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S-U-I-T-E-H-O-P.com. It's more than just a ticket. Remember Radicals, less than one week before the live class of my newest course called Hackproof. Hackproofcourse.com, sign up today. The live class that you will definitely want to be a part of is on February 8th. So sign up today at hackproofcourse.com. You'll wanna be a part of that live class so that not only can you receive the prepared curriculum, but you can also ask all of your personalized questions, which my co-host and I, Gabriel Custodiate, will answer.

So hackproof, how to beat fraudsters, prevent identity theft, and say goodbye to cybercrime. Remember, you must always protect yourself and your wealth, and one of the significant and under-discussed threats that we face in the modern world is cybercrime, hacking, et cetera. Hackproofcourse.com, hackproofcourse.com. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your host, and on today's episode of the podcast, I want to share with you a framework for how to think about investing into your children in the early ages, the early stages of life. One of the ideas that I have defended vigorously throughout the history of Radical Personal Finance is the idea that most investments into your children are best made at an early age, rather than waiting for a later age.

The best example I would use to introduce this subject is comparing the value of saving for, say, a college education fund as compared to working hard at your child's academic ability at a very early age, perhaps at the age of four, or at the age of eight, or at the age of 12.

And I've defended the idea that in virtually all cases, if you have to choose between investing money at an early age versus investing money for use at a later age, you get a much higher return on your investment when you invest it at an early age. Now, thankfully, most of us don't have to choose.

Most of us have enough money to invest in our children at an early age as well as at a later age, and both are good. But if you have to choose, I want you to choose to do it at a young age. I've defended this idea and this thesis in a number of different ways, but I've, to my knowledge and memory, I've never sat down and gone through a philosophy or a framework to help you think about how to apply this at every age, especially at the earliest of ages.

And yet, I believe that that's where sometimes your money is most effectively spent and most effectively invested. And so on today's episode, I want to share with you a philosophy, a framework, and some advice for ways that you can invest into your children at an early age. And then in what I think will be the next episode, I want to walk you through on a daily basis how I do it.

And I'll share with you in excruciating detail all of the ways that I try myself to invest into my children very, very intentionally. Now, clearly this is inspired by recent events in my own life. I've been playing Mr. Dad for the last weeks as my wife and I have recently welcomed our fifth child into the world.

And it's very interesting the difference between my first child and my fifth child, because with now my older children, I've had a chance to see some of my ideas come to fruition, see some of them flourish, and I've had a chance to lay aside some of those ideas that I held when I was younger.

And in the history of Radical Personal Finance, I also thought this would be interesting to you because all of the history is here recorded in the show. When I recorded my first episode of the podcast in July of 2013, my wife and I were expecting our first baby. And here we are almost 10 years later, and we have again welcomed our fifth baby.

And so at this point in time, for your context, our oldest child is nine, we have a nine-year-old, a seven-year-old, a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and now a zero-year-old. And so I don't have personal experience with adolescence yet, but I have learned quite a little bit along the way, and I wanna share some of those ideas with you.

I probably shouldn't make a disclaimer, but I'll make one disclaimer 'cause it will help me to feel more confident in what I say. I myself am going to try to speak very clearly and about what I know and what I believe to be true in these areas, and I'm going to share as forthrightly as possible my own experience.

I warn you, I'm rather intense about this subject. This is, for me, this area of life is, represents some of my highest personal goals. I am fully persuaded that one of the most important functions and roles in a man's life relates to his function in the world, is his role in life as a father.

And this is, as I can see, a tremendous source of personal joy and fulfillment. It is a tremendous source of impact on society, impact on lives and on a community, and indeed is the basic building block of a society, of a healthy and strong society. And so I'm very passionate about this subject, and I'm very dedicated to it, both in thinking about it and in practicing it.

I am imperfect, as is to be expected, but I care a lot about this, and I'm pretty hardcore about my application in some of these things. And so when I share things, I'm doing so to try to encourage you and to inspire you, and I'll try to share as forthrightly as possible as to why I think the way that I do and what I've done and what has worked.

Just know that it's not coming from any desire to be arrogant or to draw attention, but it's coming from a desire to encourage you and to give ideas. And I, of course, value any ideas that you have or any impact that you might make in my blind spots. So in this episode, we're gonna go in detail through a framework for ways that you can invest into the success of your child.

If you do not have children of your own, then I think this information may still be useful for you because you know children. And even if you don't have children, for whatever reason, you know children. And one of the most important things that we can do as a society is to invest in a thoughtful and systematic way into our children.

And regardless of whether you're caring for your own biological children or whether you're caring for children in your community in some way, shape, or form, many of these ideas I think can be implemented and will lead us to a healthier society. So I invite even those of you who are not parents to join me in this episode.

What you should understand is that when you become a parent, much of your outlook on life changes and transforms in a systematic way. When you become a parent, you have basically a fairly clear expectation of what the next 15 to 20 years of your life are going to look like.

And the goals related to your role as a parent quickly filter to the top of your list. And over the course of especially the first few weeks of a child's life, first few months of a child's life, you go through this natural transformation as a parent of generally losing a significant amount of your selfishness because you become more other-focused rather than self-focused.

And so the things that I'm gonna share, if you're not a parent, just recognize that parents will generally resonate with the idea that these are the highest and most important goals. Where you see this as an example, I think that is quite commonly visible, is in the field of retirement planning versus college planning.

Financial planners are generally very clear on the importance of your saving for your retirement, even to the exclusion of your paying for your child's education. But even though financial planners are very clear about the cold logic of that position, day in and day out, parents will ignore systematically saving for their own financial future in favor of investing into their children's future.

