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Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, 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 Josh Rasheeds. I am your host. Today, we begin with an article from Today in the Wall Street Journal.

Dateline is April 25, 2024. US fertility rate falls to record low. Fewer babies were born in the United States in 2023 than any year since 1979. Here's the first paragraph or two. American women are giving birth at record low rates. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from a year earlier.

Federal data released Thursday showed. It is the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking it in the 1930s. The decline reflects a continuing trend as American women navigate economic and social challenges that have prompted some to forego or delay having children. A confluence of factors are at play.

American women are having fewer children later in life. Women are establishing fulfilling careers and have more access to contraception. At the same time, young people are also more uncertain about their futures and spending more of their income on home ownership, student debt, and childcare. Some women who wait to have children might have fewer than they would have otherwise for reasons including declining fertility.

The actual total number of babies was in 2023, the United States tracked and registered 3,591,328 births. That is 2.1% fewer than in 2022. And the total fertility rate has declined to 1.62 children per woman, down from 1.66 in 2022. Now, if this is your first time thinking and talking about fertility rates, then welcome.

Welcome to the conversation. This conversation is one of the most neglected in our society, and yet it probably won't stay that way for very long because this is the issue that is going to be making the biggest macro impact in our lives over the coming decades. The statistics and the data are really, really bad.

And I want to take just a couple of minutes and talk to you about this. I've been talking about this on Radical Personal Finance for a few years, but it's been my experience that most people, even today, have no idea how bad things are and how bad things could get.

Put simply, we today, all around the world, are below replacement rates, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, and in many of our societies, substantially below replacement rates. And the reality is, simply, we don't have any idea how low these rates can go. In every place that we have data, there is not yet a bottom.

There may be, someday, an actual bottom to the data. I hope so. But the reality is, right now, in wealthy industrial countries all around the world, we do not know where the bottom is. Total fertility rates can be as low as, in Seoul, South Korea, there's something like 0.54 babies per woman.

Now, let's put this into actual data, or actual statistics that you can see with your eyes, and then I want to scare you just a little bit with the trend line that we are on. First, demographers, most of us have heard that you need an average of about 2.1 babies per woman in order to have a steady, stable population.

The 2.1 basically involves a man and a woman replacing themselves with about a 0.1%, not percent, but 2.1 relates to the margin of error for loss of life early in childhood, babies lost, things like that. So you need 2.1 babies per woman. Let's make it simpler and say it's two babies per woman, just simply to replace ourselves as a population.

I want you now to stop and to think about your reference group, the peers that you have, the community that you're involved in, co-workers, neighbors, friends, social groups, community groups that you're a part of, your church, your local parent-teacher association, whatever it is that you're involved in. I want you to think about every woman that you know.

In order for the population of your peer group to be steady, every single woman that you know has to have at least two children. Every woman you know has to have at least two children to maintain population. Now, many of us know many people who don't have two children, who have fewer or none at all.

So for every woman you know who has one child throughout her lifetime, you should know another woman who has three to match them up. For every woman you know who has zero children, you should know at least one other woman who has four or more. And I think if you'll stop and you'll think about your family, your extended family, people that you know, you'll quickly realize that your community is probably below replacement rate, and in some cases, substantially below.

Because when we think about the women that we know, for most of us, the averages are substantially below that. Now, here's what's even more scary. The rate of decline of these fertility rates doesn't have currently a bottom. I heard an analyst the other day give this statistic. He said, if you look at the rate of fertility decline in the United States between the year 2010 and 2020, and you extrapolate or project that rate of decline continuing going forward, and if you assume that there's one generation every 30 years, what that means is that in the future, under those assumptions, for every 100 Americans that are alive today, you would have 4.3 great-grandchildren.

So a population of 100 Americans who are alive today will have 4.3 great-grandchildren if our society-wide population decline continues. Most people are unaware of the fact that virtually all of the world, for example, all of the Americas, North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, all of the Americas are under replacement rate.

Most of the big countries of the world, China, far below replacement rate. India, now below replacement rate. Basically, the countries that are at or above replacement rate are pretty much all found in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's it. All of the rest of our societies are all in decline, and the rate of decline is varying.

The worst rates of decline are centralized on megacities, especially megacities in Asia. Like I said, I think that in the last year, the South Korean total fertility rate for the city of Seoul, not for all of Korea, but for the city of Seoul, which is, of course, the largest city, was a double-digit decline year over year to something like a 0.54 total fertility rate.

This is going to be the issue for the coming decades. It's going to affect every area of your life and my life, all of our governmental systems, all of our welfare state systems, all of our economic growth projections. It's all going to be driven by demographics. And while we don't know what that's gonna look like, 'cause after all, the numbers could change, the reality is that we don't see any evidence of them changing yet.

The problem is most people are not clued into this for two reasons. Number one, there's been a strong campaign for at least 50 years, a strong propaganda campaign that has been almost entirely anti-natal, anti-children. The most famous, of course, was Paul Ehrlich's book, "The Population Bomb," in which he predicted global famine and disease and poverty due to too many people.

And that's become basically the zeitgeist of our time, that idea that the world has too many people and it's gotta change. Most people are decades behind the demographic reality that we're living in today. And it's understandable, however, why they are, because while birth rates are low and heading lower all around the world, total population is high and continuing to increase for, I think, about a decade at least.

The problem is that that increase in population size on a global basis is not coming from the fact that we're having more babies. On the contrary, it's due to extending lifespans for old people. And so our world is getting bigger and bigger in terms of population with more and more old people, but we're not having babies.

And here's the problem. We've been not having babies for a very long time. And so not only in many countries do we not have babies today, we don't have even enough women of baby-bearing age to have babies. And we don't have enough children, enough young girls, teenage girls, who are going to be able to even have babies to replace ourselves in most cases.

And so many countries of the world are already in a demographic winter and there's no solution apparent for it. Governments all around the world are trying solutions of various kinds to try to stem the tide and change the numbers, but so far there is not a single sustained and enduring success story that we can point to of a wealthy industrialized country being able to change demographics.

I'd like to do my best to start a conversation here at Radical Personal Finance. And while it's unlikely that you or I can change the demographics of our country, probably or possibly we can start to change the demographics of our community. And perhaps we can have some rippling influence that would result in us having more babies within our own communities, within our own societies.

At the very least, I hope that we can make this change within our own families, within our own children, grandchildren, and on down the road. And I wanna talk today about how we can invest money into making that happen. There's tremendous paradox with regard to money. The reality is most of us don't value money itself, but what we value is what money is good for, what money can buy for us.

The problem is that money itself is what is easily measured. Because money is expressed in financial terms and we have a clear understanding of how much we have, what the current amount of it is, then we can manage it very effectively. Peter Drucker famously said that what gets measured gets managed.

And I think that's true, what gets measured gets managed. And we live in today in a modern world in which we can measure money and wealth very, very effectively, more effectively than at any time in human history. Go back 500 years and imagine you're some great, wealthy Lord of the manor, wealthy Lord of the estate.

You've got a great castle, you've got lands, you've got all of this wealth. Would you be able to actually measure your wealth? If we could just judge by Jane Austen's writings more recently than 500 years ago, about the best that a man could do to measure his wealth would be to measure his income, how much income his estate could provide for him.

And that's a useful measurement because income is spendable. But the actual value of the estate, the net worth, what we today in accounting terms would call a man's net worth, was very hard to measure. You couldn't do back then what you can do today with your fancy estate and go on Zillow and get a Zestimate telling you with pretty decent accuracy what it's worth, what you could sell it for today.

You couldn't have all of your investments and all of your companies marked to the market with a specific monetary value on a daily basis. Back then you just had a rough estimate of, am I wealthy or not? Today, we can know the exact dollar figure that represents wealth. The problem is, is that the only thing that matters?

It's pretty obvious that the goal of a man's life should not be when he lays his head in his casket to have the most zeros behind his net worth figure that his accountant draws up for his final tax returns. That's a pretty stupid measurement of a life. But because it's easily measurable, that's what we tend to optimize for.

I have a personal hobby of trying to come up with other forms of optimization, other things that we could measure that would indicate more useful metrics of life satisfaction, some version of a happiness score. Now you might do that on a daily basis by tracking your emotions with some app.

You might do that by tracking the number of minutes that you spend in leisure time, or the number of books that you read, or the number of widgets that you produce with your hobby of making stuff, the number of dates that you go on with your spouse, or the hours that you visit with your parents, or the number of children's games that you attend.

One of my personal metrics that is kind of interesting and informal is I optimize for the fatness of my children's annual photo books. My wife makes for each of our children each year a photo book containing basically the adventures that that child has gone through in this year with our family.

The interesting thing about taking pictures is that ordinarily we don't take pictures of the day-to-day commonplace happenings of our life, the humdrum events of life. I didn't walk into the office today and take a picture of my microphone as I began a podcast. But we take pictures of things that are out of the ordinary.

So they don't have to be too out of the ordinary. I might just go to the park and buy a kite today and take my children to the park and fly a kite, but that's worthy of taking pictures. That's a moment that can be captured in time, and it's worthy of taking pictures.

So what we do is we get all of our pictures together from the year, and then each year my wife makes a photo book. And some photo books are rather slender and lean. Some photo books are rather fat. And I like the fat ones because it tells me, hey, there was enough texture and variety in this past year to make for a really interesting photo book for my children.

And it's my hope that with those nice fat books, they'll have more pictures that they can go back and look at and enjoy and appreciate and recognize that, hey, this was a really great adventurous year that I had with my family. But that's not the only metric that perhaps we should consider.

There are many others. Here's one I would like to offer that I think is a reasonable metric by which to judge your success. Not for everybody, but it's a reasonable one. How many great-grandchildren will you have? - I wanted to make sure my kids were ready for the new school year and felt confident in class.

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But ideally, throughout your life, you should see some indications of the trajectory that you're on. And I think that's a pretty interesting metric for us to consider. How many great-grandchildren you have is a reasonable life goal. And what I like about this life goal is it's a very positive life goal that cannot be coerced.

I don't like goals of coercion. I don't like things that you can force people to do 'cause you can bend the world to you in some way. I like goals that require you to grow as an individual, me to grow as an individual. And if I desire to have a significant number of great-grandchildren who have issued from my loins, then I need to be the kind of guy who builds a family culture and where that is possible.

After all, I can't coerce the number of children that I have. I could do my best to plan for them, but I can't force it. Some events of having children are outside of my hands, outside of your hands, no matter who we are. But let's assume that I am able to have children.

If I'm able to have children, I can't coerce my children to have children. I have to inspire them to have children. And even if I could coerce my wife to have children, which I can't, and even if I could coerce my children to have children, which I can't, I certainly could not coerce my grandchildren to have children.

But what I can do is I can focus on investing into my family, inspiring and encouraging and leading my wife, inspiring my children, giving them a vision and facilitating their family formation and then building a culture that ideally would pass down through the ages where my children would go beyond me and their children beyond them and so on down through the ages to the level of my great-grandchildren.

And I would have to do with all of that by inspiration and leadership rather than by coercion or manipulation. Now, here's what's interesting. If you put numbers to this, then it can make it measurable. And I don't know that this is a great thing to put numbers to, but it's interesting to put numbers to non-financial goals and see how the math works out.

So let's assume that a guy like me, let's assume that I have an ambition to have 100 great-grandchildren. Round number, 100 sounds like a lot to me. What would be necessary for me to have 100 great-grandchildren? Well, at the moment I have five children. Now, I can calculate the total fertility rate that would be needed in my own family in order for me to have that number of great-grandchildren.

It's pretty simple to calculate. And I've done the math. I won't drag you through the whole formula for it, but in essence, basically it's an exponential formula that starts with the current number of children that I have. If each of my children and each of their children had on average 4.47 children, total fertility rate of 4.47 children, then the math would work out that I would have 100 great-grandchildren.

I have five children. If they averaged across those five children, again, four and a half children each, some have three, one has seven, one has five, one has six, et cetera, then it would work out to four, if it worked out to 4.47. And if that continued on through my grandchildren, then I would have 100 great-grandchildren.

It's a rather interesting thought experiment to go through. The interesting thing about that number is that I think that's a very feasible number. I already have five children, so it's easier for me. If I had six or seven, then it would be a lower number needed to arrive at that 100 mark.

But the most important thing would be how could I help my children to have enough children? By the way, in today's world, this goal is, I've never heard a motivational speaker say that this is a goal that anybody should set. I've listened to a lot of motivational speakers. I've read a lot of books where people talked about net worth goals and things that you should be focusing on in terms of your net worth and how much money you need for retirement.

I've never heard somebody say, you should have a goal for how many grandchildren you have or how many great-grandchildren you have. But although this is unusual in today's world, I don't believe that it's unusual throughout human history. If you go and you spend time reading through ancient texts, you will find that the ambition that many men and women had was to have many descendants.

The wealthiest and most powerful throughout human history have often had many descendants. And the promise of having many descendants was an inspiring promise for many men of renown throughout history. I don't have the pride and arrogance to somehow believe that the last century that has indoctrinated you and me with an antinatal mindset should somehow be more important than the multiple millennia of which we have recorded human history that has a different mindset.

And I would encourage you to think about your goals and recognize that there's wisdom in the ambitions of our forebears. So consider it. What's so interesting also, quick note on this, 'cause I did the calculations, I thought it'd be fun. What's interesting is, with every, because fecundity or total fertility rate is something that can be changed and is an exponential factor, the numbers can change massively with just a small amount.

I should spend probably another 30 minutes scaring you with the statistics on the negative side. I'm choosing not to do that, but there are resources you can go and look for that would shock you with how scary this population decline is. I don't like to use the word collapse, generally speaking, because it's a word that's fraught with emotion.

However, this is an area in which it is proper to talk about population collapse. I often wanna be a little bit more soft-spoken in my words and I talk about population decline, but it's proper to use the word collapse in this because the exponential effects of population growth can be amazing on the positive side and they can be amazing or shocking on the negative side with how quickly a population can absolutely collapse.

It's really remarkable. So here are just my numbers. So I told you I have five children, and if I had a goal of having 100 great-grandchildren, then that would require a total fertility rate of 4.47 children per child of mine to have 100 great-grandchildren. Now, the reason I mentioned that number is that that's a significant number, but it's not out of sight.

I'm not trying to say that somehow my children should have 18 children each. The goal is not just to have as many children as possible, but I'm the youngest of seven. I have five children. I don't think that 4.47 is an unreasonable total fertility rate. I would say that in my social circle, having four children is pretty average.

That there are, I know I have a handful of friends who have two or three. I don't have many friends in my social circle who don't wind up having any, but then I know various ones who have six or seven, and so four is a pretty average. Four is kind of the number that is the median, the most common number among people in my circle.

But here's what's interesting. Let's assume that I wanted to have 200 great-grandchildren. Check this out. Let's assume that I wanted to have 200 great-grandchildren, and I assumed that I could get the total fertility rate of my lineage down to up to five, an average of five across the population.

How many children would I need to have? The answer, by the way, is not that many. It's eight. If I had eight children, and then my children went on to have a total fertility rate of five across, there might be 200 great-grandchildren. Now, if I have four, you can do the math yourself.

