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My name is Joshua Sheets. Today is Friday, April 26, 2024. And on this Friday, as on any Friday in which I can arrange a microphone and an internet connection and all of that fun stuff, we record live Q&A. You call in, talk about anything you want, raise any topics you want, any questions you want.

You set the agenda. I am here to serve you in any way that you desire. If you're new to Radical Personal Finance, I welcome you here on these Friday Q&A shows. It works just like call-in talk radio. Call it open line Friday if you like. You call in, talk about anything you want.

If you would like to gain access to one of these shows, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to Patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. Patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. That will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows. We begin with Liliana in Seattle. Welcome, Liliana. How can I serve you today?

- Hello, Joshua. I'm really glad to be here. Thank you for having me and giving the opportunity to ask you a question. Doing great. I've actually been part of your Radical Family Camp, which was amazing and fantastic. Wanted to thank you for that experience. And also, I have a question for you today.

I come from, let's say, post-Soviet from Russia, from one of the post-Soviet countries. We have this cultural thing that kind of sets up kids. I have one kid who's just only one and a half years old. We have this cultural aspect of setting them up for success by working hard, grinding, studying a lot, and there's this overall belief that only through the horribles and disadvantages of life, one can become truly a strong personality and successful personality.

So this is kind of the mindset and mentality I've grown up in. I also believe that some of my friends from China and from India also have similar mindsets where they kind of train their kids to be super successful by studying a lot and working a lot. And my question is in the realm of those concepts of bringing kids, because when I came to the West, so to speak, I found that a lot of families do not have more resources.

First of all, probably our countries that I've mentioned, like Russia, China, India, have less resources. That's why it's like a zero-sum game attitude, I could say, to life in general. But here in the West, it's a much more comfortable life, more resources. Families sometimes even have some assets in place for their kids.

Some are able to pay for the college and such. So my question is, what, from your perspective, can we do to set up our little kid in the future, like being, I don't know, 15 years or 10 years, whatever, or to be a resilient, so to speak, successful. When I say successful, I don't only mean money, but overall kind of this resilient personality, if you know what I mean.

Person without giving him a hard time, if you know what I mean. And making it difficult, because I've myself been brought up without food, without money. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it's really a survival mode, which I then had to take off myself with a long years of therapy.

Obviously, I don't want to put my child in a survival mode and such. So what do you think, how can we raise children in a different way to make them still resilient and motivated to work hard in life, which every person definitely needs? I would really love to hear your perspective on that aspect.

Thank you. I love the question. Let's pretend that you were going to raise your child the way that you were raised, meaning that you didn't question the culture. You didn't think, oh, maybe there might be a better way. You were just going to reproduce in your child what your parents and your home culture produced in you.

How specifically would you do that? What would you do in order to express that culture? That's a great question to ask. I love it, because immediately I thought that it's like 50/50. It's like throwing a child into the water, hoping the kid can swim, but maybe there will be some problems along the way.

I can say that that's a great question. No money for education, no pocket money. You have to start working when you're 16 years old, really early to provide for yourself and sometimes even for your family. A really low resource. Also, along the way, it would be always saying that, look, the others are doing better than you do.

Look at Mary, a neighbor's daughter. She's performing better than you in school. What the hell are you doing? Those type of comparison in upbringing when you compare the kid to others, and this is how you negative motivation at its finest. You could do better than this. Negative motivation and also not providing any setup for anything.

This is a question that intrigues me quite a lot. I have a few thoughts on it. What I don't have is a lot of hard evidence. I don't have any data that I could present on this. I haven't found any data on this yet. There may be books or people who have researched this out there, but so far, I haven't come across very much of that.

So, I'll cite what I have come across for you, but just know that most of my answers to this question are coming from personal experience and from observations of the world and just a little bit of thought about it not coming from a strong research base. And if anybody knows of a strong research base to get me started in the right direction, I would welcome those comments.

I think that it's important to identify specifically what you would do differently because there are two truths that I think need to go together. Number one, having character. We'll just describe it as character. Having character is foundational and fundamental to success in life. Having a strong work ethic, I think, is fundamental and foundational to success in life.

And so, if we have the choice between, let's say that we could just magically produce a child who did have a work ethic or we could magically produce a child who did not have a work ethic, I don't think anybody would argue that the child without a work ethic is any better off.

Similarly, if we could produce a child of strong character versus a child who's not of strong character, nobody would argue that the child is better off if he doesn't have a strong character. I think probably the one word we could use for this would be the word "grit." That's probably where the most research is done.

Angela Duckworth is probably the most famous psychologist who's written extensively on this with her work of grit, showing how gritty children, children who have determination and a desire to succeed, are often the ones who do the best. And I think that a strong, I'm going to call it military upbringing, could certainly produce people of character and people of grit.

I think back to a society like the Spartans. And if you go back and you think about when Lycurgus laid out the law for Sparta, and he laid out this just hardcore training regimen for the way that children are being brought up is in very austere conditions with constant discomfort and constant, you know, constant discomfort, constant difficulty, constant shortage, constant lack.

Then that did succeed in creating men who were warriors, who were strong and capable warriors, who were able to do many remarkable things with that basic grit that was built into them. The challenge is that I'm not sure that grit alone is a sufficient ingredient in the recipe for success.

I think that grit is useful and helpful, but that it also has downsides to it. And so, if we only focus on that and that alone, then it seems to me like we're missing other important attributes and traits that children need in order to build successful lives for the long term.

So, as you alluded to, I have some friends who grew up in the Soviet Union, and under that educational system. And if you go back and you look at the Soviet Union and what that empire was able to produce, it truly was able to produce some citizens who had stellar academic ability, incredible mathematicians, and world-class engineers, and things like that.

I see the same thing happening in Asian educational systems today. I don't know to what degree the current Russian model of education mirrors the culture that you grew up in, but where I've spent the most time reading about it is in basically what I'll call the Asian system. And I would include in that the Chinese system, Singapore, we could include India in that, where there's just this very grueling approach to academics.

And in Korea, they have a test day where it's all about this one annual test, and the students just slave away preparing for this test. And basically, your results on these tests determine your life and where your life can go in the future. And again, I think that produces certain qualities, certain characteristics that are positive, that give good outcomes.

But they also, there's a flip side to it. There's a lack of creativity that can often be found in that. I can't cite this, so I could be mistaken about this. But I have an impression that I've read or seen analysis at some point along the way of people talking about how in the American model, the American model excels in creating individuals who are able to be creative.

I have a friend of mine who works for an international school. And I've spent a lot of time talking with him about universities. He's a guidance counselor for international students who want to go to university. And I talked to him about why people choose different universities. Why would somebody go to the United States as compared to other places around the world where you can also go and study?

And there are many, I've talked, there's incredible scholarship programs. The Japanese government has a scholarship program for people who want to come to Japan and study there. If you get the scholarship, they'll pay all of your tuition at a Japanese university. China has a number of scholarship programs where they'll pay all of your university tuition in China.

The, sorry, Europe is full of universities that are tuition free, even for non-EU citizens to participate in. And yet many of the wealthy families that he advises and counsels will still send their children to the United States and to go to college and pay enormous tuition fees for the privilege of their attending universities.

And I asked him, I said, why? And he says, well, one of the things that the United States university system can do, and just to be clear, I consider the current mainstream US university system to be pretty flawed, but one of the things that it can do is it can create students who think creatively about solutions, who think broadly and are able to come up with solutions that aren't just based upon grinding it out, just applying more work effort or more work ethic to the problem.

And that can be a whole different skill set. And so I guess my answer is that I think that both of those things are important, that having work ethic is important and necessary, having character is important and necessary, but it's not sufficient. And in many cases, if you look at basically success in life, if you take an individual that you think is successful, very rarely would I find someone who I would characterize as successful broadly.

And we can use finances exclusively, or we can just say broadly successful in life. Very rarely would I find somebody who just puts nose to the grindstone and does nothing but work, work, work, work, work, and characterize that person as successful. If they are successful, they're usually successful in one dimension, in one domain of life.

And life is more varied than that. So my thought on it is, or at least what I aspire to do, is I aspire to try to do both of those things. And my answer for it is to, so specifically, usually we're talking about something related to education and schooling.

Now, you mentioned money and basically negative reinforcement. Compare yourself to that other person over there. I'll get to those in just a moment. But in terms of an educational system, I myself have a tendency to disparage those kinds of educational systems that cause people to just work all the time.

I don't think that they're effective. And I think we have good data from learning science to show that they're not nearly as effective as they could be. And even in terms of work, what a lot of people who we would label as workaholics often do is they confuse effort with effectiveness, or they confuse volume with effectiveness.