There's just a very natural flow. So let's go to the ideas now. ♪ Let's live in the moment ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday morning ♪ - California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaba Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

♪ Let's go, let's go ♪ - Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaba.com/palms to discover more. - Where do we begin? Well, we begin, of course, with babies. That's how children start. They start as beautiful, wonderful little babies. So what can you do to invest into your child at an early age?

If we're truly going to approach this topic in a systematic way, we need to begin prior to the conception of the child. And we need to begin by discussing the topic of spouse selection. Now, this topic should probably be broken into two different categories. The first would be a discussion of basic genetic qualities.

And the second topic would be character qualities or lifestyle qualities, et cetera, kind of the softer things. Now, very few of us ever set out with the goal of choosing a spouse in a perfectly analytical way. The older I get, the more I have come to appreciate how smart it would be for us to do that.

When I was younger, and you talked to me about things like arranged marriages that has been common throughout history, I recoiled in horror at the idea of having an arranged marriage. I had the idea, well, love is all you need. And after all, what if you don't love the person that you're married to?

As I have grown older, and as my wife and I have now celebrated 11 years of marriage, I appreciate the concept of love the way that people often refer to it. And here, when I'm using the term in this sense, what I mean is I appreciate the concept of a basic attraction, one for another.

But I think that there's a fundamental component in which compatibility on every level makes a huge difference in the long-term outcome of your relationship. And so I think that the practical considerations are far higher than many of us have been led to believe by the fairy tales that we've been sold by culture around.

One of the concerns that I have about relationship formation in the modern age is that in many cases, our concepts of what is a successful and healthy relationship, what is a successful and healthy family have been formed primarily by fiction writers creating movie scripts, creating stories. And those fiction writers have, in many cases, completely succeeded in helping people to create an idea, an ideal, an expectation of how life should be.

And yet that script or that image is completely unmoored from reality in any reasonable way. And it is designed primarily to sell movies. It's designed to sell books, and it's not designed for human happiness. Perhaps a useful example that I would offer would relate to the subject of how a couple should celebrate a wedding ceremony.

If you were to go and speak to a young 18-year-old man or a young 18-year-old woman, certainly more commonly a woman, but I think either sex would share this, and you were to ask that young 18-year-old man or woman to describe to you his or her ideal wedding. And listen, you would probably get an image that comes to mind that's pretty much the way that you would describe your ideal wedding.

And yet that image would look very much like most ideal weddings that have been presented in pop culture, especially film culture. As a financial planner, I see this frequently when we talk about the cost of weddings. One reason that young couples give for the idea that they're not married is that they can't afford to get married.

Now, getting married doesn't actually cost money. Weddings can cost money. And yet oftentimes you'll have young couples that desire to be married. They are already living together as though they are married, but they haven't been able to come up with the money for the wedding. I want to ask you something.

Let's pretend that you had no preconceived ideas about wedding ceremonies and marriages. And let's assume that you were giving counsel to a young man and a young woman. And that young man or young woman come to you and they say, "Listen, we desire to be "in a relationship together, and we desire to "memorialize or to solemnize the initiation "of that relationship with a party.

"And so what we're going to do is we're going to spend years "saving money, and we're going to throw "a huge, expensive party, like nothing we have ever done "in our life in any other context. "And we're going to host a huge and expensive party "for all of our family and friends.

"And we're going to spend $10,000, tens of thousands "of dollars, we're going to spend a huge amount of money. "Sometimes we'll even borrow money "in order to accomplish this objective. "And at that party, our friends and family "will come together, they'll celebrate with us, "and then they'll leave having enjoyed a wonderful day, "and we're going to pay for it.

"In many cases, we're going to pay for it "over the course of many years." Does that sound like a really lovely thing for the couple in question? And yet, many young couples have had their entire idea, their entire ideal of what a wedding is formed such that if it doesn't fulfill what I've just described, then they'll consider it to be something of a failure.

And yet, who formed that idea? Well, movie script writers with a large production budget have formed that idea and have created that idea. They're the ones who've done that. Now, they did it based upon a shred of reality. There is a shred of reality, which is the glittering, wealthy, upper class have generally throughout history memorialized and solemnized these events by throwing a huge giant party.

But of course, these are the people who can comfortably afford to do such a thing, and these are the people that should do such a thing. But that's very different than, say, your average 25-year-old couple and what they should do. I remember an example of mine, a good friend of mine growing up.

He and his girlfriend, they were together for a number of years. They had three children together before they could afford to have their wedding. And he was a blue-collar worker. She was busy taking care of babies for a significant amount of time. They saved for years to throw a big fancy party at a fancy venue and spend thousands of dollars so that she could have the wedding of her dreams.

Now, thankfully, they're still married years later. They're doing fine, et cetera. But the point is, this entire model is broken, but it's a model that is based upon a false image. And so you wanna be careful about the images that you have relating to marriage. I simply was using the concept of a wedding ceremony and what is practical and how you're kind of forming your idea and your ideal as an obvious example that would then relate over to building your relationship on the subject or on the topic of love, defined as some magical sense of attraction to another person without any context of practical thinking.

In the same way that many historical wedding customs are much more sensible than our modern Hollywood-created wedding customs, so are historical marriage practices in many ways much more sensible than our modern Hollywood-created marriage practices. Historically, if a couple was going to get married, the community threw the couple a party rather than the couple throwing the community a party.

Historically, if a couple was going to marry, it was a community affair where the community came together to launch the couple successfully into their married life, again, by solemnizing the event, making it a public event so that there was clear indication of who was marrying whom and who was now off of the mate market.

Mate market sounds pretty terrific, sorry, horrific. Who was unavailable, who was taken, who was claimed and was no longer single. So there was a public nature to it. The community traditions for solemnizing the occasion are continuous from one to another. The vows or the commitments are consistent and it's something that the community does.

