The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use Simple Truth Wild-Caught Shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese.

No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions. Ralph's fresh for everyone. 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. Today, I want to explore some big-picture foundational causal thinking with you. One of the great passions that I personally have is to think about, identify, and maximize all of the underlying causes that lead to success, rather than wasting time frittering about with surface-level stuff.

Let me draw a logical example here from the world of mainstream financial planning all the way back. Many people falsely think that in order for them to get rich, they have to have the right investment. And so they spend a lot of time thinking about and wondering about, "What should I invest in?" It's a very common question that financial experts hear, "What should I invest in?" And it's not that that's an entirely unimportant question.

It is an important question, but it's not the foundational question. And I personally frequently frustrate people because I say, "Well, hold on. Before I answer that question of, 'What should I invest in?' let's back all the way up." And that can be a little annoying when someone just wants a 60-second answer and tell me three stocks or three mutual funds or three types of real estate or three regions of my city or my state or my country or three regions of the world where I should invest my money.

But it's not the truly correct answer. If you think about something like an investment, the actual choice of what to invest in, meaning, let's go with stocks and mutual funds because they're simpler. The specific mutual fund or the specific portfolio of stocks to purchase should be the last of the decisions, and it's the least important.

Of more importance than any particular mutual fund that you're going to purchase are things like, "What is your asset class structure going to be, your asset allocation?" Your asset allocation is a much more impactful decision to your long-term results than the specific fund that you happen to choose. When you look at asset allocation, you then have to back up and say, "Well, how much money do you have to put into the investment?" Because before you get to any one particular choice of investment, you have to have money.

And so it's much more important that somebody has $100,000 to invest into an investment than that they have $1,000 to invest into an investment. So then you ask the question, "Well, where does the $100,000 come from?" Well, it has to come from savings. So the expenses in your household and the income from your household make a much bigger difference to your ability to generate the thousands and thousands of dollars that you need to put into an investment for it to really matter than does the specific investment.

And so before I'm going to spend all my time telling someone this particular fund company or this particular mutual fund is where you should put your money, I want to talk about your income. How are you earning your money? What are your household expenses? What's the difference between those two?

Because in the early years of accumulation, that makes a much bigger difference to you. Well, then you have to back up and you have to say, "Well, what's your career choice?" Or, "Where do you live?" And because someone's career choice, their educational qualifications, a person's choice of where to specifically live and the opportunities that are available to him based upon living in the downtown area of a big city with a huge economy and tons of job options all around versus living in a rural area where he's limited to either modest local opportunities or what he can earn online, etc.

This makes a big fundamental difference in his earning ability. And then you go back to education all the way to the beginning, how much time have you had, etc. And you go back to these first causes and what you realize is it makes a far bigger difference what someone's educational path was, where somebody went to school and got his credentials, what kind of industry he chose to go into, whether his industry was trending upwards or downwards, what company he wound up joining, etc.

And you go on down the road and these are the things that are the fundamental drivers of wealth. Now, it's easier to write a simple entry-level personal finance book and talk to somebody about how to select a mutual fund. And that's not entirely unimportant. And I'm grateful to see that over the years that industry has gotten much healthier.

For example, we talk about expense ratios more than we talk about Morningstar star ratings on mutual funds. We talk about all of these things. Asset allocation is much more commonly talked about today than it was 30 years ago. But at its core, we want to go back to these fundamental issues because if we get these right or as right as possible, then it makes everything simple and easier.

And this accounts for a significant amount of my own personal interest because I have seen and observed over the years that if we can get these foundational things... I want to be careful using the word "right" because that implies an objective standard. What I mean by "right" is as good as possible for an individual in a subjective way.

If we can make these choices wisely and effectively, then everything downstream can work really, really well. Now, we can apply this both on a personal level in terms of personal success and we can also apply it on a population level. I don't think I ever... Let me give an example.

I don't think I went... I can't remember. When I did this series on investing into children, I don't think I ever recorded kind of another podcast that I had planned on that where I was going to talk about the importance of where you raise your child in terms of that impacting your children's long-term success.

And the basic idea was that if you're living in South Africa and you can move... and you spend all your money moving from South Africa to the United States of America, you have probably single-handedly made the one decision that is going to make the biggest difference of all in the opportunities of your children in terms of economics, lifestyle, everything.

Everything is improved by making that one decision. And so you should think carefully about where you raise your children, specifically the country that you live in, the state that you live in, the city that you live in, etc. And I talked about one aspect of that when talking about social grouping, etc.

But from a financial aspect, just even simply the country that you live in makes a difference. I read a biography of Elon Musk, and I remember thinking about this with regard to him. Like one of his big important fundamental things was to move from South Africa to Canada and eventually to the United States, because he just didn't see how he could accomplish what he wanted to accomplish in South Africa.

And that decision wound up being obviously a key fundamental decision. It's not that he couldn't have been successful in South Africa, but it's very hard to believe that he would have been able to build what he has built living in South Africa. And so that fundamental decision to go from South Africa to the United States for him was a core contributor.

So we can talk about this on an individual level like I did when, just a minute with my first example of tracing the chain of causal factors back to someone's education, someone's choice of careers, industry, etc. But we can also talk about this on a macro level. We can look at a society.

What is it about a place like the United States that makes such a big difference? And here we could go into various areas of analysis that I think all have validity, and it's very hard to distinguish what is more or less important. So we could begin with a geographical analysis.

One of the tremendous benefits that the United States has is the world's greatest geography. On every single level, the United States has a superior geography to everywhere else in the world. First, it is a very large country now after hundreds of years of expansion across the nation with the early founders of the country.

It's a very large country that stretches from coast to coast. The United States is a very insulated country. It has two oceans, one that protects it on the east, one that protects it on the west. On the northern frontier, not only are there not many people on the northern frontier, other than our friendly Canadian neighbors, but the actual frontier itself is so vast, the border is so vast, and it's so isolated that there's good protection there.

The United States enjoys great protection on the southern side with the vast deserts of Mexico that have traditionally made it difficult to invade from the south and from the north. And so the United States is a very safe, much safer than a country like France that has much more porous borders and much greater tensions along its borders.

