0:00

You're a podcast listener, and this is

0:02

a podcast ad. Reach great listeners

0:04

like yourself with podcast advertising from Lips

0:06

& Ads. Choose from hundreds of

0:09

top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a

0:11

reproduced ad like this one across thousands of

0:13

shows to reach your target audience with Lips

0:15

& Ads. Go to

0:17

lipsandads.com now. That's

0:20

L-I-B-S-Y-N, ads.com. Welcome

0:23

to Radical Personal Finances Show dedicated to providing you

0:25

with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need

0:27

to live a rich and meaningful life now while

0:29

building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years

0:31

or less. My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your

0:34

host, and on today's podcast, I want to explore

0:36

some of the traits, characteristics,

0:38

and attributes that

0:40

a wise and thoughtful and

0:42

strategic young man or young

0:45

woman could and

0:47

should look for in a

0:49

prospective spouse that are

0:51

likely to be highly correlated

0:53

with long-term financial

0:56

productivity. In fact,

0:58

I think highly causative of

1:01

long-term financial productivity. One

1:03

of the things that's most interesting to me as

1:05

we look at personal finance and we look at

1:08

the world that we live

1:10

in is we all understand

1:12

that the person that you

1:14

choose to marry makes an

1:16

enormous difference in the quality

1:18

of your life as well

1:20

as objective long-term outcomes. How

1:22

long you live, how much wealth

1:24

you have, we know that's true. We

1:27

know that marriage is highly

1:29

correlated with positive financial outcomes.

1:31

Married people accumulate significantly

1:33

more wealth than non-married people, they

1:36

earn higher incomes. Basically

1:39

every factor across society

1:41

is higher for married

1:43

people and significantly higher.

1:46

This confounds even cohabitating

1:48

couples who are not married, they

1:50

are not nearly as productive at

1:52

creating and accumulating wealth as married

1:54

people. We understand that marriage

1:57

is going to dramatically impact the life of

1:59

the people. long-term outcomes that you

2:01

have in life. We

2:04

understand that those outcomes are

2:06

going to be financially measurable.

2:09

On the most recent podcast, I shared with you

2:11

some ideas on how to find and attract the

2:13

spouse of your dreams. In a moment, I'll tell

2:16

you exactly why. But there's

2:18

a piece of content or advice

2:20

that I myself have never come

2:22

across in the world of

2:26

personal finance and financial literature. That

2:29

line of thinking is simply,

2:32

what should you look for

2:34

in a potential spouse that

2:36

is likely to lead to

2:38

your becoming wealthy together as

2:41

a couple? It may exist

2:43

out there. I've not gone specifically looking

2:45

for it. What I'm saying is that

2:47

after a lifetime and a career of

2:49

consuming personal finance, literature, and discussions, I've

2:52

not come across anybody who's talked about

2:54

this. I want to

2:56

open the conversation up with some ideas on

2:58

this. To me, it seems obvious that we

3:00

should talk about this. I think I understand

3:02

why we don't. After

3:04

all, very few of us

3:07

are strategic in pursuing marriage.

3:10

It would be very unusual to have a

3:12

handsome, young 20-year-old guy who has a

3:15

list of all of the things that

3:17

if I just pursue these things and

3:20

if my potential marriage candidate, the

3:22

woman that I'm pursuing has

3:25

these factors, then I'm definitely going to marry her.

3:27

If she doesn't, I'm not. It's very

3:29

unusual for, first of all, any young

3:31

person to be strategic about marriage and

3:34

even more than usual for that person

3:36

to be strategic in financial terms. After

3:39

all, those of us with experience, we

3:41

would quickly rush to

3:44

diminish the importance of financial

3:46

productivity in favor of other

3:49

more compelling metrics of life

3:51

satisfaction, such as happiness and

3:53

contentment and peacefulness and other

3:55

things. After

3:58

all, we all recognize that it's a problem. better

4:00

to be happy and content and satisfied

4:02

with life and not financially wealthy than

4:05

to be financially wealthy and not happy

4:07

and content and satisfied with life. And

4:09

there is a train of debate and

4:11

discussion that happens on this simply

4:14

does earning

4:17

ability predict happiness and satisfaction.

4:20

Well I think that these

4:22

things are highly correlated and I

4:24

don't think you have to choose

4:26

one or the other. I think

4:28

that you can be rich and

4:30

be happy. It's not impossible and

4:33

so to say that would you choose to

4:35

be rich or to be happy is a

4:37

false dilemma. And similarly to

4:40

say would you choose a marriage that

4:42

is financially productive or that leads to

4:44

happiness and long term success in life

4:46

is a false dilemma. There's no reason

4:49

to pull these things apart. We can

4:52

recognize that both of them are

4:54

important and we can recognize it

4:56

while keeping priority. So it

4:58

would be similar to say is it

5:01

possible to be virtuous or

5:03

righteous and rich. It

5:06

would be silly to say that you couldn't accomplish

5:08

both of those things but each

5:10

man is going to have a different priority.

5:13

You will say I'm going to choose

5:15

to do the right thing regardless of whether it

5:18

cost me because I believe that it's more important

5:20

for me to be morally righteous than for me

5:22

to be rich. Another man would

5:24

say I'm going to prioritize being rich because

5:27

I'd rather be a rich

5:29

scoundrel than a righteous popper. So

5:32

similarly it's a false

5:34

choice to say that we can choose

5:36

between a marriage relationship that is likely

5:39

to lead to financial productivity or that's

5:41

likely to lead to happiness. Why not

5:43

have a marriage relationship that is optimized

5:45

for both of those things? We

5:48

can optimize and say that happiness is

5:50

more important to me than financial productivity

5:54

without saying that financial productivity is unimportant.

5:56

So if we're going to talk in

5:58

the context of finance. We

6:00

ought to at least start the conversation

6:02

and discuss what are the

6:04

factors that you should look for in

6:06

a high quality, high value potential spouse

6:09

that are likely to lead to the

6:13

long-term outcome. I think

6:15

we know intuitively what some of

6:17

those qualities are. It would

6:20

be very unusual to find a beautiful, smart,

6:23

attractive young woman who

6:25

is not attracted to a man

6:27

who has a high earning capacity.