And the community comes together, provides the couple with a party, provides the couple with presents and things to start their house, et cetera. There's just a great sensibility to it. Now, again, I'm not opposed to big fancy weddings. Certainly wealthy people throughout history and wealthy fathers have been able to throw and loved to throw their daughters incredible weddings.

That's wonderful. But that is not the norm for all cultures. And as Hollywood has created this magic idea around weddings it has eroded the basic fundamental nature of a wedding ceremony. Now let's move to spousal selection. If you're going to have the best outcome for your children you need to begin by carefully choosing a spouse that is going to be a high quality parent for your children.

On the genetic level, there is a real truth to the idea that the person with whom you conceive a baby, that basic genetic DNA will in many cases predict a huge component of the child's life. And so we want to look at markers such as health, vitality, strength, size, intelligence, et cetera.

These genetic markers are fundamentally important. A significant amount of your child's genetic material, basic genetic code is going to be determined by your mate and your ancestors and your mate's ancestors. Recently with my family I've been reading a book called Deep Nutrition by Carolyn or Carol, someone or other.

This really interesting, really experienced physician in the state of Hawaii. And I really even enjoyed the book. And one of the major points that she makes early on in the book is that beauty, what we call physical beauty, is strongly tied and connected to markers of health, of physical health.

In our age we have in many cases taken the idea that physical beauty is only skin deep. We've said, well, that person may be beautiful, but you don't have to be beautiful to be healthy. And what the author argues in a way that is convincing and persuasive to me is that what we call beauty is a consistent and reliable indicator of physical health.

She goes into a really interesting set of research about symmetry and how facial symmetry, which is the primary driving force behind what we call beauty, facial symmetry is an indication of basic health. She makes a super interesting argument in favor of body type. Let me look up a quick passage, super fascinating.

When she's talking about female body type, there's this classic idea of a woman's figure being certain forms of a woman's figure being more attractive to men. And yet there's actually a strong correlation between the body type that a woman has and her basic health. Here is the quote under section entitled, "Female Body Type and Health." Beauty researchers have divided female body types into four categories.

In order of declining frequency, they are, banana, apple, pear, and hourglass. Several studies performed in 2005 showed that apple-shaped women with short waists and narrow hips had almost double the mortality rates of women with more generous curves. Why would that be? Voluptuousness is an indication of healthy female sexual dimorphism, while a lack of voluptuousness indicates a problem.

Normally, the hips and bust develop during puberty as a result of a healthy surge in sex hormones. These developments involve expansion of the pelvic bones along with the deposition of fat and glandular tissue within the breasts. But women whose genetics are such that their spines are abnormally short or their hormonal surge less pronounced, or whose diet is such that it interferes with the body's response to hormones, end up with boxier figures.

If they're thin, they'll end up as bananas. If they put on weight, it gets distributed in a more masculine pattern in the belly, on the neck, and around the upper arms, and they'll become apples. Today, after three generations of trans fat consumption, which interferes with hormone expression, C chapter seven, and with daily infusions of sugar, which interferes with hormone receptivity, C chapter nine, hourglass figures have become something of a rarity.

According to a 2005 study commissioned by Alva Products, a manufacturer of designer's mannequins, less than 10% of women today develop the voluptuous curves universally recognized as the defining features of a healthy and attractive female figure. In a world of apples, pears, and bananas, writer Nancy Etkoff has suggested that the most beautiful among us are genetic freaks.

It's not an insult. She is merely referencing the statistical improbability of someone growing up to look like, to use her example, Cindy Crawford. But the suggestion seems to capture Etkoff's general thesis accurately. When a stunningly beautiful person is born, it's largely the result of genetic chance. These select few, the thinking goes, play the genetic lottery and won big.

But I couldn't disagree more. Why would biology program us to be hot for genetic freaks? It seems to me far more probable that we are attracted to beautiful bodies because they advertise superlative health. In keeping with this idea, researchers studying the effect of these four female body types on lifespan find that women with the most attractive of the four body types, the hourglass, not only live the longest, they also live better.

Statistics consistently show that having a longer, slimmer waist, and more womanly hips correlates with reduced diagnoses of infertility, osteoporosis, cancer, cognitive problems, abdominal aneurysms, diabetes and its complications, and more. And of course, all of those are cited sources that you're welcome to look up if you're interested. So the book is called "Deep Nutrition" by Katherine Shanahan, MD.

And it's a fascinating book. And so the comments that I'm making are simply that when you are selecting a spouse, it's important that you think about the basic genetic makeup of that person. And don't be ashamed to pursue someone who is beautiful. Don't be ashamed to pursue someone who is healthy.

Don't be ashamed to pursue someone who is strong, who is vigorous, who is vitality, who expresses vitality. Because these basic things are going to be passed along to your children. This is also going to affect everything from, so your child's basic health, and it's going to affect your child's basic intelligence.

In our modern age, which is very cognitively demanding, you wanna be very thoughtful about marrying someone who reflects your personal values and your own personal levels of intelligence. This is fundamentally important, at least in my experience, for your satisfaction and happiness in life. I would have a very hard time being in a relationship with a woman who was not my intellectual evil, evil, (laughs) my intellectual equal, because it would just be very hard for me to relate.

And so if my wife didn't understand my little quirky jokes, if she couldn't discuss the way that I wanna live and the ideas and the abstract ideas and concepts that I think about on a continual basis with me, I would find my relationship with her very unfulfilling. But one of the side factors is that your genetic, your basic intelligence and your mate's basic intelligence are gonna be passed along to your children.

