Ever feel like you're falling behind on the latest tech, AI, and all the smart devices in your life? That used to be me. Until I started tuning into The Kim Commando Show. It's on over 400 top radio stations and packed with the latest in tech, AI, security tips, and tricks.

Here's a secret I learned. If an Amazon package has the letters LPN, the item was returned. It's not new. Join millions who rely on Kim Commando. That's The Kim Commando Show. K-O-M-A-N-D-O. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, and today on the show, I want to dig into one of those extremely esoteric personal finance topics that interests me enormously, and I hope that you also will find it interesting. What topic is that, you say? It's the topic of how to grow tall, or put more accurately as to most of what I'm going to discuss, how to help your children to grow tall.

What does this have to do with personal finance, you ask? Well, we've been aware for quite a while that there's pretty good documentation that indicates that tall people, most especially tall men, tend to earn more money over their careers. This has been documented in various countries and in various sectors.

How much? Well, I've seen evidence that claims that it's either a little bit below or a little bit above about 2% of an increase in earnings for each inch of height. If a man is an inch taller, you can increase his earnings by something like around 2%. That's pretty significant.

It adds up over time. I would say also that that's not the only thing. I think that generally, tall men have an easier time gaining leadership positions, gaining promotions. This is often talked about as the height premium. Taller individuals are more likely to be CEOs of companies and hold other high-level positions.

There's a positive correlation between tall individuals and prestigious occupations, high-status occupations. In addition, being tall can positively influence a lot of social perceptions and relationships. Generally, if you're taller, you enjoy greater social dominance, higher status. It makes the dating and marriage market a lot easier to be a tall man as compared to being a short man.

And in general, school goes better. Height has been positively correlated with better academic outcomes. So, in general, being tall is one of those cheat codes in life, and it makes a big difference. Now, naturally, you might ask, "Why? Why does it make a difference?" Well, we don't know for certain.

Some researchers are trying to demonstrate academic research that would tell us, but there seem to be a couple of basic theories. One theory is referred to as the human capital theory, that height is not directly the key factor that is causing greater levels of success, but we can use height as a convenient proxy for overall human capital, especially during childhood.

A child is likely taller because he receives better nutrition or better health care and therefore is also getting better cognitive development, getting better educational outcomes because he's in an environment where he's properly cared for. So, his genetic capacity is enhanced, and those early advantages turn out to stay with him for life.

Think of this in the context of some of the idea that if your child is one of the oldest ones in his grade, he has a built-in advantage, a built-in social privilege that will endure and cause him to be a standout person all along the way. That would be the human capital theory.

Other people theorize that it just has to do with bias and discrimination against people who are not tall, some form of height discrimination or heightism that taller individuals get positive biases, psychological things, and short people face subtle or overt discrimination that causes problems for them, and that bias is continually present throughout their life.

Now, which of those theories is true? I don't know. I would guess that they're probably both true. I could believe both of them. I think that height probably is a pretty decent proxy for other aspects of health, and I'll give some evidence for that in a moment. I also think that there is probably just some of these psychosocial factors that are relevant, that it's just kind of a basic bias that we have in favor of tall people, and it's probably not a bad thing in the same way that beauty is probably a pretty decent predictor of overall health.

That's why we're attracted to beauty. Height is also a pretty decent predictor of overall health, and that's why we're attracted to it. But as always, I don't think that we should judge people by outward experiences or outward characteristics exclusively. We should judge people by the content of their character and their expressed character, their character qualities, rather than based upon some innate characteristic that that individual almost certainly had no impact over.

But in life, we're always looking to get as much benefits and advantage and privilege as we're able to get, and we want our children to have as many benefits and advantages and privilege as we can pass along to them. Height is not free. It's not exclusively a good thing.

I tell you, as a very tall man, there are many times when I have envied short people. There are a whole list of frustrations and annoyances that I have experienced. When I was a teenager, I found it quite annoying that my mom had to buy me a special bed and special bedding, an extra long mattress so that I could fit on it.

To this day, it's quite annoying to me to go to hotel beds where they put the sheets really tight because the first thing I have to do is kick out the sheets because my feet always hang off of the end of a bed. It's annoying. I've many times been envious of my small friends when we're on an airplane flight, and they can just sit down in an economy class airplane seat and sit down and be totally fine or curl up in the corner of a car or sometimes stretch out in something short.

A number of years ago, my wife and I had a motorhome where we slept crossways on the vehicle, and I never slept well in that motorhome because I had to go diagonal on the bed because I can't fit just across the vehicle, whereas short people don't have those problems.

It's annoying to have shoes. I have this thing. Ever since I was probably about 14 years old, I can never get shoes in a shoe store. It's enormously annoying because the way that I shop for shoes in real life is I walk into a shoe store and say, "Do you have any size 16 shoes?" And they say, "No, we don't." And I walk out again.

I don't even bother to look at what I like. I look at what's available. Thank God for the internet because the internet came along and I was able to finally find shoes for myself. But even now, I am petrified about having a pair of shoes break on me when traveling because I can't just go into a store and get a pair of shoes.

I'm forever stuck with whatever I can bring. And so these are just a bunch of dumb little annoyances. On the whole, though, none of them are a big deal. And I don't think I would ever trade out these annoyances for being shorter, and I don't think there's many short men out there that wouldn't be happy to take on those annoyances in exchange for being tall.

By the way, there are some arguments that tall people experience certain diseases that other people don't, so maybe it's not all free. And there are some arguments that tall people have less of certain diseases than others. So on the whole, I'm happy to be the height that I'm happy that I am, and I don't have any complaints about it.

And I want to help you and others experience those benefits if we possibly can. So the question comes back to, is height something that can be adjusted? Is height something that can be influenced? And I'm here to tell you that I believe it is. And I'll give a scientific disclaimer here in a moment, but what inspired me to do this show was I realized when I was doing that Genius show on Monday that there's so many aspects of life that we consider to be immutable, so many things that we think we can't change.

And in reality, they can be influenced and they can be changed. And yet, you know, we don't—if we could change it, if we could positively affect it, why wouldn't we? And one of the benefits of wealth, meaning having a high income where you can afford to do certain things for yourself or for your children, you should spend money on changing these things.

So I'm going to tell you how to spend money to help yourself or your children be tall on today's podcast, and I'm going to give you a broad overview of it. I think at its core, the most important thing is to just simply observe that height can change. All of us do have a certain genetic potential in our basic genes, but that genetic potential is kind of a dormant guide that will vary significantly based upon our outward experience in life.

And perhaps one of the most important factors is something like nutrition. We can see this in populations. We can see that in populations of different countries, that as people have access to more food and better nutrition, people's height increases. And if we can tap into that, while it's certainly clear that we do have a genetic potential for all of us, we can maximize whatever the potential that we have is.

I've even seen this in my own family, which is rather interesting. My father is not tall. I think he's, I'm guessing, 5'10". By the way, if I sound cavalier about height, I sounds ridiculous, but I'll just tell you honestly how it is. I'm like 6'5", 6'6", something like that.