6:30

That would be a normal thing

6:32

that happens in society that we

6:35

all naturally understand. But there's

6:37

a lot more to it than just, well, he makes a

6:39

lot of money. I think we

6:41

should talk about these factors and consider them and

6:44

consider what we should optimize for and

6:47

how we should go about it. I

6:50

understand that most people are not

6:53

strategic in pursuing a developing marriage.

6:56

I wasn't, most of us aren't. Most

6:58

of us kind of just end up in a

7:00

situation that we're in and sometimes we're happy

7:02

with us, sometimes we're not. But

7:04

just because people in the past

7:06

weren't strategic doesn't mean that no

7:09

one was strategic. And just

7:11

because perhaps many people were

7:13

not strategic in the past doesn't mean

7:15

that you shouldn't be strategic today or

7:18

that your children shouldn't be strategic. After

7:21

all, one of the great challenges that is

7:23

different in this year than perhaps some decades

7:25

back is that we formerly

7:27

had a strong marriage culture, at least

7:30

in the culture that I'm from, the

7:32

Western tradition from the United States of

7:34

America personally, but across broadly Western culture.

7:37

We formerly had a strong marriage

7:39

culture that made strategy

7:41

unnecessary for most people.

7:45

But that culture is gone. The

7:48

culture that we live in is not

7:50

facilitating marriage. Young people are

7:52

not connecting with one another. They're not

7:54

dating one another. They're not having sexual

7:57

relationships with one another and when they

7:59

are having sexual relationships and dating

8:01

one another, those relationships are not automatically

8:03

leading to marriage. The relationships that do

8:05

lead to marriage are not automatically leading

8:08

to children. So those of

8:10

us who are older have to roll up

8:12

our sleeves and get involved and try to

8:14

figure out what do we do differently. And

8:17

even if it's hopeless for, let's

8:19

say, a 30-year-old guy or gal

8:22

today, it's not hopeless for my children and

8:24

it's not hopeless for your children and it's

8:26

not hopeless for the 30-year-old guy or gal

8:28

today either. So just because our

8:30

culture is gone doesn't mean

8:32

that you and I can't

8:34

employ strategy in the face

8:36

of cultural opposition to get

8:38

the long-term outcomes that stable

8:41

marriages and productive marriages entail.

8:43

And what I'm trying to do in this

8:46

series is I'm trying to bring open the

8:48

discussion in your own mind so that you can think

8:50

about what you agree

8:52

with, what you appreciate, what you don't.

8:54

As always, take what's useful, discard the

8:56

rest, but I want you

8:58

to make you think about what you want

9:01

and what you envision. And I want you

9:03

to think long-term so that you have

9:05

strategic foundation for your decisions, not just being

9:07

ruled by your emotions. And I want you

9:09

to develop options. One of the reasons

9:12

I spent so much time in the previous

9:14

episode talking about a framework to develop your

9:16

own attractiveness basically is to

9:18

help you develop options. One reason very

9:20

few young men and women are

9:23

strategic in their,

9:25

in who they would

9:27

pursue for marriage is that most

9:29

people just don't have that many

9:31

options. It's very unusual

9:34

for a young man or woman to

9:36

be sitting back with five potential marriage

9:38

candidates and be strategically assessing.

9:40

Well, let's see, candidate number one

9:42

has a cumulative score of

9:45

87 points and candidate

9:47

number two is 84.3 points. What

9:49

kind of tiebreaker could I employ

9:51

between candidates one and two? That's

9:53

not how life works. Normally, you

9:55

just have an option That comes along at

9:57

a point in your life in which you're thinking about it. And

10:00

you're open to it. and boom, you

10:02

move forward. And I'm not opposed to

10:04

that. I think that's okay, but. For.

10:07

Young man or woman who has

10:09

options. Is that the best

10:11

way to go about it? Now we

10:14

could find this most effectively and literature

10:16

usually from the female perspective if we

10:18

go back and we read. Many.

10:20

Works of Literature and we find a very

10:23

attractive woman or in some cases a very

10:25

attractive man with an annual income of nineteen

10:27

thousand and a if we find it an

10:29

attractive man or woman. There. Will

10:31

be a variety of people who are

10:33

interested in that man or woman. and

10:35

of there's some love story that ensues

10:37

to where the person finds ultimately true

10:40

love. And so my point is to

10:42

articulate that because when I was a

10:44

teenager nobody spoke to me seriously. And

10:46

the way that I will speak to

10:48

my sons and. Son. Seriously and

10:50

say, listen, you need to maximize your attractiveness

10:53

and your value in all dimensions in order

10:55

for you to have the chance of attracting

10:57

a high quality spouse. Nobody did that and

10:59

so I just didn't I never thought about

11:01

it and it seems obvious to say it,

11:04

but I never thought about it. So if

11:06

I never thought about it, I figure that's

11:08

probably two or three other guys in the

11:10

world who haven't thought about two or three

11:12

other girls in the world haven't thought about

11:15

it's and it's days world. What I see

11:17

is that a lot of people aren't thinking

11:19

about it. Even in terms of

11:21

spousal attraction, there's an enormous conflict

11:24

happening among young people. today. It's

11:26

who are not married, were there

11:28

optimizing for sexual appeal and sexual

11:31

activity and relationships are that are

11:33

not leading to marriage rounds and

11:35

optimizing for marriage. And we see

11:38

clearly where that goes in the

11:40

toxic culture that it creates for

11:42

young men and women. And so

11:45

we have to find other strategies

11:47

to forgive me for a very

11:49

long. Intro But this really really

11:51

matters and I want to provide you

11:53

are one of these stimulate your thinking,

11:56

To think about if I want to be

11:58

rich and if I'm gonna get married then

12:00

what should I look for? The.

12:03

Spouse that you marry

12:05

will do three important

12:07

things: will have three

12:09

important impact on your

12:11

financial future. First, Your.

12:13

Spouse or selection will enormously

12:16

impact your immediate and long

12:18

term financial future. On the

12:20

positive side, meeting your income,

12:22

the money that you make,

12:24

the investments the you earned

12:26

the trajectory of your career,

12:30

Your. Spouse's selected to make a huge

12:32

difference on that's let's go through those

12:34

for just a moment. Obviously the most.