And at its core, while many disciplines and skills need volume in order to acquire skills, at its core, most things can be improved by proper application and creative and efficient methodologies. And so probably the best example from an educational perspective would be to study the teaching or the learning of mathematics.

And there's a balance here. There's a war that wages of what is often labeled as the drill and kill approach, where you just do mathematics constantly, nonstop mathematics, more, more, more, more, more, systematically, as compared to learning to think about why you're doing what you're doing so that you understand the math.

And what they have—recently I finished—and I would cite here the book Range by David Epstein, the subtitle is Why Generalists Succeed in a Specialized World. And one of the things I learned from that book that I read recently that I had never understood was how—why certain math techniques are being emphasized.

The author of that book, Epstein, cited a study that some learning psychologists had done where they had gone into math classrooms all around the world, and they had recorded in detail some of the math lessons that were being taught. And they carefully detailed everything that the teacher was doing, everything that was said.

They videotaped them. They had transcripts. And then they followed the students' test scores and their long-term effectiveness with mathematics. And they discovered that when the teacher basically taught mathematics with a rote learning approach of, "Hey, this is how you do long division. You just do this into this into this into this.

You do this step. You bring down the number here," then the student was never able to incorporate those mathematical techniques at a deeper level. But if the student—if the teacher focused on a conceptual teaching of it rather than a procedural approach, then they wound up with better outcomes. And for me, that was an enormous lightbulb moment, because I, like many, have griped about the modern methods of teaching mathematics.

In the United States, the debate over this has been related to what is called the Common Core Standards. And— I'm Jane Perlez, long-time foreign correspondent and former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. I've been a foreign correspondent in lots of places—Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan—but nowhere as important to the world as China.

I mean, China is not dropping anti-democratic paratroopers into Montana. But, of course, we did see things like the weather balloon/spy balloon riveting the whole country for a week. This is Face/Off, an eight-part series in which we'll take you behind the scenes to key moments in the tumultuous U.S.-China relationship.

We'll speak with a diplomat, a spy, a tech reporter, a U.S. admiral, even Yo-Yo Ma. Plus, my pal and noted China historian Rana Mitter joins the conversation. We'll look at what's driving the two nations apart and explore whether anything can help bring them back together. Face/Off launches April 9th.

What many people find is they send their child off to fourth-grade math or fifth-grade math, sixth-grade math, and the child comes home with some weird, like, boxing approach. And the—it's like, why are you trying to solve your division problem with these weird boxes? And the parent, very well-meaning, as I myself have done, says, "Listen, I'm just going to teach you how to do it.

This is the easier way. And look, this is how you do long division." I now understand what the Common Core approach is trying to accomplish in a way that I didn't before. It's trying to get at the conceptual thinking and the conceptual understanding of mathematics rather than just the procedural basis.

Now, the flip side, we can't—I don't think it's smart to be extremist about it. On the flip side, you could say, "Well, it's just a drill and kill." But on the other side, you need to have enough practice with the actual concepts in order to really master them. Practice leads to mastery.

And so, with many things related to education, I would like to see it go through the middle and benefit from understanding and then have sufficient amounts of practice rather than just kind of drudgery, working it through nonstop. Taking education further, if you look at what different systems produce, a system that is based upon rote learning, rote practice, rote repetition can produce outcomes where the student actually has the ability to do the work.

But that doesn't seem to be a very intelligent preparation of the student for life. And so, if I'm running a communist system where I'm trying to create workers who will fit into the collective and I need workers who are very skilled with the basics of engineering, then I would be inclined to go for that kind of approach.

But if I'm trying to create well-educated students who are prepared for life and prepared and understand their strengths, their weaknesses, their skills, their interests, then I need to give more time for that. And my observation of basically coaching a lot of people with big life decisions has been that if someone doesn't have a diverse exposure to the world and time to get to know himself, then he's unlikely to be able to make good life decisions for himself.

He feels lost once he gets out of a constrained system. So, I'm opposed to just constant, never-ending rote learning from an educational perspective, because I don't think it gives us the outcome that we're looking for of a prepared human being who is well-educated, but is also prepared to succeed in life generally.

I think it just creates a highly skilled drone who is able to do computations very quickly and very effectively. Now, going on to the handling of money, this is another big question, another big debate. I grew up probably similar to how you did in the sense that my family didn't have a lot of money, and so in even the U.S.

American culture, there's a strong ethos of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And so, I didn't have a lot of money when I was in college, or excuse me, when I was in high school. I didn't own a car, but my dad would let me borrow one of the family cars to drive myself to school.

And when I asked him for some money on occasion, he would give me some money. And I worked and I had some of my own money, but I would go to the gas pump and put in six dollars of gas because I couldn't afford any more. And I would – so I know what it's like to not have pocket money.

I know what it's like to – I paid for all of my schooling. My parents paid for my high school, and then it was always understood that when it comes to college that it would all be on me. And I appreciate that because I do feel that that was helpful to me in terms of building character.

From a more mature perspective, though, I don't think that it was necessary for me to build character. And what I now look at is I see how much further behind I am from where I could be if my parents had had more resources and if I had been able to pursue more interesting opportunities.

And the specific example I would give is this. When I was in college, I heard of people doing unpaid internships. And at the time, I couldn't even imagine why somebody – how could somebody go and do an unpaid internship? How could I go and work for free? I was working three jobs my freshman year, and I couldn't imagine going and taking an unpaid internship.

And today I look back and I realize that I should have gone and done the unpaid internship. And I see very clearly that when people, especially young people, get involved in just constantly working, they lose out on the opportunities to advance based upon relationships, skill building, and creativity because of this intense focus on money.

I was recently talking to somebody about my advice for a teenager. And this teenager is working at a job in fast food, earning money. And my comment of my kind of behind-the-scenes advice was I said, "That's wonderful. That's really great that she has a job. She's 15 years old.

She has a job. She's making money. She's working at a fast food restaurant. Awesome. That's fantastic." That job should not continue for more than three months. And if she continues to try to work a job like that for more than three months because she needs money, then I consider that an enormous opportunity cost, a lost opportunity for her to try something very, very different.

I think a 15-year-old should absolutely go and get a job in fast food and do it for three months. But then after three months, she should go and get a job as an orderly in a hospital, or she should tag along in a law office, or she should go and babysit in a professional daycare.

And then she should go and you should try different things. You need to get exposure to different things. And so the big downside that poor people who grow up poor face is that they've never had the exposure to life. They've never had the chance to build relationships. They've never had exposure to interests.

And so they see the world as a world of financial scarcity. And that's where they only have one model for making money, which is work harder at my job, spend less, save more in just that standard model. And in my interactions with wealthy people over the years, I've come to see how that's not what wealthy people do.

And there are alternative models that are in many ways superior. And I'll just share one more personal story. When I was in the financial planning business, I was mentoring. For a time, I ran our college internship program and I was recruiting college students. And I enjoyed working with new representatives.

And I would go out and do joint work with them and mentor them and do things like that. And I was good at what I did. I had a lot of technical knowledge. If you want to question on some technical thing related to financial planning, Josh was the guy.

I was always the guy who answered all the questions. And so I had a good deal of pride in my knowledge from financial planning perspectives. And we hired this guy into our company who was the son of-- he was a rich kid. And his job working at the company was the very first job that he had ever had.

And I was pretty jealous of him. I wouldn't probably have said it at the time, but that's truly what it was. His parents were super wealthy lawyers from the Northeast. He'd come down to Florida. They had a Florida home. He's staying in their Florida home for free. He was staying in-- he had access to his dad's 40-foot fishing boat.

And he was out every weekend on the fishing boat with all the guys and all the girls in this million-dollar boat that he had access to. And yet he comes in and he knew nothing about financial planning. He didn't have a clue. He didn't know what a Roth IRA was.

He didn't have a clue. And he comes in and gets this job selling insurance and ultimately becoming a financial planner. He didn't have a clue about any of that stuff. I was shocked at how ignorant he was. And so I thought, there's no way this guy makes it. There's not a chance in the world that he's going to be successful.

He doesn't have any work ethic. He comes in, drives in his BMW that daddy bought for him. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here I am, Mr. Proud. I pull myself up by my bootstraps guy. That guy went on to sell more insurance and set enormous records. And today he's a managing partner with that company making millions of dollars a year.

Basically, far more successful than I ever was because he had a totally different sphere of knowledge. I had technical knowledge. I was a good worker bee. I was a good engineer. I had technical knowledge that I had acquired from my hard work ethic. But he had a totally different set of knowledge that I couldn't even relate to.