I haven't measured my height since high school. At the time, I was 6'5" and 3/4". Usually, I shoot down and say 6'5", but 6'5" or 6'6", something like that. I should measure myself, but I just don't care. When you're tall at a certain point, it doesn't matter, but it matters a lot to some shorter guys.

When you're tall, though, the experience that you have in life is that basically height is irrelevant to you. You don't notice how tall anybody is. They're just kind of all below you somewhere, and that's normal. You don't even think about it. It's only when you actually meet someone who's your height or taller that you notice it.

A couple months ago, I was talking with a guy who was 7'4", and I'm 6'6". He's 7'4". He's less than a foot taller than me, but it was a very unusual and awkward experience for me, and it was a profoundly great reminder of how I appear to a lot of other people.

By the way, this is something that you have to learn to manage. One of the things that I learned to do over the years being tall is I developed a habit of stepping back slightly from a lot of people. Generally, if you're in a conversation with me, unless I can't hear, because sometimes you can't hear people when your head is up high, so I'll usually step back, and then I spread my legs out to be a little less threatening, less overpowering to people.

There are downsides to being super tall, or tall. I don't consider myself super tall, but there are downsides to being tall, and you have to learn to deal with them. Back to my family history. It's interesting. My father, I think he's something like 5'10". My mom is shorter than him.

I don't know how tall she is, but my dad is the shortest man in my family. In my family, there are four sons, and our height increases on each and every child. So my eldest brother is taller than my father is, but he's the shortest of all of my dad's sons.

Then my next eldest brother is a little taller, then my next eldest brother is a little taller, and then I'm the youngest, and I am the tallest. I've always found this a fascinating anecdotal demonstration of the importance of nutrition. My parents always cared about nutrition. My grandfather was an early adopter of vitamins, and he was a chemist, and so he was super interested in health when he was younger and took vitamins.

My mom was always interested in health food and trying to serve the healthiest food. I would say over the years, my family's nutrition improved, and my parents' nutrition improved, so they probably gave their children different genetic and epigenetic material to work with, and then the nutrition improved with their actual children.

You see this kind of perfect stair step of height as my family's wealth increased, and they probably could afford more food and better expressions of food. This is anecdotal, but just as an example, I noticed with my parents that when I was a boy, when I was very young, we could never afford things like orange juice.

We would have frozen from concentrate orange juice. Then as I got older, then my mom started to buy the real orange juice. When I was younger, we could never afford maple syrup, and so my mom would make maple syrup using maple flavoring and a little bit of corn syrup, and she would make her own syrup for pancakes.

As we got older, though, then real maple syrup appeared on the table. When it comes to weight loss, no two people are the same. That's why Noom builds personalized plans based on your unique psychology and biology. Take Brittany. After years of unsustainable diets, Noom helped her lose 20 pounds and keep it off.

I was definitely in a yo-yo cycle for years of just losing weight, gaining weight, and it was exhausting. And Stephanie. She's a former D1 athlete who knew she couldn't out-train her diet, and she lost 38 pounds. My relationship to food before Noom was never consistent. And Evan. He can't stand salads, but he still lost 50 pounds with Noom.

I'm not doing this to get to a number. I'm doing this to feel better. Get your personalized plan today at Noom.com. Real Noom users compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, a typical Noom user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary.

And check out Noom's first-ever cookbook, The Noom Kitchen, for 100 healthy and delicious recipes to promote better living. Available to buy now wherever books are sold. And so these are just expressions of wealth. As it increases over time, then you can spend more money on groceries. And that undoubtedly had an impact on me reaching the highest of all of my brothers and of being significantly above the average height of the male population.

My point in all this is just to demonstrate that while we all have to acknowledge the role that human genetics play in our height, we know that genetics are not... We can enhance our genetic potential. We see that in cultures. We see that as people go from societies of poverty to rich societies, and they can gain more.

One of my favorite... Empty America, VB Knives. I have no idea. I forget what his name is. Just my favorite Twitter follower is Empty America. He always makes the point, if you look at the United States and you see this, you'll find a Mexican kid whose dad is 5'6" and mom is 5'5".

Mexican kid will move to the United States, eat Big Macs every day because now he has enough proper protein. The kid is 6'1" and massively taller than dad and mom because of the access to high-quality food sources. The United States produces amazing levels of athletes probably because of Big Macs, because the fact that high-protein food like McDonald's is so cheap, comparatively speaking, that a teenager who has this kind of locked-in genetic potential can produce these huge young people.

There's kind of the classic Nebraska Cornhusker football player, is that if you go out to a Nebraska football team, you find all these boys that grew up eating nothing but nonstop beef and corn, and they're huge. The United States is one of the few countries in the world that something like the NFL can actually work because of the basic size that is necessary for the athletes.

Non-Americans like to make fun, I think rightly so, at the United States calling something like the Super Bowl the world champions of football, American football. They like to make fun, "Well, you're the only people in the world that call yourselves the world champions when you're the only country in the world that is participating in this sport." I think that's a good joke and a proper thing to make fun of.

I think that in addition to that, if the NFL were open to teams from all around the world, it wouldn't make a lick of difference because, at least in my travels, I've never seen another place with a wealthy enough country where you can build thousands and thousands of big men that wind up filling something like the National Football League.

If you just look at the sheer meat that is necessary for that league to work, probably the United States is the only country in the world that's wealthy enough to produce that kind of size with tens of thousands of participants that wind up making it to a professional sports league.

So, obviously, you can have all kinds of genetic outliers in many other countries. One of my favorite athletes is a Siberian Russian wrestler named Alexander Karolin, the Russian bear. Dude was just an absolute monster, incredible guy, incredible wrestler, probably one of the – I'm not a sports guy, but certainly one of the greatest of all time in terms of his absolute prowess.

So, he's a good example of how you can have a monster of a man in a sport, but you only need one of him to compete in a single sport like that. A sport like the NFL, you need thousands and thousands of monster men to feed it at the college level – thousands and thousands is probably – I don't know what exact number to use.

The point is you need a huge participation at the high school level to feed a college level, to feed a professional sports franchise. And when size is king in something like that, then you need a rich country in order to feed people enough to make them grow large. So, how do you actually get large?

And more appropriately, how do you actually get your children large? If you want your children to be tall, what can you actually do? What I'm about to say in this section is the most proven of this show. So, I'm going to give you kind of the things that I think are – we know for pretty certain, and then we'll get into kind of some of the more questionable stuff.

And I'll make a brief – before we get into the questionable stuff, I'll indicate where we'd make the turn from what we know to bro science, which I have a high respect for, but we'll talk about that in a moment. What are the core foundations? Well, when I give people this speech on how to help your children grow large, here are some things that we know are absolutely essential.

The first one is in order for your children to grow large, they must have access to enough calories. When children grow up in a starvation environment where they don't have access to enough calories, they don't grow large. But when children have access to enough food, then they can reach their genetic potential.