It's kind of fun to run the math and just see how small impacts, when they're exponential, can make a difference. But the point I was making with 4.47 is that's about double the self-reported total fertility rate that women in the United States seem to say that they want to have.

So the number of children that women in the United States want to have, depending on the data that we look at, is between two and three children per woman, a total fertility rate. That includes the people who want four, that includes zero. But the total fertility rate that women desire to have on self-reported surveys seems to be between two to three.

The current total fertility rate in the United States is down at that 1.62 number as of the most recent data. So if we were to change this, we would have to create a different culture, and we would have to create a significantly different environment, and we would have to solve the problems that are causing people to not even have the number of, causing women to not even have the number of children they say they want, or to even actually want to have more.

And I find this a fascinating thought experiment, and I think this is, I hope this is worthy of your time. So let's talk about the different steps and talk about ideas as to how we could potentially invest money into your great-grandchildren. And recognize that all of this, I'm repeating this for the third time, 'cause I really want you to get it clear.

All of this has to come from a positive, inspirational perspective of leadership. You cannot coerce or manipulate. Maybe you could manipulate something, you could establish an enormous trust fund and require that the disbursements from the trust fund are based upon certain number of children. I don't think that's smart.

I think that our, at least 80% of our focus should be on the positive things that we could do to inspire within our own family, and then to facilitate using money whenever anything possible to help our children to have children. So let's talk through the process of your great-grandchildren.

The first initial barrier for many of my listeners to having great-grandchildren is for you to find someone with whom you can procreate. And this is astonishingly difficult today. I grant the difficulty of this. There are legions of young men and young women who desire to marry, desire to have children, and who, at least so far, have been unable to find a suitable spouse with whom they can procreate.

I have some ideas that I think will help with this. I'll deal with that in a separate podcast episode. I'll share, you can gain a few ideas from this episode, but we do need to fix this. Right now, in 2024, relationship formation among young people is not working the way that it should be working, and it's not working the way that it used to work.

Young people are not marrying at the rates that they formerly did. Young people are not coupling up at rates that they formerly did. Young people are not having sex at the rates that they formerly did. Now, for above-average men and women, women and men who are highly attractive, then those numbers are not so bad.

But we can't just focus as a society on the top 10% of men and the top 10% of women. We need to build a society that works for most people. And this can be really, really difficult. I think where I really started thinking about this was a number of years ago, when I was doing private consulting work with clients.

I ended up having two separate women, unrelated to each other, who both hired me as a financial consultant, and both of them had chosen to procreate without a relationship with a man. Both of these women, as far as I could tell, seemed like wonderful, attractive women, physically attractive, they were highly accomplished, career-driven, they did well.

I, of course, didn't spend enough time with them to make a deep assessment of their personalities, but they just seemed like lovely, attractive women to me. And those two women, neither of them had been able to find a suitable man that they wanted to spend their lives with. And so, as single women, they had both conceived and born children, planning for a lifetime of single motherhood.

I thought, is there any worse indictment of a society where a woman who seems attractive and everything like that isn't able to choose a man who's working for her? And we all know lots of men who've not been able to, normally men don't go and intentionally choose to procreate without a woman involved, but maybe their stories are out there.

But it just was pretty eye-opening to me of how difficult things are. So we need to be really working on changing these things. But that is a significant barrier, is simply for you finding someone with whom you can procreate. Now, the next barrier for you to have many great-grandchildren, for you to have a hundred great-grandchildren, is for you to have children.

And there are a few things that you need to think about here in your own thoughts. Most of the financial considerations I'm gonna talk about in the context of your children and their children, but there are some basic things that you need to think about. If you've been able to build a relationship with someone with whom you desire to procreate, you need to solve fertility problems.

And there are a variety of levels of fertility problems. The first level is just simply basic biological fertility. A man's biological ability to reproduce and a woman's biological ability to reproduce. Right now, for men of my generation, our sperm count is, if I understand what is reported properly, something like half of the sperm count of my father's generation.

It is, excuse me, testosterone levels. Our testosterone levels are half of what the testosterone levels of my father's generation was. So sperm count, but more importantly, testosterone is in shockingly bad shape. And so there's a whole area of exploration that men need to be exploring to maintain high testosterone and to maintain high sperm count.

There are a lot of things that you can do. Endocrine disruptors are probably a big issue. You need to keep your genitals cool. So anytime I see a guy sitting there with his laptop on his lap, I plead with him, "Please, don't do that." There's all kinds of factors that need to be factored in, but you need to get your testosterone checked and you need to increase your testosterone, if at all possible, with whatever the appropriate medical help is.

Many women today have basic problems with biological fertility as well. I'm not as knowledgeable in that area, but it is across our society, just basic biological fertility is something that has to be controlled for. And if you desire to procreate and you desire to reproduce, then that needs to be a consideration.

When I was younger, before I was married, people would make jokes, usually about a woman, and they would say, "Oh, she's a woman "with good childbearing hips." That was the joke. And when I was young and in college, I dismissed that as sexist, offensive sexist language, basically like, "Why would you say something like that?

"Why could you do that? "That doesn't sound nice." I never said I was going out in the world looking for a woman with good childbearing hips. As it turns out, I was blessed with a woman who has good childbearing hips. And when I've looked back at my ignorance when I was in college, I now am a little bit startled at how stupid I was to fall prey to the idea that, well, I still today would never talk about a woman's hips in that way.

I wouldn't use that language 'cause I find that language offensive. The truth that was behind that cultural aphorism is something that's important. And I derive an enormous amount of my satisfaction as a man from my family and from my children and from my wife's ability to have children. And in hindsight, I was the fool at 20 for just dismissing that as totally unimportant.

And so I think that things like fertility and screening a spouse or screening yourself on the basis of fertility is something that, well, awkward to think about or talk about, is probably something that will play a factor, play a role in our future. Because these basic issues have an enormous impact on men's and women's lives and they have an enormous financial impact.

One of the biggest expenses that I see in financial planning from wealthy people is often fertility treatments. And when your babies cost you tens of thousands of dollars for each baby, you're gonna really think about that quite a lot. And yet some of that can hopefully be avoided with better practices, with our children and protecting them from that and protecting ourselves as much as possible from basic biological fertility issues.

The next barrier for you to have many great-grandchildren would be what I call just philosophical infertility or philosophical fertility. If you wanna have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you need to marry somebody who desires children. Both men and women in today's world are broadly infected by a strong antenatal ideology, philosophy, and reality.

And don't think much that you're gonna change many people. And so if you are young and you're doing something like setting a goal of having many great-grandchildren, you really should start off on your best foot by marrying someone and pursuing somebody who is not philosophically infertile. Now, people can change, right?

I'll just share my own dad's, my own father's story. My parents had two children and kind of classic two-children story. How does the rhyme go? A girl for me, a boy for you, and praise the Lord, we're finally through, right? Boy and girl, done. That was my dad's philosophy.

He did not want to have more children. And then when his second child was something like eight years old, over a long period of change, he came to adopt a different philosophy. And it was a very difficult change for him. My mom had wanted more children, but my dad didn't.

But eventually he came to be on board with wanting to have more children and dedicating his life in that direction, and he had five more. And as the youngest of seven, I'm grateful that he did, 'cause I wouldn't be here if he had not changed. People can change. Men and women can change.

But you should focus on filtering for people who want to have children if that's something that you want to do. And probably similar for those who don't want to have children, that you just don't want to have a significant difference in your perspective. I think that also though, beyond just simply being open to children, it's important that you build an awareness of the fact that the data would indicate that in general, you're probably gonna have a better and happier life with children than without.

Now you can go and look into this yourself, but people who have children, you know this intuitively if you just think about the things that people value later in life. They're in today's antenatal society where many, many people shoot their TikToks and whatever about how great life is without children.

You can see that side and those arguments against having children. And those arguments are today very persuasive for many young people. Many young people are not having children due to livestock considerations. If you talk to older people, and if you look at the sociological data on older people, then you'll find that family life and children become, in general, a very important part of a man or woman's satisfaction with life.

I saw it put this way. There was a Twitter conversation going on, and the data was showing about the percentage of adults who had children and the question they were asked among Americans 45 and older. If you had to do it over again, how many children would you have or would you not have any at all?

And Americans were asked about that. And I won't try to read the whole chart to you. But basically what you can look at is that 7% of parents over 45 wouldn't have kids if given a redo on life. So 7% of people who are older than 45 who have children would not have children if given a second opportunity.

But 50% of childless people would have children if they were given another opportunity at life. And a guy that I follow put it this way. He says, "You're in your late 20s. "You're ambivalent about children. "Here's the probability for any given person, "but not for a specific person. "Have children, 93% satisfaction rate.

"Don't have children, 50% satisfaction rate." So if you know that you wanna have children, you can pretty much have a 93% confidence according to that particular study that that's probably the right move. On the other hand, if you don't wanna have children, just know that there's probably about a 50% likelihood that you're gonna regret that decision and then make your decisions yourself.

So think about philosophical fertility for yourself as you're making big life decisions. And then age-related fertility. Just simply the biggest problem happening in reproduction data and fertility data is that young people are not having children. - You've always had what it takes to make it happen. And we know the right tools can make it easier.

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Connect with us for details. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shell. - If you want to have children, you should begin to have children when you are young, as young as possible. And if you want to have more than one or two children, you should definitely begin to have children when you are young, as young as possible.

Most men and women are utterly ignorant of the impact of age on a woman's fertility. At the age of 30, a woman has lost 90%, nine zero, 90% of the eggs that she was born with, 90%. Doesn't mean that a woman cannot reproduce after the age of 30. But the ignorance that men and especially women have on their ability to procreate at advanced ages, meaning past 30, is pretty shocking.

It's really shocking. And there is a high overconfidence in the effectiveness of fertility treatments, and there is a strong underappreciation across our society, just flat out ignorance of how easy it is for couples who are in their 30s and beyond to conceive children. The problem is that we all get splash news stories across our screen of so-and-so who's 47 years old, had a baby.

Yes, and it was almost certainly with an egg donor, if she's a celebrity. People do have children at later ages, it is possible. But the data on it indicates that it's very difficult, often very expensive, and it is not in any way assured. So if you desire to have children, then this should be a priority for you when you are young.

Now let's assume that you're able to solve these basic problems. You're able to meet and attract a spouse who wants to procreate, who wants to procreate with you. You get married, and now you are thinking about the next generation. You're thinking, how could I spend money in the direction of this goal of many great-grandchildren?

How could I do that? I think it's really, really important to think about the culture that you build within your family, remembering that we can't coerce or manipulate our children to have children. We need to think about what are the factors that are gonna make it likely for them to want to have children.

One great interest of mine, just in personal conversation, is whenever I meet somebody who doesn't want to have children, I try to understand why. Try to understand what that person is looking for. And although I come across as opinionated and whatnot on the internet, certainly, that's my job, but in real life, I don't go through life judging people.

I'm genuinely interested, and I'm really fascinated by people who, from my perspective, would seem to have had a great lifestyle growing up, but who don't want to have children. They just, it's not of interest to them. And I think one of the factors is often that they just didn't have a great childhood, that they don't look back with fondness on their own childhood.

And I think that could be just a total death knell to, if your ambition is to have many great-grandchildren, you need to start by beginning with providing the best childhood that you're capable of providing for your own children. And that's gonna begin with the relationship that you have with your spouse.

I think the first thing is you need to be preparing to have a house that is large enough to want to have children in it. If we look at global population fertility data, what you see is that not having children and/or having very few children is highly associated with living in a big city.

Now, you could argue what the cause is. Is it a correlation or a causation? Is it a correlation of you're surrounded by other people who are busy professionals who moved to the city to make their fortune and you're just kind of infected by this social contagion of not wanting to have children?

Or is the city itself causing your childlessness or your low fertility? And I would say probably both, as with most things of causation versus correlation. They're probably both involved. But as a man who travels the world with his wife and five children and who frequently stays in hotel rooms, I will tell you that life in a tiny studio apartment with five children is not pleasant.

It's not something that is enjoyable. You're gonna need some space. You need some space to spread out. You probably don't need as much space as you think you do. You probably don't need a nine-bedroom mansion, but you do need some space. And I think this is one of the things that has been very helpful with maintaining the U.S.-American fertility rate as high as it has been, is that the United States is not such a country of big cities, but is rather a country of suburbs.

While I would argue that suburbs are not always good for children, and in fact, I prefer my children not grow up in a suburb 'cause it causes them to be isolated from society, to be dependent on cars and things like that that don't give them much independence at an early age, truth is that having your own house that's big enough and that has a little yard has been much better for overall fertility in the United States versus living in the middle of a cramped city.

So you need to plan ahead. You need to have a large enough house to want to have children in it. You also need to have a marriage relationship that is filled with sex. Children are created by sex between a husband and a wife. That's where they come from. And so you need to have a relationship that is built upon strong romantic attraction and where you have an active and vigorous sex life.

And that requires a significant amount of planning and preparation to do well. And it requires you to probably communicate and make certain that you're marrying somebody who is open to sex and open to children. One of the things that when I was a young man, I was pretty naive about the sexual problems that people have in relationships.

And I was shocked when I started interacting with people who would share with me confidentially about their non-existent sex lives within marriage. In one case, there was a friend of mine and a client who, I won't even recount, but it was just shocking to me, the barrenness of his bedroom with his wife.

And that's something that is an enormous problem and it has to be dealt with. And so I say it in something of a shocking way to say that you need a marriage relationship that is filled with sex, but it's very, very important. It's very, very important that you create the kind of relationship and the kind of dynamic, and you choose the kind of person who wants to have sex with you.

And then you need to have enough time to do that over time and not be opposed to children. If you go and you listen to people, especially from the Asian countries that have very, very low fertility rates, and you listen to them, they're all spending so much time busy working nonstop, working, working, working, working, working, working, working, that sex and sexual activity just doesn't seem to be a significant part of their life.

They don't seem to care. And I've listened to interviews of Japanese people going around interviewing people in Japanese, and you listen to them and listen to how much married couples have sex, and it's shockingly infrequent. So I'm not a therapist, I don't wanna be one, I just wanna point out that this needs to be discussed, needs to be talked about, needs to be planned for, and you need to make certain that you're screening and that prior to marriage, that you're screening for somebody who's gonna be able to match your own sexual appetite, and that the relationship that you build is the kind of relationship that has the appropriate safety and the appropriate romantic attraction for there to be plenty of sex, 'cause children come from sex.

You also need to make sure that you have enough disposable income to feel like children aren't a burden, and you need to plan financially to eliminate the obstacles to children. What are the obstacles? Well, obstacle number one often involves, if you listen to young people who don't wanna have children, say, "I'm not ready, I can't afford it." What are the obstacles?

The first primary one involves debt, student loans. Being in debt is a pretty good contraceptive, keeps people from wanting to have children. So screen for that. Screen for that prior to marriage yourself. Don't marry somebody who's deeply indebted. If you're deeply in debt and you wanna get married, get rid of the debt.

And you need to be aware of the fact that these are some of the psychological follow-on effects that are often not talked about purely in financial analysis. One of the reasons people don't pay off their student loans is because they see them as good debt. And in one sense, they are good debt.