And his parents did nothing for him in his career. They probably introduced him to some of their friends. He probably sold life insurance policies to some of their friends. But that was it. My parents did the same things. I sold life insurance policies to my parents' friends. But they had given him a totally different view of the world.

And I couldn't relate to it because I didn't grow up in it. But he makes millions and millions of dollars with his business, just a totally different skill set. So I'd say that it's an interest of mine to try to say, how can you balance these things? And I don't think that work ethic is always best achieved through purely academics or even just through working for money.

Because my friend did have work ethic. He had plenty of work ethic. And I don't know all the tools that his parents used to help him develop work ethic. A lot of times it's sports or athletic endeavors. There's many ways to acquire work ethic. But just doing more academics is not actually helpful.

And it's not actually helpful for financial success or for life success in a world, at least the United States. I don't know if it's any difference in terms of resources in the United States versus the Soviet Union. I don't know. But I think it's probably about the same in any country.

Because it's not those worker bee skills that often pay off the most. It's relationship skills. It's the ability to think creatively. It's the courage to take risks and to make intelligent decisions. These are what launch people up the ladder so much faster. It's not just doing more. And I think we have to acknowledge that and then look for ways to incorporate that.

Very practically, I have a 10-year-old. And I've noticed this in myself. My 10-year-old, two or three years ago, says, "Daddy, I need to get a job. I want to make money." And I look at him and it's like, "What do you need money for? I pay for everything." And, "Well, I don't know.

But I just need to get a good job." And my answer to him was, "It would be pointless for you to get a job right now because you're far better off to spend your time on intellectual pursuits and developing yourself." And that's, I think, the same thing. That if we look at the pathway that wealthy people take their children on, it's not – yes, there are benefits to going and working a summer job.

You get exposure to different things. Those things are helpful. But at its core, I don't want my children to struggle financially because that's going to magically do something for them. I don't think it does. I think that if you are one who struggled financially and if you come through that, that can put a hunger in you.

But you're starting off way behind where you otherwise could be. And I think it makes a lot more sense for us to support children while also having encouraging, strong work ethic, strong focus. But it's not a matter of just work, work, work, work more. It's a matter of developing the skills in another context.

And then finally, in terms of basically negative motivation, I don't know that – I'm pretty uncomfortable with negative motivation. I would not say to my children, "Look at so-and-so. He's doing better than you. So, therefore, you should do more poorly." I couldn't cite this, again, with sociological data, but I'm fairly confident that that doesn't produce good outcomes.

It really doesn't. I would never say that to an adult. And it just doesn't produce good outcomes. The best outcomes that an individual experiences in his life come from when he has something that he wants to do, and he has motivation for his own reasons to pursue that thing.

And parents beating on children and saying, "So-and-so is doing better than you are. Shape it up," then that's not a helpful thing. It's more likely to cause people to say, "I'm not doing this. I'm not doing your goals. I'm not following your goals. I don't care what so-and-so is doing.

That's not important to me." And then also, I think it's a toxic trait for adults to have. We should never take ourselves and compare ourselves to other people as a sign of how we're doing. The only rational person that we should use for comparison is the person that we were.

So, we should focus on looking back and taking satisfaction and confidence and pride in the progress that I have made, based upon, compared to who I was in the past, and look at how well I'm doing, and then learn to rejoice with other people who are also doing well, but not compare ourselves to them.

So, in summary, I think that those traits are useful and important, but I don't think that they're the traits of wealth and of wealthy people. I think that they are the traits of basically poor people who become factory workers and see the world through a scarcity model, who don't know themselves, and they don't prepare and equip people for success.

And I think that you can do both of those things. I think you can be very skilled with academics. I think you can have a strong work ethic. And I think that you can do it in a generally positive environment where you haven't done everything to basically climb a mountain that you don't actually care about climbing.

What do you think, Liliana? Yeah, I guess there's a lot to think about. I want to thank you for bringing in their perspective. I really love the idea about looking into other ways to bring up the motivation, the work ethic through athletics and sports and other activities. And I really love the thought about kind of the financial need not to be the main motivation to work.

I really love this idea. I think I will have a lot to think about. And thankfully, I have some time before the kid grows up enough to do any work. So I have a lot of information. And thank you for citing the research. I've written it down, so I'm going to take a look at it.

And thanks a lot. I really love your perspective. My pleasure. I would add in closing, as I move on, I would add that perhaps one more comment would be appropriate. As a parent, it's important to always observe what is happening and then respond to what you see happening. So let's just use the example I cited from my own parenting role.

Right now, my 10-year-old, just as the example, the one who's saying I want to get a job, my 10-year-old is doing very well in academics and is generally showing broadly good work ethic, good focus, making good progress in academics. Now, let's assume for a moment that all of that stopped.

Let's assume that there's no progress being made. He's just turning into a lazy bum, not showing any character, no integrity, just wanting to do nothing. Well, now, I would go in a different direction. And we would say, all right, let's get you a job, right? Let's put the screws to you.

And I could imagine myself, let's say I'm a mega gazillionaire, and I have a child who is 20 years old and getting out of college and driving daddy's BMW and has $10,000 a month on his debit card that I just put there automatically for him. And he has no motivation.

He's doing coke in the clubs on the weekend and sleeping in till 1 p.m. every day and doing nothing with his life. Well, now, everything changes, right? Now, you need to bring a different system, a different approach so that there is motivation to change. And so, as a parent, it's our job to identify and say, are you progressing?

Are you making progress? Do you need to apply yourself more? And is the environment that you are in appropriate at this stage of development? And so, I think that we should always be aware of the fact that we can and should change things as necessary to respond to the actual events happening.

Ben in Arizona, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. I was glad to finish your three-hour podcast you recorded yesterday. It helps inform the back half of my question today. Great. I want to know your thoughts on the GLP-1 drugs known, I don't know, Wagobe, Ozempic that will assist individuals with unusually rapid weight loss.

I know you've said before publicly on the podcast and a lot of people probably keep it private to themselves that they have a hard time getting those last few pounds off. They have a hard time either staying motivated or eating right or whatever. These GLP-1, semaglutide, Ozempic as most people call it have been called the miracle drug and you've seen probably a lot of people have heard about people taking those.

I just want you to riff on it a little bit and you can tie it back to in your financial career as a financial planner, there's probably been things not lose weight fast, but gain money fast. Maybe not a get-rich-quick thing, but oh, if you do this, here's an unusually rapid way to gain wealth.

What is the mindset or long-term or what are your thoughts on this? I haven't heard you talk about this and it's been a couple of years now that these drugs have been on the market. I appreciate the question. I would generally not comment on something like that because while I'm aware of them and I read casually, I wouldn't want to profess any kind of expertise that I don't have.

I have not studied them deeply and I'm not deeply knowledgeable about them. I'm aware of them, I've read about them, and so I'll give you my straight answer. Except in the context of a Friday Q&A when you toss me up a softball and say, "Hey, what do you think about this?" where I'll always answer.

I don't do podcasts about things that I don't know about. Okay, I'm pushing the limit. Yeah, it's good. Let me answer it. First, the only drug I use is caffeine. I drink coffee and that's the only drug that I use. And I think in general, it's important for us to be skeptical of drugs because they are miracles and we should be skeptical of them for a few different reasons.

And so specifically with regard to weight loss drugs, I think that these drugs will probably turn out to be real lifesavers for a lot of people. And there are many, many people who have been unable to lose weight, they have diabetes, they have all kinds of issues. And if this drug can help that to happen, then I think that the downsides of their obesity or their diabetes are so severe that they will be better off consuming the drug.

And so I have no problem with people taking them. I think in general, we should be slow to take any kind of external substance. And the reason for that is I think we have an excessively high confidence in the safety of bodily inputs and we shouldn't be so confident in that.

The body is a very complex, I don't even want to use the word machine because that puts the wrong image in our mind. It's a very complex organism and it's very hard to predict what a particular substance or a particular input or additive will do. And I have very low confidence in the current regime of efficacy testing and safety of most drugs and most inputs to the body.

And my reasons for that is partly due to the testing process in terms of how the short term trials work and how they measure the harm. I appreciate that biologists have developed advanced models to try to project long-term effects based upon short-term data, and I don't trust them. I think that there's abundant reasons to see that in some cases, harmful effects from certain types of drugs, certain types of medical treatments only show after decades of use for some people.

And I could cite example after example after example after this, I'll intentionally keep it just a little vague in general, but short-term safety testing is not sufficient for somebody who's generally healthy. Let me use a non-drug example. Recently I was amazed to see, a month or two ago, the patient using Elon Musk's Neuralink technology, and he was using Neuralink to control a computer.