Now, this is, I think, increasingly a major challenge in our modern society. I started thinking about this issue myself for the first time years ago when I read Charles Murray's excellent book called "Coming Apart," in which he analyzes the culture of the United States and some of the things that are contributing to this weird, basically two stories that we have in American culture.

And it's hard to summarize the entire book in a few sentences. But in that book, he talks about the increases in cognitive homogamy. And so homogamy, the word, it's not commonly used, but homogamy refers to the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics. Educational homogamy occurs when individuals with similar educations have children.

Cognitive homogamy occurs when individuals with similar cognitive ability have children. Let me read an excerpt here because it'll put this into focus in terms of how things like basic intelligence are transmitted generationally and what this can and is increasingly resulting in in our modern society, from a section called "The Increase in Cognitive Homogamy." "Before the age of mobility, "people commonly married someone from the same town "or from the same neighborhood of an urban area.

"The events that threw people together "seldom had anything to do "specifically with cognitive ability. "Similar cognitive ability was a source of compatibility "between a young man and a young woman, "and some degree of cognitive homogamy existed, "but it was a haphazard process. "Meanwhile, educational homogamy was high "because hardly anyone went to college.

"In large proportions of married couples, "both had less than a high school education "or both had a high school diploma. "As the proportion of college graduates increased, "so did the possibilities "for greater educational homogamy at the top. "As college graduates found, "they had more potential marriage partners "who were also college graduates.

"Drawing on the extensive technical literature and the CPS," which is, I forget what the acronym stands for, basically a large, standardized, continually collected body of survey data, "sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mayer "examined trends in, quote, assortative marriage, "as it is known in the jargon, from 1940 to 2003.

"They found that homogamy has increased "at both ends of the educational scale. "College graduates grew more likely "to marry college graduates, "and high school dropouts grew more likely "to marry other high school dropouts. "For our purposes," which is trying to understand how the new upper class came to be, "the effects of increased educational attainment "may be seen in a simple measure.

"In 1960, just 3% of American couples "both had a college degree. "By 2010, that proportion stood at 25%. "The change was so large that it was a major contributor "to the creation of a new class all by itself. "But increased educational homogamy "had another consequence that the academic literature "on homogamy avoids mentioning.

"Increased educational homogamy "inevitably means increased cognitive homogamy. "A college education, starting with admission "and continuing through to graduation, "is a series of cognitive tests. "To be able even to begin a major in engineering "or the hard sciences, "students have to be able to do advanced calculus, "and that in turn requires logical mathematical ability "in roughly the top decile of the population.

"To be able to cope with genuine college-level material "in the social sciences and humanities "requires good linguistic ability "in the top quartile of the distribution "if you're content with scraping by, "closer to the top decile if you want to get good grades "in a moderately demanding college. "To graduate means passing all these tests "plus a general test for perseverance.

"The result is that each level of educational attainment, "high school diploma, AA, BA, MA, "and a professional degree or PhD, "implies a mean IQ for people attaining that level "that has been remarkably stable among whites "at least since the beginning of the 1980s." And here the author goes and shares a paragraph on why he is limiting this data to whites only.

Most of the book is whites only data. He has an appendix on non-white data, but whites only data avoids a lot of the racial issues in America over the course of the 20th century and gives for better analysis. Then he presents a chart showing how basically the IQ levels for degree attainment are very, very obviously driven by the height of educational attainment, right?

For the mean IQ for persons completing no more than no degree in the year 1982 to '89 is 88. 2005, it's 87. High school diploma, 99, 2005, 99. Associate's degree, 105 and 104. Bachelor's degree, 113, 113. Master's degree, 117, 117. And then PhD, LLD, MD or DDS, 126 and 124.

The stability of the scores over the three decades from the 1980s through the 2000s is remarkable considering that the number of bachelor's degrees expressed as a percentage of 22 year olds increased from 22% in 1981 to 37% in 2008. But the country was also becoming steadily more efficient at getting the best students into college over that period so that the greater size of the college population didn't mean a markedly less able population.

If the mean IQs at the higher levels of educational attainment have been stable, then the growth of two degree couples has meant, inevitably, greater cognitive homogamy at the top. But that's just the beginning. The college sorting machine has also been at work. College brings people together at the time of life when young adults are beginning to look around for marriage partners.

And the college sorting machine brings the highest IQ young women and young men together in the most prestigious schools. As if that weren't enough, graduate school adds another layer of sorting so that the brilliant young woman who went to a state university goes to Harvard Law School where she is brought into the elite pool.

For the prospective members of the new upper class who don't find a marriage partner as an undergraduate or at grad school, the names of the schools they attended give them badges that signal their status to prospective mates. The substance of their education also sorts them into occupations that increase the likelihood that they will eventually marry people with similar characteristics.

So it's not just that college graduates are likely to marry college graduates, but that graduates from elite colleges are likely to marry other graduates from elite colleges. Back in the days when Harvard men and Wellesley women were more likely to be rich than to be especially smart, this meant that money was more likely to marry money.

In an era when they are both almost certainly in the top centiles of the IQ distribution, it means that very smart is more likely to marry very smart. Goes on and talks a little bit about shared culture, how cognitive ability is just kind of a marker for having a shared culture.

And then we read this section here. Transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation. As I read this, pay careful attention to the comments on the durability of wealth. Another consequence of increased educational and cognitive homogamy is the increased tenacity of the elite in maintaining its status across generations.

The adage, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations grew out of an observed reality. If the children and grandchildren are only average in their own abilities, money from a fortune one in the first generation won't keep them at the top of the heap. When the parents are passing cognitive ability along with the money, the staying power of the elite across generations increases.

Specific numbers can be attached to such statements. The stability of the average IQs for different levels of educational attainment over time means that we can predict the average IQs of children of parents with different combinations of education. And we can also predict where the next generation of the smartest children is going to come from.

