400 | That's what I love about bro science. On the whole, it sounds like an enormous hassle,

01:07:52.800 | sounds very painful, and it sounds kind of weird to be that obsessed with height

01:07:56.240 | beyond that perspective. I think that one of the negative things about height is that this can

01:08:03.360 | become such a big thing in guys' minds. And instead of just embracing however tall you actually are

01:08:09.120 | and enhancing yourself with other characteristics, then the guys sit around and become depressed

01:08:16.800 | because they're not six feet tall. And I have a real bone to pick with people that emphasize this.

01:08:24.640 | And I feel like a lot of the bros and kind of the red pillars and things like this are spending so

01:08:29.440 | much time on height, talking about how, "Well, you've got to be six feet tall," or, "You've got

01:08:33.600 | to have a certain height, and that's going to make everything easy." And in so doing,

01:08:39.280 | it could cause a young and impressionable and vulnerable young man to think that's somehow

01:08:44.160 | going to change everything. But I know lots of short guys who are extraordinarily competent,

01:08:50.400 | extremely successful, married to beautiful women, have great lives, are very highly respected,

01:08:55.920 | and they've done it all though being short. And interestingly, I've spent some time talking with

01:09:01.680 | some men in this situation. And in the same way that I'm glad that I'm tall,

01:09:06.960 | because that was my experience, they've expressed to me that they're glad that they're short,

01:09:10.880 | because being short and having to deal with the discrimination that they faced as short men

01:09:15.280 | caused them to become stronger and to adapt for that height restriction, for being short,

01:09:26.160 | with other character qualities and other things that were ultimately quite effective for them.

01:09:31.280 | And so I think that one of the things that really bothers me when I spend time

01:09:35.600 | listening to these guys and reading the comments is that some people think that somehow being tall

01:09:42.480 | is a magic formula that is going to lead to your automatically being successful in life.

01:09:47.840 | And I can tell you as a tall man, it ain't that way. I'm glad that I'm tall. I acknowledge that

01:09:56.080 | it has helped me in many ways and is a great benefit, but it's not some kind of unilateral

01:10:03.200 | cheat code that fixes everything. You still got to develop a whole bunch of other stuff. So

01:10:07.840 | if you do the stuff that I've recommended and you still wind up being shorter than you would hope to

01:10:13.280 | be, don't even worry about it. Press on and do the best you can. My hope in today's podcast,

01:10:20.160 | again, as I said, very esoteric. Here's one of those factors that is genuinely a true factor.

01:10:25.680 | I think you can help your children especially to do this. And I think that this should be one of

01:10:30.480 | those areas in which the reason you get rich is so you can spend more money on food. And that's

01:10:35.760 | kind of the closing point I want to make to you, is that sometimes people spend so much time

01:10:40.560 | piling up money and you're still eating rice and beans because, "Well, we're not going to spend

01:10:46.880 | more than 21% of our household income," and your kids are starving because they're eating rice and

01:10:52.160 | beans. And I want to shake you and say, "Bro, go buy some steaks." Throughout history, one of the

01:10:58.160 | great benefits of being wealthy has been to be able to afford higher quality food and enough

01:11:04.400 | of it. Throughout history, most of our ancestors have gone through their lives basically starved,

01:11:09.280 | starved both of calories and of nutrition. Good food costs more than cheap food. I am grateful

01:11:16.640 | that we can stay alive and get enough calories to be okay very, very cheaply today, but good food is

01:11:24.880 | still going to cost you money. And so, you should embrace the fact that you can afford better

01:11:30.640 | groceries and you can afford higher quality food. And this is quite literally something that you're

01:11:35.760 | building an inheritance in for your family, for your future, and for your future health,

01:11:41.840 | and for your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren. You have the ability,

01:11:47.840 | not only prior to conception of your children, but you have the ability to affect the epigenetic

01:11:54.560 | future of your children. And so, feeding your children the best quality food that you can

01:11:59.840 | afford and the best quality food that you can find should be a high priority for your wealth.

01:12:05.920 | And it's interesting. You see this in a lot of people. There was a video that was going around

01:12:09.520 | Twitter, sorry, picture, I don't know, six months, 10 months ago, something like that.