Sometimes financial loans can enable you to earn a significant amount of money. Often the interest rates on student loans are quite low compared to what you could earn with alternative investments. In many cases, financially, it makes sense for you to invest into things that are gonna out-return your student loans.

I can't argue with that. If your student loans are at a rate of 3.5% and you can invest at a rate of 3.501%, then mathematically you should go and invest the money instead of paying off the loans. The problem is those student loans are in many cases a pretty effective contraceptive.

And so if you wanna have children, you probably should consider clearing off those student loans. Because the freedom that you feel and the confidence that you feel with regard to being debt-free may give you the courage and the strength to go ahead and have children when you want to, especially at a young age when you're able to, as compared to the long-term future benefits of 82 years from now, you having a slightly higher net worth because you've just made the final payment on your student loans with your 3.501% returning investment.

This is the problem with financial planning. We gotta balance math and we gotta balance life. And sometimes, and math always should inform life, but life is not a mathematical calculation. The second thing that often causes people to not have children is not owning a home. And so again, you should consider owning a home as quickly as you're able to and putting yourself in a situation in which that home is a relatively small fraction of your overall financial incentive and overall financial value.

From a purely fertility-based analytical lens, a couple who buys a small home, maybe one of them bought the home and owned it before coming in, a small single-family home, has it debt-free and who has no debt, that couple is much, much more likely to welcome many children into their life as compared to a couple that lives in an apartment, has student loans, and is paying a rent payment every month.

So you need to think about those and build a lifestyle where you can do it. And you wanna make sure that you have enough disposable household income just to feel like you can afford children. What is disposable household income? Well, first of all, it starts with the total amount of money that you earn.

If you look at fertility rates, there is an inverse correlation based upon whether you are a man or whether you are a woman. Men, as men's income increases, the total number of children that men have increases concomitant with that rise in income. For women, it's the opposite, that as women earn higher wages, earn more wages, then the number of children that women have goes down.

And I think that's intuitive. Note, by the way, that that is not the same analysis as women's overall income or overall household income, but it's based upon wages. Women who are wealthy, women who have a high household income and/or who are women who are wealthy, women who have royalties, women who have investment assets, they do not suffer a decline in fertility throughout their lifetime because of their high income.

But women's wages are an indicator, making it more likely that a woman has fewer children if she earns higher wages. Whereas men, it's the other side. But total income is only one component of that. We need to focus on disposable income. And disposable income is income that is available, basically margin in your budget.

And disposable income is something that is controlled based upon your expenses, based upon what you are committed to. So you can have a household income of $100,000, but if your household expenses are, say, $90,000, then that couple is not gonna feel financially confident to have children. How could we do anything more?

On the other hand, if the couple had household expenses of $60,000, then now that couple is gonna feel much more confident to have children. So you need enough disposable household income to feel like children are not a burden. And finances are an important component of that. So if you're in debt, get out of debt.

If you can buy a house, buy a house. If you can do it with a low amount of money, do it, and that's going to be more likely for you to be able to have children. You need to develop the personal parental skills that will help your family life to be joyful.

One big obstacle to people having children is if you feel like you can't even handle the children that you have right now. Generally speaking, I never set out to have five children. That wasn't a goal. I would've said, my wife and I, if you'd asked us 10 years ago, we would've said, okay, well, we'd like to have children, but we didn't have a number.

I didn't plan to create a mega family. At the time, I didn't have an ambition to have 100 great-grandchildren. Just kind of happens one by one. But as with each child, you want to basically consider your life, and the goal is, the thing is basically, can we handle this?

Like, are we in charge of our family? Are we in control? Are we managing this, or are we overwhelmed? 'Cause if you've got a couple that's just sinking under the burden of their children, then they're not going to want to have more children. And so we want to build skills and parental skills that are going to help family life to be joyful.

Obedient children are a joy. Disobedient children are not. I don't like to compare children to dogs, but I think in this case, we could compare it to a dog. If you've got a dog, and your dog is beautifully behaved, and you tell your dog to come, and the dog comes, and you tell your dog to stop, and the dog stops, then for you, the dog is a blessing and a joy to your life.

But if you've got a dog that just runs out the door at every turn, and that stands in the middle of the table and pees in your flower vase, then there's a good chance that you're not going to want any more dogs, and children are similar, is that the skill that you have as a parent to deal with children is going to make a big difference in the likelihood of your having more children.

And this is one of the greatest tragedies in our current environment that causes people not to have children, is that you'll have a family that has one or two children, and the children are running their life. And they don't really have anywhere that they can go or anyone that they can talk to that they trust who can give them advice.

We've had an enormous professionalization of child advice. If you went back a hundred years, there were not any books written on how to raise a child. Everyone grew up around children. You had a society, there's children all around, and everybody kind of naturally absorbs how to have children. In today's world, with the dearth of children, now we're going to have a baby, and we start going reading 15 books, and you have no way to filter and know whether the advice you're getting in the book is good or not.

You just grab something that fits with you and connects with you, and you go on with it. And so people don't really have the experience, and then many people don't have the skills that in many cases, young fathers and mothers today, they don't have any model for skills dealing with children.

They don't know how to do it. And that means that oftentimes their family life is not a joy, it's a burden, it's a tragedy. I saw this horrendous video recently of this mom walking around her house with her camera. And I think it was a mom, I watched it with the sound off, but she's walking around her house with a camera, and she's showing, and every room she goes into is a disaster zone.

And there are just, there are toys everywhere. Every single floor is covered with toys. Everything is destroyed. The entire house is a wreck. That video would be the most powerful contraceptive you can imagine for just an average young man or woman. But it's not because you have to live that way with children.

It's because of the mother and father's ineptitude as parents and their unwillingness to clean up their house. I have five children in my house. It's not ready to be photographed on the front page of "Martha Stewart Living" every day, but at every moment, because children get toys out, they play with them, things happen.

You get involved in projects, and it's normal that there's going to be disruption to a house. If you wanna live in a museum, don't get married, don't have children. But the house is presentable by the end of the day. And it can be made presentable in 10 minutes of picking up things.

And it's just a habit, it's a simple skill of picking things up and keeping a house picked up. And you can expand that to every area of parenting. Learning how to work with children is something that adds to go on. So developing skill acquisition needs to be a component of what parents do.

Because you want your family life to be joyful. You want your children to grow up in a house that's filled with peace and harmony and love and tranquility. And they're not gonna see the Legos out on the floor as a disruption to that. But if they live in a hell hole, then they're not gonna wanna have children.

And so you wanna think about that. If you wanna have children, a supportive community will be enormously helpful to you. And so you may have to create it yourself. You may not know anybody who wants to have children, but you wanna come around it and get yourself around a community of people who also like children and want to have children.

You may have to amputate negative peer pressure, and that may even be family. In my wife and my family, we have family members. We have to steel ourselves against the opprobrium that we receive from certain family members due to our reproductive choices. Just deal with it. Just tell, yeah, we're not gonna tell that person we're expecting a baby.

We'll just let them find out when the baby arrives. It's easier that way. And this is pretty normal. I know my parents, at one point in time, my mother's parents strongly offered, they were worried about how many babies my mother was having. They said, "Listen, we'll pay for you to be sterilized.

"We'll pay for the surgery so you could be sterilized." My parents had to look them in the eye and say, "Get out of here. "You're not involved in this component of our life. "And if you continue to press on this, this is the end." And so sometimes you have to take a choice.

Remember that you have the right to live your life the way that you want to live. And what's astonishing to me is that in the current wave and where we are is that there are kind of two sides to rights. There are enormous numbers of people who are scandalized about reproductive rights and will say, "You have no right to tell me "what I can do with my body "and what I can do with the baby that's inside my body.

"These are my reproductive rights." That's the cultural ethic. But in many cases, those same people feel like they have the right to turn around and tell you that you can't have another baby. If you want to have a baby, that's between a husband and a wife, no one else involved.

That's it. So deal with it in that context and shut out everyone else around. But you'll find that if there's a community around you, a supportive community will be enormously helpful to you. So those are just some thoughts in terms of yourself. Those are incomplete. But now I want to focus on how do we get the next generation?

How do we get our children to want to reproduce and how do we facilitate that? So I've talked about the pleasure and the memories. If your children associate their own childhood with a pleasant family dynamic, then there's a decent chance that regardless of whether you indoctrinate them with a pronatal message, that they're going to want to continue it because they just naturally associate childhood with pleasant experiences.

And if you have, your children are going to think that the environment that they're raised in is pretty much what's normal. In dealing with multiple children, so I talked about parental skill. Parental skills change over time. The cool thing is that children usually come one at a time. Sometimes they come two or three at a time, but most of the time, one at a time, and your skills can change.

And it's really great. With one baby, you learn a whole set of skills. With the second baby, you learn a whole different set of skills. With the third one and the fourth one and the fifth one, they're just a different set of skills at every stage along the way.

The cool thing, however, is that it's not only mother and father who are learning skills, but your children themselves are learning skills. And one of the reasons that low fertility rate countries have falling fertility rates is that the people in those countries can't even imagine how to be a parent of multiple children.

Let's say that you grow up in a one, you're the single child in a Chinese family, and you don't really know anybody. You know a couple of people, one or two people who have two children. You don't know anybody who has six children. You don't know anybody. And all of your extended family has just one child.

Well, the idea of having two children is something that you're gonna have no context for. You grew up as one child. You didn't even have brothers and sisters. You didn't have a younger brother or sister. You didn't see your parents interacting with children of multiple ages. You just have one child.

That's all of your frame of reference. The idea of having two children is literally unimaginable to you. You take all of your ideas and input and philosophy from what you see on TV. And since what you see on TV or in a movie can be sensationalized one way or the other, either all glowing positivity or all scathing negativity based upon the agenda of the producer, then you don't really have any context for it.

So it just becomes literally unimaginable to you. And the same thing continues to the generations. Cool thing is that your family can change that. And so I grew up with multiple siblings. And so the idea of having siblings around is totally normal. And then even if you're the youngest, like I was the youngest, in my growing up, my older siblings got married, had children, always around lots of children.

So the idea of being around lots of children is a totally normal thing. And so that's one of the reasons you should focus on building a community, if at all possible, of other people who have children, because that'll form a frame of reference for your children. And you want children to think about their childhood and take pleasure in it.

Back to Asia, I myself shudder when I see videos about Asian children's youth. And you find these videos, and basically as best I can tell, the children in many of those cultures in Asia live their lives chained to a desk, doing nonstop academic book work with threat of a teacher's ruler coming down on the back of their neck.

Little bit of hyperbole, not much in that. The intense academic burnout. A guy in, I saw a guy in India recently posted his high school study schedule with this just insane degree of academic commitment to study, study, study, study. If that's your memory of childhood and it's all academics, just nonstop study, study, study, study, study, study, why do you wanna bring children into that?

It's an utterly miserable life and a miserable existence. Yes, there's breaks. I'm not being too extreme with my views. I'm just drawing from the overall perspective. When I think of my childhood, I think of pretty much nothing but pleasure. Some of my most intense and appreciated family memories just involved traveling across the United States with my family and staying in national parks and state parks with a beat up old pop-up camper.

And didn't cost my parents a lot, it just cost them some time and to go out and do that. But yet those family environments were so conducive to relationships. We would stay in campgrounds probably 'cause we didn't have much money, but also because you stay in hotels with your children, there's nothing for the children to do.

Or you stay in a campground, it's just nonstop work or play, it's just all around. And so those family dynamics of just being together is most of my memory of childhood. Holiday gatherings, when you have holiday gatherings with lots of people, they're super fun. And our holiday gatherings were always big.

It wasn't three people gather around a table, they're always enormous. And what's interesting about the fun of large families is that not only do you yourself have lots of children, but the marginal cost of having other people in your life is usually not that big. So imagine that you're a family of three, right?

Two parents and a child. And you're gonna go out and invite four single people to join you for Christmas dinner. There's always a spinster that you know, an old lady who doesn't have a family. There's always some committed bachelor that you know, and there's always a Jewish guy and you know, just very, and a disabled person, right?

I don't like to call them strays, but honestly, that's what I call them, just various strays. And so our family always collected the strays. Just imagine you're three people and you collect four strays for your Christmas dinner. That's an enormous imposition on your lifestyle. You probably don't even have enough plates.

You don't have enough chairs. Your table's not big enough for it. And so it's a big deal. Well, growing up with seven children, we were always at least nine. And so for my parents to collect four or five strays for meals was just not that big of a deal.

And so that makes a fundamental difference in the experience that someone has growing up in an environment where there's lots of people and people are associated with joy and with fun. And that just simple experience changes your perspective of life. And so you wanna work really hard to facilitate an enjoyable childhood so that your children will have this perspective.

And so if you need to spend money to have a bigger dining room table, go buy a bigger dining room table. If you need a bigger house, go buy a bigger house. If you need a bigger car, get a bigger car. These things are things that you can do to basically create the party wherever you go.

And just trying to share honestly and truthfully, in our current lives, in our current world, all of the infrastructure of life is designed around very small families. So I had a friend of mine growing up, good friend. They had two children. And they always had normal cars, but the cars were always 5C cars.

And these were good friends of ours, lovely couple. No argument or judgment of any kind. I don't even know anything about their reproduction. I wouldn't judge anybody. But my observation was always, they always had four of them. And the four of them always filled up their cars. So they had two cars, five seat cars, and the four of them always filled it up.

They were never with other people. They were never with other people. They never invited anybody to go with them. They never had room in their car for them. They never invited anybody to go with them. They never, they would go, they would go to an event, but they would always go in their own car.

And when I can think about that with my own childhood growing up, my dad always had a 12-passenger van. He didn't need all the seats, but ours was always the party bus, bring in four or five other people with us. And it was just always the case. And so we grew up with lots of other people in our lives.

And that simple logistical difference makes an enormous qualitative difference in your experience of life and your experience of people. I would be very surprised if my friends with the two children if any of their children went on to have many children, it's just not part of their culture. And they can make the decisions they want to.

People can change. My dad was one of two and he had seven. So people can change. My point is that these cultural things matter. And in today's world, where you gotta have a bunch of car seats and whatnot, it keeps people from even being together. I hear sometimes from my clients and people I interact with, one of the big problems of socialization is unlike even 30 years ago, you can't have someone to go pick up your kids for you.

Because if you've got young children and used to be, you would work it out and say, "Hey, I'll drop the kids off at practice. Can you go pick them up?" No, I can't pick them up because I have a five seat car. Or even if I have a seven seat car, I don't have car seats.

So car seats are an enormous contraceptive. I read a paper on it one time. And the guy was saying, he drew a statistical analysis. I can't remember all the details, but he drew the statistical analysis. Basically, could eliminating car seats dramatically increase fertility? And his mathematical argument was yes.

I don't know if it's true or not. All I know is that my least favorite thing about being a father is car seats. I despise them. And I will be thrilled when the day comes where I don't have to do them. For now, it's a necessary cost, but that is my, I'm not being hyperbolic.

That is my least favorite thing about being a father is having to deal with car seats. Back to the point. Infrastructure things that you can do with your life may help you to surround your children with others and may help you to have people around and have childhood be more of a joyous occasion.

If you have two children, don't just automatically buy a four or five seat car. Consider getting the seven seat SUV. So at least on occasion, if there's four in your family, at least on occasion, you can get three extra people and bring someone else's children home. These little things matter.