So, as a parent, I believe that your basic rule for children should be, "My children have unlimited access to unlimited calories. All children who are growing up should have access to unlimited quantities of calories." That statement, I believe, is true with regard to height generation. But obviously, if you're anything like me, it probably struck some fear in your heart.

How do I make sure that I don't have a bunch of fat slobs for children? How do I avoid this? If I'm going to give children access to unlimited quantities of calories, how do I make sure they don't just, again, turn into fat slobs? I don't want that. That's not the goal.

Well, I think here your defensive strategy is to make certain that your house is empty of all junk calories. I believe that children should have access to unlimited quantities of calories, but only in certain forms. And so, what I do my very best to do and what I think is the right way is keep a house that is empty of junk food.

So, your house should be full of all kinds of options, and they should be primarily centered around whole food, but there should be no junk food in your house, no empty garbage junk food. Children should never have access to that stuff on a regular basis. I think it's fine if every couple of months you go to some kind of birthday party and there's Doritos there.

Great. But don't have that garbage in your house. It's fine if you go to a pizza party at school. Great. But don't have pizza in your house, and don't ever have that kind of stuff as a natural part of it. If you have unlimited access to high-quality calories of real food, then your children can satisfy their hunger, reach their genetic potential, and that will be the key factor for them.

A huge component of the calories that are available to your children should be protein. So, one of the most important nutrients to maximize is protein. So, the perfect diet, as far as I'm concerned with my knowledge, and I probably should have given more disclaimers. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a doctor.

I'll undoubtedly make mistakes in everything I'm going to tell you. I'm just doing my best as a layman to say, based upon my research, here are the things that I think are probably true. You check with all of the relevant experts, and please, experts, if I get any of this wrong, correct me on it, because I am not a biology guy.

I just listen, and this is the best I've got. So, the key nutrient to overemphasize on is protein. The bulk of your child's diet should be made up of protein, and the most important forms of protein are animal proteins. So, the perfect diet for a teenager, a 12-year-old boy, or a 14-year-old boy, or a 16-year-old boy would be eggs for breakfast, five, six, eight eggs, whatever he'll eat for breakfast, with several glasses of raw milk.

Lunch, ideally, would be a form of protein, maybe two or three hamburgers and some vegetables or fruit on the side, and then dinner should be steaks. Dinner should be as much red meat as possible. Steak, burgers, whatever you have access to, lamb, whatever you have, but as much access to as much meat as possible.

That should form the basic foundation of the diet. And by having access to huge quantities of protein, then your child will have the necessary building blocks of his body. Now, related to this is also fat. You want to emphasize a high-fat diet, so especially animal fats and naturally-occurring oils fats, naturally-occurring oils like olive oil, coconut oil, things like that.

You need to avoid all seed oils and all vegetable oils. All of that needs to be completely stripped from the diet, but emphasize high quantities of fat. I never hear of fat as a nutrient coming into play as a recommendation for height. There, it's always protein, when you hear people talk about the research that we know about it, but fat is really, really important for cognition, for brain development, for cognition, and for satiation, for having the body properly regulate everything.

I don't think that a zero-carbohydrate or a low-carbohydrate diet is necessarily the best choice for a teenager, a person who's metabolically healthy. In fact, when you actually get to the hormone level of human growth hormone, HGH and IGF, and these actual hormones that drive the creation of height, although I can't explain the actual metabolic process sufficiently here in this format, that insulin production and having a spike in insulin actually enhances some of those hormones.

So, carbohydrates, I don't think, are the enemy for metabolically normal children and teens, but in general, the carbohydrates should be consumed in the morning and at lunchtime and not consumed in the evening, if possible, for the best hormonal response, and they should be healthy carbohydrates. So, it should never be sugar.

Sugar is a poison. It shouldn't be bread. It should be potatoes and other carbohydrate vegetables to the extent that you're going to have carbohydrates. But the key thing to overemphasize is going to be protein. So, let me summarize the formula for you so far. Number one, unlimited quantities of calories, primarily focused on protein, heavy amounts of protein, supplemented by significant amounts of fat, and you should eliminate all of the junk, especially all of the junk that can mess all the signals of satiety up.

The primary way to avoid a young person being fat is to avoid eating the kinds of junk food that mess up his ability to know when he is satisfied. And so, if you're only eating healthy food, and healthy food is the food that is available to you, then you're going to eat until you're full, and then you're going to stop.

And when you're hungry, you're going to eat again until you're full, and then you're going to stop. It's only when you get into all the fake chemicals and all the garbage that messes all that system up that then we worry about people just dramatically overeating beyond their normal capacity.

The next thing that is absolutely necessary after huge amounts of calories, unlimited calories and lots of protein is sleep. After that, the second most important thing that a young person can do in order to reach his maximum height potential is to sleep. It is my strong conviction that if at all possible, children and young people should always sleep naturally with no artificial awakening.

I understand that our entire society has screwed this entire thing up. Everything in our modern society is an enemy to sleep. We have artificial lights that allow us to stay up and be productive and be stimulated until late into the night. We have artificial devices that stimulate us. They stimulate us with blue light late at night.

They stimulate us with constant kind of things that keep our brains engaged. We're engaged with constant and never-ending controversies and stresses that keep our brains awake. So we go to bed late, especially teens. They're up half the night. They go to bed late, doing all kinds of crazy stuff all through the night, going to bed at one o'clock in the morning.

And then our entire school system, at least in the standard model in the United States, starts far too early, and teens are dragged out of bed early in the morning to be at school at seven o'clock in the morning. And all of this is unnatural, and all of it is destructive for a young person's success.

This is not only destructive for height, by the way. This is also destructive for learning. All of the learning science that we're aware of indicates that memories are processed, and learning happens during sleep. Learning doesn't happen when you listen to a tape where you're just going to learn French in your sleep.

That does not work. But all of the learning is cemented during the nightly flushing that happens in the brain, and all of your actual learning is consolidated. And so, basically, the standard model for teens where they stay up really late, get very little, small amounts of sleep, get up way too early and go to school way too early, it destroys all of the cognitive benefit of learning during the daytime because the memories are never processed.

They never actually learn. But that's the academic side. What about the physical side? Well, the body grows during sleep, and it grows during sleep both literally, physically, but also during the production of certain hormones. So, the bulk of your human growth hormone is produced in a healthy body during sleep, and the most important sleep is the first hour.

That's when all of the hormones are produced. So, if you have a teenager, and you want your teenager to grow tall, the single cornerstone habit that you can instill is to go to bed at the same exact time every single day, ideally as early as is reasonable. Now, I have not raised teenagers myself.

It is my understanding from listening to other people with their stories of their teenagers, as well as a little cursory awareness of some of the studies on it, that the circadian rhythm of a teen naturally changes basically regardless of the environment. I'm skeptical that it has to be that way, but I'm willing to acknowledge that your teenager is probably going to stay up later.