The United States has incredibly productive internal geography. It has the world's most vast network of rivers that allow for low-cost transportation, some of the world's most fertile farmland. The latitudes of the United States cover all the different climate zones. Just the geographical variation within one country allows it to be one of the most incredible opportunities in terms of geographic structure ever.

And that's a simple, basic fact of what exists in that place. And so if somebody's looking at the world and trying to hitch his fortune to a place, then choosing a place that has good geography is going to make a difference to his overall long-term future. And you can see that if you look back and trace the history of the United States.

You could do this from a sociopolitical perspective as well. And you could say, what are the basic factors that are interwoven into the American economy or into the American society that have caused the country to be successful? And there are various elements of it. There are elements of free commerce, free association.

There are elements of work ethic, a strong Christian work ethic that sees work as an expression of productivity that leads the Americans to work very hard, to interact with one another. You can look back and you can see the relatively flat structure that enabled lots of people to build things.

And the geographic diversity. You can study federalism and the value of federalism in terms of allowing the states to compete with one another. You can look back and you can see how the government was formed, that you had a very weak central government because it was not necessary that there be any more than that.

And you can analyze these factors on a large level. And that analysis is helpful to inform various decisions. Well, let's go back to your and my economic success. The reason I'm trying to use first a personal example and then a broad example is that there is one major area that affects both of those things from a specifically economic, financially productive perspective.

And that factor that affects our lives individually very intensely and our economy very broadly is, and I'm going to combine, marriage and birth rates. If you look at the world and you think about and analyze the impact of marriage rates and all of their follow-on factors, marriage rates, divorce rates, successful marriage rates, and I mean successful in terms of the enduring nature of a marriage, it not ending in divorce, and also successful in terms of its quality, the quality of a marriage to two people happy together, joyful, fulfilled, contented in their marriage relationship, etc.

So if you look at marriage rates and their impact on society, and you look at birth rates and the impact of those birth rates on society, you see the factor that I think is, it's hard to imagine anything more foundational to individual success as well as to broad-scale economic population level success.

And let me just make a few comments as to why that is. If you look at various markers of success, everything from health levels, mental health, I've come to not like that term, I don't know an alternative though, but it's just so overused, but basically people's levels, self-reported levels of happiness, contentment, etc., purpose, meaning, etc.

in life, on every single metric, married people dramatically outperform unmarried people. Married people make significantly more money than unmarried people. Married people accumulate significantly more wealth than unmarried people. Married people enjoy significantly longer lifespans than unmarried people. Married people enjoy significantly higher health spans, meaning they enjoy higher health for longer than unmarried people.

Married people report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction than unmarried people, etc. And so if you look at it on just a broad level, people who are married are on every metric more successful than unmarried people as a group. That even includes people who are not married particularly well.

There are many people who are married but who are not married well that still enjoy some of those benefits. There are outliers. There are single people on all of these metrics who outperform the married people, as is the case with all populations. But we need to first, before we go to extremes, we need to first look at what causes a population to experience these positive effects.

So married people enjoy these advantages over unmarried people. So if we're looking to align somebody with all of the positive effects of wealth, happiness, contentment, health, longevity, then we should look at how to help people get married and stay married and marry well. And that is a fundamental causal factor.

Now if we look at population level data, meaning how does this group or this class interact with other parts of the population, I think we see similar trends that a population that is filled with strong and healthy marriages is a population that is highly stable, productive, etc. as compared to a population of unmarried people, a population filled with tension, filled with divorce, with low marriage rates, a population that's very unstable and very unproductive.

And then, so if we look at that, we can see the impact of these things. And I'm not going to try to quote a bunch of statistics, you dig into it yourself, but I can't name a single data point that, and I have notes that I've made over years of thinking about this stuff, and I talk about the case for marriage and the case not to marry.

And if you look at the survey data that can be collected, that sociologists have sought to collect, the survey data would lead you away, coming away basically convinced that on every metric, the key to success and happiness in life is to be married. There are only a small number of reasons why somebody would not want to be married.

And I basically group these under three. The first biggest reason, the most important, that influences most people, is simply not having found an ideal marriage partner, not yet having found an ideal marriage candidate. And if we identify that, that's the reason, then we're in good shape. And this is what most single people self-report is, "Why are you not married?" "Well, I haven't found, you know, the right person yet." So that would be one very good reason not to marry.

You should not marry someone who is not an appropriate marriage partner or marriage candidate, just because marriage in and of itself is somehow a big thing. A second big reason is there is a small group of people who prioritize, above everything else, personal freedom and personal autonomy. And so those are people who I think should not be married, because if personal autonomy is your most foundational value, then going into marriage, a relationship in which you surrender significant amounts of your personal freedom and personal autonomy in order to work together in partnership with another person, is probably a wrong decision for those people.

And there can be many reasons to do that. So that would be the second categorization. And then the third thing, which is growing today, is basically a broad-scale, well, fear and apathy. Fear of the negative results, fear of divorce, fear of, you know, of a bad marriage, etc. And then just general apathy of, "Eh, well, I'm just not that interested in life," and, you know, "I don't think I need to do all that much," etc.

So these are some broad-scale things that are happening to people in terms of reasons not to marry. So, back to follow my train of thinking. The first thing is that marriage is one of those things that personally makes a big difference in your life. On a society, marriage is one of those things that makes a big difference on a societal level.

And we don't quite know what it looks like to live in a society with very low marriage rates, because we're entering into uncharted territories with the current extremely low rates of marriage. But I think we can see some of the glimpses of where that's likely to go, in terms of many aspects of our society at the moment.

There's enough early warning indicators showing us that the future, with much lower societal marriage rates, is likely to be very volatile. And I think that this is borne out by kind of smaller studies that we could do around the world. Some of the most volatile places to be, the most volatile civilizations and societies, are societies where you have large numbers of young men, young women, who are unpartnered.

That's a very volatile group, and it's very hard for society to successfully handle those people and their volatility. Related to marriage are birth rates. And birth rates are one of those other areas that makes a huge difference in your personal life, as well as in a societal level. Both are important, although I think we can track it much more on a societal level.