And it was just remarkable to see. But this patient is entirely paralyzed and he's able to use this Neuralink technology to control a computer. I think that's a perfect application. He's obviously a perfect study participant to be using this technology. And if I were paralyzed, I would probably be quickly on the list to try to say, "Hey, I want to get Neuralink." But for me as a healthy individual with a properly functioning body, for me to go and sign up for Neuralink and say, "Let me just get started with this technology.

Let me always be the early adopter," is a very foolish way of making a decision. So it's much wiser to be a little slow, to be a late adopter, and let technologies work their way out and prove their way out. So if somebody is 600 pounds and they have failed for 20 years at losing weight, bring on the Ozempic, right?

Absolutely. But if you've got an extra 15 or 20 pounds, then I think it would be crazy for you to try to treat that with a drug just from a pure, basic standpoint of risk versus reward. Because you wouldn't be a severe acute case of somebody whose life is literally going to be…you're going to be dead in 10 years without this drug.

Now, that doesn't mean that there's another element to it as well. And so when there's a drug available, people often go for what they see as the quick fix. And as you alluded to, people do this with money, and they do this with physical drugs. And so they say, "Well, look, here's this magic thing." I remember when I was in high school and I was fat, and I would read these ads and I would go and I bought these fat-burning powders and different things like that.

I was always looking for a quick fix. I was looking for a way to try to get a quick result. And all I did was burn money and take stuff that, you know, ephedrine and whatnot at the time that I have no idea what it did or didn't do to my body, and it wound up…and it didn't wind up with any long-term good.

And so it's really important, I think, to do a good detailed analysis of what actual…what if you're actually doing the fundamentals, if you're actually doing the fundamentals of life building and skill building. And so one of the things that I found interesting when I got older is I went back and I found some of my fat pics, like the before pictures that fat people take when they're going to go on a diet.

And I look back at them now with detachment, and I realized I wasn't actually all that fat. I was just what today would be labeled as skinny fat. I didn't have as much muscle as I should have had. And if I had just found a way to build an active lifestyle and focused on building an active lifestyle, if I had become active, then all of the fatness that I was worried about and I was looking for drugs would have disappeared.

And the same thing applies then to money. I had an experience a year or so ago where somebody was going on and on about how he was…he had invested with this thing, and he was going to make millions and millions of dollars. And I asked him about it, and it was instantly…it was obvious to me that it was a Ponzi scheme.

And it was just a textbook Ponzi scheme. And the guy's going on and on about all the millions that he's going to have in two months' time because of this incredible new thing that is being done. And I just thought, like, this is so stupid. This is such a stupid waste of time for you to be going down this pathway when you're not even doing the basics of good personal finance.

And maybe it's necessary that we all do that. When I was in college, we all got involved in trading futures and doing orange juice futures and things like that. Didn't have a clue what we were doing and went flat broke. And it's the same thing that maybe you just got to realize that it's better for you to take the long, hard path because it's much more predictable without necessarily denying that there may be performance-enhancing drugs that can help you at certain times, and there may be really great investments that come along at a certain time.

The people who gain the most from performance-enhancing drugs are not fat people sitting on their couch. You know, a guy who's just fat and not going to the gym and starts taking Trend, all he's going to wind up with is terrible back knee, and he's not going to look any different.

He's going to destroy his heart and have terrible acne all over his back. But the guy who's in the gym all the time and really has the fundamentals down, that's the guy who benefits from the performance-enhancing drugs, if that's his goal. And you can do this in the mental space.

You know, I've never taken Adderall, but I've never used nicotine. I've never taken Adderall. But I wouldn't be opposed to somebody using those drugs, but they need to be used in moderation in a specific application. Or another example would be caffeine, right? I periodically stop using caffeine because I don't want to be addicted to anything.

And then we get to a point where the caffeine, just the usefulness of caffeine, wears off. And if you are already doing the good stuff, if you already have good study habits, and you have good work habits, and you're really making progress on your goals, and then you want to use a nootropic, you want to use Adderall or some other nootropic or even just straight caffeine to get you through and to amp you up on just on a big project, to finish up a great project or get you prepared for an important presentation or something like that, then great.

That's a good use of a drug. But it's not a good use of a drug on a standard thing. If you go to the gas station where you are, I was in Arkansas a couple weeks ago, and I was filling up my car. And there was a young redneck dude, probably 20 years old.

And he's coming out of the gas station with three Monster Energy drinks, getting ready to go and mow lawns all day. And it's just kind of the classic thing. It's happening to so many young people is that they're consuming enormous amounts of caffeine. And they're doing it because they're not sleeping.

And it's a destructive thing that's ultimately going to lead to long-term problems. It's not a good performance enhancer. So any kind of enhancement, even from an investment perspective, I have no problem with people taking speculating on various investments, trading very aggressively and things like that. I think that's all perfectly fine.

But the people who profit the best off of that are those who have all of the basics covered. And then they take a portion of their portfolio and they speculate on something that could really work for them. People who go after Get Rich Quick scheme don't generally wind up rich themselves.

It's just the sponsor of the scheme who winds up rich. And I think the other aspect of it is that if you take the easy way, even when it works, there's two major problems. 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 certified to operate in Virginia by Shell. When I was in high school, I knew a guy personally who had gotten super rich in the dot-com mania. And he was a young guy, had built some random company that he had sold for and was involved in.

And he was in his early 20s driving a Porsche, doing awesome, going on and on about all of his wealth. And I watched it. And a year later, the dude was totally broke back working some just dead end job trying to pay his bills. And Porsche was gone and everything was gone.

That was the earliest exposure I had to people making it big really quick. And I realized the same principle that you can trace with lottery winners, that when people come into a windfall of any kind, if they haven't grown and they haven't become capable to handle the windfall, inevitably the windfall disappears because they didn't become the kind of person who could handle it.

And the way I like to say it is that the most important thing about becoming a millionaire is becoming a millionaire. If you, if somebody dies and leaves you a million dollars and you don't think like a millionaire and you haven't had the hard one experience that comes from earning a million dollars yourself, there's a pretty decent chance that you won't be a millionaire for long because you yourself didn't become a millionaire.

That doesn't mean that you can't quickly become a millionaire. So when I counsel people who come into a big windfall and here's a couple million dollars that I wasn't expecting, then I think that you can become a millionaire very quickly, probably a few years, a year, two years, three years.

But you have to become the millionaire and it doesn't happen just because you get these results. And I would say the same thing that happens is this guy, some guy starts using steroids to improve his gym physique and he's doing it after he just spent six months in the gym.

I don't think he's ever going to mentally be as strong as the guy who's been in the gym for years and built his body the hard way, the slow way, getting slow results. That guy's going to have a bulletproof psychology and he's going to be confident in who he is and what he's done.

And then if he adds steroids to that in the future, it's not going to affect him very much. But the guy who comes in and he's six weeks in the gym and goes ahead and starts using steroids, that's going to mess him up psychologically because he knows he'll never know what it's like to not be fake.

And he'll always be insecure about that. So that's how I would comment on it, to say that if somebody's in a dire circumstance, take drugs. Absolutely take drugs to try to save a life. There's no problem with that. But if not in a dire circumstance, there's an enormous productivity to doing something the hard way because of the confidence that it builds in you.

You know, for not wanting to answer the question, you gave a really good answer to the question. I appreciate that. I asked the back half of that question. Sure, go ahead. So with your podcast yesterday, I got thinking, I'm within your demographic that you talk about with your podcast audience, except for I'm single.

I know you have a lot of families listening. I'm 35. I'm single. I'm five foot eight and not, yeah, I have a few extra pounds, but I'm decently average, pretty decent looking with an above average income and above average savings. That's except for the family part. That's your demographic for your audience.

Sure. One thing you mentioned yesterday is that when you're looking for a partner and you do want to get married, you should optimize for physical attractiveness. One thing that when you're in your, when you've been working a while, you have saved. Yeah, I've been in the gym, but there's various other options that are available to you when you have money to optimize for physical attractiveness.

There's various lists, hucks, augmentations. How do you view that and surgeries or things like that in terms of optimizing yourself for physical attractiveness? I would give basically the same answer to it, meaning I don't have any particular reason to say that somebody shouldn't do, somebody shouldn't engage in some form of plastic surgery.

I've recommended it to people. I have a child whose ears stick out kind of far and I've changed that child's hairstyle a little bit, but if it is something in the future and you can just get your ears tucked back and that helps you, then great. I don't think it's that severe, but just saying that I don't think that's a problem to engage in plastic surgery or anything that you think could help you.