That's what every parent of teens tells me is the case, and so I'm willing to acknowledge that that's probably the case, even though I fight against it. And I'm going to fight against it until I'm forced by outward circumstances to change. So, maybe it is the case that bedtime has to move from 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock, right?

That's fine. But the bedtime for a teenager should certainly not be 12 o'clock midnight, should certainly not be 2 o'clock in the morning. The bedtime for a teenager should be as early as possible in the evening and as much of a wind down as possible, and he should get to bed early and prioritize sleep.

Now, obviously, I can remember being a teen. Teens are often not enthusiastic about a "early bedtime." But if you want your teen to have maximum success in life, in academic outcomes, as well as in physical outcomes, you have to prioritize sleep. And perhaps this will help you if you're the parent of teens and you're fighting with your teens.

Dig into the literature a little bit and understand how important sleep is to both physical growth, physical development, athletic performance, as well as proper just hormonal regulation and long-term academic outcomes. I can't overstate how comprehensively consistent the literature is on this. There is no literature that I have ever found that indicates that sleep should not be a cornerstone habit.

So my suggestion for you with a teen is engage your teen with it and use height as potentially that thing, a motivator. I think a lot of teens are simply unaware, probably less now than when I was younger. But I was a teenager. Nobody ever talked about this stuff.

Today, with bro science and YouTube and social networks and whatnot, all this kind of information comes across a teenager's screen much more effectively, and then teenagers who are motivated can dig into it. But if you're a parent, dig into it yourself so that you can help your teenager to be motivated and to be knowledgeable about it.

If you have a young man that you're raising as a teenager and he wants to grow tall, then a cornerstone habit for him after eating enough and only eating high-quality food, a cornerstone habit needs to be sleep. And hopefully, this will give you an extra tool to motivate him.

And if you want the best outcome, let me tell you what I think is the best. How do you get great sleep? Number one is you should try to arrange so that whenever possible, your evening schedule involves some kind of early-ish wind down, so not a lot of high stimulation activities in the evening.

Now, you choose whatever time is appropriate for your functioning of your community. This will probably change between summer and winter and at different seasons of life, but try to arrange for some kind of wind down. Try to make certain that your home is not excessively bright, so making certain that your home is populated with yellow lights and that you can dim the lights as the evening goes on will make a big difference.

I have a very hard time believing that if we were to go back 200 years and we're all living by candlelight, that somehow teens are going to have that much of a hard time falling asleep at 8 o'clock when the sun goes down like everyone else does. Now, I don't know that.

I can't prove that. I'm just skeptical of that stuff. But regardless, we know that pulling down the light is a big deal, especially we know that if at all possible, we want dim lights. That's the most important thing as compared to bright lights. We want to get rid of blue lights if at all possible.

So if it's possible, we want to eliminate the use of screens and bulbs that give off blue light. You can do this using night mode on devices, night modes on TVs, night modes on phones, night modes on computers, and you can also use blue light blocking glasses. These are quite popular.

I have no experience myself with them, but these are quite popular for a lot of people. And so get a pair of blue light blocking glasses and start wearing those after dinner if you require doing some homework on the computer or things like that, and use night mode. And then have a consistent early bedtime.

And so what I would suggest for teens not having ever fathered a teen, so maybe I'm mistaken about this, but I really believe this is a good foundation, is have your teen consistently go to bed at an early time. Something like in most cultures, something like 9 to 10 o'clock I think would be ideal, maybe earlier if possible.

And then if your teen can't fall asleep due to that kind of natural circadian rhythm change, then have him read with a physical book, not a fake book, not an e-reader, have him read with a physical book, and have him read with a very dim yellow light. So just a soft artificial candle, that's what I like, is just kind of a soft artificial candle, or get a yellow book light for the purposes of reading in bed.

So if a teen is lying down in bed, horizontal, in a completely dark room, reading for an hour or two, then he should naturally fall asleep when his body is ready and prepared to go to sleep. The sleeping room should be as dark as possible. You should use blackout curtains, or the teen should use an eye mask if necessary, but the room should be as dark as possible.

It should be very cool, as cool as possible. And then there should be no non-natural waking time. So there should be no alarm clock. There should be no artificial awaking unless it's absolutely necessary. If you find that your teen has to get up to go to school at a certain time, then you have the only solution you have to that that's best for the health of the teen.

If you're not going to pull him out and homeschool and say, "We can start school when you wake up," then you need to dial back the bedtime in order for him to get a full night's sleep. Food, protein, and sleep are the cornerstone factors that will influence height as well as everything else.

All other performance and health and beauty and everything is influenced by those. Prioritize sleep and use the motivation that a young man may have to be tall or use the motivation that a young woman may have to be beautiful and tall and smart to prioritize sleep and motivate your teenagers to go to bed early.

Because when we're talking about height, remember, you only get puberty once. The time to maximize your height is before and during puberty when you have the most potential. I'll briefly touch on post-puberty height at the end of the show, but don't miss puberty and don't consign your child who could grow to be 6'2" to have him be stuck at 5'8" and then whining around online that all the girls want a 6' boyfriend.

Don't consign him to that just because he was goofing off all night on social media. End that and create a household that goes to bed early, which means, of course, that you, as a parent, you have to set the same solution. By the way, I think that's probably reasonable.

Some people are night owls, but on the whole, there's good evidence that the most important sleep is the sleep that happens early. I forget if it's before midnight, but they can track it. The sleep researchers see it. All right, what's the next factor that we know absolutely improves height?

Well, here it's athletics, it's movement, and most importantly, a special kind of movement. If you are parenting someone who wants to grow tall, you want to prioritize sprints. This is much more important than long, slow cardio. Sprinting has been demonstrated to enormously increase the production of human growth hormone, and basically what we're doing with these techniques is trying to maximize the hormonal potential of a body.

And so, there should be lots and lots of sprinting in a teenager's life. That should be the cornerstone thing to emphasize, lots and lots of sprinting. If you have lots of sprinting, which stimulates human growth hormone, lots of sleep, which stimulates human growth hormone, especially the first hour, and lots of food, then your child should reach his genetic maximum fairly easily.

But it needs to happen consistently from the beginning on. Tuesdays at Papa Murphy's, you can get large signature or thin crust pizzas for just $12. We call it Take and Bake Tuesday. Talking $12 Take and Bake Tuesday? That's today's topic. It's terrific for tuning up a tiring Tuesday through a tasty $12 treat.

Truthfully, Take and Bake Tuesday tops tossing back tacos. Tell that taco to hit the trail, it's Take and Bake Tuesday's time to triumph. Time out, this is turning into a tongue twister. Totally tis. So, just try Take and Bake for $12 every Tuesday at Papa Murphy's. Change the way you pizza.

And so, this should be always kind of a primary thing that you are driving towards. So, develop a structure where your child is sprinting consistently, and that sprinting should be constant and built into life. Incidentally, this is also going to help with many of the other things that we know have a knock-on effect.