On average, children are neither as smart nor as dumb as their parents. They are closer to the middle. This tendency is called regression to the mean. It exists independently of genes. Regression to the mean is a function of the empirically observed statistical relationships between the tested IQs of parents and children.

Given the parameters in the note on page 366, the expected value of the IQ of a grownup offspring is 40% toward the population mean from the parent's midpoint IQ. Suppose we have four white couples with the same level of education, plugging in the average IQs for those levels of education as given in table 2.1.

I added a fifth couple who both have degrees from elite colleges with a midpoint IQ of 135. Here is what we can expect as mean IQs of the children of these couples. Parents' education, two high school dropouts, expected IQ of the child, 94. Two high school diplomas, expected IQ of the child, 101.

Two college degrees and no more, expected IQ of the child, 109. Two graduate degrees, expected IQ of the child, 116. Two degrees from an elite college, expected IQ of the child, 121. These represent important differences in the resources that members of the next generation take to the preservation of their legacy.

Consider first a college graduate who marries a high school graduate, each with the average cognitive ability for their educational level, 113 and 99 respectively. Their expected midpoint IQ is 106. Suppose they have built a small business, been highly successful, and leave $5 million to their son. If their son has the expected IQ of a little less than 105, he will have only about a 50% chance of completing college, even assuming that he tries to go to college.

Maybe he inherited extraordinary energy and determination from his parents, which would help. But those qualities regress to the mean as well. Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations is a likely scenario for the progeny of that successful example. Compare that situation with the one facing the son of two parents who both graduated from elite schools.

If he has exactly the expected IQ of 121, he has more than an 80% chance of getting a degree if he goes to college. These percentages are not a matter of statistical theory. They are based on the empirical experience of both the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

If you had an IQ of 105 or one of 121 and entered college, those are the probabilities that you ever got a degree. In addition to those differing chances of graduation are qualitative differences between young people with IQs of 105 and 121. First, the reasons that someone with an IQ of 105 doesn't finish college probably include serious academic difficulties with the work, whereas the reasons a person with an IQ of 121 doesn't finish college almost certainly involve motivation or self-discipline.

No one with an IQ of 121 has to drop out of college because he can't pass the courses. Second, there is a qualitative difference in the range of occupations open to those two young persons. The one with an accurately measured IQ of 105 cannot expect to be successful in any of the prestigious professions that are screened for IQ by their educational requirements, for example, medicine, law, engineering, academia.

It is unlikely that he can even complete those educational requirements. Someone with an accurately measured IQ of 121 can succeed in any of them if his mathematical and verbal talents are both strong or succeed in the ones geared to his talents if there is an imbalance between mathematical and verbal ability.

Now, think in terms of an entire cohort of children. Where will the next generation of children with exceptional cognitive ability come from? For purposes of illustration, let's say that exceptionally high cognitive ability means the top five centiles of the next generation of white children. More than a quarter of their parents may be expected to have a midpoint IQ of more than 125.

Another quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 117 to 125. The third quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 108 to 117. That leaves one quarter who will be the children of parents with midpoint parental IQ of less than 108. Only about 14% of that top five centiles of children are expected to come from the entire bottom half of the distribution of white parents.

Therein lies the explanation for that startling statistic I reported earlier about SAT scores. In 2010, 87% of the students with 700 plus scores in critical reading or mathematics had a parent with a college degree, and 57% had a parent with a graduate degree. Those percentages could have been predicted pretty closely just by knowing the facts about the IQs associated with different educational levels and the correlation between parental and child IQ.

They could have been predicted without making any theoretical assumptions about the roles of nature and nurture in transmitting cognitive ability, and without knowing anything about the family incomes of those SAT test takers, how many test preparation courses their children took, whether they went to private schools or how ingenious the educational toys in the household were when they were toddlers.

In an age when the majority of parents in the top five centiles of cognitive ability worked as farmers, shopkeepers, blue collar workers, and housewives, a situation that necessarily prevailed a century ago, given the occupational and educational distributions during the early 1900s, these relationships between the cognitive ability of parents and children had no ominous implications.

Today, when the exceptionally qualified have been so efficiently drawn into the ranks of the upper middle class, and when they are so often married to people with the same ability and background, they do. In fact, the implications are even more ominous than I just described, because none of the numbers I used to illustrate the transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation incorporated the effects of the increased educational homogamy of recent decades.

In any case, the bottom line is not subject to refutation. Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper middle class, and more specifically, from parents who are already part of the broad elite. (sighs) One sidebar that was included that I skipped over earlier in the text that's important.

Which comes first, education or IQ? Educational attainment is correlated with IQ, but education does not have much effect on IQ after the child enters elementary school. By that, I do not mean that the absence of any education after age six wouldn't make a difference, nor that exceptions do not exist.

Rather, I mean that if 1,000 children are administered a good IQ test at age six, and those children then attend a wide variety of elementary and secondary schools, their IQs at age 18 will be very similar to what they were at age six, and statistical analysis will not show that the children who went to the expensive private schools got an IQ boost as a result.

This finding goes back to the famous Coleman Report in the 1960s. Scholars still debate whether additional years of education are associated with increments in general mental ability or just increments in test scores, but no one contends that education routinely transforms average children into intellectually gifted adults. The point that I want you to draw is basic, the basic genetic makeup of the person with whom you choose to procreate is going to have a significant effect on the long-term results that your children experience in life.

In a perfect world, you would marry somebody who is exceedingly beautiful, exceedingly strong, exceedingly healthy, and exceedingly smart. In a perfect world, you yourself would be exceedingly beautiful, exceedingly strong, exceedingly healthy, and exceedingly smart. Now, none of us chose the genetic makeup that we personally enjoy, but we all have a responsibility to maximize our own gifts and abilities.