12:37

Glaring. Example as what income

12:39

does my spouse earned If you

12:42

are a young woman and you

12:44

marry a man who was earning

12:46

fifty thousand dollars a year and

12:49

doesn't have much potential but taught

12:51

beyond cost of living raises in

12:53

his life. As compared

12:56

to a man who is in a

12:58

highly paid career or on a highly

13:00

paid for career trajectory and as a

13:02

potential to earn five hundred thousand dollars

13:05

a year, there's going to be an

13:07

obvious difference in your long term wealth

13:09

based upon that selection between those potential

13:12

husbands. So. There's

13:14

that income is to his direct and clear.

13:16

But there's more important in terms of a

13:18

career trajectory for all of us. Let's say

13:21

that you're a young man and you're married

13:23

to a woman. Who.

13:27

Complements your career choice or a woman

13:29

who you're constantly fighting with in your

13:31

career Choice does can take many different

13:34

expressions are to take an expression in

13:36

terms of where you need to live

13:38

for your couple for both of your

13:41

incomes, How you need to approach it,

13:43

How much see once you to come

13:45

home from work early cause that's where

13:47

she is versus how much he supports

13:50

you working late, working on the weekends,

13:52

going for it, taking risks, living small

13:54

and frugally so that you can accumulate

13:57

investment capital. these things are

13:59

enormously impactful long-term and it's the relational

14:01

dynamics that make a big, big difference.

14:04

So enormously impact to your short and

14:06

long-term financial future on the positive side

14:09

is going to be determined based upon the

14:11

specific person that you marry. Now

14:13

we can flip it to the negative side. The

14:16

spouse that you marry is going to

14:18

enormously impact your long-term financial future on

14:20

the negative side. The big one is

14:22

risk of divorce. You may lose a

14:24

decade of financial productivity. If you marry

14:27

somebody, you're in it for a decade

14:29

and then there's a divorce and all of a

14:32

sudden your net worth is destroyed. You lose several

14:34

years of productive work that are now

14:37

spent fighting for in divorce court.

14:39

It's enormously disruptive, but also then

14:41

on the expense side, the expenses

14:43

that are associated with this particular

14:45

person that you marry are going

14:47

to be enormously impactful. And then

14:50

the third aspect is the really

14:52

long-term financial future of your descendants

14:54

in terms of genetics of your

14:56

children, the way that your children

14:58

are brought up, the culture that

15:00

your children have, they're enormously important.

15:03

And careful spousal selection is the magic

15:05

key to solving all three of these

15:07

things because none of these are random

15:10

factors that just happen to you. In

15:12

a moment or in the middle of this show, I

15:15

will relate to you some stories of a

15:17

marriage researcher and his story is

15:19

that he can predict divorce with 91% reliability,

15:22

whether a couple will stay married or whether

15:25

a couple will divorce. And it's just an

15:27

example to show that there are things that

15:29

you can look for in any situation to

15:31

know how likely you are to divorce. All

15:33

the signs are there as to is this

15:35

person that I'm likely to marry or that

15:37

I want to marry? Is this person likely

15:40

to be a dog walker or a doctor?

15:44

The signs are all there from an early age.

15:46

And so you're not wrong to look for these

15:48

things. Remember, I

15:50

think you can and should be

15:52

extremely picky prior to marriage. Once

15:55

you're married, then you're all in on marriage,

15:58

but you should be very picky prior to

16:00

marriage and you with this decision of

16:02

the person that you're going to marry, you

16:04

as in

16:07

no other decision, you deserve to

16:09

be entirely selfish about your decisions.

16:12

Now, why don't people do that? Well, they

16:14

don't think about it and they don't develop

16:16

themselves to be able to attract a very

16:18

high quality spouse and it's not surprising. Most

16:20

people who are unmarried, it's not surprising that

16:22

they're unmarried if you have a little bit

16:25

of experience in life and you just look

16:27

and understand, well, it's not, duh, of

16:29

course this person is not married. What does

16:31

he bring to the table? What does she bring to the table?

16:33

What is he doing? What is she doing with her time? Who

16:35

is she meeting? And as I

16:37

described in detail in the previous episode, it's

16:39

a function of what are you looking for?

16:42

Do you know that? Have you optimized your personal

16:44

traits of attractiveness so that you can attract the

16:46

people that you want to attract and repel the

16:48

people that you want to repel? And

16:51

then have you been invested into going

16:53

and finding the kinds of places where

16:55

people are that are likely to

16:57

be in a relationship with you? It's

16:59

not magic. It's

17:02

a math formula based upon what

17:05

you're looking for and it should

17:07

be relatively normal for an

17:10

attractive young man or an attractive young woman

17:12

to have a few options. And

17:15

that's not abnormal. Where

17:18

you see the proof, the evidence of this

17:20

most starkly in today's world is

17:23

just look at the options that a beautiful

17:25

woman or a very highly

17:27

developed, high value man has in the

17:29

dating marketplace. This young

17:31

man or woman has many options to choose

17:33

among. And it's

17:36

that balance between recognizing, okay, some

17:38

things are innate but not everything

17:40

is innate. And a young man

17:42

or woman can develop himself or

17:44

herself to be attractive to have

17:46

multiple options and that puts you

17:48

in a different situation. And

17:50

you should be very picky about

17:52

what you are looking for in

17:54

a prospective partner. And

17:56

when you marry, be all in on

17:58

marriage. So I'm trying. The help you

18:00

to think about what are what you'd have

18:03

options by engaging in sufficient levels of personal

18:05

development, developing your own attractive qualities that would

18:07

be attractive to your ideal spouse, and then

18:09

doing that young enough. See, you know it'll

18:11

have your back up against the wall. your

18:14

thirty years old now he of a sudden

18:16

you're gonna get serious about life will. That's

18:18

probably not the best time to do it.