01:12:13.360 | And it was a picture side-by-side of Bear Grylls' son, Marmaduke, and Donald Trump's son,

01:12:21.680 | Barron Trump. And it was funny because you had these graduation pictures of Bear Grylls and his

01:12:27.200 | wife and their son, Marmaduke, who's just towering over his father. And then you had Barron Trump

01:12:36.080 | towering over Donald and Melania Trump. And this is exactly what my pictures with my parents look

01:12:41.680 | like. This is what we should look for as fathers and as mothers, is we want our children to be a

01:12:47.840 | few inches higher than we are. And then we want our grandchildren to wind up being a few inches

01:12:51.600 | higher than our children are. And we want to express and continue to grow to the ability that

01:12:59.920 | we're able to because all of the things that lead to height also lead to health, also lead to better

01:13:07.440 | cognitive performance, lead to all of the other things. Remember that it's not necessarily the

01:13:12.800 | case that height is some kind of social cheat code that is the thing that makes you successful.

01:13:20.640 | It's not all discrimination. Let me read you the abstract. Here's this from a paper

01:13:26.000 | that was published by researchers Anne Case and Christina Paxson. The paper is called

01:13:30.800 | "Stature and Status, Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes." Let me just read you,

01:13:35.040 | published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in August of 2006. Here's the abstract.

01:13:40.160 | "It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and on average earn

01:13:45.760 | more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain

01:13:50.880 | the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized

01:13:56.240 | factors such as self-esteem, social dominance, and discrimination. In this paper, we offer a

01:14:01.920 | simpler explanation. On average, taller people earn more because they're smarter. As early as

01:14:07.920 | age three, before schooling has had a chance to play a role, and throughout childhood, taller

01:14:13.680 | children perform significantly better on cognitive tests. The correlation between height in childhood

01:14:19.600 | and adulthood is approximately 0.7 for both men and women, so that tall children are much more

01:14:25.120 | likely to become tall adults. As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher

01:14:30.720 | paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence

01:14:36.720 | for which they earn handsome returns. Using four datasets from the US and the UK, we find that the

01:14:42.240 | height premium in adult earnings can be explained by childhood scores on cognitive tests. Furthermore,

01:14:48.800 | we show that taller adults select into occupations that have higher cognitive skill requirements

01:14:53.840 | and lower physical skill demands. So if this paper is true in terms of the author's

01:15:01.360 | research outcomes, then the basic point of height is just to use it as an external marker

01:15:08.640 | for what I'm going to call health. A healthy body is going to grow to its genetic potential,

01:15:16.480 | and height and health also produce high cognitive ability or intelligence. So height is just an

01:15:24.720 | external thing that we can see of the internal processes. And this is basically the same thing

01:15:32.080 | with regard to beauty, that beauty is an outward indicator, generally, of health. So if we look at

01:15:39.520 | it in that terms, then you don't have to think, "Well, Joshua's just trying to paint some weird

01:15:44.160 | picture where we're trying to be high so we can get the girls." I'm saying that what you do to

01:15:51.120 | create good health, all those things I said of abundant food, of the highest quality,

01:15:56.240 | lots of protein, lots of high-quality animal proteins, lots of sleep, and lots of exercise,

01:16:02.720 | these are the things that our bodies need to actually create physical health through all of

01:16:07.840 | the natural processes that it already is doing. You probably don't need to supplement with all

01:16:12.640 | that stuff. Your body's just doing that stuff naturally with adequate and good sources of

01:16:16.480 | nutrition. So it's just a natural flow-together factor. But by pulling it apart in this way and

01:16:23.360 | talking about the component factors, I hope that I can encourage you to, most importantly,

01:16:29.200 | buy good quality food for your children and eliminate junk food from your house and for you,

01:16:33.520 | and number two, encourage a good sleep environment for your family, both for yourself and for your

01:16:42.320 | children. You got to fight for this. It's an epidemic for our teens and they're destroying

01:16:46.080 | their lives. And these things will lead to good hormonal regulation, lead to higher testosterone

01:16:52.720 | levels, better HGH production. And then we combine that with lots of activity, which again has all

01:16:58.080 | those hormonal effects and creates a healthy body, then we're putting in place a good foundation.

01:17:03.440 | And whether it's a good foundation to earn more or just spend less money on healthcare,

01:17:07.280 | this is absolutely a solid personal finance topic. Hope you've enjoyed the show. Esoteric?

01:17:14.080 | Yes. Interesting? I hope so. I love weird trails like this. I love it. I hope you've enjoyed my

01:17:23.200 | narration of it. I refer you to the bros for more discussion, but on the whole, just do those things

01:17:29.360 | that I said that we know work and then let the bros keep on experimenting. I think it's super fun

01:17:34.960 | to see what they wind up with in the coming years and build a genetic heritage for your great,

01:17:41.520 | great grandchildren. Use your money to do that. Thanks for listening. I'll be back with you very

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2024-08-15_Earn_More_Money_by_Growing_Taller