We have a responsibility to maximize it. I was sick the day after Christmas, in bed for a day, and every time I get sick, I just reflect on the fact of how difficult it is to do anything productive when you don't feel well. And one of the great gifts that I have been given has been just enjoying robust personal health.

For all of my challenges and shortcomings, I've always generally enjoyed good personal health. I've generally felt good. I've generally lived most of my life pain-free and pretty well cared for. When I compare, and so when I'm sick, I'm just shocked at how much of my own personal success in life has been due to this factor that is significantly out of control.

I do my best to maximize my health. I try to be wise with my decisions, as we all do, right? But at the end of the day, a significant amount of my genetic heritage and my robust personal health, I didn't do anything for it, right? I didn't deserve it.

It's just my genetic lot in life. And same thing with intelligence, with physical attractiveness, et cetera. None of us did anything to deserve where we are, but we do have a responsibility to maximize those gifts that we have. When you're choosing a mate, a spouse, I believe that is a time in which you should be, and you have every right to be, perfectly selfish.

I believe that marriage is a permanent institution. When my wife and I said, "I will," to each other, I signed away my life with no escape. I said, "I will have you and hold you, keep you, "in sickness and in health, for better or worse, "no matter what, in poverty and in wealth, "no matter what, till death do us part." That is a huge commitment.

That commitment is a necessary precondition for what we'll talk about in the future, of the stability that children need to grow up in. If you're going to make a commitment that is going to affect the rest of your life, you must be very, very careful about entering into that commitment.

Be thoughtful and careful about your spousal selection, even to these very practical, very visible things, 'cause it will make a huge difference in your life, it'll make a huge difference in the lives of your children. Now for a limited time at Delamo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon, see dealer for details. - Let's now pivot from basically those kind of objective, hard physical factors, and let's talk about some of the sociological factors. As you'll hear as I continue in this podcast episode, in discussing the care and nurturing of a baby, care and nurturing of children, et cetera, what will quickly become apparent is that questions of character, questions of personality, questions of virtue, questions of psychology, questions of worldview, of religion and theology, these questions will be exceedingly important in the care and nurture of your children.

One of the comments I'll make in a little bit when we talk about babies is the importance of babies being surrounded by nothing but love. Love and caresses and gentleness and kindness, et cetera. If you marry somebody who is loud, who is harsh, who doesn't know how to express love and care, who doesn't know how to cuddle a baby, who doesn't have the personal patience to deal with a crying baby without lashing out and getting frustrated and angry, then your hopes and dreams for your children's long-term future are going to be significantly harmed.

And so you wanna be very, very careful about the character of the person that you are marrying. You wanna be very careful about the character of the person with whom you are procreating. Because if you have a child with somebody who is of low moral character and you're fundamentally, you're running from behind, so what do you wanna look for?

Well, you make your own list, but I think that of utmost importance is basic issues of virtue and of character. You want to be in a relationship with somebody who has high moral character in all of its fullest expressions. You want someone who is patient. You want someone who is kind.

You want someone who is exceedingly self-disciplined. You want somebody who is compassionate, loving, tenderhearted. All of these character qualities that we can go through need to be reflected in your prospective spouse. If you were to go through a list of virtues and character qualities, what you'll see is every single one of them, if present and in its strongest form, can have a very positive impact and influence on your children.

And each one of them, if absent or only present in a very weak form, can have a negative impact. Think about assertiveness. If you are in a relationship with someone who is not assertive, then your child may grow up to be the dominant force in a household rather than being the submissive one in a household and understanding very clearly his role in society due to the assertiveness of a parent.

Or cleanliness. If you are in a relationship with someone who is unclean or who is slovenly in his or her manner, his or her dress, his or her deportment, his or her way he or she keeps his or her house, then this can negatively impact it. If a child is surrounded by a, grows up in a slovenly hovel, then that child is not going to achieve his potential.

He's gonna have to work to escape it rather than growing up in cleanliness and in carefulness, right? Helpfulness or moderation or modesty or orderliness or purposefulness or gentleness or generosity. Again, go through a list of character qualities and what you'll see is that all of these are important. They're gonna be important for the functioning of a parent and they're gonna be important for the example that is gonna be set in front of your child.

If a child has a positive example set of strong virtue and strong moral foundation, then that child will naturally absorb the idea that this is the normal way of living. And then that child will be as one who stands on the shoulders of the giants before him. But if the child has a strongly negative example, that child has to go through this long and circuitous pathway of systematically discarding the negative example to which he's been exposed for all of his formative years and then surrounding himself with positive examples.

So all of these things matter, they matter hugely. And even a person of the highest virtue and character is going to be tested in the crucible of babies and children. I remember distinctly an experience that I had when we had our first baby. I always had, I continue to have and have always had a fairly high opinion of myself, a strong sense of self-confidence.

I know where my strengths are, where my weaknesses are. And I am generally a fairly patient man, et cetera. But I remember so much when we had our first child and there was a time in which he was just crying and crying and crying and my wife and I were tired and were worn out and up all night and no sleep and trying to figure out what is wrong with this baby and is he physically hurt?

Is there something that we're doing wrong? We're inexperienced parents, of course, et cetera. And one of the things, by the way, that happens in your parenting journey is your tolerance for something like crying increases. Obviously, none of us want a child to cry, but I remember, or I see sometimes, if a single person without children is around and your baby's crying, like the person just like starts, especially men, they start shifting their chairs.