18:20

You don't want to have your back up

18:22

against the wall, you want to really be

18:25

doing this early so that you have time

18:27

and you can patiently look and thinks beyond

18:29

just the short. Term, You know I feel good

18:31

when I'm with him or. Whatever. The

18:33

short term things are you need to

18:36

be com a person have vowed you

18:38

who brings something to the table so

18:40

that you can attract a high quality,

18:42

high value spouse and what should you

18:44

look for. Or I'd like to characterize

18:46

what you should look for into three

18:48

different categories because I think it's useful

18:50

for analysis and I'm not gonna give

18:53

you a comprehensive list that is one

18:55

stimulate your thinking said the you can

18:57

make your own list but I think

18:59

of we characterize these things on different

19:01

levels. Then. We'll

19:03

understand. Will

19:05

be able to develop in

19:07

the fullness of time. A

19:09

more comprehensive list some of

19:11

the traits that you should

19:14

look for in a potential

19:16

marriage partner. Our genetics. But

19:18

and and they're genuinely physically

19:20

genetic Traits: Some our long

19:22

term traits that are not

19:24

quite genetics, but that are

19:26

very, very. Enduring

19:28

in terms of their impact, the

19:31

kind of childhood that somebody had

19:33

is not necessarily a genetic trait

19:35

on the physical level, but yet

19:37

is has enduring influence who will

19:39

probably effect this person's view and

19:41

outlook on life for the rest

19:43

of his or her life. And

19:45

then some traits are relatively easily

19:48

changed, their skills that can be

19:50

attracted and developed. For example, let's

19:52

say that your initial response to

19:54

when I say what should you

19:56

look for in a spouse to.

19:58

Enhance your financial future. You might say some like

20:00

I want to marry someone who's good with money.

20:04

He. Takes great, but what does that

20:06

mean? Does that mean skill?

20:08

That budgeting? You wanna marry somebody who

20:10

skill That budgeting. I. Don't think

20:12

much of that because that's a skill that can be

20:14

learned and six weeks to six months is not that

20:17

hard to develop the skill, a budget and you can

20:19

be done with that in six weeks to six months.

20:21

Or do you mean by I want to marry someone

20:23

is good with money? I want to marry someone who

20:25

are into million dollars a year. Or.

20:28

Earning. A million dollars a year is

20:30

a skill that is usually gonna take

20:32

I would say at least a minimum

20:34

of a decade to develop idol. I

20:36

don't know anybody who's done in less

20:38

than two decades and off and much,

20:40

much longer. Much sometimes has multiple decades,

20:42

and there's so many underlying skills that

20:44

are necessary to earn a million dollars

20:46

a year. So which of those things.

20:49

Are. Do you mean when you say I want to marry

20:51

someone who's good with money? Again,

20:53

I would be happy if I'm family to

20:55

to somebody if I see if I clearly

20:58

recognize that earning a million dollars a year

21:00

is more important than being good at Mare

21:02

at budgeting forty thousand dollars a year than

21:04

I need to figure out. What's the environment?

21:06

What are the skill sets the put someone

21:08

on the tenure past the earning a million

21:10

dollars years. That's the key thing to optimize

21:12

for. The budgeting can be six pretty easily,

21:14

so we'll look at some some. Positive

21:17

traits to look for odds. One more

21:19

question I want to talk through. The

21:21

question is should this be a conversation

21:24

that is sex specific? Should this be

21:26

a conversation where I say husband's Here's

21:28

what you should look in: Why of

21:31

foreign potential wives And since wives his

21:33

what you should look for potential husbands

21:35

or should I use the inclusive term

21:37

of spouse? I'm not opposed to sexism.

21:40

Generally, I'm a man. I enjoy spending

21:42

my time with men. I don't really

21:44

spend time with women. I'm a five.

21:47

Woman: man of got a wife, I've got

21:49

a daughter, I've got a mother, and I've

21:51

got two sisters. That's about. Most.

21:53

Of the the women that I spend time

21:55

with in my life and I enjoy my

21:57

life that way and the the the audience.

22:00

Braddock personal finances predominantly male, but

22:02

I don't think that this is

22:04

a. I don't think that

22:06

this conversation is one where we should

22:08

automatically be sex specific. in our we

22:11

talk about and what we do and

22:13

and how we deal with things. I

22:15

think that it's It's hard. In our

22:17

current very androgynous age, it's hard to

22:20

determine where the line should be drawn,

22:22

but there are lines that need to

22:24

be drawn. And I think there's some.

22:26

Marriage strategies are the same for men

22:29

and women, and some are difference. In

22:31

addition, though, we need to go beyond

22:33

marriage and recognize that your. Strategy.

22:36

Will. Be different depending on whether

22:38

you're optimizing for marriage. Or.

22:41

Whether you're op devising, optimizing

22:43

for reproduction and long term

22:46

family vitality as in children

22:48

and grandchildren, Because. These

22:50

things are two different things. I'm going

22:52

to be talking about marriage, but in

22:55

the back of your my because that's

22:57

what I titled my show. But in

22:59

the back you might need to distinguish

23:01

between marriage and long term family formation.

23:03

And it's important that you understand that

23:05

there is a somewhat robust circle of

23:07

social views or science for social science.

23:09

But I don't know the the words

23:11

social science that we can look out.

23:14

We can look at some data, us

23:16

we can look at some studies, some

23:18

analysis of try to form some opinions.

23:20

That are informed by data and research.

23:22

In this area you probably don't need

23:24

the research which you probably need to

23:26

do is just simply can. Be.

23:29

Willing to confirm your your your

23:31

bias been to be willing to

23:34

confirm your natural knowledge of the

23:36

world because we've all seen foul

23:38

relationships naturally function in our life.

23:41

So let's talk about for example,

23:43

the a male doctor marrying vs

23:45

a female doctor. And with this

23:48

will introduce a couple of terms that are important.

23:50

Think about because the people so. First.

23:54

If. you both that's that you have an

23:56

equally qualified male doctor female doctor high

23:58

income earning high status perfect very huge

24:01

amounts of intelligence needed, huge amounts of grits,

24:03

some of the factors that are highly correlated

24:06

with positive financial

24:08

expectativity. So

24:10

we could see that a male

24:13

doctor can be attracted to and

24:15

happily marry a female doctor. This

24:18

happens all the time. A male doctor

24:20

can be attracted to and happily marry

24:22

a female doctor. The

24:25

male doctor can be attracted to

24:27

and happily marry a female school teacher.

24:31

But it's unlikely that a female

24:33

doctor, it's unlikely for

24:35

a female doctor to marry a

24:37

male school teacher. And it's

24:40

not just in terms of exposure. It's not

24:42

just in terms of, well, they didn't meet

24:44

each other because they were in different schools.