What I think the problem is exactly what I just described is simply that have you done the necessary kind of initial work. So, I do think that you, if you want to marry, I think that it's important that you optimize attractiveness at every level, but it's important to be aware of what are the basic things that actually really are fundamental for attractiveness.

So, here would be an example. The most attractive trait, I think, for men is generally confidence, personal confidence. You can be a man and your body can look anything. Your body can be, you know, any shape, any size. You can have all kinds of wacky things "wrong" with you.

But if you are a confident person and you just express this self-confidence, you're ambitious, you know where you're going, then that, I think, is probably the fundamental thing that is the most attractive to women. So, that's the first thing to focus on. Then let's say that your ears, let's say you have one ear that sticks out and one ear that doesn't.

Then the second thing after just like personal confidence would be to come back and say, "Well, are you in shape?" You know, if I'm coaching you and I'm saying, "How can you attract a really high-quality wife?" then I think assessing your fashion and all of those things are really important.

But what's funny about fashion is that if you're in great shape, if you're strong, if you're muscular, if you're athletic, you can put on any clothes and they all look good on you. But if you're fat and lumpy, then you can spend a thousand dollars on some fancy duds and it just doesn't look very good on you.

And so, trying to optimize for the most important thing is personal confidence, then trying to get in as much shape as possible. Then you go and you say, "You know what? I got this one ear that sticks out and the other ear is not so much and I go and see a plastic surgeon and see if I can get my ear tucked in." Sure, fine.

You know, go ahead and get it tucked in. And that may be something that improves your confidence. It's not that you have to do one thing or another. So, let's say you're going to the gym and you're working out and you're counting your calories and you're counting your macros and making progress, then does that mean that you can't go ahead and buy new clothes and then feel better because you don't look like a bum?

No, it doesn't. You can do all of these things simultaneously and there's no reason not to do them basically simultaneously. But don't go down the pathway where you think, "Well, you know what? I'm 30 pounds overweight and I dress like a slob, but if I just had, you know, I don't know, a tummy tuck or whatever, that would make a difference." No, don't do an 80/20 analysis and say, "What are the 20% of things that if those were right would solve all the difference?" And in terms of optimizing for attractiveness, everything matters.

The most important thing is building confidence and having and expressing confidence. And we could talk about how to do that, but that's the fundamental thing. And then becoming as strong and as athletic as you are capable of being, which also feeds into confidence. Those are the 20% of things that give you 80% of the results.

Then you add on the clothes and you add on charisma and you practice, you take some dancing lessons and you kind of do those other things, then those will all add in and help you to feel more confident. But don't think that if you just pay a plastic surgeon to cut off the end of your nose that somehow that magically changes anything.

That's that would be how I would approach it. Perfect. Great. And thank you for expounding on the question. I didn't think that those two would lead into each other, but after listening to your podcast, I thought, well, let's ask that second half of the question to find out. So thank you.

Yeah, my pleasure. And I would just say, I mean, obviously I don't know anything about you, your situation. I would just say that if you do want to get married and in line with kind of the most recent podcast that I did, you need to, I'll do another podcast.

Probably I'm planning to do another podcast in the coming days where I'll go over this specific question in a little bit more detail. But what I want you to know is that it comes down to number one, who you are and do you have the expression, do you express the characteristics and qualities that are attractive to someone who you would consider to be an ideal wife?

So you need to have those characteristics and qualities and they need to be expressed. So that's the first thing. And then it's just a numbers game. And so what, because there's two things that can be true. You can be a guy who's just full of self-confidence and totally jacked and you dress like you're on the cover of a fashion magazine and everything is great and you have all the money in the world and all the income and you sit in your house and you don't ever meet women.

Well, it ain't going to work, right? On the other hand, you could be out there meeting 20 new women a week and none of them say yes when you ask them on a date. And now we know, hey, there's something fundamentally wrong with the basic attractiveness you have or the character that you have and your ability to express it.

So both of those are important. You want to cultivate the characteristics and traits that are going to express attractiveness and then calculate how many opportunities you have for that and take a look at that and then just see which of these needs to be optimized. Chances are it's probably more on option B than it is on option A, because you probably are just a normal attractive guy.

But what often happens is that men don't actually set a goal to get married and they don't go out and they don't go meet women, they don't try, they don't do it, and then they sit around and wonder why year after year after year they continue to be single.

So just calculate both of those things. They should be optimized, but there's two sides of the equation. We go to Mava in Texas. Mava, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. I'm just interested to follow up on a question I asked last week, given that I put a little bit more thought into your response and just it helped to verbally express what it is that I've been thinking about.

So just as a quick summary, kind of a working mom versus full-time mom comparison, and you expounded on that quantitatively and then also qualitatively. And I think kind of with the three options you presented, you know, mother being a caregiver, daycare, or a third option, just kind of with my situation have actively explored and participating in the third option, which is conducive to like a fully remote role and just kind of the lifestyle that my family currently has.

But I think what you said that resonated was not to decide now, but put a plan in place such that being a full-time parent at home and considering home education and similar kind of lifestyle would be possible. So I just wanted to kind of explore that avenue further in terms of the plan in place.

And I think from, you know, a financial standpoint, I've consumed enough of a general personal finance content, including your podcast over the last like seven, eight years that the financial piece seems fairly understood and straightforward. But thinking kind of in terms of what are my general, I hesitate to use such a strong word, but like reservations or what concerns me, what causes me to be afraid about being just kind of in the home instead of in the workplace kind of comes down to three main points.

So I'd be interested just to kind of hear your thoughts and how you would go about addressing these reservations that I have just from your perspective personally, but also just kind of being part of a homeschool, non-traditional, single income community seeing trends at large. So my first concern is just kind of around losing intellectual trajectory because it's kind of stereotypical, but mom, kids at home, just not able to engage in continued growth.

And I really value just kind of engaging with ideas, engaging with other adults to explore ideas. And that's really been helpful to have a professional setting to explore that, but just kind of thinking how to continue that if I was fully at home. And then the second reservation is just kind of not wanting to land in a scarcity mindset, because I know just thinking about the five points you have in approach to building wealth of increased income, decreased expenses, invest, avoid catastrophe, optimize lifestyle.

Like a lot of times the stay-at-home mom, the stay-at-home parent gets really obsessed with number two, decreasing expenses. And I would say that I have a decent approach to optimize and know which expenses actually bring value to my life, but I just don't care for that mentality where you feel as though you can't make a difference on the top line.

So suddenly your impact for the family gets really invested on line two of just like decreasing expenses and of course supporting numbers three through five. But basically just I have concerns about landing in a scarcity mindset kind of like financially or even just as an outlook as to what I bring or deliver, because I don't want to just get stuck there.

And then the third reservation would just be kind of, because I tend to be results oriented, a slight concern about starting to view children or home like as a project to, I don't know, optimize their education, try these different things with whether it be curriculum or learning styles or just something that becomes perhaps too intense where suddenly if I'm viewing too much of children's success like as a metric to be optimized, it becomes kind of oppressive or there's like a risk of losing relationship because my focus is very solely and squarely on my children.

So just curious what you would say maybe to each of those reservations or if you kind of have a broad response. Appreciate your thoughts. You're turning into one of my favorite callers. I hope you'll keep this up because these are such useful and interesting questions and I really appreciate them.

First, with regard to losing the concern of basically losing intellectual engagement in terms of if you became a full-time mom, I think this is absolutely something to be cautious of and be aware of and to be asking the question, but it's relatively easily solved. It's not going to be relatively easily solved at all times, but it's relatively easily solved if you have it as a specific goal.

So I have heard lots of full-time mothers complain about this and talk about this and say, "Well, I just spent all my time, all my day with children and where's my adult interaction?" And adult interaction, I think, is necessary. It's something that is really good for you. It's good for all of us.

I would say that in many ways, the same exact concern that you have is the same concern that I have and it's something just simply that relates to being an entrepreneur, being a solopreneur, somebody who's fairly isolated because I work by myself in my home office. It's the same basic risk.

Children can be demanding and there will be phases in life in which you really don't want to see anybody. And so my wife, when she has a baby, she doesn't want to go anywhere. She doesn't want to see anybody. She just wants to be at home and be with her baby and I don't want to go and see anybody.

And so I wouldn't say to you, if you have a baby and you're at home for a month, that you should expect to go and engage with your intellectual engagement. So that's what I'm trying to be honest, to say that you're probably going to be isolated and intellectually stultified at that period of life because your sleep schedule is all erratic and you're just happy to nest and be at home and not go anywhere, not see anybody, not do anything.

But that doesn't mean that when you have a six-month-old baby that you have no further intellectual engagement with the world. So let's break intellectual engagement into two things. The first thing is adult contact. Do you have adult contact with other people? What I found really remarkable when I left my job was that I basically also left all my friends that were from that job.