Let's start with personal level, though. Birth rates seem to have multiple effects and multiple impacts. So, on the one hand, in every society that we look at, as that society has become industrialized and wealthy, birth rates have declined over the course of the last century. Every society that we measure, as a society becomes wealthy and industrialized, birth rates are declining.

The most interesting and most potentially worrying aspect of that is simply that we don't know where that ends. First of all, there is no society that I'm aware of that we have any record of birth rates going down and then back up. And there doesn't seem to be a floor to the low birth rates.

The lowest birth rates in the world right now, according to demographers, are probably in South Korea, where the total fertility rate is something like 0.81 babies per woman at the moment. That's the lowest, to my knowledge, that's the lowest that we have in the world that is recorded and tracked.

Probably similar to that is some place like China. Their official statistics are higher than 0.81, but their official statistics are entirely untrustworthy. And so it's just a guessing game as far as what their actual fertility rate is. Japan has had an extremely low fertility rate for a long time.

And that's more interesting, I think, because we could see many years of that playing out in terms of its impacts, etc. And then everywhere in the world is in some direction of population collapse. And by the way, when I use language, I try to be very careful with my words.

I'm not always successful, but if I use hyperbole, I usually label it as such. When I use the word "collapse" in this case, talking about population collapse, I'm using it very carefully and I believe it's the apt and accurate word. It's not hyperbole. And so, a quick comment on why this is not more widely discussed.

We're living in a unique bubble on a global basis, where globally speaking, populations are continuing to increase. And so there are several factors that are causing people to not take these broad-scale societal risks seriously. One, in the 1970s, there was a massive societal scare that was inflicted upon the population over fears of overpopulation.

Most famously, Paul Ehrlich's horrific book, "Population Bomb", I think it was titled. And so most people in the world who are uneducated, if you go out and you ask them, they have this basic mindset that people are a problem, we have too many of them, and we have to get them under control.

And so there's this broad-scale, anti-humanist mindset among the uneducated, ignorant populace. And there are a couple of reasons why this is destructive. Number one, numerically, it's a false claim that Ehrlich's and others' predictions turned out to be woefully wrong. Not necessarily because they couldn't have been right, but because humans invented new technology and we enjoyed the Green Revolution, wherein global crop yields and global agricultural production increased massively, and we've been able to feed the world population in abundance.

And we have the lowest malnutrition and starvation rate that we've had in forever because of this Green Revolution. So we always need to be careful with forecasts, and I won't predict any kind of catastrophe, as I talk about population collapse, for the same reason, because I don't want to be wrong for the same reason Ehrlich was wrong, is that I think that as humans we are an adaptable bunch, and we can and will create solutions to problems.

And so I don't think worst-case scenarios are really generally the right path to go down. But there is wide-scale ignorance as far as total population numbers, and some of that is understandable, because where we are right now is living in an age in which global populations are continuing to increase, and will continue to increase.

The problem with that data, or that number, is that most of the population increase is due to longer life expectancy and longevity than it is among baby-making. So the world's population is not currently increasing because people are having more babies. Rather, the world's population is currently increasing because we have a lot of people who in centuries past may have died in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, who are now living an extra decade or two or three due to increased levels of nutrition, better lifestyles, better sanitation, better medical care, etc.

And so we have a more long-lived population, but we don't have the babies in place to replace them. And what's worse is that in many countries of the world, I want to be cautious saying most, but it feels like most sometimes when you look at the data, in many countries of the world not only do we not have the babies to replace those people when they do die, but we don't have the people who can make babies.

We don't have young couples who can successfully make babies. And so our population decline is as close to certain as anything that we can say because we simply don't have enough people. Even if there were some widespread trend and change back to having more children, then we would still not enjoy the kinds of population growth that we would like to see in a healthy population because we simply don't have enough people to make those children.

Our grandparents didn't have enough children for us to, for them to have grandchildren, basically. Our grandparents didn't have enough children for them to have a significant number of grandchildren. And though the grandchildren are now being born, there's not enough of the grandchildren to have a spreading family tree for great-grandchildren.

And so we're living in this temporary period where there can be a lot of intellectual dissonance that people experience where they say populations are growing, but what they don't understand is that populations are currently growing, but they're not growing to having more babies. And we don't have enough people to have babies in the future.

And so population decline is as close to inevitable as anything that we know of based upon measurable demographic trends. It's some of the most certain areas of science because we can see it decades in the future and it's a mathematical problem. So there's a broad scale level of ignorance among the population of those factors that I described.

There's also a strong antinatal philosophy that has taken hold in the population. So this expresses itself at many levels. You have the environmentalist perspective that says that people are a blight upon the earth, that the best thing that could happen would be for all humans to be eradicated from the earth so that the earth could recover and go back to its glorious, flourishing, jungle-like nature without the interventions of human beings.

This is, at its more extreme levels, it's one of the most obviously disgusting worldviews to exist, and yet it is widely popularized. That many people have at the base of their foundational philosophy this genocidal hatred of human beings. And it's evil, and yet because it's expressed in the soft form of "well, children are bad for the environment," that people don't often label it and identify it as such.

And it has infected the philosophical ideology of many of our peers, most concerningly many of our youngest peers. There are other reasons as well. You match together that environmentalist movement with a perspective of personal freedom and personal autonomy. That many of the young men and women of childbearing age, and those who will be entering into childbearing age in the future, have lived their mindset under the promotion of, again, personal freedom and personal autonomy being the controlling ideology.

And this is especially true in the individualistic Western philosophy world. It seems to have a similar effect in Eastern philosophy, but where I can trace it most effectively philosophically is in the Western world. We built upon the concepts of individualism and individual success, but then we added on to that the entire expression of personal freedom and personal autonomy.

And it's to the point where philosophically it seems as though a, certainly a plurality, and I think a majority of our young people, believe that the only things that they should ever do in life are things that they choose to do in life, and that there is no reason why they should expect any external force or any external pressure to do anything that they don't want to do.

And the glorification of the self and personal freedom and personal autonomy is the foundational philosophical feature of life. Well, that doesn't work well when it comes to entering into healthy relationships, where there is a give and take and there is a changing of yourself in order to meet someone else's needs, in order to serve and to love and to integrate with someone else.