24:46

There is an element of that, but there's

24:48

something deeper related to it. The

24:50

first trend that we clearly see

24:52

across society is the trend of

24:54

homogamy. Homogamy is defined

24:56

in the social sciences as a marriage

24:58

between individuals who are

25:01

in some culturally important way

25:03

similar to each other. It's

25:06

a form of assortative mating. And

25:10

the marriage union can be based

25:12

on similarity of socioeconomic status, class,

25:15

gender, caste, ethnicity, or

25:17

religion, or age

25:20

in age homogamy. So these

25:22

are all expressions of homogamy. I'm reading directly

25:25

from the Wikipedia article on homogamy here. Now

25:28

we would contrast homogamy with

25:31

heterogamy. So homogamy similarities and

25:34

heterogamy differences from one another.

25:37

So in sociology, heterogamy refers to

25:39

a marriage between two individuals that

25:41

differ in a certain criterion,

25:44

including all of those that I just listed. Very

25:47

common expressions of heterogamy in today's

25:49

world would be age heterogamy. So

25:52

partners marrying at disparate ages, Ethnic

25:55

heterogamy, partners with different ethnicities,

25:57

marrying, and of course, social.

26:00

The and all of these things are.

26:02

Are. Relevant to it's the have was

26:04

that old movie the Business Man marries

26:06

a prostitute. The these kinds of things

26:08

are always the substance of literature and

26:11

and. The discussion. And. And

26:13

we love them. And so what you

26:15

see if you think about a maga

26:18

me and had raga Me as you

26:20

can see that were simultaneously attracted to

26:22

both of these things. There's a reason

26:24

that and again if you if you

26:26

don't have to send your life you

26:28

could find it literature. There's a reason

26:30

why people marry someone of our class

26:32

or of our culture or of our

26:34

religions as a reason. Also that we

26:36

simultaneously has Aids and an appreciation and

26:38

the fixation with the wealthy guy marrying

26:41

the poor girl, that the Princess Mary

26:43

and. The that cb the prince

26:45

marrying the servant girl, the

26:47

of business man marrying the

26:49

prostitute the of the people

26:51

of of romeo and juliet

26:53

from different families is all

26:55

this fascination with this. Ah

26:58

integration with people similar to

27:00

each other and different from

27:02

each other. And these are

27:04

important because some people. And

27:07

some factors are very important to

27:09

marriage. Some factors are less important

27:11

to marriage. Some factors are very

27:13

important to reproduction and some factors

27:15

are less important to reproduction. Now

27:17

we have our first our discussion

27:19

of hum Aga Me Now Similarly,

27:22

we can then moved to a

27:24

different term and the term is

27:26

hyper Gummy. I target me What

27:28

we would refer to a non

27:30

clinical terms as dating up or

27:32

marrying Ups is a term that

27:34

is used for a person who

27:36

dates. Or marries his spouse

27:38

have a higher social status

27:41

or sexual capital than that

27:43

individual person. And the Antonin

27:45

for hypertrophy would be I poke me

27:47

and these are the. The. Basic.

27:50

Balancing. Between them now. The. experience

27:52

that men and women have

27:55

so we're hyper gimme or

27:57

had poke me is different

28:00

I could demonstrate this to you by

28:02

just looking at popular cultures. What

28:04

is usually the case is that

28:07

men are not particularly concerned with

28:09

the social class or

28:13

the earning ability or some

28:16

external feature of

28:18

a woman that they're attracted to. Men

28:21

tend to not necessarily be

28:23

hypergamous. That doesn't mean

28:25

that they want to be

28:27

married to a woman who is very dissimilar

28:29

to them. That's why we

28:32

don't talk about hypogamy. Nobody really wants

28:34

to be married to somebody who is

28:36

dissimilar. What it means is that men

28:38

aren't generally pursuing somebody of a higher

28:40

class or status as

28:43

a very important part of their life. Again,

28:45

I would go back to pretty woman.

28:47

Here you have the wealthy successful businessman

28:49

who is attracted to the prostitute who

28:51

has made a series of

28:54

unfortunate decisions. At her

28:56

inner being, she has a heart of gold. Of

28:59

course, somehow she's going to make

29:01

him happy because of who she is.

29:04

He pursues her and attracts her

29:06

and marries her. That would be pretty

29:09

woman. What you don't

29:11

generally see is the opposite. You

29:13

don't generally see any, I couldn't

29:15

name any movies, where there's

29:17

an incredibly attractive, successful,

29:20

beautiful woman who then goes

29:23

and marries a male

29:25

dud with no prospects. When

29:27

you see this reflected in popular culture,

29:30

you wind up with movies that are

29:32

more like the movie The Proposal. In

29:36

The Proposal, you have Sandra Bullock

29:38

who is a high-powered editor and

29:40

high-powered business woman. All

29:42

of a sudden, she

29:45

finds out she's going to be kicked out of the United States

29:47

and be deported to Canada unless she has

29:49

a relationship. In

29:51

a fit of desperation, she goes after

29:53

her poorly paid assistant and says, actually,

29:56

you're going to be my fiancé. Basically, she

29:58

manipulates and coerces him. into

30:01

being her fiance. But

30:05

then of course in the long run, they

30:07

wind up madly in love and together, well

30:09

why? Well, what it turns out that her

30:12

fiancee, though he had a low paying job,

30:14

was actually from a wealthy elite family in

30:16

Alaska where they basically owned half of the

30:18

Alaskan town that they were

30:21

from. And he's actually a really high quality

30:23

guy. So even though the initial indications of

30:25

her status in life were

30:28

different, even though he was her

30:31

assistant and a lowly paid lackey,

30:33

in reality, he's actually this really

30:35

fabulous amazing guy and this temporary

30:38

and wealthy and sophisticated and accomplished, but then

30:40

this temporary low point in his life of

30:42

being an assistant was just part of a

30:44

strategic desire to find himself. And

30:47

so you can see this throughout our culture and

30:49

there's good data done on this. This

30:52

Fort Wayne Philharmonic season is bigger, bolder

30:54

and beyond. Join us on Saturday, March

30:57

23rd at our performance hall at

30:59

the PFW Music Center as we welcome

31:02

pianist and crooner extraordinaire, Tony Deser for

31:04

Sinatra and Beyond. Caleb Young conducts the

31:06

Fort Wayne Philharmonic as Mr. Deser brings

31:08

his infectious versions of Sinatra standards and

31:10

more. Come fly with us for a

31:12

Swing Through America songbook with two performances

31:15

on March 23rd. Sinatra

31:17

and Beyond with Tony Deser. For

31:19

tickets, go to fwphil.org. There's

31:22

been various studies and the social studies

31:24

that across people, across culture, men

31:27

and women approach relationships differently

31:29

and they look for different

31:31

things. And so there is

31:33

an element of specificity that

31:35

is necessary because the competitive

31:37

strategies for men are different

31:39

than the competitive strategies for

31:41

women. Women can

31:43

optimize for features such as

31:45

high income, high status,

31:47

high power, but

31:50

they're less important than optimizing for

31:52

other features because men are looking for different things

31:54

in wives and wives are looking for husbands. And

31:57

So some of the big problems that we face though.