I'm here trying to focus on the big things that are obvious and easy for you to take away from here. But sprinting will have a very natural effect on helping your child to maintain a low body fat percentage. Being lean is very important for HGH and IGF-1 production. So, you want to emphasize leanness.

Well, if someone is eating a lot, even if it's all high quality, how do we make certain that he doesn't get fat? We have exercise, and so that's where sprinting comes in. By sprinting, you are going to stimulate high quantities of human growth hormone. Sprinting also should lead to a child being more athletic.

I've become convinced that speed is trainable. When I was young, I always just thought, "Well, you're the speed that you are." But no, people can learn to be faster. Again, there's probably going to be genetic limitations, but most people can become faster. So, teaching your teenagers to be fast and getting them under a good sprint coach is going to help them to grow, but it's also going to help them in their athleticism.

It's going to lead to their potentially having more success with things like sport. We know that this will significantly increase testosterone production, which is hugely important for long-term growth. When men are in highly competitive masculine environments, especially things like sports competition, then that environment itself stimulates testosterone production. So, we want to do everything possible to create these environmental factors to stimulate testosterone production.

Now, sprinting has both the hormonal benefit as well as having the physical benefit, and by sprinting here, I'm referring to running, doing running sprints. We want to create an environment of as much physical activity as possible, and we want to create an environment with as much physical shock as possible.

There are many, many important reasons why we also want to do weightlifting and build muscle. All of that is going to be super important, but it's not directly related to height, and in fact, it could have a negative effect on height due to compression of the bones. We should do it, but it could have a negative effect on height.

So, somebody who is kind of in puberty or nearing the end of puberty and is very short, we would probably avoid heavy squats because we don't want to engage in anything that could be compressive on the skeletal system, and we would use other kinds of exercise. The kinds of exercise that we want to maximize in order to stimulate height are shock exercises and especially jumping exercises.

We want to stimulate bone growth and we want to stimulate nerve response and basically stretching out. So, the perfect exercise is going to be sprinting and then jumping exercises like basketball or volleyball, especially not sand volleyball where there's less impact, but court volleyball. Anything where we're constantly jumping is going to send signals to the body to indicate that it should grow, and especially while those growth plates are open, we want every part of the nervous system to be focused on growing as tall as possible.

So, do tall people play basketball or does basketball create tall people? Yes, both of those are true, but basketball and constant jumping and constant looking for height actually, as best I understand it, seems to stimulate growth in the body. There are other also interesting effects of this. Just the physical shock of this has an important impact on the bones.

Now, bones grow, again, not a doctor, forgive me if I get this wrong, but it's my understanding, bones grow in basically two ways. The primary way that bones grow has to do with the growth plates. So, during puberty, while the growth plates are open, the bone is just growing naturally through that normal process, and we want to stimulate that with all of the proper nutrition and all of the proper impact.

However, bones also grow, I think it's called Wolf's Law, something like that, bones also grow based upon tension. And so, we want to put as much tension and pressure on the bones of young people as possible so that the bones grow big and strong. And the bones grow big and strong both by bearing a heavy load, which is where weight-bearing exercises are important, and due to shock, that when you shock a bone, you create small micro-fractures in the bone, which in a way that's analogous to the way the body builds muscle, where we create small tears in the muscle and the body builds it back stronger.

We create small, tiny little fractures, micro-fractures in the bone due to shock, and then the body grows those back a little bit bigger. And this is one of the techniques that the bros are trying to use to lengthen the bones after puberty. More on that in a moment. But the point remains that we want to stimulate the hormones and the growth of the bones as much as possible with lots and lots of high-impact exercise.

So, lots of sprinting, lots of jumping, lots of plyometrics, lots of jumping down off of boxes from height, and especially jumping sports, such as basketball or volleyball or something else. And we want the highest-impact version of this to stimulate the maximum amount of growth. Now, when you put all this together, what I've said so far, this should sound like basically a fairly normal, healthy environment, which is clearly, I think, what most of us need.

We know that the human body is going to have a certain genetic potential based upon its overall—your parents, your grandparents, and genetics going back forever. And then the human body is going to develop best with high amounts of nutrition, with very nutritious foods that have a proper kind of comprehensive nutritional makeup.

We all know that junk food is doing nothing but harming us. And so, anything related to junk food, we can get rid of. We get rid of it. We all know that we need protein and fat and probably carbohydrates in order to reach our best potential. We all know that we need lots of sleep, good hydration, and lots of movement.

And that's all pretty well acknowledged. But if you disrupt any of those things, then you're going to minimize the body's ability to grow large. And by the way, that disruption really can happen at any point in time with long-ranging effects. I have a friend of mine who is a man who is very short.

And his reason for being short is that he was born, I think, with umbilical cord around his neck. I can't remember exactly. But he was born, he wasn't getting oxygen. He almost died as a baby. And his brothers are all tall, lots of genetic potential. But he himself is short because probably due to that trauma that he experienced as a baby.

If you observe the cases of children who are malnourished, who are starved, they never grow to be large and strong. And so, this stuff is obvious. And if you are interacting with a teenager that's just experiencing a high-stress environment and not sleeping and all this stuff, then there's a good chance that that person is not going to grow.

So far, what I've said, I don't believe is in any way uncontroversial. And if you maximize these things, I think you've done the things that there's really strong evidence for and that's kind of intuitive that you obviously should do. Now, I'm going to continue on and we're going to talk briefly a little bit about bro science.

Now, I have a lot of respect for bro science. And the idea here is, it's kind of a slang term that we use for the bros, the guys online who want to accomplish something and they're talking around and studying this and theorizing that and testing this and trying that and documenting that and things like that.

Generally, the bros are not people with a trained scientific background. They're usually not medical doctors, usually not statisticians, usually not researchers. But the bro science is, I have a high respect for because I think this is the foundation of good scientific research. And what has happened is before we could all connect on the internet, we were finding that the whole scientific community was strangled by the publishing process.

Whereas dispersed knowledge and dispersed experts, especially people who have a high interest in going and finding other academic research to review, this is something that's really valuable. But we also need to take it with a significant grain of salt. Anything that we learn from something like bro science needs to be tested by a proper scientific verification, if at all possible.

And we should hold bro science or whatever the girl version of that is, I haven't heard of girl science, probably out there, we should hold it loosely and say, "These things could be true, but I'm not certain they're true." And if you get into bro science, you get into two basic areas.

Number one is, are there other things that you could do to stimulate growth before and during puberty? And then are there things that we could do after puberty? Let's begin with first, before and during puberty, when the growth plates are open, what are some of the things that we want to do?

And by the way, if you want to gain access to what I'm about to talk about, remember, up till now, I've focused on things that I think are pretty well demonstrated, pretty well proven. I think that most doctors are going to agree with me. I don't think I've made a mistake so far.