And it does not work when it comes to having children, where you sacrifice, as a parent, huge levels of personal autonomy and personal freedom in order to meet the needs of your child, and in order to provide for your child what your child specifically needs. And so that's kind of a broad scale philosophical ideal.

There are other things that we could talk about as well that are leading to low birth rates. One of the most worrying is simply that the age at which a woman has her first baby has continually been pushed to later years due to a variety of reasons, but in many cases due to delayed marriage rates.

And that does not bode well for fertility. One of the great tragedies that you could... What's interesting is if you look at the population statistics and you try to figure out what is going on, one simple way to look at it is simply this. In historical eras, it may have been very common for a woman to marry and have children in her late teenage years.

Somewhere 17, 18, 19, 20. Then there was a generation in which we pushed that back, and it became very common for a woman to wait until after what we today usually call college years to marry. So it's okay, it's normal for me to marry at 24, 25, 26. And then it has become normal since then for a woman to marry at 30, 31, 32, etc.

Well, there are two basic facts that emerge from that. If we assume that children are coming in after marriage, which is when children should come for all of the healthiest effects of children, number one, there's just simply a great shortening of the number of years in which a woman can successfully gestate and birth a healthy baby.

Those years decline from 20 to 8, right? Fewer than 10. If we go from, say, age 20 to 40, being natural windows of fertility for most women, to 30 to 40, there's a halving right there of the number of potential children that a woman is capable of having. And then the other after effect of that is that a woman's fertility and her chances of conceiving a baby, especially a healthy baby, and carrying that baby to term, basically have collapsed by the time a woman is in her early 30s.

And so many women are under a false assumption, because they know people who are successfully having babies in their mid-30s, and they think it'll be easy and normal for them to have a baby at that age. And yet they find that it's not so easy and it's not so normal.

And this has many, many effects. So, from a financial perspective, and I'm always going to be tying this back to finance, you have massive costs to having a baby. One of the great challenges of our day is that we are having a reproductive crisis, where many people are not able to naturally conceive and birth children.

And nobody really knows exactly why, and it's probably not one causal thing. Men's testosterone levels are much lower, sperm count is lower, health is lower. These are big population level issues for men. Women's fertility is impacted. I don't know quite all of the right medical terms to use to be impacted.

But one of the things that's been the most shocking to me, and my wife, in terms of a couple in our natural childbearing years, is to see how many of our friends have struggled and struggled and struggled with fertility for various reasons. And again, some of that is simply age-related, that, okay, we're trying to have a baby at 35, and it's much harder to have a baby at 35 than it is at 25.

It's harder on everyone involved. And so this often means it leads to significant amounts of fertility treatments, which leads to significant costs. And so the cost for having a baby goes from a basically zero-cost endeavor for those who are able to conceive and birth easily, to a tens of thousands of dollars endeavor for those who are not able to do it.

And a lot of this is driven by age. And then, so we could talk about it from that perspective, many levels, but all of the trends from a personal level are against childrearing, and that has massive impact on a population level. And so if we look at the economies of the world that have the lowest total fertility rate, what we see is a huge boom that is followed and probably will be followed by a massive bust.

And the boom is this, that people who do not have children often enjoy a much higher lifestyle than those who do have children. And this is kind of a natural follow-on effect of excess income that's available for spending. The classic expression of this was the dual-income, no kids philosophy of the 1980s.

And I've worked with many couples in this situation. And I'm not here to argue that it's not a fantastic financial situation to be in on an individual level. If you have a couple, and there's a big if here, but if you have a couple that comes together, and that couple has all of the freedom of individuals who don't have children, they can pursue big careers, they can work long hours, they can build huge businesses, and they're not accountable to little humans and the time demands that little humans put on your life.

And if that couple can also benefit from all of the cost-saving measures of sharing an apartment, sharing a car, sharing all of these things that lead to lower expenses, and if that couple can also benefit from having a fairly stable lifestyle where, hey, we can go on vacation together, we have companionship that comes from marriage, so we don't have to go out and, you know, the guy's not a single guy who has to go and spend huge amounts of money courting various women and spending all his money trying to attract women to be with him.

He's got a wife, and so he spends money on her, but she makes tons of money as well. That's a powerful economic unit because you have a high income and low expenses. And that leads to either very high levels of consumption or high levels of saving and investment, or in many cases, both.

And so that is a powerful driver for an economy. The problem is that as that couple ages out and becomes old and their expenses go down, etc., and as they spend their money, there's no follow-on replacement generation. And so the economic activity of the economy lowers because there's just not enough people to replace them.

And so as we saw around the world, baby booms happen after World War II. And as those baby boomers retire and die off, there's not, on a global basis, there's not so many people to replace them. Now the demography in some countries is healthier, and so there are more babies to replace them.

In the United States, there are more babies. In New Zealand, in France, in some other nations, there are more babies. And so it's not quite as pronounced as it is and will be in Japan and South Korea. But on a broad-scale economic level, we don't know the impact of this because basically all of our economic systems are built upon never-ending growth, never-ending expansion, and a broadening of the population base.

What does it look like when a population starts to narrow? We don't know. We don't know. There are leading indicators. You can go and you can look at Japan, and you can try to figure out how the Japanese dealt with it. And so they've dealt with it by trying to figure out how to bifurcate their work and their economy so that their knowledge work is done in Japan, but they do most of their manufacturing overseas, where they can find the workers, because there's not enough workers in Japan to do it.

You can go and you can tour some of the fascinating places like Italy, where you can buy a house for a euro, and you see villages collapsing, and villages and towns desperately trying to lure new people to come and live there so that they don't die. Italy is... we read a story last week about a school being closed, because there were only two students that were enrolled in the school.

And this just goes on and on. So the point is we don't know. But we're going to find out in the coming decades, and we're going to have a first front row seat to it. When I talk about these issues personally, just with friends and things like that, not in a public manner, I am persuaded that one of the consistent themes of our conversation and analysis over the coming decades is simply going to be population decline.

I see it gaining in the public sphere. I've been talking about it publicly for... I didn't go back and check, but I've been talking about it on Radical Personal Finance occasionally for several years. But publicly speaking, I see a little bit of attention being paid to it. Some of this data is getting out there.