But you need to build an environment of pleasure around your children. Not nonstop frivolity. I'm not opposed to working. What I'm saying is that childhood should be a joy. Don't overburden your children with just nonstop work. Don't make your children hate school because they just do it all day, every day.

It's not necessary. School and education seems to be a very, very effective contraceptive, a very, very effective way to destroy fertility rates. The more school that someone goes through, especially women, the more school that a woman goes through, the less likely it is that she has children or has many children.

I'm not opposed to highly educated women. I'll talk about education in a minute. But we need to recognize the fact that if something is destroying your species survival, that you shouldn't just automatically accept it as an unqualified good. Your ideology needs to include expansion of the group and expansion of the tribe in order for it to be effective.

And so we have to look and try to understand how do these things work. And intense schooling for too long is not something that is increasing birth rates. I think in addition to providing a joyful experience for your children, you should consider indoctrinating your children into experiencing the joy of family life.

Children in general are going to rise to the ambition that you as a parent give to your children. You say to your child, you're gonna go to college. Guess what? There's a very high chance that your child will go to college. I went to college because we're the kind of people who go to college.

My wife went to college because her dad said you're going to college. So she went to college. That was it. In general, it's pretty much the same thing. Families who are college educated, their children go to college because it is expected that their children will go to college. In many cases, children work a job because it's expected that you work a job.

And this creates all kinds of issues in people. I have to leave my job and go be an entrepreneur. And it requires incredible self-determination for them to go and be an entrepreneur because their family was job-having people. On the other hand, it's entrepreneurial people. And entrepreneurial people, they tend to consider it normal to have businesses.

Years ago, I was with Dan Miller. This is on the podcast in the archives. But I was with Dan Miller in Tennessee interviewing him. And he was talking about his daughter. And he was talking about the fact that with his children, he basically ruined his children to any kind of job because their entire lifetime, their father was always an entrepreneur.

And they always knew what it was like to, they never knew what it was like to have a two-week vacation. They just did what they wanted to do 'cause that's what you do as an entrepreneur. You do what you want to do. Now, a lot of times, you do a whole lot of work that you don't want to do, but you pretty much live your life how you want to live when you have a business that you can control.

And his point was that his children were either, some of them, they were entrepreneurs and very likely to be entrepreneurs 'cause it's hard to trade that in for the benefits of a job. I feel like I've pretty much destroyed my children's possibility of a job. I hope not. I hope they, I still want them to have jobs.

But in terms of the lifestyle that we live as a family, I think my children would find it hard to imagine if what it would be like for a mother and a father to go away to a job every day. They've never had a mother who'd gone to a job every day.

And so that's just kind of the expectation that I would, that they have about motherhood. And they've never had a father who had a job. They don't remember when I had a job. And while I work in an office, I'm pretty much always there. And so that's their entire frame of reality.

Well, we can do this accidentally or we can do this intentionally. And what is happening is our current generation of young people is indoctrinated to not have children. We need to indoctrinate our children to have children. That word indoctrinate is something that causes a significant level of discomfort in people.

We don't like the idea of indoctrination or propaganda, but in reality, I don't think we should be as uncomfortable with the word as possible. I'm sorry, as we are. I think that the concept that there would be some kind of neutrality in ideas is a myth. There is no neutrality.

And so either you're going to indoctrinate your children with your beliefs and your vision and your philosophy, or someone else is going to indoctrinate your children with his beliefs and his vision and his philosophy. There is no neutrality. There is no neutral position really on anything. Now you can choose the level of pronatal indoctrination that you give to your children.

Right now what we're seeing is there's an intense antenatal indoctrination. Imagine you grew up in China and imagine that there was a one-child policy in place for decades and decades and decades. And that if you had more than one child, there would be a forcible abortion. That indoctrination creates a society that can't reproduce itself.

Now you could go to another extreme ideologically. You could indoctrinate your child that your ambition in life should be to have as many children as you possibly can have. And you would have a woman who's pregnant for 35 years of her life and has 32 children, or a man who has seven wives and seven children with each wife.

That could be the kind of indoctrination that you could give. But that's not, those aren't the only options. You could indoctrinate your children with basically a friendly pronatalism, which is basically kind of how I would describe my position. I'm not a, I don't think that people should have as many children as they're capable of having.

I don't think that, you know, I don't think that the goal is just to have as many children as possible, but I think that we should be welcoming and appreciative of children because they're an enormous good in life and in society. And that it should be between a husband and a wife and the intimacy of their own communications and the intimacy of their own bedroom, the decisions that they make, and no outside interference.

That's kind of like a friendly pronatalism as I would describe it. Maybe I'll be more of some extremist in the future. I don't know, I don't think I will, but I can indoctrinate my children with a friendly pronatalism. And that's my ambition is to appreciate children 'cause children are the most valuable resource that we have in society.

They are children, they are people. They are the ones who are going to solve all of the problems that we face right now and fix everything that's wrong with the world systematically day by day, generation by generation. They are an unalloyed good. Children are an unalloyed good. There is no, there is nothing bad about children.

So children bring challenges. There's nothing bad about challenges. Challenges are good for us. And so the point is that you need to indoctrinate your children intentionally or someone else is going to indoctrinate your children intentionally. And your children are gonna be 16 years old thinking that they should delete themselves from the earth to save the planet and some other dumb philosophy.

So why not just indoctrinate our children into believing that getting married and having children is a great thing to do? Every bit of sociological data is on the side of that being the right choice. And as long as we reserve appropriate levels of reserve to say that, hey, you may be different, right?

You might be someone who doesn't want this, that's fine. But every bit of data indicates that this time-honored tradition of how to live your life and how to grow your family is a really powerful one. Every bit of data indicates that that's the right move. So let me indoctrinate you into what the data says and then allow for different decisions.

If your child wants to go and spend 10 years living in Tibet, great, that's fine. I'm not gonna force you to, I'm not gonna drag you kicking and screaming into an arranged marriage and say you have to marry this girl right now. That would be absurd. But we shouldn't shy away from recognizing that we need to indoctrinate our children into the right beliefs that are most likely to leave them living happy, successful, fulfilled lives.

And getting married and having children is an important component of that. We know that all the data is on our side. We also know, by the way, that for all the data that is not on our side, meaning statistical outliers, many people say the worst thing I ever did was get married.

Worst thing I ever did was have children. We know that a lot of that was entirely avoidable. And so poor mate selection is the fundamental flaw in marriage. Not the institution of marriage, but poor mate selection. And we can control for that. We can adjust for that. We can teach our children that.

And we need to indoctrinate our children into the importance of choosing a high-quality spouse. I talk about this with my children. I don't want them to be 18 years old and say I wanna get married and me saying don't marry that guy, he's a loser. I want my children at 18 or 20 or 25 to be very discerning and to be thinking about what are the qualities that would make someone a good prospective husband, a good prospective wife.

I need to be thinking about that. And I need to control my impulses and not be drawn to somebody who's bad for me. Oh, it just feels so good. This guy, he's toxic. She's toxic, but somehow I should pursue her. No, that's stupid thinking that leads to tremendous chaos.

And don't let your children absorb that. It's stupid. You don't go after people who are bad for you and somehow think that if you just spend more time with this girl who's bad for me, but it feels so good. No, it doesn't work out. The movie ends right before the divorce.

So don't go down that road. It's stupid. You need to indoctrinate your children to experiencing the joy of family life. We need our daughters to have ambitions to motherhood instead of only having ambitions to be a boss babe stem chick. It's important that motherhood be something that is appreciated in society.

You and I can be the ones to change the culture around this, not the entire culture. There's gonna be a whole lot of boss babes stem chicks created by our culture right now. But you and I can start it. I always find it interesting that I go on Netflix and Netflix has an entire category of girl power movies.

There's no category for boy power movies. There's no category for motherhood movies. There's just a category for girl power movies. And so we need to change that. We need to lionize mothers and we need to cause our appreciation of motherhood and mothers to be transformed so that motherhood is transformed into a high status occupation.

I want my daughter to be married to a man like me. That's my first responsibility as a father. I need to be the kind of man that sets the example for her. That's my responsibility. But I want her to marry a guy like me. I think objectively speaking that my wife has a pretty great life.

It's not perfect, it's not easy, but I would say that on a scale of zero to 100, it's pretty stinking good. I'm probably not a 10 as a husband, right? I'm not a 10 out of 10. There's guys out there that are richer than me, better looking than me, have better abs than I do, smarter than me.

But in terms of the overall package, my ambition in life is to be a dream husband for her. And I wanna model what that looks like, not only for my good, for the health of my relationship, but for my daughter to aspire to. And I think that being a mother is a pretty great lifestyle choice for my wife.

What does it mean for me to be a great husband? Well, it means adequately providing for my wife, providing the luxuries that I'm able to provide, retiring her from the job market so she can sleep in every day, sexually satisfying her, providing a strong social group for her, providing her with children, supporting her and her goals and ambitions and the things that are fulfilling to her.

And as the father of my family, that's my responsibility. My wife's goals and ambitions are mine. I take them on as the father, as the leader of my family. And all of our family planning gives priority to those things. Now she's got her own set of duties. She's got her duties to be an excellent wife to me.

She owes me loyalty and support and my callings and ambitions. She needs to create a home environment that provides me with peace and comfort and joy. She should seek to sexually satisfy me, to take good care of our children, to be a loyal partner in life. So there's a beautiful harmony between these things.

But the point is that being a mother should be an attractive thing and we can model that for our daughters. Now, I don't myself like making abrasive remarks or being abrasive or taunting people, but what we need to do is we need to show this to the world and we need to raise it up.

Because what happens is we spend so much time apologizing for the drunk husband that says, "Well, I'm gonna get me a beer," and is abusive and whatnot. And that's such a meme that a lot of times our daughters and young women are just living their lives scared. They're scared that every man is drunk and abusive.

Every man doesn't care about them. Every man is gonna use them and grind them up. And that is just not true. It may be that the most visible men, the people who are most obvious in society, the guys who get the most views on their toxic TikTok, maybe they're really toxic.

But those of us who are not need to be equally strong in marketing what is good and what is satisfying, what is beautiful about our lifestyle. My favorite brand of content in the world is mother content. I wanna see it 100X. I wanna see, there's this lady, I don't know her name, but I'm aware of her.

There's this lady, I think she lives out in Wyoming or something like that. She makes these Instagram things of her cooking this just insane food. And she's at this wood stove, and she's at this wood stove surrounded by little children in an apron looking like a 1935 housewife, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and making this just like elaborately homemade food from all of the stuff that was grown on her property and whatnot.

And the commenters love to point out that she's cooking on a $30,000 wood stove, because I don't know, either she or her husband is the heir or heiress to this vast fortune. And I love it. I love it. I am so grateful that woman exists. I hope that she gets millions and millions of followers because her lifestyle is attractive.

She's surrounded by all these children, and she's cooking on a wood stove, and it's just pure luxury, but it's different than toxic luxury. We need more of that because, and we need more of it in public, in view of young men and women. It's hard for me to talk about my private life sometimes because I don't enjoy the backlash of the internet.

I don't enjoy fighting with people who just wanna come and make fun of me of things that I hold dear. I also don't really wanna put my children on the internet. I've thought many times I should show. I mean, we do slide shows and family movies of all the places that we go.

We visited 16 countries last year, and so I have a little movie that I made of each country, and we go through it with my children, and we kind of relive the memories, and we talk about these. I love my life. My life is awesome. It's not perfect, but it's awesome.

It's really good. And I sometimes think like I should share more of that. And I'm doing that here in this context. And I want you to do that. I want you to share your life. I want people to see and to understand that your life doesn't end because you have children.

It's not like you just can't travel the world because you have children. And maybe someday I'll decide that it's right for me and my family to put movies out online. But for now, I just try to support people that do it and just say that you create your reality.

And it's not as though you have either a bad life. You create it. And I want to share the message that I'm sharing with you now that children are really great. One of my favorite memes that I saw recently about motherhood was this. I forget what the image was.

But it's like, girls, get this. It's like OnlyFans, but you've got only one fan, and he's a subscriber for life, and you bear his children, and he pays all the bills for the rest of your life. Like, it's great. It's like OnlyFans, just one fan, and it works out for life.

And it sounds ridiculous, but we need more of that. Because you got a whole generation of OnlyFans girls going around and doing everything they can to get naked for random men on the internet to pay their bills. And if they were just willing to be a great wife and mother, they would find a great guy who will appreciate her getting naked for him, and he'll pay all her bills.

It's a pretty simple contract, and it still works. So let's be those who encourage our daughters to have ambitions to motherhood instead of only having ambitions to be boss babe stem chicks. We also need to build stronger men. Hi, I'm Chris Gethard, and I'm very excited to tell you about "Beautiful Anonymous," a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone.

I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call. We talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones.

I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today, "Beautiful Anonymous." Men who have ambitions for family and who are willing to do the hard work necessary to attract and deserve a high-quality woman.

As a man and as a father, you are going to bear enormous burden and responsibility, and you'd better be ready to handle it. Now, the good news is that burdens and responsibilities in the natural course of family life and in business life and in most life, they grow progressively.

They grow little by little, and as you bear one little bit of responsibility, you become stronger and you bear the next one until you turn around and you're 30 years old or you're 40 years old or you're 50 years old, and you are a giant of a man. That's the way that life is supposed to work.

But you do need to be ready to handle the ones that you encounter. So you need to be a man who is in control over emotions. You need a man who is filled with kindness and consideration for other people. You need a man who has a strong earning ability and a strong work ethic.

Women are not wrong for wanting a man who makes a lot of money. Women are absolutely right to desire a man who makes a lot of money. So you have to develop your work ethic and your earning ability, and you have to do it intentionally. You can develop a strong moral character with a minimum of vice.

One of the great complaints I have about our popular culture is we celebrate vice. We celebrate things that are destructive. What has destroyed over the years more marriages than something like alcoholism? Having a drunk dad is a pretty good guarantee that you don't wanna have children, you don't wanna be a dad.

And yet alcohol has destroyed enormous numbers of families. And yet in our popular culture, what do we celebrate? Drunkenness. And I complained about this a number of years ago when I was at a professional conference. And I haven't been to any kind of industry conferences for a few years now, so maybe it's changed.

I hope it has. But it used to drive me crazy. You go to an industry conference, I would go to a podcasting conference or a FinCon or something like that. And you get up on the second day and the first speaker on the second day, hey guys, what a great party that was last night.

I'm amazed that you're here and can anybody remember it? And just this constant cultural celebration of drunkenness which destroys families. Don't do that. Gambling, the generosity in all of its forms has to be gotten rid of. And so you need to develop, as a man, you need to develop strong moral character and get rid of vices.

And you need to develop the ability to inspire confidence and trust. The decision that a woman would make to bear your children as a man or to be willing to be your wife and even consider being a full-time mother, in order for that to happen, you have to inspire confidence and trust.

You have to be the kind of man who can inspire her in that because she is consciously choosing to make herself vulnerable if she makes that decision. The vulnerability that a woman endures with that is enormous. It is properly fear-inducing. And so she has to make a good decision about you and be confident in that decision.