And I think that's normal, but it was surprising to me. I didn't expect it. And so the first thing is just to probably squarely look in the eye and say that if I were to leave my job and be a full-time mom, most of the friends that I have at my job probably aren't going to continue to be my close friends.

Maybe it's easier for women. I've observed some of the women in my life that they do have the ability to keep friendships more, maybe it's easier for women than it is for men, but in general, your reason for being friends with those specific people is probably your job and your workplace.

And so if the job and the workplace ends, then that ends some of that adult social contact. But that doesn't mean that you can't bring adult social contact into your life. How I would look at it would be to say that the time that you spend working at a job can also be viewed as an impediment to your social contact with adults.

And I think that if you had a vision for this as a mother, even if as a full-time mother, if you had a vision for your social life, you can pack your schedule as full of social contact as you want. The natural and obvious thing that often happens is you wind up building friendships and relationships with other mothers.

And so very commonly, I see mothers will have a play group. They go to the park with their friends and everyone goes and sits at the park on Tuesday morning from nine o'clock to noon. You go to the latte and play place and you get your latte with your girlfriends and the kids play on the play place and you enjoy contact that way.

So there's all kinds of opportunities that you have where you wind up interacting with other moms, moms of young children, because often there's an age banding to that. Usually you would meet those moms. They're all at the park probably now. And so you just don't see them because you're at the office.

So it's not that hard to basically build friendships with people at your local park, at your local gyms, at your local activities. A lot of times also a mother will have some kind of group of people that she meets from her local church. Even if you don't attend a local church, a lot of churches will have various moms groups where they'll get together on Wednesday morning at nine o'clock and there'll be lots of other women.

And those are a great outlet because those other mothers have the same need and desire you have for adult contact. In addition, I think that one of the things that I see is often not talked about is basically the idea of mother or wife as a socialite in our current era.

Now, I don't know how much of this is true. I'm stereotyping here just as an observation. So I don't know how much of this is true. But if you went back and you kind of thought of a stereotypical 1940s housewife, the way that she's viewed on some TV program or some book that you read, then the 1940s housewife often had a very, very active social life.

And you'll see things in a movie where Tuesday night, there's a bridge club at her home. And on Thursday morning, she's down at the ladies charity relief service that she's being involved in. And then on Friday night, she and her husband are hosting a cocktail party. And then on Saturday, they're hosting an event at the local pool.

And you can just kind of expand from there. But there's a whole element of wives and mothers being responsible for community events and creating community culture that has been lost because most women are now at their jobs. And so if you're at your job all day, and that's where you're getting your social contact from, then it's an unusual woman who wants to host a Tuesday night bridge club or a Friday night cocktail party.

But if you are an active, energetic mother who wants to be more social, then you have the opportunity with your time being freed up to engage in more of those activities and to host more of those things. And probably once you get your baby to, I don't know, six months old, six months old are pretty easy because usually by then they've, well, sometimes, as long as they're not sick, I've had a bunch of sick babies.

So ideally, six month olds can be fairly easy. They've kind of settled into the world. They're no longer newborns. They're strong and they're healthy, but they're not running around everywhere. Then you can create those points of social contact and you can have time to do them more than you otherwise have time to do.

And so this is a big benefit. I see this as a benefit for me as a husband is if my wife had a job and she had to go to a job every day, she's going to get off at five o'clock, then I don't feel good as a husband about saying to her, "Hey, let's have three families over on Tuesday night and let's have a nice meal for them." But if you don't have a job and you have the afternoon free and the day before and you can do meal prep and you can be a hostess, then it opens up the opportunity for your family social life to increase and to be more engaged because you're not tired from working all the time.

You're not stuck going to work every day. And I think that you can do a lot of those things and they're depending on your lifestyle. I mean, I've given the 1940s examples, in today's world, a lot of times, and we'll get to kind of homeschooling or home education in a moment, but a lot of times, a lot of moms will have a homeschool co-op and, "Hey, on Thursday afternoon, I'm going to have the homeschool co-op over and then we're going to have small group for our church.

We're going to host that on Wednesday night." There's just so many things that could be done if you're interested in socializing with other adults. There are lots and lots of things that could be done by you when you have time that opens up and is freed up for you.

But most, again, I'm stereotyping, but it just seems to me because most women today have jobs, they don't have the time or the energy to engage in hosting people in their homes, nor do they have the time and energy to engage in the charity functions, all the community things that were once done by many women as far as building the base in the community.

So let me just go to community things as well. Impact or intellectual engagement doesn't have to only come from paid work. I'm skeptical. I mean, you might have a really intellectually engaging job, but most of us, our jobs become somewhat repetitive over time. I think that in many cases, you would have opportunity for you to build more intellectual engagement with something that you care about if you have more time.

This is why people are often pursuing early retirement and financial independence. They have these things they want to do if they have more time. Well, if your husband was able to earn the income that your family needed, and you then had your time freed up, you've achieved an expression of financial independence.

No, you're not together living on the income from your investments. But I'll tell you a secret, he's probably happier having a job to go to, and you probably are happier having your time now. And you can then go ahead and engage in those intellectual engagements. And so, I used to go to all these charity meetings and political clubs and socialite things all around Palm Beach, and I did it because I was prospecting for clients in my financial planning business.

And women are the cornerstone of those things. Women are the activists of local organizations. And what's cool about those kinds of opportunities, let's say that you have an issue that you're really passionate about, and you become a local activist for that issue, and you're hosting clubs and events, and maybe you're hosting breakfasts for a political candidate, or I don't know, whatever it is that you're doing, and you're really involved in those things, you'll get more actual socializing and actual intellectual engagement from those pursuits than you ever get with your current dozen co-workers that you interact with in the context of your profession.

But probably right now, you're not doing very much of that, because the job is an impediment to that kind of socializing. In addition, if you really want to have intellectual engagement, I think that, and here I'm switching, to be clear, from social engagement, of socializing with other adults, to intellectual engagement.

If you want to have intellectual engagement, then I think that being a full-time mom is a really great way to do that. Some of my favorite writers that I enjoy reading are full-time moms. They're also academics and engaged in writing, but there's a good synergy between their family life and their intellectual pursuits.

And so I see this with professionals who are writing books, there are people who write influential blogs, or write and publish essays frequently, there are people who are doing original research, I know a lot of women who do activism of various kinds, and they're engaging in activism, and it's all around their children's schedules.

Because that kind of work, and that kind of intellectual engagement can clearly be done with children involved, it just doesn't require them to go to an office outside the house for eight hours a day, and be there eight hours a day, every single day. And so intellectually, you can have all kinds of intellectual engagement, and you can have all kinds of professional engagement around children.

Now I would just give one caution to say that I have found it very hard to see how, I don't know how moms run a business and take care of their children full-time. I've tried this, I've tested this with my children, maybe if it's one or two children, maybe you can do it more easily, you can certainly do it more easily when you enroll your children in school, if you enroll your children in school when they're older, but the caution I would give is that don't expect to be running a business as a mom and think that you're going to be able to do six hours of productive work, because the way that the work changes, I don't think that being a mom is the hardest job in the world.

And I think that it's wrong for us to say that. It's not the hardest job in the world. What it is, however, is it's difficult because it is a continual, constant job. And so, because you're responsible throughout the day, then you can't put together, right now I can go to my office and I can sit down in my office and I can spend eight hours alone and I can just get in the flow and the zone and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

When I'm with children, I can get 15 minutes here, I can get 20 minutes there, I can get an hour at naptime, but I can't get like five hours put together just because I told my children, okay, I'm going to go and work now. And I think that's what's demanding about being a mom, is that you're on all the time and you're continually, you don't get that like focused mental time.

But if you can come up with activities that fit into that life and work, okay, I'm going to read an hour here on this subject, I'm going to browse, I'm going to do a few minutes of my Twitter feed here, 15 minutes here, I'm going to answer some emails there.

You can insert this work into your workday. Now, in addition to that, I think that if you were interested or became interested in home education, that I think a lot of home educators, I myself included, find that one of the most interesting things about having children is that you can fix your own educational deficits in your homeschooling.

Because now you get the chance to go through and teach them all the stuff and you get to learn a lot of stuff alongside them. And I see this, my wife talks about this, about all the stuff that she's learned homeschooling our children. I see this with all the stuff that I've learned about homeschooling our children.

You can go through and you can read things alongside your children, you can learn things, you can find new applications. And I find home education to be very intellectually rewarding, especially if you're doing it in a serious manner and you're shooting for a high level education. And so even if I don't think the right model is to think that you, the model of home education that I think is incorrect is to think that somehow you have to teach your children all the stuff, you don't.