But on the whole, that's only among the educated, connected class. It's not among the broad scale, large groups of people in the world. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere, from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner. Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County in Santa Ana and get yours.

Offer in soon. See dealer for details. So that's a broad level area. But what are the problems that I want to strike at in what I have to do? Well, basically, as I see it, almost every single thing that we do as a society, and specifically I want to talk about my own home culture, which is the United States of America.

Almost every single thing we do as a society is destructive of marriage and is destructive of children. Of the idea of even having children. Almost everything. Not everything, but almost everything. Let me give a few examples to whet your appetite a little bit. The first thing that is destructive of marriage is that we have delayed, we have, as a society, we have delayed the age at which somebody is to marry.

And so we criticize people for marrying young. If one of the greatest sins that you can do, and by the way, I'm going to talk about kind of broader secular culture, but the evangelical Christian culture in the United States that I know well, in many cases it's not much better.

In some cases it's significantly worse. But one of the biggest sins that, say, an 18-year-old could commit in today's world is to go and marry. And that is a shockingly bad truth for the enduring nature of marriage and of child, of having children. For an 18-year-old to marry in the United States of America, that 18-year-old would have to counteract a massive level of pressure brought to bear upon him or her at every level.

There may be exceptions to this. Maybe there is some very tight-knit community of some kind that, you know, religious community where marriage is really prized and prioritized, etc. But even somebody who's sympathetic, like me, for marriage is still going to be quite skeptical of an 18-year-old marrying. The data indicates that people who marry a little bit later are often better off.

And it's very hard to find an 18-year-old who has been prepared effectively for marriage. So even the most pro-marriage pastor or counselor, etc., is going to be pretty skeptical of an 18-year-old marrying. And so, hear me clearly, I'm not recommending that we tell all 18-year-olds to marry. There has to be a whole lot of work that's done before that.

In order for an 18-year-old to marry successfully and effectively, that 18-year-old needs to have been trained and developed from, say, the age of 8, in order to be ready to be married at 18. And there's a whole set of preparations that need to be done to demonstrate character, to develop character, to develop various strengths, to develop an income, to develop a vision of the world, to develop maturity, etc.

Some of that can be influenced by simply having a society that works on it. Some of that can only be influenced by the earth going around the sun more. There are some things that it's only a matter of a number of days. And so, it's much more acceptable for, in our society, that the 18-year-old do anything else except get married.

And that doesn't lay a good foundation. Continuing on, if somebody marries, or if somebody is going to marry, we put tremendous barricades in the way. We don't teach people how to effectively choose a spouse, teach young people. Broadly speaking, we teach young people that there's going to be a day in time in which your heart goes pitter-pat, because you see somebody across the room, and when your heart goes pitter-pat, you'll know it, because that's true love.

And now that you know that there's true love, because your heart goes pitter-pat, then now it's time to get married, and that's the foundation of a relationship. Meanwhile, ask any marriage counselor, ask any marriage, read any book on marriage, etc., and you'll quickly discover that your heart going pitter-pat in a uniquely strong way is not a very reliable indicator of an enduring, sustaining marriage.

As a society, we have made it very hard to get into marriage. The amount of money that is spent on a wedding has become outrageous. And basically the idea for many people has become that young married people, people who are marrying, are supposed to throw this giant expensive party, and we've erected all of these for their friends, and we've erected all these financial obstacles in the way of marriage, so that people frequently report, they say, "Why don't you get married?" And they say, "I can't afford to." And these are people who have found a partner that they're with.

In many cases, they're living with that partner, they're sexually active with that partner, and someone says, "Why don't you get married?" And they say, "Well, we can't afford to. We're saving up." It's an insane system, and yet we've created these giant obstacles for it. We've made marriage, in many cases, very dangerous from the perspective of government control, finances, etc.

One of the great trends right now that is very negative is that men especially are being fed a constant train of thinking that it is dangerous for men to get married. And this is one of those things that to unpack it, we have to dig a little bit deeper.

Because on the one hand, this advice is entirely right. Men are very concerned about divorce. Women are too. But people are concerned about divorce, and men feel like they are unfairly treated in divorce. Men feel like they have no legal leg to stand on. They feel like at any point in time, a woman can divorce me, she can take half my money, she can take my income for, in many cases, life, and I can't do anything to protect myself.

She can take my children, she can take my income, etc. All you've got to do is just do a little bit of counseling, financial counseling, relationship counseling, etc. And you will hear stories that will make you go home and cry. On both sides. But men are dramatically affected by this.

And as a society, what we have done is we have changed the calculus for men, in terms of men being able to get what they want. Men want sex, and men want sexual relationships. When as a society we made the expectation that in order for men to get sex, they had to achieve certain things in their own life, they had to be of a certain quality and caliber, they had to be employed, they had to be stable, they had to be able to provide, etc.

And then they had to marry in order to gain access to sex. Men moved heaven and earth to do those things. Today, men don't generally have to do any of those things in order to gain access to sex. And so because of that, they don't really do many of those things.

On the flip side though, marriage was, in the United States, a stable institution. That there was a time in which a man could know that as long as I don't commit adultery against my spouse, as long as I don't leave her, as long as I don't abuse her or commit some criminal act against her, I'm going to stay married, she can't leave me.

Well today, that has all changed. And now, a man's spouse can leave him for any reason. And in our modern "feels first" culture, that basically if a woman's heart goes pitter-pat for some other man, and she leaves her first man, then she can take advantage of whatever the wealth and the productivity of the relationship has been, as well as go on her way.

Now the flip side for women is also true, that marriage has become filled and fraught with danger for women. And women, instead of being in a society that has encouraged the protection of women, women increasingly find themselves in a society in which they have to do it all. They have to go out and they have to be independent.

They have to make money. They have to provide for themselves. They have to provide for their marriage in terms of financially. They have to have a big job. And they have to raise and have children, etc. And it's no small wonder that women are turning away from that. And in terms, it's a huge thing.

When a woman has a baby, she is incredibly vulnerable. And I don't just mean in the act of childbirth, because of course that's true, but she's incredibly vulnerable from then on. And so, as a society, we have to protect that, and we're doing a horrific job of it. When people have children, everything about our modern society is structured against them.