If I'm going to make a mistake, it's going to be in the second part here of the show where I dig into this bro science stuff, because I'm not an expert, I don't understand it well enough. I'm trying to give you a list of general guidelines that I think will be helpful to you.

If you want to access bro science yourself, your best place is to start is YouTube. Go to YouTube, do a couple of searches, some things like how to grow taller, how to reach my maximum height, how guys can get taller, things like that. Watch a few videos, and then sit back and let the algorithm start feeding you some algorithmically chosen videos, and then start looking through and seeing what you learn from it.

And the bros have dug a lot deeper into the science and understanding it because they're usually highly motivated. There's a guy who's 20 years old and he's five foot eight, and he says, "I got to reach six foot," and so he's doing all kinds of stuff to try to do it.

So I'm not that motivated, being tall, naturally, so I just have a cursory knowledge of it. But let's begin with, I'm going to pull together a few lists from the bros that I'm going to talk from now. So let's start with a list of mistakes that you want to avoid.

Some of the things that are really important during puberty for guys is that you need to make certain that you avoid high estrogen levels. If your estrogen levels are high, then that can cause your growth plates to close prematurely, premature to what they otherwise would do. They close quickly.

So you need to reduce estrogen levels in your body during the growth period. How do you do that? How do you reduce estrogen levels? Well, first, you need to make certain that you maintain a low, healthy body weight, that you're not fat. It's my understanding that fat tissue, especially visceral fat, can convert testosterone into estrogen through a process called aromatization.

So by keeping your body fat percentage down, you're avoiding that process of creating high estrogen levels. I think of this one basically as man boobs, is that we want to avoid getting man boobs. Why does a guy get man boobs? Because he gets fat. So we want to avoid that.

Incidentally, I'm going to say something. It's very strong. It'll be offensive to many people, but I really think it's an important message that we as parents adopt. I believe that for you to have fat children and fat teenagers is a form of child abuse. Allowing your children and teens to be fat is a form of child abuse.

Now, obviously, it's not a severe form of child abuse in compared to the many horrific kinds of abuse that children face. But having been a fat teenager, I want to promise you that that life sucks and it's something that you want to avoid. And I don't see any reason why any child or any teen should be fat.

And I see a whole host of things that parents can do and should do and must do to help their children unfat themselves. And all of this just involves lifestyle changes. So if you are a parent of a fat child, then I believe that you should take that as a responsibility and say, "I have to change this, and I have to do this while I can." Because coming from Joshua Sheets, remember, I have been a fat child and a fat teenager, and that sucks.

And if you can change it as a parent, you must change it. And by the way, you can change it. It's totally changeable. But allowing your healthy young boys to be fat kids with estrogen producing man boobs in them, that is child abuse, and we should deal with it as such.

Now, again, I acknowledge that I'm using a strong and very offensive term here, but that's how I think of it in my own mind, and I want us to change that. So we have to keep body weight down. How else do we keep estrogen low for boys? We need to avoid estrogenic foods.

We need to limit soy products, especially. We need to avoid all processed foods. All processed foods should go away. Be thoughtful. If possible, consider things like organic produce. Avoiding pesticides, which may be endocrine disruptors, can be one strategy that I think is worth doing. So if you have money and you can afford to purchase organic food, then that's probably something that you should do.

You need to reduce as much as possible other access to other endocrine disruptors. So plastics are a huge deal. We have to avoid BPA, BPS, because those substances can mimic estrogen. So you never heat food in plastic containers. You always use BPA-free products, and whenever possible, just reduce the use of plastic.

Just completely cut it out. There's really no reason for plastic in your household. Be super, super careful with all kind of personal care products. Many cosmetics and shampoos and lotions and all of that stuff contains all kinds of junks, parabens and phthalates and all kinds of chemicals, and a lot of the stuff increases estrogen.

So we need to get rid of all that stuff if at all possible and keep the skin products as pure as possible. You also want to eliminate cleaners and toxic cleaners and chemicals from your home, and go to super simple stuff. Clean with vinegar. Don't clean with the weird stuff that just had all the stuff.

Eliminate all the fragrances. Eliminate all the cheap candles and all this crap that messes up our systems. Filter your water. So tap water, especially in a municipal system, tap water can contain trace amounts of estrogenic substances, BPA, pharmaceuticals like birth control residues in our water, and all kinds of other pollutants.

So it's not going to kill you from drinking it, but it's going to screw up your system. So get a high-quality water filter in your house and make certain that you remove all of that stuff. And then be thoughtful about foods. I've read that there are foods that lower estrogen.

Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, flax seeds may be useful. Citrus, things like that are the kinds of things that could help to reduce estrogen amounts. And then hopefully this isn't a big thing for teens, but reduce alcohol consumption. Alcohol can mess with the liver's ability to metabolize estrogen.

And then just in and of itself, like beer, for example, is one of the worst, like most feminine things possible. I always think of it as beer gives you boobs. So make sure your teen isn't consuming beer. It's terrible. I hate the fact that men associate beer with like kind of a masculine drink.

It's not. It's a terrible drink from the perspective of masculinity and femininity, and estrogen is a component of it. So however we do it, we want to do the best job possible of limiting estrogen levels, especially for your boys and your male teens. We want to avoid certain kinds of chemicals.

We want to avoid accutane. Accutane is a brand name for isotretinoin, which is a medication that's used to treat severe acne. Be super, super careful about anything like that because it can cause premature closing of the growth plates because it speeds up the maturation of chondrocytes. So be careful of anything related to acne medications.

I am no expert on acne, but I think that a huge portion of it can be cleared up with dietary influences. So if you got someone struggling with acne, put them on an all-beef diet and see what happens after a few months, and I'll bet you a significant part of it goes away.

I don't know what your teen would rather have, acne scars when he's 20 years old or an extra few inches of height, but my guess is the height would probably be a priority. You have to absolutely make certain that there's no steroid use or artificial testosterone injections. This is deadly, and as anabolic steroids for muscle growth has become more common in our society, then these are filtering down to teens.

And so steroid use and artificial testosterone can deplete your stem cells, and that leads to early closure of the growth plates. We want to avoid tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors. These are substances that, as I understand it, are intended to block the estrogen receptors. In theory, these could be used under careful supervision of a doctor to potentially do all that good stuff we were saying earlier about getting rid of the estrogen, but ironically, it seems as though they actually could lead to earlier closure of the growth plates if the hormonal balances are not maintained properly.

So we want to be super careful about jumping on random drugs without understanding them, without being under a doctor's care. And then the obvious ones. Don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs, don't eat junk food in any form. No marijuana, no vaping, no Doritos, no junk food at all, because all of that stuff can reduce your human growth hormone production, mess with your blood flow, hinder your ability to produce IGF-1, and it's all the basic functioning of these hormones that actually creates the growth in a young body.

Let's switch now. What about things like vitamins and supplements? I'm not really competent to advise on this, so I'm just going to list some names that I hear about and say that a lot of this stuff probably would have some impact, but it's unproven, and a lot of this stuff I'm guessing would be available in a good diet.