They're like, "I don't know what to do." And they're super uncomfortable. And as a parent, after a while, you just learn, sometimes children cry and you can't fix it. And at least if he's crying, it means he's not dying. Right? You're okay, okay. Crying is annoying, but he's crying because he's overtired.

We'll be home in 15 minutes. He can just cry for 15 minutes. We'll get him in his bed, he'll go to sleep, et cetera. But that takes time to learn. And so I remember our first child, there was a point in time where I was so frustrated. I was holding my baby and all of a sudden, I was swept by this overwhelming urge to just like frustrated to shake my baby.

And it scared me to death. 'Cause all of a sudden I realized, oh, that's why shaken baby syndrome or whatever is a thing. Like this is what happens. You're so filled with frustration and anger. And like, you're at the end of your rope and you're tired and you can't fix it.

And you just wanna fix it that you're just like, ah, you wanna just lash out. Now I understand why people shake their babies. And I didn't for the record, I didn't. I put him down in his crib. I walked out, I closed the door. I walked to the end of the house.

I sat down, breathed for a few minutes and then went back five minutes later and started again and calmed him, soothed him, et cetera. But I just vividly remember, it's those times when you come face to face with your own wretchedness as a human being. And you realize, wow, if I didn't have the self-control that I have, I could have just done something really horrific and harmed my baby.

And he's totally innocent in it. And so those things matter. They matter hugely, hugely. Now, a couple of important comments specifically to men. One of the things that you need to think very carefully about, if you want your children, if you desire to have children and you want your children to flourish, you need to very carefully choose a woman based upon her qualities and her abilities and her aptitude for motherliness.

One of the great challenges that we face in our modern era, on the backside of four waves of feminism, is that very few women are ever encouraged to develop abilities, skills, qualities, or appreciation even of motherly characteristics. Most young women in our modern Western societies are being systematically trained for careers in business, in medicine, et cetera, rather than as mothers.

And so this makes it very challenging to distinguish and navigate between a woman who's going to be a good mother versus a woman who's going to be a great career woman. I see a little bit of a change where I see that there are broad swaths of women who are wishing that they could have more of the old-fashioned motherly style of living and are feeling frustrated with how they've been basically shoehorned into modern business-making, money-making careers.

But it is very challenging because a lot of times, the women who are the most successful in the modern business world make the worst mothers. And the women who are probably the best mothers are probably not going to be very successful in the business world. It's important that you think about this and think about what you want as early in life as possible.

If you desire to be in a relationship with a career woman, feel free, it's your life. If you desire to be in a relationship with a mother, it's also your life, and you can choose that. On this topic, I myself feel like I dodged a bullet when it came to choosing my wife.

The reason I feel that way is I was not confident when I was 20 years old that I wanted a woman who was willing to be a great mother and a great wife. I was so infected with the modern kind of feminist worldview that I thought it was discriminatory for me to say that I would want a woman who would be a good mother.

I wouldn't have gone out and done that. And there were several women that I was interested in who, in hindsight, it's now blindingly obvious to me that it would have been a horrific relationship for me personally because they were very career-driven. There were three different girls that I was interested in, all three of whom went on to become doctors.

And if I had ever ended up in a marriage relationship with those women, it would have been very difficult for us because their careers were very important to them. And yet, with my interest in traveling the world and living a free lifestyle, et cetera, I would have found it difficult to be married to them because of the many compromises.

Now, I'm not casting any aspersions on them. I think I haven't, I'm not in touch with any of them. I know that at least a couple of them are mothers now, and I'm sure they're wonderful mothers, et cetera. But their life decisions have, and the importance of their careers set them on a different track.

And that track would have been frustrating to me. Back to what I said a little bit ago, when you're choosing a spouse, you should be completely and entirely selfish. And you should be thinking about your vision for your children, and you should choose the best mother that you can for your children.

My wife and I, prior to being married, it was not like we sat down and kind of had this, you know, tremendous, you know, long-term plan that we were gonna go and have five children. Kind of just emerged naturally. But in hindsight, with experience, I can now see that one of the reasons it emerged naturally is because we had a high degree of compatibility on some of these issues.

My wife was working, she had a job, et cetera, but she wasn't super career-oriented. She wasn't trying to earn a million dollars as, you know, a lady boss. She was working 'cause she needed to work, and she was happy to be married to me. And in hindsight, it's one of the things that I appreciate the most about her is that she can be fully focused on being a mother.

And I consider that a major asset. As you'll hear when I talk about some of the things that you can do with babies and children, one of the most important things that you need is time. And you especially need time from your children's mother. And so if you are attracted to somebody who expresses motherly qualities, or if you're attracted to somebody who has developed skills and ability and knowledge and prepared herself to be an effective mother, that's a hugely important thing for you to consider.

And if you want children, and you want your children to be raised well, the choice of the mother and her character qualities, her inclinations, her personality, is going to be a choice that you cannot overcome, meaning you cannot go beyond that basic choice. You are going to succeed or fail to the degree that she possesses those character qualities that you need.

Now, I want to speak to my female listeners. The exact same thing applies to you. If you're going to be in a relationship with a man and you are thinking and caring about the long-term success and future of your children, you need to be exceedingly discriminatory around choosing a man who's going to be a high-quality, capable father.

You need to be very, very careful about who you conceive children with, and make sure that you are only conceiving children with somebody who is going to be a world-class father. Because if you wind up raising a child by yourself, your child will never be as successful as he otherwise could be if he were raised by a mother and a father.

A child who doesn't have a strong, virtuous father in his life is going to begin his life completely handicapped. And that will express itself more and more as the years go by. And so your choice of a man of high moral character and integrity is exceedingly important. Your choice of somebody who is going to provide you with the lifestyle that you want is exceedingly important.