The expectation of a dual-income household while also maintaining children means that parents have to institutionalize their children. And it's obvious to all parents that institutionalizing children is bad for children. Even though many parents do it, and they choose to do it, I have a hard time thinking of intelligent, self-aware people who think that that's ideal.

They often come to the decision to say that institutionalizing my children is best for us right now. Mom can't handle the stress, so we'll put the baby in daycare. Dad can't do that because he's just not made that way, so we'll put the baby into a government school. But none of this is ideal.

Not a single thoughtful, intelligent person, if sitting down with unlimited resources, would ever choose the modern, institutional nature of child-rearing as the best ideal outcome. It's always a satisfying, it's always a... My vocabulary is missing at the moment, but it's always a matter of, "Well, this is what we can do at the moment.

We can't do anything else." But none of it is ideal. And so, you put a parent in a situation where they know they're not doing the best thing for their child, does that give any motivation to go and have more children? You say, "Okay, it's one thing for Elon Musk.

Well, Elon Musk can have, I don't know how many children he has now, nine children or seven, eight children by four women, who knows. But Elon Musk can do that because Elon Musk can start a school in his house and he can hire tutors, etc." That's always been the prerogative of the rich.

But if I have a child, that child's going to go into daycare, being raised in an institution which has terrible influence on a child's long-term development. The child's going to go into a mediocre government school because that's what we can have. The child's going to add massive costs to my life and to my lifestyle.

You know, it's just going to... That's what I can do. And so, why would I want to put more children into that? And of course, this is easier to say because people look around and they say, "Well, why would I want to bring my child into this world anyway?

This world is filled with problems and violence and war and catastrophe and all this stuff. Why would I want to bring children into this anyway?" And they're not wrong, you know, to some degree. There has to be an overriding and overwhelming compelling vision on the flip side as to why that's actually the case.

It has to have a philosophical driver as to why you want children and what the world needs from your children. And then you have to have the personal motivation and the personal resources to follow it through, etc. And so, it's very hard to have children. It's very hard to make the numbers work.

It's very hard to make the budget. It's very hard to make ends meet. And it's increasingly hard in the United States because of the intense individualistic culture. Most parents today feel incredibly isolated in their childbearing. And that has to do, on the one hand, there's a positive healthy trend that especially in Western culture and American culture, we often respect the integrity of the family unit, the nuclear family unit.

But there's an element in which that proper respect of boundaries is healthy. And there's an element in which expecting that nuclear family unit to do everything is totally destructive. And unfortunately, we have a lot of that destructive nature. It's that parents don't feel like they can rely on anyone else to help them.

They feel like if they are going to rely on anyone else to help them, it all has to be a paid relationship. And there are various levels of this. So it's like, well, I can ask mom and dad to come and babysit, but mom and dad are across the country, so obviously that's not going to work.

So if I'm going to go out and get a break and mom's going to have a break where she can go to the coffee shop and drink a latte in peace, she has to find someone or pay someone to take care of her children so she can get a break.

If dad and mom are going to go on a date night, they have to hire a professional babysitter. And I can't even do that because I don't trust babysitters because they're all criminals. Or I have to do a background check and we're so safety conscious, rightly so, but it adds all of these burdens to it.

If you start to have many children, then my wife and I, we have five. You enter into a totally different space in the world where when you have many children, it becomes impossible to do many things. It becomes very difficult to do many things. It becomes very difficult to have a break with five, as my wife and I have five children.

It's not possible to find a babysitter for five children unless you do what we do, which is only have a babysitter late at night when all the children are in bed. But hiring a 16-year-old girl to take care of five children, unless she is from a big family, it's just not possible nor safe.

You need two or three babysitters to deal with that because people don't know how to deal with children, etc. Even parents, you have enough children and your parents may be well-meaning, etc., but your children will wear them out and they're just not used to it. And so when you have a lot of children, you're basically committing yourself to a very expensive lifestyle and a very intensive lifestyle down the road.

Now, I think it's worth it. I'm very excited about the future. But there's no question that it's an intense time when you have many young children and it has a heavy cost on everyone involved. And so you have to decide for yourself if the cost is worth it. As a society, my point is that as a society, we discourage children at all.

We discourage marriage. We push the age of marriage off. We discourage many children because of the cost of it and the lack of community support, the lack of the village that we all need to help raise our children effectively. And then those children themselves face major problems. The most intense forms of discrimination that exist in society right now are age discrimination.

That age discrimination is most pronounced against the young and the old. And so there's a major aspect to this in career planning, that people who reach their middle age and later face huge levels of age discrimination in terms of developing themselves, getting jobs, keeping jobs, etc. But then children face huge levels of age discrimination.

Our entire society, especially in the United States, is a society that seems created and designed to isolate children and to keep them invisible and out of society. You can't let your children walk down the street because a car is going to come and run them over because we don't build safe places.

The children are entirely dependent upon their parents to drive them everywhere. And that driving culture means that it's incredibly annoying to have children because your entire life is spent driving around, sitting in traffic with your children. And so it's very hard to find any kind of reasonable lifestyle where your children can just be children and they're allowed to grow, but they're allowed to also integrate with society.

And they're encouraged to do that. And it's horrific because you have a 10-year-old, and a 10-year-old is perfectly capable of going across town. But next thing you know, some nosy neighbor is going to, because the society has become so anti-children, "Well, children have to be coddled and protected," etc.

Some nosy neighbor is going to call child services, child services knocking on your door. You have zero rights when it comes to child services. By the way, at some point I may do a show on how to deal with child services. But everything that we do with police officers, etc., goes out the window with child services.

It's the exact opposite if the person on the other side of your door is a child services representative as compared to a police officer. You have to do everything completely different. And so it's just a never-ending stream. So, let me, I've done enough talking about some of the problems.

And so the question is, "Josh, are you just going to whine and complain and whatnot?" No, I refuse. I don't whine and complain. I want to have an honest look at some of the problems. But I want to work on solutions, because there are solutions to these things. And these solutions are important both for your and my families individually, for our children to flourish and thrive, and for our society.

In order for the society—the future belongs to the fecund. The future belongs to those who show up for it. The future belongs to those who have children. The future belongs to your children. And people who just throw in the towel and say, "Well, the world of the future is so bad.