But here's what people look at. First, a lot of the bros are supplementing with minerals to help with bone regulation and bone repair. Magnesium, zinc, boron, calcium, and phosphorus. The bros are also taking amino acids to try to help create necessary proteins like collagen and help with hormone regulation of HGH.

So aminos like arginine, ornithine, lysine. Some guys are taking a little bit of creatine. I don't know much about creatine. I was always super skeptical about it, but now I hear more people talking about its positive benefits, and glutamine. Some people are taking proteins and peptides, collagen supplements, beef gelatin, colostrum powder, and then vitamins that support various bodily functions, especially vitamins A, B6, B7, B12, C, E, and K2, in addition to omega fatty acids from fish oil supplements and flaxseed supplements.

Some of the bros are taking glucosamine sulfate with the goal of basically keeping their morning height before their body gets compressed and to support cartilage synthesis in order to get to sleep. Sometimes some bros are supplementing with melatonin, although that should not be done on an ongoing basis. Some of the bros are using something called GABA, which evidently reduces cortisol and can promote the release of human growth hormone, as well as various adaptogens such as ashwagandha, tribulus, and rhodiola rosea.

And I don't myself have any idea what any of those are. I just hear about them in listening to what the bros are testing. Talk to a doctor. And then some of the supplements that are out there that generally you should never engage with unless you are speaking to a doctor.

One is MK-677, which is ibutamorin, which, as I understand it, has been proven to make teens taller but can cause all kinds of problems. Obviously, human growth hormone injections, which may lead to growth of height but can cause other health problems. And then anabolic steroids, which are likely to speed up the closure of the natural growth plates.

So, in general, I think be super careful with anything that is chemical and medical and just focus on those proven things that I said, and that's probably going to be enough for what anybody needs. I think the reason the guys are short is their sleeping, probably sleeping and nutrition.

And if you just fix nutrition and sleep and movement, you've probably fixed a whole lot of problems. Now, in conclusion, let's turn to kind of a wacky and interesting world of the question of can you grow taller after puberty? The idea is after the growth plates on your bones close, can you grow taller?

Now, the interesting answer is absolutely yes. Before you think I've lost my mind, I would say absolutely yes with regard to surgery. There are clinics around the world that you can find people telling their stories where basically a dude will go in and they perform this procedure where basically they cut the bones in their legs, stretch the bones out, and after this very long and painful procedure, literally they're adding several heights, several inches of height to people.

And evidently, growing taller is such a big deal that people are willing to pay huge amounts of money and undergo enormous amounts of pain to grow taller after puberty through the use of surgery. So, I'm hoping to help you avoid that, help your children avoid that, but just trying to remind you of some basic things that are going to help them reach their genetic potential when they're younger, but basically not stunting their growth.

But that is the case. Now, short of that, it's kind of interesting to try to understand could this make a difference. If you go on YouTube or you start listening to people, you'll find a whole lot of guys in their early 20s and late teens who are really focused on this.

And again, they're doing the bro science thing where they're looking and looking and trying to figure out is this possible because they want to grow. The answer is probably not much, meaning that would be the medical answer as I understand it. Most doctors would say, "Can you grow after the growth plates are closed?" As I understand it, the responsible answer would be to say, "Well, probably not.

No, you can't." Some would be probably very certain, "No, you can't," or, "Probably not," or it would be very unreliable. But the guys are testing it. And as I understand it, there are a couple of things that they are testing. First and foremost, it's that it's a little bit uncertain.

Unless you've had an actual x-ray, I guess it would show you if the growth plates... Unless you've had a full x-ray that says definitively, "Your growth plates are certainly closed," then there's a bit of a wiggle room at the end of puberty as to how long a guy can grow.

There have been some people who stopped growing when they were 15 years old, and there are some people who were still growing at 25 without doing anything unusual. But the normal thing is by the time you're out of your teenage years, your growth plates are probably closing over. So, there are a couple of things that guys are trying to do.

Number one, they're trying to do everything possible with their hormones to do everything possible to try to get any growth that is left from a hormonal perspective. So, it's not uncommon that a teenage young man will go through and eat like junk and not exercise and not sleep, and all of a sudden he's 17 years old and he's super short, and he's like, "Well, maybe I could do something." So, if he cleans up his diet and he cleans up his sleep and cleans up his habits, then maybe he could still grow a little bit.

In theory, there's some interesting theories about possibly if hormonal changes were significant enough that maybe there would be some kind of change that could actually happen with the hormones. You see this with... There's been some documented medical cases of people who've had a dysfunction in their pituitary gland, and I think there was one guy I was reading about that went from like dwarfism to giantism based upon this change in his pituitary gland.

So, I don't understand it enough, and I'm not interested enough to dig into it enough to understand it, but that would be kind of the hormonal aspect of it. And then a lot of them are also focusing on trying to say, "Is there something physical that we could do?" And this physicality to me makes sense, but it is hard work.

And so, there are two elements to the physicality. The first one is basically stretching, and stretching doesn't seem to have the greatest long-term effect, but it's not nothing. So, as I understand it, our height changes based upon the work that gravity affects on our bodies. So, if you measure yourself in the morning, right after you get up, after you've been lying in a bed all night, then that's when you're going to be the absolute tallest.

And then it's not uncommon to lose a not insignificant amount of height throughout the day so that at the end of the day, when gravity has been pulling you down, you are the shortest at that point in time. So, there's people that are experimenting with various things to stretch themselves out, and they do hanging on a bar and stretch out and decompress their spine.

And sometimes they hang upside down using something like gravity boots or an inversion table. And that kind of stretching activity does seem to have some impact on height, but it doesn't seem to be anything that is long-lasting or permanent. It's basically just stretching out all the ligaments and the vertebrae and the bones.

And that's probably not a bad thing, just like—by the way, I didn't even talk about fixing posture—but you can fix your posture and express yourself as a taller person. The more long-lasting thing would be to say, "Can you grow the bones?" And this is what some of the bros are trying to test.

There's some documented history. There was a Russian guy who was a high jumper that grew when he was in his 20s because he wanted to be a better high jumper. And one of the things that he pioneered was basically he slept with—he set up a system of like an elastic band bed, and while he was sleeping, he would have these bands stretch him.

And this, in addition to basically law of attraction exercises where he just visualized himself growing taller, he was able to allegedly, documentedly, extend his height by several inches from this. And so what the bros are trying to do is to test this and say, "If we get a lot of high impact activity for our bones, which creates small micro fractures in the bone," again, as I said earlier, that's analogous to the small micro tears of a muscle when you're exercising, "and then we sleep or we spend significant amounts of time in kind of a stretched-out position, then as our bones grow, they regrow and they rebuild the basic bone material in a stretched-out way.

And could this help us to lengthen our bones, lengthen the bones of our legs so that we are actually taller?" And there's people that are claiming to get that experience. They're documenting it. I don't know how true it is. It's just interesting to observe. I find it fascinating from a purely scientific perspective to see people informing themselves, see us sharing research around the world, and then seeing people documenting their experiments.