One of the conclusions I've had for years and have proven again over recent weeks is if you're going to be a committed parent with young children, I do not believe it is possible to do that as well as it could be if you are trying to also earn money.

I am a very, very skilled father on the day-to-day functioning of my household. And when we have a new baby, as I'll talk about in, I guess at this point I should probably do a separate episode, but when we have a new baby, my wife has one job, be with baby, that's all.

And so I'm running the household and I'm very good at it. I am very skilled at it. It actually annoys me when people make jokes about men being incapable of washing their towels and cooking and whatnot. I'm very skilled at it. Even with my skill, I find it very hard to create the time to sit down and do something as simple as recording a podcast for you, even though I know what I want to say, because the demands of young children are continuous.

And so if you want to be a full-time mother and be able to pour into your children, you better choose a guy who can make enough money to support you and who wants that, and who's willing to do that with a happy attitude. You better be careful of choosing somebody who's gonna be patient with you, who's gonna be patient with you when you are your most vulnerable.

One of the times when a woman is in her most vulnerable state is during childbirth and immediately after when she's recovering, exceedingly vulnerable. And so you need to choose somebody who's gonna provide for you, who's gonna care for you, who's gonna protect you, et cetera. So you must be very, very careful and very, very discriminatory in choosing someone who is the highest quality for you in your relationship.

Don't succumb to the idea that the only thing that matters is the feels. Don't succumb to the idea that the only thing that matters is whether your heart goes pit or pat when he looks at you. That's important in some measure, but it's not in any way the kind of thing that's going to survive the decades.

And you want something that's going to last. And if you want your children to succeed, you can't just depend upon the basic genetic material. Your goal is not to go out and find a sperm donor who is tall, dark, and handsome and has a high IQ. You need somebody who has those basic qualities, but also is going to be a world-class father.

Be careful and discriminatory in that process. In summary of what I've said so far, if you want your child to invest into the long-term success of your children, it begins with who the parents of your children are. And since you're going to be one of those parents, the primary choice that you have is who is the other parent?

Who's going to provide the genetic seed necessary for the growth of this baby? And who is going to be there throughout the long, challenging life course of this child and of this baby? Make sure if you want children that you're marrying somebody that you want to have children with.

Make sure also, of course, that you talk about it and that you want to have children. That's a fundamental component, of course, of those important conversations. But be very, very careful and discriminatory in advance of your mate. - Now for a limited time at Delamo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon, see dealer for details. - I think I'm going to conclude this podcast episode here. I was planning to go through every step, but I've spoken a little bit in greater detail about these topics than I intended to, but I'm satisfied with what I've recorded. I believe it's appropriate.

So we'll pick it up in the next episode. Also, of course, my children have awakened from their nap time and I'm now needed in my household in order to allow my wife to rest and to sleep. I can hear them in the other room, and so I'm needed for daddy duties.

So we'll make this into a multi-part series instead of a two-part series, which was the original intention. I hope that these ideas have been useful to you. I hope that these things have been helpful. I guess the final comment I would make, it's just simply that for many of us, these things, these decisions are already made.

For many of us, we already have a child, right? We've already chosen who we're married to. We've already chosen these kinds of things. The child is already generated and created, et cetera. But I do have a significant amount of my listening audience who has not made those choices. And I believe that these things matter and they should be considered, they should be talked about, et cetera.

We should be talking, one of the important classes, it's funny, in our homeschool co-op, I believe that education should reflect reality. And so in our homeschool co-op every year, we talk about, okay, what classes do we wanna have? And my wife suggested to the group, she's like, "You should have Joshua teach a class "on espousal selection class." And the teenagers, shockingly, didn't jump on the idea for whatever reason, but it's certainly a class that I'm going to be teaching systematically in my own homeschool and that I think we should teach to children.

The life course that people are on is so blindingly obvious that if we'll walk away from the Hollywood mumbo jumbo and all the garbage that they create about the way life works and we just look at it, it's so blindingly obvious, right? You don't want, character matters, physicality matters, health matters, et cetera.

This stuff makes a huge difference. And what I believe is so important is when you build a foundational relationship based upon compatibility, respect, et cetera, based upon a philosophy and a worldview of love, right? My definition of love is that love is an action. It's not a feeling, right?

Love is an action, like Voddie Bachum's definition. But love is an action, excuse me, love is, what does he say? Love is a decision, love is a, now I'm blanking on it. Love, act of the will, that's what it is. Love is an act of the will, accompanied by emotion that leads to action on behalf of its object.

I'm surprised I forgot that. I find that to be one of the most useful definitions of love. Love is an act of the will, accompanied by emotion that leads to action on behalf of its object. The idea is love is not something that you just feel, right? Those are chemical reactions and they come and go and they're important, but they're not fundamental.

They are the important and worthy and wonderful icing on top of the cake that makes the whole cake wonderful. But if that cake is just icing, right? Icing is gross, children think icing is great. Like, oh, I can just eat icing. Then you reach about 15 and you realize that eating icing is not nearly as wonderful as eating a really delicious cake with icing on top.

What Hollywood calls love and what our culture worships of these emotional reaction and feeling to another person is the wonderful icing on top of the cake that makes it spectacular, right? Makes it just burst in your mouth with flavor and you love it, but it's not the foundation for a cake.

And so we need to, if we're gonna see our great-great-grandchildren succeed, we need to establish a family culture in which these issues are discussed consistently and thoughtfully so that our children arrive at marriage age of 20, 25, 30 years old and they have a clear understanding of what they're looking for and what is available to them.

So enough for today. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with you as soon as I can. Remember, Radical's less than one week before the live class of my newest course called Hackproof. Hackproofcourse.com, sign up today. The live class that you will definitely want to be a part of is on February 8th.

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