The world is in such a bad place that I'm not going to have children and I'm not going to change it." These people are losers and they will not leave their stamp on the future. The future belongs to those who stand up and say, "The world is in a bad spot.

Things are looking bad, so I better get busy and I better stabilize my life. I better stabilize my family life. I better create a happy little city on a hill and invite other people into that. And then, God permitting, maybe we'll have a little bit of impact on the future." Because the future is not guaranteed in the sense that it's not programmed to be bad.

In fact, I believe the future is programmed in the fullness of time to be good, ever trending towards righteousness, justice, improvement, etc. Now, those long-term trends are going to have lots of ups and downs in the short term. And we're living in one of those short-term downward trends, where there are some positive trends, but a lot of this stuff is going to be difficult.

That's okay. None of us chose to be born. None of us chose when we're going to be there. And as I look at it and say that I was born for this reason, so if I'm born in a time of difficulty, let me tackle the time of difficulty so that my children can live in a better world.

And what the world needs is children, because people are the ultimate human resources, excuse me, are the ultimate resources that we need. All of the solutions to all of our problems are going to come through people. That's it. And none of these problems that we face are insoluble. So don't take the black pill.

Don't sit back and say, "Well, it's just future. It's just terrible, and why could anybody do that?" Take the, I don't know what the opposite of the black pill is, take the positive pill, and say, "All right, I may be living in a difficult age, but that's okay. I'm ready for this.

For such time as this, was I here? Was I put here? Was I born? And I'm going to roll up my sleeves, and I'm going to work on solutions to these things." And don't worry too much about the world. We can't affect the giant globe, is what I mean, but you can do something in your sphere.

And so that's what I want to do. I want to share with you some of the things that I, the ideas that I have, and I want to spark and inspire a conversation. Maybe you with me. I love that. But more importantly, I want to inspire a conversation with you and your family, with you and your spouse.

I want to inspire a conversation with you and your community, etc. And these conversations are really important, because if it's true, as I think it is, that the single biggest crisis that we're going to face, the consistent theme of the next several decades, is going to be population collapse.

And by the way, it's not just children. Again, marriage in the United States, the marriage statistics are abysmal and getting worse. People are not successfully forming partnerships. And it's not this happy world where people want that. The number of men and women who want to marry is much lower than the number of men and women who are able to successfully partner and marry.

Just like, back to my comments about the number of children that women want to have. It would be one thing if a woman says, "Yeah, I don't want to have any children, that's why the birth rates are down." But on a global basis, even in, and especially in, very low fertility societies, but especially societies where we have good data like the United States, sociologically speaking, women, even those who are successfully partnered, are not having as many children as they self-report that they want to have.

So what we're doing is not working on any level. It's not healthy, it's not working on any level. And so we have to change it. And so we have to work and build new solutions. And it may be too late for you, it may be too late for me, but it's not too late for our young friends.

We can completely, in a generation, we can completely change the course of society. But we have to be diligent about it, and we have to labor where we are, we have to try things, test things, and we have to communicate and say, "Here's what works." And I'll just give two examples as I close.

One example. One of the things that's super interesting about some of the sociological data is, kind of something that I have been aware of, is that you can look at population-level data, but population-level data is only the surface level. You have to get down deeper and study what's the case.

And so, it's a simple thing. The groups of people who are the most, the groups of people who seem to be the most insulated from declining population numbers are Christians, evangelical Christians, committed Catholics, etc., and conservative Jews. Those are the two population groups that have not suffered the broad-scale decline of population collapse.

Now, their numbers may be smaller, but for example, in my kind of sphere group, I would say the normal total fertility rate for a woman is four children. That seems to be kind of the norm. That's the mode, right? The mode of my friends, in kind of evangelical Christian friends, usually have four children.

Not 18, but not one or two, four. And then, of course, there's some that have five, some that have six, some that have more, plenty that have one or two, but the norm is four. So, if you look across the population, the total fertility rate among evangelical Christians is significantly higher than the fertility rate among others.

So, why does that matter? Well, what I'm saying is, interesting here is I can trace a generational change. One of the great challenges for Christians has been that often, they would raise their children, but then they would put their children into a secular world, and they would wind up losing their children out of their own Christian faith, in many cases.

And so, the statistics and the data on a number of Christians becoming non-Christians, joining the nuns, etc., from the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s, etc., those statistics and those data are really, really difficult. It's a continual theme, like, "Why is this happening? What's going on here?" And so, basically, many Christians finally woke up and realized that, "If I want to maintain Christian community, if I want my children to follow in the faith of their parents and their forebears, then I need to do something different." And so, in terms of that cultural change, the cultural change is very significant.

People realized, "I can't send my children into the meat grinder." And so, the secular system has largely depended, since secular people generally don't procreate, or they don't procreate in numbers that are significant, if they do at all. And so, the secular system has grown in the United States, largely based upon the children of religious people.

But religious people have now finally gotten the message. When I look back, when I was being homeschooled, it was very normal that many Christian people would say, "Well, I'm going to send my children into the government school, because they're going to be salt and light there." Well, it didn't work.

So, today, I know virtually no Christian people that put their children into government schools. I don't think they're there. I wind up working with them professionally, etc. In terms of my personal environment, it's always either Christian schools, classical schools, homeschools, some variation of that. And so, this is an example that I look at, and I've observed, and I've been part of, in terms of generational change.

People figure out how to change the issue. And so, one of the things that I'm quite confident in is that the future is going to be much more religious than it is today. That I think we're probably at a high watermark. Maybe it continues for another decade or two, in terms of the secular, the growth of secularism.

But I've watched so many of my friends become atheists in the early 20s, and then abandon that and say, "That didn't work in the early 30s." When I was in school, when I was in college, and soon after, this was a time of the new atheism, etc. And I was heavily influenced.

It seemed like everything was against Christianity. Well, those people have all collapsed. They all disappeared and ended in disgrace. And so, you watch a movement come, and you watch a movement go, and you say, "Okay, generational change is possible." So, if you're very young, I want to encourage you that you can change things in a generation.

And I think I'm probably at the ideal point to share and discuss this a little bit. Right now, I'm 38 years old. Almost to 40. For birthday coming up, I guess, never mind. I'm 38 years old. And my children, I have five children, and I've been married for 12 years.