And I think that one of the biggest impacts here is that men themselves have become very antenatal. Instead of having a vision of a hundred great-grandchildren and your descendants being as many as the sands of the seashore, a lot of men rejoice in the extra money that their wife can bring in for them.

They push her to bring in more money so they can buy a nicer set of golf clubs. It's just toxic guys that create the environment around themselves. Here's a, I'm gonna read to you verbatim, just this beautiful message that I received from a listener of mine. And we were talking about this in a different forum.

And this listener wrote to me and she said, "Overall, the greatest impact to support these women "has been the shift in priority. "It's not just women, it's their husbands too. "So many women need the push to give up their career "and the biggest catalyst is their husband. "So many men are fearful of losing the second income "that they put pressure on their wives "to work full-time out of the home.

"Then the wives put pressure on themselves to come home "and do the second full-time job "of motherhood and homemaker, "hence one or two kids or zero. "In addition, when a husband supports his wife "to shift her priority to being a homemaker, "she has time to meet other moms "and participate in programs like M-O-P-S "and thus be more encouraged, supported, "and as a result, feel free to have more children.

"It's also difficult for these women "when they get married later "because they've been supporting themselves "for so long. "It can be scary to be unemployed. "I speak from experience. "When my husband asked me to stay home, I was terrified. "I had been supporting myself for 10 years up to that point "and now I was being asked to not do what I had known "and to be fully reliant on his income." So this is an important thing.

You need to understand that for a woman to believe in you, you need to be worthy of being believed in. There's this, if we look at the current mismatch in the dating environment, there's an element of truth in a lot of the things that are really frustrating and really angering to a lot of people.

And so filter the current content you hear of the complaints and the frustrations. Filter the current content that you hear and recognize that it has an application. I'll just give two examples, one for women, one for men. There's this meme online in popular culture about what do you bring to the table?

That men are now asking women, "What do you bring to the table?" And of course the woman always responds, "Well, I am the table. "If you don't like that, if I'm not good enough for you, "then just move on, buddy." And what you should hear if you are a woman, you should hear men saying like, "Wait a second, why do I need you?

"What benefit do you bring to my life?" That's a fair question to ask. And what has happened is that many women have been trained by our society to bring everything to the table for the man who signs their paycheck and nothing to the table for the man who gives them their life.

That's the distinction. And so you need to ask yourself, "What do you bring to the table?" If you are a woman. "What do you actually provide to a man "that would cause him to wish to marry you "and have children with you?" If that's something that you desire. Similarly, on the flip side, it goes towards men.

Women tend to want a man who is strong, who is tall, who is good looking, and who earns good money. Well, guess what, buddy? You gotta be those things. You gotta be the kind of man who can provide for your wife. You can't be the guy who has no ambition, just sitting around, I don't like to use the cliche, but it's true, just sitting around playing video games constantly and not able to provide for a woman.

What do you have to offer her? You don't deserve her 'cause you can't offer her anything. So I'm not gonna go further down that, but you need to think about that and recognize that in every cliche, there's an element of truth. And if you listen through it carefully, you can develop yourself to attract and inspire the kind of relationship and lifestyle that you desire to have.

We also need to increase respect for men who are fathers, not just men who are rich. So for our sons, fatherhood should be something that has social respect. In our financially driven age, what today we tend to do is we tend to raise men on a pedestal based upon how much money they earn, how many followers they have, or some other similar metric.

And we don't differentiate men who have those things from men who are strong fathers and men of character. And I don't know how to do it, but we need to do that. I was blind to this when I was younger. I was a big Tim Ferriss fan. I was a big, well, I won't name all the names, but I was blind to it.

Sorry for picking on Tim. I usually give a long list, but it's not necessary. I was blind to this. I thought, I wanna be like this guy. I wanna be like this guy. I wanna be like this guy. And today I look at them and I'm like, I don't really wanna be like any of them.

I appreciate them for the wisdom that they have, but I wanna be like that guy over there who has five children and he's a pillar in his community. He's a leader in his local city. He's an elder in his church. He is a businessman who runs an honest business.

And he may not make as much money as so-and-so over there who's destroying society does, but I'm not gonna raise up so-and-so because he makes more money and his work is destroying society. I'm not alleging that Tim Ferriss is destroying society. What I'm saying is we need to filter that.

And we need to be very careful of who we ourselves admire and then who we encourage to be admired in the world. And it's not easy to do. It's not easy to do, but we need to figure out new ways to do that. And we need to bestow status on men who are fathers, both biological fathers, just simply due to their being fathers, and then the fullness sense of the word, the word that we all, the sense that we all aspire to.

Being a father should be a high-status occupation. One of my favorite things from the Bible is that a man's qualifications for public Christian ministry are all based upon his being a father. If you look at the qualifications for a leader, an elder, and Titus, and Timothy, it's based upon his family.

Because if a man can't govern his own family, how can he govern the house of God? I wish for a culture. I desire a culture in which we take that farther. We always need to be cautious that we don't exclude men and women who don't marry, who don't have children.

I think that we could take it in the wrong direction. But we should appreciate men who demonstrate themselves as strong and capable men in the intimacy of their home, where their children respect them and admire them, and their family is well-run and is happy and contented. And then we should promote them to other positions of responsibility, 'cause they've learned a lot.

Hopefully, these qualitative factors will help our children want to build families and dynasties of their own. But they're still going to need our financial support. And I think that we can do a lot to support our children financially so that they can themselves go on and repeat the process.

If these qualitative factors are present, I don't think that the money is strictly necessary. What I mean is, if you're raised in a loving, caring environment to parents who are paupers, and yet they instill values in you, you have a contented home life filled with joy and happiness, you can solve everything else yourself.

There are many poor children who have been raised in great circumstances, though those circumstances reflected financial poverty, who have gone on and gone to college and gotten great jobs and continued on. On the other hand, there are lots of people who are raised in wealth who grow up in a toxic family environment and don't go on to reproduce, grow the family, and you have just mass chaos and catastrophe in the family line.

So if you could only have one or the other, I would beg you to have the qualitative factors. But as a listener of Radical Personal Finance, the data shows me that you have above-average resources. So my question is, can you spend that money to help these qualities pass on through the age?

We all know you can. One thing that I hear very frequently from wealthy people is that they so appreciate that their parents paid for their college education so they could start debt-free. We'll talk more about that in a moment. And so they wanna do the same thing for their children.

This is a good expression of spending money on children where it really pays off because now your children can get married sooner. They don't have to pay off a bunch of student loan debt. Your children can have children sooner 'cause they're not deeply in debt. There's lots of things that you can do, but let's expand it a little bit.

Let's break it apart. So as parents, recognize that there are individual steps to family formation for our children. Family formation means first attracting a spouse. In some cultures, it might mean being able to attract someone with whom you can arrange a spouse, but in our culture, it's pretty much the children need to be the ones attracting the spouse.

So your child will need to be able to attract a spouse, ideally at a young age. Your child will need to be able to select his or her spouse, then marry the person, and then have children and continue down the line. And so let's break it apart into those component parts so that we can think about ways that we could influence that.

The first component of attracting a spouse is if at all possible, we want to help our children to be highly attractive. I use that word broadly, and I want you to fill in what that means, but we wanna help our children to be highly attractive in every sense of the word.

That includes physicality. We want our children to be in great shape, not to be fat, not to be weird, not to be skinny, not to be diseased. We want our children to be strong, healthy specimens of young people. So anything you can do to help that happen is really valuable.

I was with a family recently and they said, we're not gonna tell our children what sport they have to play, but you gotta play a sport. It's necessary that you play a sport. You're always gonna play a sport. Well, that's a really great way to help your children to be active at all times and develop the physicality that goes with this.

John Taylor Gatto, the well-known educational, well, the well-known educator and then commentator on education. He had 12 qualities of elite, basically the elite private schools teach their children or ways, things that the elite teach their children coming from all the finest boarding schools in the world. And one of those things that elite families always teach their children is a strong involvement in athletics because they know that athletics is the primary way of developing physical grace that is necessary to be a strong and attractive human being.

I think he makes a good argument. I really appreciate it. I have his, I keep his 11 and I go through, I think it was 11 or 12, I don't remember, but he goes through all these qualities and I go through it constantly and say, how am I doing on my own education for my children?

I may not have my children at Le Rose, but I can still bring a Le Rose education to my children if at all possible. And so athletics are an important thing. You wanna be strong, you wanna be in great shape. You want your children to be physically attractive. Today's world, we could just put that under for men, the looks maxing movement.

Health, hygiene, style, personality, confidence, all of these things are important. When I look back at myself as a young man, I didn't even, I never thought about my physical attractiveness. Sounds ridiculous to say it, but I think a lot of people don't. Young men and maybe women do more, but as a man, most young men, I don't think much about physical attractiveness and yet physical attractiveness matters.

And physical attractiveness is something that will ultimately allow your child to have access to a broader pool of potential spouses than otherwise he or she would. And it's everything. So when you're spending money on your child's braces, that's a good move. If you got weird teeth, my teeth, 'cause I didn't wear my retainer, my teeth have gotten all crooked and it bothers me.

And so I'm probably gonna go ahead and start correcting mine here in the coming months and years and see if I can get them fixed. And so it's, whether you're an adult or whether you're younger, if you've got weird teeth and they're all weird shaped, then get them fixed.

We can get them fixed. Many aspects of physical health and physical beauty can be changed. There's, you know, for men, well, for men and for women, one of the great problems that's facing our young people is they've got weird jaw formation. And you've got all these like men and women who have these sunken faces and their jaws are all set back and they're not strong and handsome and confident and beautiful.

And there's a couple of things related to it. First of all, some of it could be genetics. A lot of it could be just related to the food that people are having, too many carbohydrates, too much sugar, even not enough chewy meat. So go ahead and buy the Greek gum and give it to your children to help them to chew a lot.

Feed chewy cuts of meat. Do mewing exercises to help your children to develop strong jaws, get proper orthodontia so that your children's faces are properly constructed. If you've got fat children, get them on fat. If you have lots of acne, help them to stop. I think that there's a, I've abandoned a philosophy that I used to have.

And the philosophy was this. I don't think that we should judge people by circumstance. So let me back up for a moment. I don't believe that we should judge people by external traits that can't be controlled. So if you meet a guy or a girl who has a really ugly face, I don't think that it's appropriate to judge that person for having an ugly face.

And I don't think that, and I don't think we should ever do that. Beauty, the beauty that we most value should always be the beauty that comes from within, from virtue, from character, from an inner beauty, from an inner righteousness. That's the beauty that we should value. And so I don't want to go through life judging people based upon the beauty of someone's face.

On the other hand, I think it's entirely reasonable to judge people for circumstances they can control. So if a man or woman is super fat, that can generally in almost all cases be controlled. If someone is just ugly because of things that could be easily changed, right? Then maybe that's an appropriate place to say, this is saying something about your character.

The problem that I have is that I think that beauty is properly characterized as an expression of health. And I changed my opinion on that a couple of years ago from reading the book that I promoted various times, and I'm blanking on the name and I'm blanking on the author, Dr.

Catherine, someone or other. And she convinced me that beauty is a pretty decent substitute for health, that the things that we call beautiful have to do with attractiveness and for health. And I was talking with a friend of mine, and this friend has teenage daughters, and this friend is feeding her, they've chosen in their family to have an all, basically to be basically carnivore as a family.

And her daughters, I was admiring her teenage daughters, just had this beautiful, totally clear, glowing skin. And she said, "Yeah, my daughters are the ones "who really want us to be on carnivore." Because they said that when they stopped being carnivore and they went back, they started to break out in acne, started to have these, they didn't like their skin, their skin wasn't in good shape.

And I thought even something as obvious as skin, you would say, well, the quality of my skin, whether or not I have acne or how much acne I have, I shouldn't judge somebody for that. But in reality, it's probably a reflection in some degree of how healthy someone is.

And being, trying to attract a healthy and beautiful spouse is a smart move from a financial perspective, from a long-term planning perspective. Health, beauty is an indicator of health, and health is something that is going to significantly reflect on the quality and satisfaction that you have in a marriage relationship.

And so this is something that should be optimized for. When I married my wife, I made a commitment to her to have and to hold in sickness and in health, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part. In sickness or in health is a very big marital commitment, a very big vow.

If I were, once I marry her, I have a commitment to her that doesn't end until either she dies or I die. That can be a very burdensome commitment to carry out. We should always honor people who fulfill their marital vows to a sick spouse, to an ailing spouse.

That's proper for us to honor those people, no question about it. But you have a choice in who you marry. You are never required to go into a marriage relationship by anybody else or any circumstance. You have a choice. You don't have a choice after you're married. And when I reflect on the quality of my life and the satisfaction that I have with my wife and with our children, I realize how a significant component of that satisfaction is due to just basically having good health.

I have good health, she has good health, we have healthy children. It makes a big difference in my life. I would have a much harder time being as confidently approving of marriage being a great life decision. If I had a wife who was sickly, I had children who were sickly, it would be harder for me to express such an unhindered approbation of the quality of my life.

So breaking that back to the beginning, when I was in college and considering various girls that I was attracted to, I wasn't thinking about health. If you had told me I should be thinking about health, I probably would have said, oh, come on, that's no big deal. Love is love.

I'm just gonna fall in love with the girl who's right for me. She's the one. I didn't have very mature thinking on it. Today, I would do it very differently. And today, I would tell my children, I do, I will, I do and will, that one of the things you need to screen your spouse for is health.

And so all of us need to be as healthy as possible, as attractive as possible, as physically attractive as possible, because physicality, physical attractiveness, especially external physical attractiveness is closely related to health. And you want to choose somebody who is healthy in order for you to have the highest probability of having a satisfying and enduring relationship.

We want to help our children to be highly attractive so that they can attract as the most attractive potential spouse possible. Now, the key here is not to optimize for the wrong factors. So we don't want to optimize, for example, for promiscuity. That's not a goal. We know that sexual promiscuity dramatically damages the long-term prospects of men and women to marry and their satisfaction with marriage.

So we don't want to optimize for promiscuity. We want to optimize for marriage, not fornication, but marriage. That's the context for it. And so we should train for that and we should do everything possible to help our children develop attractiveness. All skills of attractiveness can be learned and developed.

Physical attractiveness is a skill. There are lots of component skills, component skills of eating, exercise, body sculpting, muscle building, et cetera. These are skills that can be learned and can be put into place. I was young and dumb, and I always thought that this was kind of accidental. I watched this video this last week or a few couple days ago that really inspired me.

And it was a guy named, there's a YouTuber named Brandon Carter. He's this dude, he's super buff, body of a Greek God type guy. And he's 40 years old. He's got this big platform and really attractive guy from a physical perspective. I don't need to pull him down. He's an attractive guy from a physical perspective.

He did this video where he shared how he travels the world with a food scale. And literally, he travels the world and he weighs everything he eats. And his point was, he says, I care about this result. I'm not gonna leave it to chance. So I weigh everything that I eat so I can properly log it in MyFitnessPal and make sure that I'm in a caloric deficit.

That video was inspiring to me because as a lifelong not physical guy, as a lifelong fat guy, when I was younger, I always thought it was accidental. I thought that like the muscular guys, my friends with the great six pack and the really attractive shoulders and whatever, I thought, well, it just comes that way, right?