That's what I love about bro science. On the whole, it sounds like an enormous hassle, sounds very painful, and it sounds kind of weird to be that obsessed with height beyond that perspective. I think that one of the negative things about height is that this can become such a big thing in guys' minds.

And instead of just embracing however tall you actually are and enhancing yourself with other characteristics, then the guys sit around and become depressed because they're not six feet tall. And I have a real bone to pick with people that emphasize this. And I feel like a lot of the bros and kind of the red pillars and things like this are spending so much time on height, talking about how, "Well, you've got to be six feet tall," or, "You've got to have a certain height, and that's going to make everything easy." And in so doing, it could cause a young and impressionable and vulnerable young man to think that's somehow going to change everything.

But I know lots of short guys who are extraordinarily competent, extremely successful, married to beautiful women, have great lives, are very highly respected, and they've done it all though being short. And interestingly, I've spent some time talking with some men in this situation. And in the same way that I'm glad that I'm tall, because that was my experience, they've expressed to me that they're glad that they're short, because being short and having to deal with the discrimination that they faced as short men caused them to become stronger and to adapt for that height restriction, for being short, with other character qualities and other things that were ultimately quite effective for them.

And so I think that one of the things that really bothers me when I spend time listening to these guys and reading the comments is that some people think that somehow being tall is a magic formula that is going to lead to your automatically being successful in life. And I can tell you as a tall man, it ain't that way.

I'm glad that I'm tall. I acknowledge that it has helped me in many ways and is a great benefit, but it's not some kind of unilateral cheat code that fixes everything. You still got to develop a whole bunch of other stuff. So if you do the stuff that I've recommended and you still wind up being shorter than you would hope to be, don't even worry about it.

Press on and do the best you can. My hope in today's podcast, again, as I said, very esoteric. Here's one of those factors that is genuinely a true factor. I think you can help your children especially to do this. And I think that this should be one of those areas in which the reason you get rich is so you can spend more money on food.

And that's kind of the closing point I want to make to you, is that sometimes people spend so much time piling up money and you're still eating rice and beans because, "Well, we're not going to spend more than 21% of our household income," and your kids are starving because they're eating rice and beans.

And I want to shake you and say, "Bro, go buy some steaks." Throughout history, one of the great benefits of being wealthy has been to be able to afford higher quality food and enough of it. Throughout history, most of our ancestors have gone through their lives basically starved, starved both of calories and of nutrition.

Good food costs more than cheap food. I am grateful that we can stay alive and get enough calories to be okay very, very cheaply today, but good food is still going to cost you money. And so, you should embrace the fact that you can afford better groceries and you can afford higher quality food.

And this is quite literally something that you're building an inheritance in for your family, for your future, and for your future health, and for your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren. You have the ability, not only prior to conception of your children, but you have the ability to affect the epigenetic future of your children.

And so, feeding your children the best quality food that you can afford and the best quality food that you can find should be a high priority for your wealth. And it's interesting. You see this in a lot of people. There was a video that was going around Twitter, sorry, picture, I don't know, six months, 10 months ago, something like that.

And it was a picture side-by-side of Bear Grylls' son, Marmaduke, and Donald Trump's son, Barron Trump. And it was funny because you had these graduation pictures of Bear Grylls and his wife and their son, Marmaduke, who's just towering over his father. And then you had Barron Trump towering over Donald and Melania Trump.

And this is exactly what my pictures with my parents look like. This is what we should look for as fathers and as mothers, is we want our children to be a few inches higher than we are. And then we want our grandchildren to wind up being a few inches higher than our children are.

And we want to express and continue to grow to the ability that we're able to because all of the things that lead to height also lead to health, also lead to better cognitive performance, lead to all of the other things. Remember that it's not necessarily the case that height is some kind of social cheat code that is the thing that makes you successful.

It's not all discrimination. Let me read you the abstract. Here's this from a paper that was published by researchers Anne Case and Christina Paxson. The paper is called "Stature and Status, Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes." Let me just read you, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in August of 2006.

Here's the abstract. "It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and on average earn more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized factors such as self-esteem, social dominance, and discrimination.

In this paper, we offer a simpler explanation. On average, taller people earn more because they're smarter. As early as age three, before schooling has had a chance to play a role, and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests. The correlation between height in childhood and adulthood is approximately 0.7 for both men and women, so that tall children are much more likely to become tall adults.

As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence for which they earn handsome returns. Using four datasets from the US and the UK, we find that the height premium in adult earnings can be explained by childhood scores on cognitive tests.

Furthermore, we show that taller adults select into occupations that have higher cognitive skill requirements and lower physical skill demands. So if this paper is true in terms of the author's research outcomes, then the basic point of height is just to use it as an external marker for what I'm going to call health.

A healthy body is going to grow to its genetic potential, and height and health also produce high cognitive ability or intelligence. So height is just an external thing that we can see of the internal processes. And this is basically the same thing with regard to beauty, that beauty is an outward indicator, generally, of health.

So if we look at it in that terms, then you don't have to think, "Well, Joshua's just trying to paint some weird picture where we're trying to be high so we can get the girls." I'm saying that what you do to create good health, all those things I said of abundant food, of the highest quality, lots of protein, lots of high-quality animal proteins, lots of sleep, and lots of exercise, these are the things that our bodies need to actually create physical health through all of the natural processes that it already is doing.

You probably don't need to supplement with all that stuff. Your body's just doing that stuff naturally with adequate and good sources of nutrition. So it's just a natural flow-together factor. But by pulling it apart in this way and talking about the component factors, I hope that I can encourage you to, most importantly, buy good quality food for your children and eliminate junk food from your house and for you, and number two, encourage a good sleep environment for your family, both for yourself and for your children.

You got to fight for this. It's an epidemic for our teens and they're destroying their lives. And these things will lead to good hormonal regulation, lead to higher testosterone levels, better HGH production. And then we combine that with lots of activity, which again has all those hormonal effects and creates a healthy body, then we're putting in place a good foundation.

And whether it's a good foundation to earn more or just spend less money on healthcare, this is absolutely a solid personal finance topic. Hope you've enjoyed the show. Esoteric? Yes. Interesting? I hope so. I love weird trails like this. I love it. I hope you've enjoyed my narration of it.

I refer you to the bros for more discussion, but on the whole, just do those things that I said that we know work and then let the bros keep on experimenting. I think it's super fun to see what they wind up with in the coming years and build a genetic heritage for your great, great grandchildren.

Use your money to do that. Thanks for listening. I'll be back with you very soon. Boldly searching for your next used vehicle? With CarMax, you don't have to settle on anything when it comes to your ride. Instead, steer clear of the ordinary and buy the car that's right for you.

Because CarMax makes it easy to stop settling and find a car you'll love today. Start shopping now at CarMax.com. CarMax, the way car buying should be.