Your job is to be a facilitator, but you can read along with them, you can read to them, you can be looking through their books. And if you choose a really challenging curriculum for your children's home education, you'll learn more from that curriculum than you ever did from your own schooling back in the day.

So it is important to plan for losing social contact with other adults, but that can be planned with actually proactively going for it. And intellectual engagement is just a choice. Either you disengage and you just become the person who's not engaged or you keep intellectual engagement as part of your life and your lifestyle.

And I think that it's perfectly possible to be very socially connected with other adults and highly intellectually stimulated, even if you were a full-time mom. I'll pause there. What are your thoughts on that, on my answer to your first question? Yeah, I think that was a helpful overview. You basically were outlining points about looking to history, for example, there's no need to reinvent and that maybe even my skew or thought about a stereotype of losing adult contact is kind of exposed to because I am occupied during business hours and not aware of what else is happening.

So I think exploring those avenues, thinking about it intentionally, exploring it before necessarily committing, deciding or exiting the workforce is a good avenue to kind of just kind of remove some of the concerns I have. And so those are good avenues to explore, appreciate those thoughts. Good. What you have right now is financial freedom because you have a high income.

What you don't have right now is time freedom. If you did choose to become a full-time mother, you would give up a measure of your financial freedom of the excess income, the extra disposable income that you're earning from your salary. But what you would gain would be time freedom and time control.

So I want to be honest to say you don't get total time freedom because now you're caring for a child. And so that structures your life in a certain way. But you do have full control over how you use your time. And children can be easily integrated into life.

And so you could, if you're the kind of person, if you're the kind of woman who is motivated to be socially connected to others, you can have a much more active social life than you have right now as you engage in it and as you build your skills. And so the reason I say skills is that as a parent, you do acquire some different skills.

So I take my children out to eat all the time. You've got a baby. I've got a 15-month-old baby. There are many times where I need to sit the baby next to me, sit the baby on my lap, and I have to carry on a conversation while listening to four other children and just making sure that everything is okay.

That's a skill that you develop. And then before you have children, I always, when I'm with single people, I'm like, listen, you've got my full attention. Just because I'm looking and listening to four other people doesn't mean my attention's not on you. And so you'll observe that you'll build those skills naturally.

They'll be acquired. But you can have a very, very active social life if you want it. And you can, and I would also say that you can do this really beautifully as you build a network. Let's pretend that you couldn't pay a babysitter, but you still wanted to engage in an active social life.

Well, when you have time freedom, you can have a thing where on Tuesday morning, every other Tuesday morning, I've got my girlfriend who lives across town who's got a two-year-old and I've got a baby. She's going to come over here and bring her baby one Tuesday morning, and the next Tuesday morning I'm going to swap with her, and that's going to be my morning where I go to my favorite Pilates class and have a latte by myself at Starbucks on my way home.

She's going to take care of my baby for two or three hours while I go and do that. And there's one thing. Oh, by the way, let's just go ahead and visit for an hour or two after I get back, after each of us gets back, and we'll swap that out every other Tuesday.

On Wednesday, I'm going to have my mom come over and take care of the children at lunchtime. Just be here for an hour or two, feed them lunch and play with them while I go and have lunch with my former coworkers every Wednesday. And then on Thursday night, we're going to invite people over from church, or that's going to be our hosting night.

So every Thursday night, there's going to be someone coming over. And my point is that you can do this if you have the motivation and the vision for it. You can do it without spending money on it, and you can have access to childcare, and you can have access to social contact.

It's totally doable if you have the vision for it and the desire for it. The reason I keep emphasizing if you have the desire for it is that some moms, they just do well in a kind of an isolated environment. And they find that they're so focused on, you know, I'm doing all my homeschooling, I don't want to go and socialize all the time.

And so not all women do this, but it's not because they couldn't, it's often because they don't want to at this particular phase in life. Moving on to the second question you asked, of not wanting to land in financial scarcity. Two things occur to me. Number one, I don't know about the nature of your husband's income.

And I don't particularly want to ask, I just want to say that one of the things that many men find is that when they don't have to think about managing two careers, the opportunities that they have are much bigger. I can't guarantee it, because if your husband just has a straight up job, and okay, he has a job, and he's not going to change, and he's going to get cost of living raises, and he's not super aggressive about building his income, or anything like that, fine.

But I think in general, if you put a dual income, two people together, and you contrast that with a motivated man whose wife is a full-time mother, I think the motivated man will often, can often wind up earning much more money, because of his freedom to go after bigger opportunities.

So let's say that he was offered a promotion. Well, if you've got a job, and you live in Dallas, and he lives in Dallas, and he's offered a promotion to move to Washington D.C., if you have a dual income couple, then you've got to negotiate that between two jobs, and it becomes a real tussle.

What about my career? What about my job? What am I going to do in Washington D.C.? If you have one job, then it just comes down to, is this the right move for our family, for our social contact, for our children? And if you want to pick up and move to Washington D.C., you pick up and move to Washington D.C.

In addition to that, especially if you have children, the problem that dual income families face with children, is they're always trying to split all of the parental duties right up the middle to keep it fair and equitable. And so, okay, you pick up the children from daycare on Monday, and you've got to be there at 5.05 to pick them up, otherwise we get charged extra if we're late.

And I'll pick them up on Tuesday, and you pick them up on Wednesday. And so, your husband's at the office on Monday afternoon, and there's a big meeting and a big client opportunity, and someone says, "Hey, why don't you come to dinner with us? I'm meeting so-and-so big shot." "Oh, no, I can't, because I've got to go and pick up the baby from daycare.

And I can't do that, because then my wife will be mad at me, because this was her night that I'm supposed to go pick up the baby from daycare." There's an enormous pressure. Now, I don't want husbands to ignore their wives or be not present or anything like that.

There are times in a man's career, however, where if he has the mental freedom to pour on the work during a period of time, because he knows that his wife and his children are taken care of, then he can make much bigger moves and get much farther ahead in his career quicker.

I'm not convinced that it's just an automatic given that we'll always have lower income because a mom becomes a stay-at-home mom. I think in some cases, and I don't want to say many, because I can't prove many, but I'll just say some. In some cases, being freed up as a man to really go after your career without having to try to simultaneously negotiate with your wife around her career and negotiate about who's going to take care of the children, and I've got to go on this business trip and all these other things.

It allows you to make potentially bigger moves and to go farther faster. If you look at the most successful businessmen in America, it's very unusual to find them being a dual income family. It's very common that the most financially successful men will have a full-time wife so that they know my children are well cared for, my wife is well cared for, and I can focus on the money and I can make a lot more of it because of my freedom.

I view this as an enormous benefit for me as a husband and as a man. I view the fact that my wife doesn't have a job as an enormous asset rather than a financial liability because it frees me up to be able to travel if I need to, to be able to go after opportunities, to work early and late when I need to, to take spur-of-the-moment meetings.

I would not make as much money as I do if we were both earning an income and then trying to negotiate our parental responsibilities evenly down the middle to try to handle things. One thought on finances is that you may wind up, in the fullness of time, if your husband has a career that offers him where there's opportunity, and if he's making, if I remember he's right, a couple hundred thousand dollars, there's clearly opportunity, you may wind up four years from now having a much higher household income than you do today because he has additional flexibility.

I can't guarantee it, but I would say it's a strong possibility. On the flip side also is that you are, depending on your professional training and your interests, I think that you can massively contribute to your family's finances in ways that go far beyond clipping coupons and cutting costs, especially if you hone your skills or have any interest in doing things like managing your family's investments.

One of the great problems that dual-income couples face is generally, both of them are always focused on their jobs and always focused on their careers and they just got to make more money, make more money. And so because of the cost of working, generally expenses are higher than they otherwise need to be, and generally there's very little time available for focusing on investments and finding good investments.

In the beginning that's okay, but as your family accumulates capital, it becomes much more important that you manage the capital effectively to make good investments than that you make more money. And so looking at your $120,000 income, you have an income amount that is being reduced by taxes, you could probably save some money by running your family's budget efficiently because you have time to take over the finances of the management of the budget and make sure that we've got all the best packages and all of our expenses are as low as possible.

But if you also focus on developing interest and expertise in investment management and you manage your family's investments, you can contribute to your family in an enormous amount. The most common way I see this is if a husband has a business and his wife does real estate, that's a very, very common thing.

A lot of times she'll get a real estate license and because she may sell a couple of houses a year just from personal contacts, especially if she's very social, you can take the baby with you to a lot of stuff, you can work the work around some of the other things.