It's all genetic. Nonsense, it's a lifestyle decision. And Brandon Carter travels the world with a food scale? I don't. He looks like that? I don't. And it was a good slap in the face that I needed to say like, yes, you're gonna be a weirdo and you're gonna be a weirdo by weighing your scale, weighing your food when you're traveling the world.

But if you want these results, this is what you gotta do. And so similarly, so that's why I say that physical attractiveness is a skill. Carter has developed skills that I haven't yet developed. So if I want what Carter has, then I can develop skills that match Carter's and I'll get closer to what Carter has.

That's the point. So physical attractiveness is a skill. Personal confidence is a skill. It's something that we need to teach to our sons and our daughters. Teaching them personal confidence, helping them to develop personal confidence, helping them to develop an attractive personality. Personality is simply a skill. It's not an innate thing.

Yes, there's an element of innate, like inherited qualities, but we can all develop personality. I can turn on personality, I can turn it off. I can change it. Learning charisma and all of these things that ultimately cause people to be attracted to us are skills. And I think that if you'll take that and then think about how can I invest into helping my child to develop these skills, then you'll have a really great path to run on.

Young people need to have at least one thing that they feel really confident about. Ideally, it's more than one, but at least one thing that they feel really confident about. And you as a parent can nurture that, you can pay for that, you can help that to be acquired.

We also need to help our children know how to attract a spouse. And I mean the actual actions to take to attract a spouse. They need to learn how to market themselves effectively. So physicality is an expression, but learning how to dress in an attractive way. Learning how to dress in a way that attracts the right kind of attention.

I think men get away with a lot more than women do in terms of if a guy is in good shape, he can kind of be a slob and a lot of girls will overlook that. But the converse is not always true. And so with our daughters, if you want your daughter to attract a very high quality man, then you need to proactively train her and teach her how to do that.

I don't yet have any teenagers, but here's my thought on teenagers. I was interacting with a client of mine recently. We're talking about his 15 year old daughter who was going out and shopping for a dress to go to a school dance. And he made these comments. By the way, comments that anger Joshua, there's just a few of them.

Number one is don't come at me with like, does your wife work? I think I talked about that earlier. That one annoys me. Number two, don't come at me with any of this macho nonsense. When my daughter gets, I'm gonna be sitting there cleaning my gun when the guy comes over and I'm gonna scare him off and I'm gonna scare off all her boyfriends.

I hate that. And I don't like to be confrontational in real life. There are a few things that I confront men on every single time I hear them, and that's one of them. Don't give me any of that macho nonsense about I'm gonna scare away my daughter's boyfriends and I'll talk about that when she's 30 years old.

You don't want that. You want your daughter to have a boyfriend. A really, really great one that you are thrilled to welcome into your family as a son-in-law. You want her to bring home a phenomenal man to interact with you and to join your family. That's what you're looking for.

You don't want her to be scared, you don't want to be some loser redneck sitting there cleaning your shotguns so she doesn't bring guys home to meet you. But what you want her to do is you want her to learn how to attract the right kind of attention, not the wrong kind of attention.

And so you need to teach your daughter as a father, as a mother, you need to teach your daughter how to attract the right kind of attention, how to address in a way that's going to attract the eye of a really high-quality man, not a low-quality man. And there's a skillset for that, how to market yourself effectively, how to express your personality.

So I have lots of detailed thoughts on that. I just want to point it out to you that don't follow for these stupid tropes. Think in advance and teach your daughter how to dress so that she can land a world-class husband. Because for her life and for her happiness and for her fulfillment, that will be an amazing thing for her.

And you want her to do that at 18, at 20, at 22. Because at 18 and 20 and 22, she's got the pick of the litter in terms of number of high-quality spouses that she could attract. And that's the best pathway for success, not for you to engage in some bozo, macho nonsense.

And somehow then she's 35 years old and you've scared away all her boyfriends. And now you say, all right, honey, you're 35 years old, you can go and marry. So attracting a spouse is a whole set of skills and you can invest into your children to help them to be attractive.

Selecting a spouse. In terms of selecting a spouse to help form the foundation, you need to give thought to how your children are likely to meet a potential spouse. When I was in college, I made fun of people who talked about the MRS degree, the idea that a girl would go to college to land a husband.

I thought even at the time that it was a stupid joke. And okay, maybe it reflected reality a long time ago, but it was just a stupid joke. I no longer think that. I now think a very reliably good reason to go to college is to interact with a selection of carefully filtered, high quality men and women with hopes of potentially attracting a spouse.

The thing I most value about my undergraduate degree is I met my wife, that's it. And if I had to do it all over again, and that was the only thing I got out of college, I would do it all over again. The cool thing about colleges and other institutions are that you have the ability to bring together a very strong and highly concentrated pool of attractive people who are filtered based upon something.

In college, they're at least filtered based upon academic ability, which is strongly correlated to IQ. And you want your children to be smart. And a lot of IQ is inherited from mother and father. So you want to marry someone with the highest IQ possible. Well, we don't give potential dates IQ tests, but the homogamy that is created in the college environment or the environment of college lends itself very well and makes itself highly suited for homogamous relationships.

And so college is a great screener of IQ. And it's one of the reasons we see a distinction and a separation of social classes in the United States is that more and more, all the smart people go to college and the dumb people don't. And so you have these social classes that are separating themselves from each other.

There may be other screens. I went to a Christian university. The reason I did that, even though when I was 18 years old, was I said, you know what? If I go and sit down at the lunch table and introduce myself to five people, I want there to be a good, a strong chance that of the five, several of them would be people that I would want to be friendly with and be friends with on an ongoing basis.

And that philosophy served me well. Given the chance to do it over again, I'd do it over again in a heartbeat. I would not want to go to a government college and be where the applicants, I'm talking about IQ and I can't get my words out, where the applicants are screened for IQ and academic ability, but not screened to some degree for lifestyle or character qualities.

I don't want to be friends with the majority of the people at a lunch table in the government college. I'm more likely to want to be friends with the majority of people in the private institution or the Christian institution or something else where there's some kind of screening environment.

I'm not interested in going to keggers on the weekend. I'm interested in people who are serious about life and serious about it. So you can screen for that based upon the kind of institution that you attend. So I think you should be careful and you should encourage people to do that.

And one of my concerns that I have with the current anti-college commentary that many people have, which is in many cases, probably rightly placed, meaning that college is not as valuable as it once was, is that there's a signaling component of college. And so if you're a young man who could go to college and doesn't, you now have a significant barrier to overcome with a woman who could go to college and does.

And we know in the data, on matchmaking data, that this is an important factor for women, and I think it's rightly important. It's not something that should be ignored. Now, it can be overcome. Any individual factor can be, but you should be careful about that. I believe as a parent that it's my responsibility to create a lifestyle for my teens that they have a broad exposure to many potential spouses.

If you want to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, take the responsibility seriously and recognize that it begins with, first and foremost, creating attractive children who have the character qualities, all of the things that will help them to be good husbands and wives. And then it's also a component of exposure.

Finding a great spouse is an element of how many people are you exposed to and how attractively are you able to represent yourself to those people. It's just a numbers game. There is no one person in the world who's right for you. There is a person that you choose as your spouse that you're able to attract and that you had exposure to.

So in addition to the qualitative aspects of investing into your children to help your children to be as attractive of a potential husband or as attractive as a potential wife as you can help them to be, you want to expose them to the widest possible candidate pool. And the question I always have, if a young man or young woman is talking to me and says, "I want to get married," my question is, "How many women did you meet last month?

"Tell me the number." And if a guy isn't meeting any women, then you know he's not serious about being married. And I always start my speech with, "You need to develop yourself into being an attractive man." But the second component of that is how many women did you meet?

And so as a parent, I think it's my responsibility. If I want my children to be married and I'm gonna take it seriously, then it's my responsibility to help them to have exposure to broad numbers of people. So you should look for social outlets for this. Number one, this is a very good reason if there's a local school in your area, it may, even if it's an expensive local school, but the kind of people at it are the kind of people that would reflect your culture.

This is a very good reason for you to pay expensive private school tuition so that your children are exposed to a peer group that would reflect your family's values, your family's social class, and the kinds of things that you do. Social class in today's world matters enormously. What has happened is if you look at some of the data, I've been reading Brad Wilcox's recent book on marriage.

And what's so interesting, the point that he makes in that, and he's made it for years in his essays, is, excuse me, the point that is fascinating about it is that the higher social classes, and I'm measuring that based upon socioeconomic status, income and wealth, the higher social classes are the most likely classes to say that you can and should live however you want.

So it'll be very unusual for you to find a rich person who will say, you should get married and stay married, and men and women should marry each other. On the contrary, wealthy people are very likely to say, hey, you live however you wanna live. You do you, man, you do you, right?

That would be what they would say. But in reality, their lifestyle decisions are the exact opposite of that. They get married, they stay married. And the selection of a spouse is very, very important. So one of the things that's interesting is that if you look at the data, all of the upper class components, so for example, a couple that's married is, sorry, a couple with high educational achievement is more likely to be more religious.

If you look at religious trends in the United States, the more highly educated someone is, the more likely they are to be religious. And the more enduring the marriage is. So these social class things that the wealthy people, they say one thing, but they're enforcing and reinforcing with their lifestyles something different.

That's where we are. And so if you want your child to have access to a social class that encourages marriage, that's going to see it through, then you probably want to send your children to expensive religious schools because there's the highest exposure to people who are going to reflect those values.

And so spending money on that intentionally is a smart move, it's a good move. In addition to schools, or if you don't have access to schools and things like that that are part of your choice, make sure that your children are exposed to a broad range of people their age.

And so one of my goal, my decisions is that, especially with teenagers, I will make certain that my children are involved in many social groups. And it can be everything from a local camp that you love to attend, some kind of youth rally, or some political movement, or something like that.

But your children need broad exposure to many people to have a high chance of them being exposed to different kinds of people so they can start to understand the kinds of people that they would be a good match for, but also have a high chance of meeting someone who is a good match from a natural perspective.

And so you can spend money on that. So if you have young children as I do, plan to be spending lots of money on travel and on dues and organization fees and school expenses and things like that when your children are teenagers. And hopefully that will continue through college and beyond if they haven't met somebody when they are a teen and initiated a relationship that might result in marriage.

In terms of selection, we also wanna be super intentional about teaching our children what to look for in a high quality spouse. If you're listening to me at this point, however long, I'm over two hours into this podcast. If you're listening to me, there's a good chance that you're married or wanna be.

But if you're married, you know what makes for a good relationship. You probably don't wanna say it, just like I don't always wanna put all my things out on the internet. You probably don't wanna put it in a tweet and wait for the mob to pile on you for your unacceptable opinions.

But you know the things that make for a good husband or a good wife. You know the aspects of compatibility and the features to look for. So train your children in that. Help them to be thinking about that. Helping them to be looking out for those things. Earlier I was making fun of the bad boy complex.

It's so cliche and yet it's so true. Women wanna be attracted to the man, and I know he's not good for me, but I'm just so into him. This is stupid behavior. Teach your daughters not to do it. Think with your brain, not with your emotions, and control your emotions with your brain.

Emotions are important, but they are a stupid master. So teach your children that. Teach your children to be questionable when they're attracted to someone who's clearly not a good fit for them. Teach them about the character clues to look for. So I've shared some of them, but no complaints to my parents, I appreciate that.

But I've got a long list of things that I wanna make sure my children are looking for in the world. Everything from physical health, I've already described. I never thought to look for physical health. And maybe if I had been interested in a girl who wasn't healthy, I bet my parents would have said something.

But by that time, it's too long and too late. And we're living in a world in which in our current moment, young people are, as best I can tell, there's not a strong cultural movement towards analysis. What I mean is that you're expected to be attracted to somebody no matter what, and it's just in you.

Your sexual attractions and your romantic attractions, they're these innate things that you can't control and you just are who you are. And people make stupid decisions because of this mindset and this philosophy. And they go out into the world thinking that this is true, and then they screw up their lives.

So I think that's dumb, and we can do better. So let's train our children, and we have the data. Any one of us can invite a marriage therapist over for dinner and say, "Hey, marriage therapist who talks to hundreds of couples "who are in the process of divorcing, "what are the things that you're teaching "your children to do?" And we can have that conversation and we can learn about what not to do.

All the research is there available for us. And that's why it annoys me that so many men especially, but men are scared of marriage 'cause they somehow think that a 50% divorce rate is accidental. It's not an accidental statistic. It can be controlled based upon good decisions at every level of this.

Selecting a spouse, teach your children to select. Now, marrying the spouse, okay? Marrying the woman, marrying the man. We used to have strong social pressure in favor of marriage before sexual activity and before children. That social pressure is basically gone. We need to bring it back on a consistent basis.

Sexuality outside of marriage causes enormous destruction. Sexuality within marriage causes enormous happiness. You may not be able to control the broader culture of your country. I can't control the broader culture of my country, but we can control the culture of our family. And we can teach children soberly the facts about marriage and sexuality.

And we need to be very clear. The data on this is strong in terms of the damaging impact that promiscuous sexuality has on long-term relationship satisfaction. Similarly, marriage at one point in our cultures was strongly supported by communities. It can be strongly supported again. We may not be able to fix the tragedy of no-fault divorce in the United States of America, probably not, but we can still provide the social support for marriage in our communities.

If somebody is, and I'm not gonna go through step-by-step how to do it, but it has to be done. It has to absolutely be done. There are always people in the top 20% of couples who are gonna sail into marriage and sail through marriage and have no problem whatsoever, and they need no community support for marriage whatsoever.

There's probably always gonna be a bottom 20% of people who no amount of community support, no amount of counseling, no amount of, they're just broken people who their marriages are destined to fail catastrophically. It's the middle 60% that we should be concerned about. And the strong social pressure to be cautious before marriage, and then to maintain marriage, we can keep a significant portion of that middle 60% of marriages intact and time for the emotions to dissipate and for people to realize, you know what, we're better off together.

And so to the extent that you have influence in your community, learn to support marriage so we can work with that 60% and improve that. It's really important. Financially speaking, we need to pull apart the different components of marrying someone and see how they can be financially supported. The first component is attractiveness, meaning is he a moneymaker?

Can he provide for me if you're a woman? Women care about how much money men earn. And I believe that that is right and they should. Men don't have the same consideration. Men do not generally care how much money a woman earns. And the kind of man who cares about how much money a woman earns is probably not the kind of man who wants to have children and build a family, build a legacy.

So we have to separate this based upon men and women. But it's right for men to be expected to be earners. And in a moment, I'll talk about how to facilitate that. But the first thing is how to signal that appropriately. There needs to be a strong indication that this man is a good earner and there needs to be some measure of his wealth.

I didn't intend for this podcast to become the beast that it's become, but at its core, there needs to be financial disclosure, but at the proper time. And so a man needs to be earning enough and there should be an indication of financial stability. Now, the traditional way that a man showed his financial attractiveness in many cultures was doing things like having a home, having a job, having a house, preparing something for his wife, preparing a life to bring his bride into.