32:00

The in our current society is

32:02

that's the traditional. Ways.

32:04

In which these were. Facilitated.

32:08

For unstructured for some of them

32:10

are working better than ever designed

32:12

and some of them are working

32:14

worse than ever designed. So hum

32:16

Aga Me as an example. Right

32:18

now, in our current culture, we

32:20

have more and more homogenous relationships

32:22

than ever before, and the Hum

32:24

Aga me though is primarily related

32:26

to intellectual ability and which A

32:28

for which we can use education

32:30

as the proxy. I. First started

32:32

thinking about this very a decade ago

32:35

when I read Charles Murray his book

32:37

called coming Apart and I was why

32:39

first met that the word for maga.

32:41

Me and what we see is simply

32:44

that our society, the whole thesis is

32:46

coming apart which I think is continuing

32:48

as best I can tell is simply

32:50

that the rich getting richer and the

32:53

poor getting poorer. But it's not just

32:55

in financial terms is basically in every

32:57

terms our societies are becoming more and

32:59

more intensely segregated. Not based upon skin

33:02

color, Necessarily not based upon wealth

33:04

necessarily, but based upon all

33:06

of the features related to

33:08

it. And a big one

33:10

is intelligence. And in terms

33:12

of relationships, intelligence is an

33:14

enormous at is an enormous

33:16

elements of. Of.

33:21

The. Long term future of our society as

33:23

well as your own children will be

33:25

read out a short passage from my

33:27

copy of. Coming. Apart before

33:29

the age, the into this is from

33:31

a section titled the Increase in Cop

33:34

Cognitive Her Maga Me: Before the Age

33:36

of Mobility People commonly married someone from

33:38

the same town or from the same

33:40

neighborhood of an urban area. The events

33:43

and through people together seldom had anything

33:45

to do specifically with cognitive ability. Similar

33:47

cognitive ability was a source of compatibility

33:50

between a young man and a young

33:52

woman, and some degree of cognitive. Her

33:54

Maga Me existed, but it was a

33:56

haphazard process. Meanwhile, educational, Her Maga. me

33:58

was high because hardly anyone went to college.

34:01

In large proportions of married couples, both had

34:04

less than a high school education or both

34:06

had a high school diploma. As

34:08

the proportion of college graduates increased,

34:10

so did the possibilities for greater

34:12

educational homogamy at the top. As

34:15

college graduates found, they had more

34:17

potential marriage partners who were also

34:19

college graduates. Drawing on

34:21

the extensive technical literature and

34:23

the CPS, sociologists Christine Schwartz

34:26

and Robert Marr

34:28

examined trends in

34:30

assortative marriage as it was known

34:32

in the jargon from 1940

34:34

to 2003. They found that

34:36

homogamy has increased at both ends of

34:38

the educational scale. College graduates grew more

34:40

likely to marry college graduates and high

34:42

school dropouts grew more likely to marry

34:44

other high school dropouts. For

34:47

our purposes, trying to understand how the new upper

34:49

class came to be, the effects

34:51

of increased educational attainment may be seen

34:53

in a simple measure. In 1960,

34:55

just 3% of American couples both had

34:58

a college degree. By 2010, that proportion stood at 25%.

35:00

The change was so large that it

35:05

was a major contributor to the creation of a

35:07

new class all by itself. But

35:11

increased educational homogamy had another consequence

35:13

that the academic literature on homogamy

35:15

avoids mentioning. Increased educational

35:18

homogamy inevitably means increased

35:20

cognitive homogamy. A

35:23

college education starting with admission and continuing

35:25

through to graduation is a series of

35:27

cognitive tests. To be able

35:29

even to begin a major in engineering

35:31

or the hard sciences, students have to

35:33

be able to do advanced calculus and

35:35

that in turn requires logical mathematical ability

35:37

and roughly the top decile of the

35:39

population. To be able

35:42

to cope with genuine college level material in

35:44

the social sciences and humanities requires good linguistic

35:46

ability and the top quartile of the distribution

35:48

if you're content with scraping by closer to

35:51

the top decile if you want to get

35:53

good grades in a moderately demanding college. To

35:55

graduate means passing all these tests plus a

35:57

general test for perseverance. We'll call that grit.

36:00

We'll come back to grit later. The

36:02

result is that each level of educational

36:05

attainment, high school diploma, AA, BA, MA

36:07

and professional degree or PhD, implies a

36:09

mean IQ for people attaining that level

36:12

that has been remarkably stable among whites

36:15

at least since the beginning of the 1980s. I

36:18

must limit the numbers to whites as I

36:20

present these data because aggressive affirmative action has

36:22

produced means for African Americans and Latinos at

36:24

each level of educational attainment that are substantially

36:26

lower and more variable than the white means.

36:29

Since we are talking about the new upper

36:32

class, there are good reasons to think in

36:34

terms of the white means partly because African

36:36

Americans and Latinos who enter the new upper

36:38

class have passed a number of career tests

36:41

signifying that they approximate the white means on

36:43

cognitive ability for each level of educational attainment

36:46

and partly because the new upper class is

36:48

still overwhelmingly white. Table 2.1

36:50

shows the evidence for these stable means. Let

36:52

me just read you table 2.1. I'll

36:55

use the 1982 to 1989 data. The

36:59

mean IQ for the table is titled

37:01

mean white IQ for levels of degree

37:04

attainment in the NLSY 79 and NLSY

37:06

97. The

37:09

mean IQ for persons completing no more than

37:11

no degree is 88. For

37:14

persons completing no more than a high school diploma or

37:16

GED is 99. For

37:18

persons completing no more than an associate's degree is 105.

37:22

Bachelor's degree 113 IQ. Master's

37:24

degree 117. PhD,

37:27

LLD, MD, DDS is 126.