So, almost 13. So, at its core, I'm going to share with you from not a newlywed, but I'm also pretty connected to kind of where we are. And that's the mindset through which I'm going to share things. I don't have all of the wisdom and perspective that I'll have when I'm 80.

That's why we need to talk to 80-year-olds about it. But my concern is that sometimes 80-year-olds are out of touch. And they're out of touch with the generational trends. So, I try myself to be a catalyst on some of these conversations. If I go into, especially in Christian circles, I always...

Here's one if you want to blow it up. Go into a Christian circle and ask people if they hold these two beliefs. And here's what Christians believe. Christians simultaneously believe that young men and women should be sexually chaste until marriage. And they also believe that nobody should get married until after they finish college.

Those two beliefs are basically incompatible with the broad... Those practices are basically incompatible. Not entirely, but largely. And so, something has to give. We have to... Something's got to give. So, what's going to give? How are we going to reconcile those two things? So, there's your kind of starting point.

Because we as a people need to be talking about it. And for my less religious and non-religious friends that are listening, you guys know that I love you. There's a lot that you can take away from this. If you are committed to a healthy society, there's a lot that you can take away from this.

Always remember this. If you want to be an atheist, the healthiest, safest place for you to be an atheist is in a predominantly Christian society. That's going to always be the place where you get the best kind of life experience as an atheist. And it seems like a lot of my atheist friends are waking up to that.

But you don't have to adopt my religious beliefs. But you can't walk away from religious beliefs entirely. Because open your eyes and look around at the world and ask yourself, "Are we really getting the results that we want?" We have a lot of work to do in the coming 50 years.

We have a lot of societal work to do. We have people dying on our streets. We have massive levels of discontentedness. Massive levels of just failure at every level of society. And we can't go out and fix a country. I'm not running for office and I got no interest in it.

But if you can fix a life, and you can fix a marriage, you can fix a family. A family is the strongest building block of society that can reach out to a neighbor family. And can be involved in supporting a neighbor family. You bring families together and you have communities.

Communities can handle, and as they always have handled, their problems. Communities can handle a village drunk. Communities can handle an abandoned mother. Communities can handle that. But those communities themselves have to be healthy. And so we have to look forward. And we have to look forward to building the communities of 30 and 50 years from now.

And the basic building block of that is going to be our children. And our marriages. And how we help them. Broadly speaking as a society, what we are doing is not working. Having spent several years looking as best I can at the sociological research and what not. If you wind up today, happily married, at a relatively young age.

And you wind up with the number of children that you want to have. You are a statistical anomaly. You should be very grateful for it. You are at the very top of something. You are at the top of the looks class. You have just fantastic good looks. You are at the top of your health.

You have great health. You are at the top of the income class. It's a very privileged existence that you have. You are raised in a society that allows you to find and meet and marry your spouse, etc. And there are, just to be clear, there are plenty of people out there.

But that doesn't seem to reflect the broader population. And so we have got a lot of work to do. If we are going to prepare our children for marriage. We are going to prepare them and help and coach them through some of the problems. How do they find and attract a suitable partner.

How do they build families. How do they handle these massive financial needs, etc. To have children, etc. We have got to look at it differently. And so I have gone longer than I intended here. What else is new? But it's your choice to listen. But I am going to share with you in days to come some of the ideas.

Some of the things that I think can really help in order to help this to happen better. Because we have a lot of work to do. This is just an introduction to some of the problems. Some of the solutions. But we are not victims. We can and will respond to the world we live in.

To the changing trends of that world. And we will adapt to it in a healthy and productive way. In order that the future may be better than the past. Thank you for listening. I hope that you will take these things. You will create your own ideas. I hope that you will wrestle with what I have to share with you in coming days.

And then come up with your own ideas. So that we can work together to ideate, test, and put into place newer and better solutions to the problems of today. Keep your chin up. Recognize. And we will do this in a separate podcast. But if you think that there is anything uniquely terrible about this current day.

Friend, I beg you. Go back and study history. We have it so good. There is no generation that has had it better. There is no generation of the past that I myself would want to go back and trade with. So don't fall prey to the golden era fallacy of thinking, "Oh, it was just so much better back then." It was not.

You and I are living in the best time to be alive in human history. There is no time that I would rather be here than now. Even with all of the problems. Because at its core, this will be my closing comment. At its core, we have total freedom to change this stuff.

To fix this stuff. One of the fascinating things about it is that in the current world, the things that you can do that have the greatest impact on your life and your livelihood are entirely voluntary. No one is forcing you to do anything. You can make free independent choices.

And those choices are entirely voluntary. And you can change everything. You can change your life. You can change your family's life. The way that you structure marriage. The way that what you do, etc. This is entirely up to you. So don't fall prey to thinking that, "Oh, it was just so much better in another time." Recognize honestly what is different from today versus before.

And then recognize what you yourself can do. And recognize you're completely free to make your own choices. I'll try to share with you some that I think are worth making. But at the end of the day, you live your life and I'll live mine. Thank you for listening. I'll be back with you soon with more specifics.

Just a general introduction today. We've got to solve this because on a personal and broad scale societal level, these are those fundamental foundational trends. Marry well. Have children. And your future and the future of your community is assured and established regardless of what happens with the government. Don't marry well.

You've got catastrophe of divorce. Your children don't marry well. They're going to be living in your spare bedroom when they shouldn't be. Don't have children. You're going to be reliant on a government system to care for you or some kind of paid helper with your own personal wealth. And a few people have enough wealth to do that.

But you're going to be relying on a government welfare system that is collapsing because all your neighbors didn't have children to take care of themselves either. And you're going to have a robot changing your adult diapers. So, you know, make your choice. But as for me and mine, I'm going to choose the things that work and then try to adapt to our modern age and choose some of the ideas that will be effective.

Thank you so much. Be back with you soon. As a major research institution, Arizona State University offers the most online bachelor's degree programs along with world-class faculty and dedicated support. Discover why ASU is ranked number one in innovation for nine consecutive years. Tap to learn more. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use simple truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese. No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions.

Ralph's, fresh for everyone.