In our current time, most of that has gone away in just favor of an engagement ring. And an engagement ring is probably important in terms of a signal or a token of a man's ability. So I'm not the guy who's telling you to buy a ring from a bubblegum machine and give it out.

Because there's an element at which a man demonstrates his worth for his bride and demonstrates his ability to provide based upon some external thing, some bubble, some proof of it. We don't have a dowry system, but finances have always been an important component of marriage throughout history, and they still are.

However, I would say an engagement ring should probably be less important than a debt-free house. So finding an ability to say, "Hey, here's a debt-free house," that should probably take priority over an engagement ring. So consider and make sure that we are choosing signals of financial ability that are appropriate for the long-term success of the couple.

Weddings should be funded by the community, not the couple. A huge impediment right now to marriage is the cost of a wedding. Well, duh, if you're a young couple and you think that it's your job somehow to throw an enormous party so all your guests can get drunk on your dime, you can't afford that.

Weddings should be a community affair. And what has happened is we've broken our communities, we've approved men and women shacking up together, and then we've somehow said that that's okay, and then in 10 years, after you've shacked up together for 10 years, then we'll come to the party that you throw.

That's not the way it is. The community that a person is involved in has always been an important component of marriage. So the community enforces proper social order by expecting marriage as a prerequisite for sex. And then the community comes together and ideally should create the wedding so that the couple can make their commitments, make their public vows one to another, and the community supports that.

And that's a fundamentally important part of community stability. So as a parent who is looking to invest into your children, I think it's right for you to consider paying for weddings. And that's a proper and right expression of money. You can figure out how much it is. My point in this podcast is simply to show that if you desire to help your children to get married and have children and to do it at a young enough age so that we can change some of these fertility rate problems, then paying for weddings is a reasonable goal.

It should also be reasonable that if you yourself don't have the financial capacity for it, that you have a community that can do it, that have a community that can come together, can have a great big potluck after church, have a great big potluck in the park and throw a wedding, throw a party for someone.

If you want, if you, as I do, if you are a man or a woman in your community and you want to see marriages built and be strong, and you want to see all of the good things that come from that, then you need to be willing and I need to be willing to do some of the work to support that and not just sit by and poke fingers at statistics, but do the work to support couples in that.

That's our responsibility. Also in terms of marriage, financial impediments to marriage must be limited. The biggest financial impediment to marriage is student loan debt or some other form of debt, but student loans are the big one. If my daughter is going or my son is going and gonna marry a woman and he finds out that she's got $150,000 of student loan debt for a non-high income producing career, I'm gonna strongly encourage him that this is an enormous negative factor.

I wouldn't say it's an ultimately disqualifying factor of anything really, 'cause all of these factors, they need judgment and ability. I don't think that just having, oh, this is absolutely disqualifying is the case. There's very few of those, but it's an enormous red flag and if he marries her, it will be an enormous impediment to their life for the coming years.

Same thing both ways. So be aware, be very cautious of student loan debt and teach your children to be very cautious of it and if possible, I mean, sorry, student loan debt can always be avoided. There's always a way and in most cases, avoiding it is the right move.

Now, some specific suggestions for young men and how we can help our young men to be prepared. We need to optimize and rethink our entire educational system and income generation of the system that we have right now and help our young men to optimize education and income generation at an early age.

One of the big problems that we have is I think marriages generally work best if a couple is close in age. So we don't want to have a 40-year-old son who's marrying a 20-year-old daughter. That's not ideal. Much better to have a 23-year-old son marrying a 23-year-old girl, excuse me.

Son and daughter was not what I intended to say. We don't want a 40-year-old man marrying a 20-year-old girl if it can be avoided. We want 23-year-olds to marry, 25-year-olds to marry, 20-year-olds to marry. We want people to marry in an age bracket where they're similar to one another.

The problem is that if a man is expected to provide and be wealthy and established and able to make lots of money, then generally he needs some time to make that happen. And so it's a very unusual 20-year-old who is able to financially attract a girl. It's much more likely that he'd be 30 or 35 when he's able to attract a high-quality girl.

On the flip side, we want our daughters to be attracted to men who can provide for them. The problem is that the man who can provide for her is probably not gonna be able to do that until after a decade of working, of earning and making money. And she's probably gonna be significantly past her prime fertile years able to have children.

And this is the numeric problem that couples are facing right now. That a woman's highest period of fertility comes from middle teenage years and into 20s. By the time she's 30 years old, she's lost 90% of her eggs. Her pregnancies are likely to be more challenging. And every year that goes by into her 30s, it becomes more difficult.

So it's very difficult to start having babies at 30 years old and have six of them by 40. That's pretty rough. It's much easier to start at 20 and have six babies by 40 without it being a major problem. But the problem is how does a 20-year-old select a high-quality man who's also 20 years old?

So we need to work on this. And there's a couple aspects to it. Number one, a lot of our current delayed marriage is due to very high educational requirements for our current society. And these educational requirements are fine. They are what they are. They're real, they're important. And we can't just toss them aside and say that we don't need them anymore.

They are important and we need to pay attention to them because at the end of the day, it's good to be highly educated. But we also need some alternative methods. So first, we can put a lot of education, much more education into the teenage years than we currently do.

But we also need to put education and income generation into the teenage years. A lot of educational time is wasted with frivolity. And while I'm a fan of being in a classroom dynamic where you can meet potential spouses, a lot of it is a waste of time. And so the emphasis that I'm trying to say is we need to help young men to be earning money at an earlier age so they can build confidence in their earning abilities and start building skills that will pay off significantly for them in the fullness of time.

Now, I think this is one big reason why the United States really shines here. In many countries, young people can't even work until they're age 18. In the United States, 13 or 14 or 15 in most states, you can work and generate gainful employment. So that's good to have job experience.

I have lots of thoughts on what that should look like for teenagers, but the point is it's good and that there's job opportunities for teenagers. Teenagers need to go after them. And it's a balance because education is important, hobbies and avocations are probably also important, but earning ability is important.

And a man who's been earning money for himself and paying for his own bills is going to have a much higher degree of confidence and is gonna have the confidence that he could support a wife if he needed to and if he chose to. So I think that we should not extend childhood like we do until a very late age by extending schooling out for long, long periods of time, but let's compress those things a little bit and let's recognize that they can be done side by side.

Young men should be productive in their teen years while also becoming highly educated. In addition, young men should be taught by you and by me to be serious about their finances. Young men should be establishing their financial base with an eye towards optimizing for marriage and children, not necessarily optimizing towards maximum net worth or frivolity.

My regret of my teenage years is that I engaged in too much frivolity and I did a lot less frivolity than a lot of people, but there are other pathways. Years ago, I interviewed Steve Maxwell on the show and I liked his sons, sorry, his book. He has a book called "Raising Our Sons to Buy Debt-Free Houses," something like that.

And what he showed in that book from his personal family experience was that all of his sons were able to, with their own labor and their own savings, all of his sons were able to buy and pay cash for an individual single family home prior to marriage, in some cases as early as I think late teenage years, 18, 19, some of them early 20s, but prior to marriage.

Now, this was in the context of a town in Kansas, so lower cost of living than some other places, but that should factor into it. And so interestingly, his sons all married and his sons all have various grandchildren. And so you can see the connection between that, that that was a good and proper move for them.

And I don't see why more of us shouldn't do that. Children and teenagers, let me just use the word adolescence 'cause not children. I don't want children to work for money necessarily. Adolescents and teenagers can work for money and they can save money and we can teach them to do that.

And so you can either teach your child to spend all of his money on mindless consumerism, or you can teach your child to have the goal of buying a debt-free house by the time he gets married. And your child will probably achieve the goals that you teach him to accomplish, teach him to go for.

So pay attention to that and recognize that these are worthy things that can be done. So let's help young men to be more serious at a young age and that way they can be more established and more attractive to a high-quality potential wife at a younger age instead of having to wait until he's 30 or 35 years old to be able to attract her 'cause that's a major problem of our current fertility rate crisis.

It's not as severe as the other factor though, which involves our young women. One of the enormous problems in the current declining fertility is that women are waiting significant amounts of time before having babies. All of the reasons that they're waiting make sense. But they're all culturally induced reasons.

If you look at the kind of normal expected strategy of a young woman today, normally speaking, a young woman is going to be strongly encouraged to finish high school before having a baby. And so one of the enormous declines, let me read from an article here, I'll read from an ABC News article.

(clears throat) So this ABC News article on the current fertility rate, talking about how there's a significant decline and I'll start here. Aside from an increase in teen births in US fall to record low as overall total rate drops by 2%. So this is the same article that I just, or the same data that I led the show with, but we're talking about another factor of it.

In 2023, there were 3.59 million births recorded, a 2% decline from the 3.66 million recorded in 2022, a 2% decline year over year, according to the report from the CDC. This follows what has been a general decline since the mid-2010s. Between 2015 and 2020, the number of births fell an average of 2% per year from 2015 to 2020, including a decline of 4% from 2019 to 2020.

Skipping on, aside from an increase in 2006 and 2007, the teen birth rate in the United States has been continuously declining since 1991. From 2007 through 2023, rates for younger teens, ages 15 to 17, and older teens, ages 18 to 19, declined by 8% and 6% per year, respectively, the report found.

Reasons for the decline in teen pregnancy are not clear, but the CDC says evidence suggests it's due to a mix of more teens abstaining from sexual activity and more sexually active teens using birth control. Birth rates also declined for women between ages 20 to 29 and ages 30 to 39.

For preteens and teens between ages 10 and 14 and women aged 40 and older, rates were relatively unchanged from 2022 to 2023. So here we have the story of declining birth rates in words. Now, none of us want preteens to be having babies. None of us do. Most of us don't want teens to be having babies.

I would like to offer just a small qualification of that to say that I think it'd be lovely if 18-year-old girls have babies, 19-year-old girls have babies. I think that's fantastic. I have a friend of mine who they, he and his wife, now wife, conceived their first three babies out of wedlock starting when she was, I think, 17, and they wound up having six babies and built it into a great family and everything has worked out.

I am never one to encourage premarital sex or pregnancy outside of marriage. The data would indicate, though, regardless of what I would say about it, that this is an important source of births for a society. If you look at the fertility rates and reproduction rates throughout Latin America, the decline in unexpected unwanted teen pregnancy has resulted in a huge component of the collapse of birth rates.

Previously, prior to widespread contraception, previously, the unexpected unintended teen births made an enormous component in overall Latin American fertility. Today, due to the collapse of unintended teen pregnancies, the total fertility rate in much of Latin America has broadly collapsed. This is one of those paradoxes where I'm acknowledging the numerical truth without endorsing the societal dysfunction that we don't want teens to be having babies outside of wedlock.

That is not the goal. But those babies outside of wedlock actually had a positive effect on total fertility rate. And that positive effect is now significantly declined. But back to the kind of the normal course of a young woman's life in today's world. It'd be very normal to say, "You need to finish high school." Okay, 18 years old.

Then for most people, especially from an audience like mine, most of us would say, "Well, you need to go to college." And today, women are going to college at enormously high rates. And very few women want to get married and very few women want to have children until they get out of college.

I think we should question that assumption, by the way, which I'll come back to in a moment, but that's the case. So now she's probably gonna be 22 or 23 years old. Then the entire purpose of going to college for most young women is to prepare themselves for a career.

And so therefore, she needs to go on and get a career and she needs to establish herself in a career before having babies. In many cases, not necessarily before getting married, although marriages and relationships, it's not that easy for modern women to nail down a guy into a marriage.

There's a whole lot of women living in relationships of various undefined forms, situationships, whatever it's called. So it's not as easy as it once was for a woman to get married, even though she'd be an attractive girl because the whole dating marketplace has changed. The point is that in many women's minds and in their ideal timing, she's going to establish herself in her career, which probably takes about a decade from say 23 to 33.

Now, if she's able to find a high quality guy, enormous question there related to a woman's basic hypergamous tendencies to want to marry someone who is her superior, if she's gonna find a guy that she's willing to accept, and if she's able to convince him to marry, which is difficult in today's world, then that often puts her at say 30 something before having babies, which means there's not generally much time for her to have babies.

And this is especially acute given how difficult the load can be on her is that is her husband ideally, is her husband even gonna be willing to support her? What's the cost gonna be for her walking away from her career? It's enormous financial cost for a young woman who has dedicated 20 years of her life to preparing herself for a career, and now she's supposed to walk away from that when all of her social clout and value is being expressed based upon her earning ability.

That's a significant challenge for a young woman. So we need to change various aspects of this, and we need to do it intentionally. The first thing is we need to optimize for motherhood without neglecting the possibility of the contrary. I find it challenging to figure out how to express these things appropriately, so you're gonna have to listen carefully.

We need to optimize for motherhood without neglecting or harming our young women who may not ultimately turn out to be mothers. That's a challenge. So there are some people who would take an extreme form on these views. You would have an extreme feminist form that would say you don't need to be a mother, you don't need a man, so let's just optimize everything for career.

You go, boss babe. Then there might be a very fundamentalist religious backlash that says we don't care about careers, you just need to have a mother. We want you to have as many babies as you possibly can. I am very uncomfortable with either of these extremes. It does not seem right to me that in our current society, women not be prepared to live independent lives.

Marriage does not happen for all men and women, and so therefore, as a father, I think I have a responsibility to prepare my daughter to be strongly equipped if she is single for her lifetime. And so we don't want to neglect proper academic preparation, proper career preparation. I don't think that the kind of fundamentalist extremist, women shouldn't go to college line is appropriate in most cases.

We know from the data that highly educated women have the most enduring marriages. I appreciate being married to a very smart woman. I don't care about, it's one of those things where it's not the college degree that makes a difference, but the fact that she would go to college and is capable of going to college is to me important.

I would have a very hard time being married to an ignorant woman. I would be a very hard time being married to a woman who was not my intellectual equal if we make weird grammar jokes with one another, and that would, if I couldn't do that, it would be frustrating.

So I want to be married to a smart woman. But what I appreciate very much about my wife is that her entire ambition was not related to her career. So we want to optimize for motherhood without neglecting the possibility of non-motherhood, non-marriage. So because the standard approach is not optimizing for motherhood in any way due to that long train, again, go to college, don't get married till after college, build your career, and start thinking about children when you're 33, that doesn't work for long-term fertility.

And many 30-year-old, 35-year-old women are having a much harder time having babies than they thought they would at the time because they were poorly educated. And then in addition, it's basically impossible to expect young men and women to be sexually chased as sexual adults for 15 or 20 years.

And so this is creating all kinds of toxic problems in the marriage marketplace. And so if a girl has not been sexually chased and she goes to college and she's had this boyfriend, that boyfriend, this boyfriend, the other boyfriend, then now her ability to attract a very high-quality husband is severely diminished based upon this lifestyle.

And again, a lot of girls finding this out and it's very sad, it ought not to be so. So we've got problems for men and problems for women and we have to work within this. We have to solve this for the next generation. High levels of education and career ambition are generally less important to men and potential husbands, meaning your wife having high levels of education and career ambition is generally not so important to men who wanna be husbands.

It is often important to women, the women themselves, but it's not important to men. In addition, a lot of things related to our professionalization of society are causing enormous problems. Women having high-paying jobs leads to lower fertility. Men having high-paying jobs leads to higher fertility. So I think that college is a great place for a woman to meet a high-quality, ambitious man.