37:31

Now we'll come back to the transmission of cognitive ability

37:33

to the next generation in a moment. The

37:36

point, however, is that our society

37:38

is sorting itself on

37:40

many, many features and these features

37:43

are important and this homogamy that

37:45

even though there is a tendency

37:47

to say, oh,

37:52

we don't mind, we don't care about

37:54

being the same. After all, we don't

37:56

care about ethnic differences among couples. We

37:59

don't care necessarily. about age disparities, you

38:01

do you, you like who you like, etc.

38:04

There's this intense homogamy that is

38:06

happening in our society

38:08

based upon the way that our

38:10

society is now sorted and structured

38:12

by educational institutions, careers, things like

38:14

that. Then that's mixed

38:16

with the natural

38:18

hypergamy or lack of hypergamy between

38:21

men and women that is creating

38:23

enormous pressure on young people and

38:25

their mate selection. These

38:29

features and attributes need to be

38:31

thought through, need to be understood if we're going

38:33

to give people good advice. Let's

38:35

get to the advice. What should you look

38:37

for? Let's begin at the genetic level. Let's

38:40

begin with those traits that you

38:42

should look for in a potential

38:44

partner that are going to impact

38:46

your life, your wealth production, and

38:49

your children. Let's

38:51

start with those ones that are largely

38:54

unalterable, which is what I'm calling the genetic

38:56

traits. The first one that you need to

38:58

look for is good health and longevity. Let

39:01

me repeat for the 15th time. You're

39:06

listening to me in the

39:08

comfort of your own ears. That

39:12

means, generally speaking, you're

39:14

consuming my podcast in a private space. Don't

39:19

let anyone shame

39:21

you and say

39:23

that somehow you shouldn't be looking for

39:25

the highest quality spouse that

39:27

you can attract. I'm

39:31

saying this to you because I never would have believed

39:33

it if I'd heard this advice when

39:36

I was younger. I would have seen

39:38

myself as some kind of white knight to say, oh no,

39:40

I shouldn't have high standards

39:42

of the person that I want to

39:44

marry. I shouldn't have

39:47

requirements and even basic fundamental genetic

39:49

requirements. I should accept all people

39:51

the way that they are. The

39:54

problem with that is that real life happens. When

39:57

Real life happens, you start to

39:59

understand. That these basic

40:01

features and characteristics that the partner

40:03

that you marry has enormously impact

40:06

your life And so it sounds

40:08

enormously specced selfish for me to

40:10

say to a young unmarried men

40:13

are young unmarried woman. You

40:15

should look for a potential

40:18

marriage partner who has robust

40:20

health. After all, all

40:22

of us have friends who do not enjoy

40:24

robust health. All of us know people who

40:26

don't enjoy robust health at. All of us

40:28

want desperately to help those people we want

40:30

to dump. We want our friends who are

40:32

unhealthy to get healthy. We don't want to

40:34

express the the concept that I'm just gonna

40:36

not pick you because you're unhealthy. We would

40:38

never say that out loud. You don't have

40:40

to say it out loud. That's why the

40:42

fact that you're listening to me in the

40:44

comfort of your ears, in the privacy of

40:46

your own mind. you know, ever have to

40:48

say any of this stuff to anybody out

40:50

loud. Nobody can judge. You for. The

40:53

decisions you make although you'll feel the pressure

40:55

A We live in a world in which

40:57

were you can't judge me for whether I

40:59

marry a man or a woman, You can't

41:01

judge me for the plan A person and

41:03

I'm attracted to are not attracted to, but

41:05

yet you are facing enormous judgment if you

41:07

say I'm only going to marry somebody who

41:10

is healthy and yet when I'm telling you

41:12

is that these things. If you're

41:14

young, they matter and. Eat

41:17

This is a cumulative set of

41:19

factors. These are cumulative set of

41:21

factors that. You. Will

41:24

have to choose but for

41:26

every factor that you. What?

41:29

I'll call compromise on what I mean.

41:31

As for every factor that are scale

41:33

of one to ten you choose somebody

41:36

who scores low on this factor of

41:38

it's going to impact your life enormously.

41:40

If you marry somebody who is healthy

41:43

then the ease of your marriage the

41:45

ease of your finances are likely to

41:47

be enormous. The have someone has a

41:49

strong immune system. They're not susceptible to

41:52

chronic diseases that got good overall physical

41:54

fitness, Just everything's easy and and and

41:56

and a simple in that element of

41:58

your married. Life. On the other

42:01

hand, you marry someone who's sick all

42:03

the time and now the the on.

42:05

Does. The pressure that puts upon

42:07

your marriage is significant. If

42:09

you marry someone, you make a

42:12

vow. To. Be with them. In.

42:14

Sicker sickness and in hell for

42:16

better or worse for enrich for

42:19

richer for poorer. So. Once

42:21

you are married to someone of you

42:23

come to me and you say hey

42:25

Joshua, You know my husband or wife

42:27

has sick all the time. What do

42:29

I do? I'm going to be standing

42:31

in front of you saying you absolutely

42:33

have to support this person. This is

42:35

your wife, This is your husband that

42:37

we're dealing with you. Oh this person.

42:39

a duty of care And though that

42:41

duty of care bankruptcy you because you

42:43

are paying for medical care though you

42:45

can't work because you're a full time

42:47

caregiver or whatever the situation as I'm

42:49

gonna honor you for your faithfulness. To

42:51

your husband or wife in their

42:54

time of sickness. But.

42:56

Prior to marriage, you have

42:58

a choice, and it is

43:01

smart for you to be

43:03

as discriminating as you possibly

43:05

can with your choices. Prior

43:07

to marriage, Or flip

43:09

of. this is simply the fact

43:11

that there is a limit to

43:13

the kind of person that you

43:15

are going to be able to

43:17

attract into a marriage relationship with

43:20

you. If you are A To,

43:22

you're gonna have a very difficult

43:24

time attracting a ten into a

43:26

relationship with you. So if health

43:28

is a component of what you

43:30

would rate someone on then and

43:32

you're A to, you're probably gonna

43:34

be marrying a one a To

43:36

or A for. You're. Not going

43:38

to be marrying a ten so

43:40

you have a choice either. I'm

43:42

willing to transform myself from a

43:44

to to a ten and do

43:47

everything I can he other factors

43:49

that I can control in order

43:51

to attract a very high quality

43:53

spouse, or I'm gonna settle for

43:55

somebody who is closer to my

43:57

age settling. Is. Not a

43:59

negative. That everyone settles at some point

44:01

in time. For some reason people who don't

44:03

settle our single for the rest of their

44:05

life. but you'd there's a lot you can

44:07

do to prepare yourself. That's why spent so

44:09

much energy in the previous episode. A try

44:11

to make this point that you can change

44:14

yourself. You could go from a to to

44:16

a seven and then you'll have access to

44:18

people who are a good match for you.