But more importantly, if you become the one who's finding the real estate, finding the deals, managing the tenants, managing the contractors, managing the investments, you can get really great performance out of an investment portfolio. If you're interested in other avenues of investing and you become Ms. Crypto or Ms.

Airdrop or Ms. whatever, gold coin collector, whatever it is, you can start to develop and exercise knowledge in ways that you can't right now. And so I think that if you're interested in the family's overall financial well-being, that you can contribute enormously even if you're not generating income. And what I love about this is and then that's to say nothing finally, that's to say nothing of you having a business of your own as well that you manage.

And so I really get annoyed if I am counseling a couple where they're a dual income couple with both of them earning W2 income. That is the least efficient way to build wealth in the United States. You're highly taxed. You have no time freedom and the lack of time freedom means you can't find inefficiencies in investment markets, whatever markets you're interested in to exercise.

My favorite is to have one high income because that gives you stability of income that can be useful for borrowing ability just for stable financial management. And then to have you be the one who manages the contractors of the rehab, the flip house that you guys are working on and finds the next deal and builds a little business that you know we have a build a little very tax friendly business that gives you guys the ability to sink to have a whole bunch of deductions for things that you enjoy doing anyways.

So there's a lot of opportunities that go much beyond cost cutting that if you're motivated to pursue, you could pursue that would enhance your family's financial standing. Appreciate your thoughts. Yeah. Just to kind of think of what works with lifestyle and vision, I guess it kind of comes back to vision.

That's kind of the theme. Kind of have some idea of what I might be interested in and actively explore it to kind of address some of these concerns that I have. Thanks for sharing those thoughts. Yeah. My pleasure. Now to number three. You said, "Okay. Well, I don't want to be this like hyper focused.

I'm going to use the term tiger mom who's just all obsessed with how my child is doing and you need to do just a little bit better and we need to raise your IQ just a little better and blah, blah, blah." I would say that my answer to this is just the fact that you're concerned about that means you're not going to be that.

On the contrary, I think it's much more important that you be the kind of really engaged mother that your children ultimately will need. You've probably listened to my series on how to invest in your child. I think that ... Now, I don't know. Time will tell because some psychologists just basically say, "None of it matters.

It's all innate characteristics and blah, blah, blah. Here's all the evidence that parental input really doesn't make any difference. How you're born is how you're born." I don't really believe it, although I'm sensitive to their data and I don't believe it. I think you can make an enormous difference in your child's long-term outcomes.

That's why I really want moms to be engaged. I want you to feel like you do have a mission. I want you to be on a mission for your children and I want you to engage in that fully. I think that there is enormous evidence on basically everywhere you look of the power that you as a mother have in the long-term outcomes that your children experience.

Everything from the bonding that you have with a baby and the importance of breastfeeding in your baby's long-term outcomes and just the engagement and the play and the character formation and the vocabulary formation and the intellectual ability that you can instill and everything. It just goes on and on and on of the things that can be done.

I would say that could you be too obsessed with the outcomes that your children are having? Yeah, you probably could. I would say that probably the best solution to that is have three babies. Because if you have one and it's all about my one little precious and you're just hyper-focused on that one baby, then you could probably smother your one baby.

If you have three children, then you're probably not going to smother the one because you're too busy managing three. You can still make enormous progress. But on every single metric, an involved parent, we don't know where the limits of human capacity are. So, I have proved and am proving this in my experiments.

I'm probably more obsessed with this than you could ever be and testing this and trying that and doing this and let's see what this outcome could be. But on basically every level, if you care about your child's physical formation, you can have the healthiest athlete in the world. If you care about your child's academic performation, he can finish a master's degree by the time he's 19 years old.

If you care about your child's social life, he can have friends on every continent. There's no limit to what's available. And I think that your children are enormously privileged when you can create that kind of environment for them and you can be their coach. You can be the person who's digging into the research and who's doing it.

And I think we need more of that. And so, if you become hyper obsessed with it, my only comment would be create an outlet for it. So, I'll read your mom blog. I love mom blogs. I'll read everything that you're doing and I'll try to learn from them and try to apply them.

But our children are our future and I believe personally that motherhood specifically, fatherhood also, I believe that motherhood is a noble calling and that you can accomplish that the world needs your children. And I mean that on a physical sense, that the world needs your babies. And I mean that on the sense that the world needs your children and the world needs you to be engaged with them and productive so that they become pillars of society.

Our children are the asset that we most need. And you know, I stole that line from my mom because she used to have a lot of children and people would make nasty comments to her that anybody with big families always hears. And her answer, which is remarkable because she's a very humble woman and usually not this snarky, but I don't know how many times she actually said it, but she said, you know, the answer I finally settled on is just simply the world needs my children.

And I'm talking to you right now because of my mother and the work that she did for me. And she is enormously responsible for who I am. She's not a perfect mother, but I'm grateful for her labor in my life. And to the extent that I have the opportunity to be here speaking to you at the moment, I owe an enormous portion of that to my mother and I honor her for my life.

And the idea to me that somehow, this is why I don't like to tell women that they shouldn't have jobs. I don't feel like that's my place. That's up to them and their husbands to work it out. But I do want to really solidly, solidly represent the fact that not all important work is measured in dollars.

If my mom needed money, there's not a limit to how much I would give her. If my mom were in need, there's no limit to that. And I look at my mom at 80 years old with her six children and her 16 grandchildren. And as far as I can tell, she has an enormous reward for her years and years of labor.

And it seems to me much more satisfying for her to have the joy of that than if she had earned whatever she would have earned through her working lifetime. My mom did take a job. So when my parents were younger, my dad was in the Navy. He was gone for six months at a time.

And so she didn't have an income at that point in time. She was trained. She had a training and certification. She has a college degree. She was a trained teacher. And then they had children. My parents were missionaries abroad and they had children. And she was raising with small children.

And there was a point in time at which they decided they didn't want to continue homeschooling. And so she took a job at the local private Christian school in order to get the tuition reduction for my family. She worked that job while all of us worked our way through.

And then after they didn't need the tuition reduction anymore, then she came back and was a full-time wife and mother again. And that was the time that she had a job. My point, what I'm saying is that, so it's not that I don't think that you can't have a job.

And you're having a job may be strategically useful and helpful and important. But the impact that you can have at your job can be measured in one dimension. The impact that you can have as a mother can be measured in a different dimension. And if you did become very results-oriented and focused on your children as a project, I don't see that as a bad thing.

And if you're too weird about it, then someone will correct you and you'll recognize, "Hey, I don't want to be that weird." On the contrary, I think that work is really important. And it's to be honored. I honor you if that's the path that you go down. And your children will honor you if that's the path that you go down, as I honor my mother.

And I think that this is the best way I can express what I want to say on it, is that our society has broadly settled on financial earnings as the basic metric of value in life. And our society has broadly brainwashed our daughters and young women into unidimensionally calculating their value based upon their income.

And I wish to push against that and say that income for any person, man or a woman, is a very thin measure of value, and that we have lost something enormously important in our society. We've lost babies, as the show that I released yesterday shows. We've lost babies, and our society, our population around the world is collapsing.

We've lost social integration, social cohesion. We've lost all of the important work that women once did of engaging in their communities and solving problems. Women, traditionally speaking, even today you see it in voting rates and in activism in organizations, but women are the ones who get things done in their communities.

And our communities are hollowed out because many of our women are sitting in a cubicle making their boss rich instead of making their community better. And so our communities suffer for it, and our families are suffering for it. And so I think that if you and your husband, between you guys, if you go down that path, it's something that is worthy of honor and respect, and you can feel proud of your work.

And while you don't have the same metric as making more money than your girlfriend, I think that if you imagine yourself at 80 years old able to reflect back on your life and see your children happy, healthy, married with children of their own, you see your grandchildren, you look at your community where you have impacted this issue, that issue that's important to you, you've engaged with people, you see the people's lives, even just in terms of personal ministry towards people.

There are people all around you that are hurting, who are hungry, literally hungry, who are hurting, who are homeless. And I've watched my mother pour out her life taking care of people her entire life. And at the recent family camp that I hosted, I brought my parents to that.

And in the context of kind of our closing event, my dad was sharing a story. And throughout my lifetime, I watched my parent host at least, I don't know, I would say 30, but maybe that's too many, more than 20, certainly more than 20 people who I've watched my mother care for in various capacities throughout her lifetime.

And so the point is to measure your life not exclusively with financial income, but to measure it more broadly and then make whatever choices seem appropriate for your family at this point in time. So that would be my closing remarks. Thank you for the questions. I appreciate it. That wraps up today's Friday Q and A show.

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