Well, we've gotta figure out if there's some ways that we could change the educational and career curve that would create more options for women and create options for them to have babies without feeling like that's the only thing, that's the only thing that they can have. So I go back to the teenage years.

Can we have more educational accomplishment for young women during their teenage years? Can we speed up education? I think we have to, or we're not gonna survive as a society. The data, again, our collapsing birth rates are so clear. Highly educated women are not perpetuating themselves, generally speaking, if they're marrying later in life.

There's lots of mothers who are highly educated, but generally what's happening is they are becoming, they're getting their degrees and they're getting married, they're stepping out of the career world, and they're raising babies. But women who are hardcore on career track, it's very difficult for them to have babies.

So could we change it? Could we get more education accomplished in the teenage years? A good friend of mine was homeschooled. She went to college at 16, and she was a practicing doctor, probably when she was, I think, 23, 24. And she herself married a doctor and had children.

And so I think adolescents and teens are capable of a much more accelerated educational program than we currently do. Another question, couldn't we make careers fit around motherhood? So the pressure that women feel to make as much money as possible is often due to the old system of men starting a career, raising their family, working, and then retiring at 65.

So women feel like they got to do all of that on the same time schedule as everyone else. They got to compete with men constantly and be earning the same amount or more than men. And they got to do it all in the same timeline. But why do we have to do it on that timeline?

Why can't we create social structures that allow a woman to have children while she's in school, getting educated, doing things? Why can't we create a time gap where she spends 10 years raising small children? And then after her children are older and they can be enrolled in school, then she goes and starts her career or continues her career.

I think that many of the expectations that we have around how to handle school marriage children are false. I don't see why it would be a bad thing to have babies in college. There clearly needs to be some financial support. So if I were an 18-year-old and I had an 18-year-old wife and I were thinking about having a baby, my question is just how am I gonna do it?

How am I gonna provide for a wife and a baby? But if I have a job and my wife is in school, I don't see why she can't have a baby and go to school. It's actually probably a really great time to have a baby because she's young, she's energetic, she can deal with lack of sleep or loss of sleep or disrupted sleep schedule much more easily than she can when she's 35.

There's lots of other people around. There's lots of babysitters. There may be people in our dorm. There's lots of people who can come and take care of the baby while she goes to class. There's all kinds of ways. So college and babies, I don't think are necessarily opposed to each other.

Why should they be? They don't have to be. And so we just need to think through all these assumptions that we've embraced that have created a falling apart society. So couldn't we make careers fit around motherhood? Couldn't a mother start earlier in some cases, but then start later and continue later?

Couldn't she, if she wants to have children and she wants to earn income, couldn't we accept both of those things by just adjusting expectations? All of these things are just social expectations and thus they can be reprogrammed. In addition, you asked the question, could we subsidize motherhood financially? Now, many countries are doing this.

It is not demonstrating itself to have a positive impact on total fertility rates. But in many countries, the ones I have the best data on are the European countries. You have the German Kindergarten system where parents are just paid for having children. And that's something that can be done.

I think will be done more in the future, but it's not actually changing things right now in terms of birth rates. Nevertheless, I expect that to be a path that we continue down, that I think we're gonna continue to say, can we pay people to have babies? Can we subsidize them?

And so here, I think it's very reasonable that that could happen. And if you put this together with health benefits and other forms of subsidies, then I think that young people could make this work. Let me give an example. Let's say that I've got one of my sons and one of my sons finds an amazing wife.

And let's say that they meet at 18 years old and they go to, and they're living, they could do this in the United States, but I'm just gonna use a welfare state country as an example. So they move to Berlin and they're going to college in Germany that's tuition-free, living in Berlin.

And they of course have to pay for housing, room and board. But when you're young, you can do that and you can fit two small people into a room. It's not that big of a deal. And if you have a baby, great, you have a baby. Well, in Berlin, they would start receiving kindergarten.

And not only then, of course, would the government pay for medical costs, but you get kindergarten for the child. You get a monthly payment amount for the child. You have a very low income 'cause they're both in college. The college is paid for. All that my son would have to do as a husband would be to provide enough money to pay for room and board.

And if I, as a parent, am involved in that, then I can support him and them in that as well. Because as a parent, I should be willing to support my children if they're having grandchildren to some degree. If I'm not willing to do it, why should I expect society to do that?

Now we could do something similar in the United States. In the United States, tuitions are very broad, but it doesn't cost that much for college students to live. It doesn't cost that much for them to feed themselves. There are already today in the United States, there's plenty of welfare programs, Medicaid that can pay for the birth of the baby.

And there's not a version of Kindergarten in the United States today, but there may be something like that in the future if we continue down the path that we're in in a welfare state. So my point is that if young people desire to have children, they can be done during college years when young men and women are most fertile, when they're able to handle that.

And I don't see that as something that should just be avoided at all costs. I think there's something that should come into play there. And we probably will be subsidizing motherhood in virtually all of our societies in the future. Again, most welfare states are already doing that. We're not doing that in the United States.

We will be in the future. Right now, the United States has been relying almost entirely on immigrants to make up for the population shortfall, but the world is basically running out of immigrants. So the only potential source of immigrants for the United States would be Sub-Saharan Africa. All of the Americas are now basically empty of immigrants and there aren't enough people there.

They're facing their own population issues. So we're gonna be fighting with the rest of the world for all of the African immigrants, but Europe has already been importing more of those immigrants than the United States. So next, I would just say, can we adjust career expectations and make family enterprises more common?

So I would love to see more of this. Can we bring together men and women in family enterprises? If you look at most of the problems that husbands and wives face with their career obligations, the worst possible living arrangement is for both of them to have jobs. If either the husband or the wife doesn't have a job, but instead has a business, which gives him or her a modicum of self-control over his schedule and his life, then you have dramatically better outcomes from that.

So could we give men and women a balance? Now, what's even better is bring both of them together in a family enterprise. And so if our sons and our daughters could channel their career ambitions into something that's a good fit for a family enterprise, then we can satisfy that desire to build a career without it compromising the family.

And I think that there's a lot more of this that is needed. I didn't marry my wife because she, you know, could make me a lot of money, but my wife is an important part of my life and in my world. And what I've always admired is husbands and wives who work together in a business and they bring complimentary skills.

I think that brings a whole set of challenges that have to be worked to, but that's an enormous opportunity for solving some of these, the tension between the family and the business. And I also see that as appropriate for all these other benefits of passing down through the generations as well.

We've talked then about attracting a spouse, selecting a spouse now, and marrying a spouse. So now what about having children? What do people need to have children? General young people to be confident in having children, they need to be debt-free, they need to have a sufficient income and they only need to own a big enough home.

And so as parents, we can affect these things. We can teach our children to stay out of debt. People being indebted is entirely a choice. It's a lifestyle choice that people make. And we can teach our children to stay out of debt, knowing that that will help them to be able to afford to have children in the future.

You say, "Well, Joshua, what about educational debt?" You can teach your children to stay out of educational debt. I wrestled with years with some of the hardcore scenarios of law school, medical school, I finally cracked the nut on those. Not perfectly, and I'm not saying that all people should avoid medical school, but debt is entirely avoidable.

So let's do that because it matters for reproduction. In addition to just teaching them to stay out of debt, we can pay for it. If you want to have grandchildren, you probably need to pay for your children's college. It's up to you. If you wanna have grandchildren, you probably need to pay for your children's college.

If you wanna have grandchildren soon, and many grandchildren, you probably need to pay for your children's college. Next, as parents, we can subsidize our children's first house, or at least a down payment. If we don't have money, we can subsidize with education, as I described from Steve Maxwell's story of his son saving enough money to pay for their houses.

We can also subsidize it with money. If you want great, so if you want your children to be successful with money, give them money when it really counts. And giving your children a down payment for a house, or giving your children a house, I think is an amazing goal for you to have.

If you show up in my office, and you have a thin retirement portfolio, but you have three children, and all of your children are living in debt-free houses, and they've all got three children, I would bet you're gonna be more satisfied with your life and with your decisions than if you showed up in my office with a big, fat retirement portfolio and no grandchildren.

Houses don't cost that much for most listeners of Radical Personal Finance. What happens is that we've never set goals around them. We've set goals exclusively around accumulating lots of money for retirement, not based upon housing for our grandchildren. So consider, save for a down payment for your child's house.

Save for a house for your children. If you can't do that, and if you wanna have grandchildren, give your children the big, fancy house that you live in, and you move into a small studio apartment. I'm not joking about this. To me, it's the most obvious thing in the world that would be a win-win for multiple people.

There's so many wealthy men and women in their 50s who are living in fancy houses, and they're bugging their children, "Why don't you gonna have children? "Why don't you have children?" And the children are saying, "Mom, Dad, "we can't even afford to live." And both of them are right.

So if you really care about it, give your children your house, and you go and move into a small apartment. Both of you will probably be happier about it. You don't need a big, giant house when you're 50X years old or 60 years old. You need a studio, an empty nester, you need a studio apartment.

You'll probably be happier in your studio apartment going out every night, eating out every night, enjoying kind of a totally different lifestyle, and your children will do better being in a house, and you'll probably have some grandchildren. So be open to anything. We have to change things, or our families are gonna die, and our culture is gonna die.

We can support child raising within our community. So the cost of childcare is the third big expense. The things that people say that young people who could be having babies, who are choosing not to have babies say. Number one, debt, student loan debt. Number two, housing. Number three, childcare.

Well, if you can't give your children a house, or maybe you can't, support your children with childcare. Retired parents can be primary caregivers for grandchildren, and this can be a really great way to provide the care that allows moms and dads to go to work, and yet provides really high-quality care.

And you've done it once, you can do it again. And so if you want grandchildren, be willing to do what is necessary to help encourage that. In addition, we can subsidize many of the luxuries of life to support our children. So if young parents know that when you have children, you know that there's a pretty decent chance that you're giving up on some of the luxury consumption items that your friends are gonna be able to go and do.

There's a reason why there's nonstop, nonstop, you know, we're not nonstop, but there's a reason why there's all the TikTok memes of, you know, we're dual income, we're dual income. We can go anywhere we want this weekend. As a parent, you know, I'm probably giving that up. So go ahead, if you are a wealthy parent, go ahead and subsidize some of the luxuries.

And you can do that in various ways. You can do it structurally. You can provide your children with income. You can do it with a trust. You can provide your children with housing. You can give your children a boat. You can do things on an ad hoc basis or on a continual basis.

But if you have money, be willing to spend it to help your children to have children. Now, if you just throw money at your children and you haven't built all those cultural foundations that I started the show with, I don't think you're gonna have grandchildren. I don't think you're gonna have a hundred great-grandchildren.

But if you focus on doing both of them, then I think the chances are pretty good that you'll be able to do both. My wife and I have grown our family based upon what I have earned. Nobody's given us really anything. And that's fine, and that's good. We have five children, so they didn't need to give us anything.

Probably would have been easier, though, if people wanted grandchildren and they wanted their things to grow on, it would have been easier to have a stipend. So look for ways you can do it. You can pay for your grandchildren's school, or you can tell your children they would be.

My children are not in private school. That's something that grandchildren can subsidize. You can pay for schooling. You can pay for activities. You can pay for extra expenses. There's all kinds of things that you can do for your children to help them and encourage them to have grandchildren. And so think ahead and plan for those things.

In addition, I think it's reasonable to think about estate planning. And I think that if you want to have grandchildren, then you should consider splitting your estate not based upon the number of children that you have, but based upon the number of grandchildren that you have. I'm not necessarily encouraging this, as I think that it should be part of the family dynamic as to what your goals and values are.

What I'm trying to say is that if we were to set a goal of something like you're having 100 great-grandchildren, then we should be open to all the strategies that could potentially help in the accomplishment and the achievement of that goal. And one thing that you can do if you have money is you can tell your children that I'll spend money on the things that I value, and one of the things that I value is grandchildren.

So if you have four children and two of your children have four children and two of your children don't have children, why don't you reflect that in not only the money that you spend now while you're alive, but to reflect that in your estate? When children, in the same way that in order for a woman to be a full-time mom and walk away from a highly paid career, she needs to really believe that it's worth it, and that's a hard thing for many women to do, similarly for children.

If you know that I'm investing into having children, I know that I'm taking a financial cost for this because I'm giving up potential income to be a present father. I'm giving up flexibility, and I'm also adding expenses to my life. If I know that my wealthy father or my wealthy mother is writing me in for a significant portion of his or her estate, that's gonna help me be more willing to make that choice.

And while that's probably not gonna affect the global fertility rate, it's probably gonna reflect the total fertility rate within your family. I've said quite a lot. I hope that it is useful to you. I didn't really expect this show to be three hours, but here we are. My hope in today's show is not to give you all the answers, but to inspire a conversation.

As a society, we are dying. Slowly and inexorably. We're not dying as quickly in the United States as we are in Japan and in South Korea and in China, but we are dying. And the first obligation that we have to our fellow humanity, to our species, is to not die.

Human beings probably don't deserve to be on the endangered list yet, but there are warning signs everywhere. So if you care about that, if you care about the continuance of your family, then pay attention and let's talk about these things. What I'm hoping to do in today's podcast is just to give you enough thoughts to inspire a conversation.

I want to inspire you to talk with your wife, talk with your husband, and to start there. As I've previously said, maybe have one more baby. I think it's worth it. I think you won't regret it, but consider it. If it costs you a little bit of money, I think that's a reasonable decision.

Broadly speaking, I wanna inspire conversations with you with fellow parents. Again, I don't see any reason why having the largest number at the end of our life in a net worth statement is a compelling goal. It's not, I think it's a dumb goal. I think we should optimize for other things.

And there's a whole range of optimization that you can optimize for for yourself. But I also think it's reasonable that if we look at all of recorded history, all of recorded humanity, all of our ancestors who've come before us, that the ambition that a man or woman had to be the patriarch or matriarch of a dynasty, that that was a core component of life for many people.

And I don't see why it should change today. And somehow, though we live in the easiest time in human history, with the most abundant wealth of all time in human history, we've optimized almost exclusively for higher financial wealth, and we're not even replacing ourselves. Whereas the societies that replace themselves are often the ones that are desperately poor, can barely feed themselves, desperate violence, children dying all over the place, and you and I sit back, fat, happy, and rich, and we don't even bother to continue.

So I'd like to just inspire people to add some other goals. I think the ambition to say, "How could I build a family culture "that resulted in my having 100 great-grandchildren?" is a pretty cool idea. I didn't say 1,000, obviously not. Maybe it's 50. You do the math, you pick your number.

But if you had four or five children, and each of your children had four or five children, then things grow pretty quickly. And that's not too crazy. That's not too far out of the envelope for where you could possibly be. And I think that if you spent money on building that kind of family culture, spent time on it, I think that you reflect back at the end of your life with a high degree of satisfaction on your contribution to your family, on your contribution to the human species, and on your contribution to the world.

Thank you for listening. I hope that I've inspired some conversations. Share with me your ideas in the days to come. I really wanna hear from you in the days to come. - The drive to go further and reach higher. The same thing that inspires you inspires us. At Strayer University, we're always searching for new ways to make education more affordable.

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