44:20

And so you want to change those things

44:22

that you can change. You may be able

44:24

to change your health, but even if you

44:26

can't change your health, there's a lot of

44:28

other things that you can change. And what

44:30

you'll see as the people who don't

44:32

have robust health is they'll give ten

44:34

attention and focus to developing their other

44:37

qualities. They can still attract a very,

44:39

very high quality protect prospective spouse. You

44:41

see this all the time with people

44:43

who are profoundly handicapped and yet to

44:45

have attracted a very high quality spouse

44:47

because they've. Developed other

44:50

qualities so. Or

44:52

not a sorry so long but I

44:54

I I just I think of myself.

44:57

At a younger age when I

44:59

make my podcasts and I would

45:01

have been in my own mind.

45:04

A guy who was willing to be a

45:06

white knight. I would have been a guy

45:08

who was. Willing. To say

45:10

oh well, here's this wonderful girl on. after

45:12

all, if I marry her, I could help

45:14

her rights. And in

45:16

hindsight, with. The

45:20

perspective of. More.

45:22

Than a decade of marriage and

45:24

five children and everything that that

45:26

involves. While I'm still young enough

45:28

to remember being that guy, I

45:30

look at it now on. I

45:32

realize no one ever told me

45:34

how important it was to be

45:36

entirely selfish with my selection of

45:38

a. Spouse and I Oh,

45:41

and I owe a good amount

45:43

of the success and happiness of

45:45

my marriage to me having some

45:47

filters that were cultural filters built

45:49

in as well as just to.

45:54

God's. Providence. his

45:56

blessings on my life i wasn't a strategic

45:58

as i could have been of probably should

46:00

have been. But once you're in it, you're in

46:02

it. So you deserve to be selfish in your

46:04

thinking and write down exactly what you want, but

46:07

then you also have to develop and cultivate the

46:09

traits and attributes that are going to be able

46:11

to attract someone. So forgive

46:13

the lengthy

46:16

side bar there, but it's really important

46:18

that young people understand you

46:21

can be selfish and you should be selfish about

46:23

this as much as anything else. You should be

46:25

selfish about working in the kind of career that

46:27

you want to work in, about marrying the kind

46:29

of person that you want to marry. You should

46:31

be selfish about these things, but you

46:34

can't be selfish in a non-deserving

46:37

way. You can't say, well, I deserve

46:39

to be a doctor and not be

46:41

willing to put in the really, really

46:43

long years of work to develop yourself

46:46

and the really long road to build the skills

46:48

and pass the exams and pass the classes and

46:50

get the degrees. If you want to be a

46:52

doctor, go for it, but you prove

46:55

that you deserve being a doctor with your work.

46:57

Similarly, you can't say, well, I just want to

46:59

marry a 10 and I'm a

47:02

2, but I just deserve a 10. Okay. Well,

47:04

if you're going to deserve a 10, you're going

47:06

to have to transform yourself from a 2 to

47:08

a 7, and you're going to have to work

47:10

really, really hard to market yourself effectively until you

47:13

convince the 10 to be with you. And

47:16

that's going to take you some time and a whole lot of

47:18

work. So I hope

47:20

that's helpful. Back to the list.

47:22

What are the genetic traits that we should be

47:24

screening for? Well, big one is

47:26

good health and separately longevity, which is related

47:29

to health but not determinant of

47:31

it. You want to look for

47:33

a partner with a robust genetic

47:35

predisposition to good health, and

47:38

you should assess that

47:41

and look for something that

47:43

is likely to screen

47:46

for somebody who is healthy. If

47:49

your partner is healthy, then

47:52

he or she is going to be able to

47:54

enjoy a more active

47:57

lifestyle with you. You're going to have

47:59

lower healthcare. costs, you're going to be

48:01

able to earn more money because you can

48:03

work consistently. If you

48:05

ever get sick, you have understood,

48:08

especially if you're sick for more than a few days, you

48:10

understand how impossible it is to be

48:12

financially productive when you're sick all the

48:14

time. A huge portion of our

48:16

ability to earn money just comes from just

48:18

the natural attribute of feeling good, feeling strong,

48:20

being able to go to work and be

48:22

effective on a day-to-day basis. And

48:25

when somebody gets sick, mentally sick, physically

48:27

sick, everything falls apart. And

48:29

a lot of that stuff is predetermined by genetics.

48:31

And so you want to screen for that. How

48:34

do you screen for health? Well, I think first

48:36

you should screen for what you know about, just

48:38

knowledge of health conditions.

48:41

If you are, let's say, getting to know somebody

48:43

and that person, you find out

48:45

that person has some significant illness or chronic

48:47

disease, then you should take that into account.

48:50

And that might be something that you

48:52

say, okay, this is not

48:54

for me because of this chronic disease. You

48:56

should trust your own basic instincts related

48:59

to health as well. I

49:01

think that one thing that

49:03

Dr. Catherine Shanahan, the author of the

49:05

book Deep Nutrition Convinced Me Of,

49:08

is that various aspects of what

49:10

we call beauty can

49:13

be considered as markers for

49:16

health. Beauty, which

49:18

is often related to symmetry,

49:21

has a strong genetic

49:23

component related to it.

49:26

And if you're interested in that discussion,

49:28

read Dr. Catherine Shanahan's book called Deep

49:30

Nutrition, where she discusses it extensively. She

49:33

may have published other things on it. That's just where I

49:36

came up with it. But in general,

49:39

we are attracted to various markers of

49:41

beauty as being related to someone who

49:43

is healthy. For example, let's

49:46

say that somebody has a highly

49:48

symmetrical face and body. You're

49:51

likely to say, hey, that

49:54

person is really beautiful because of the symmetry

49:56

of his or her face and his or

49:58

her body. really beautiful.

50:00

That's related however that.

50:04

Let's say that somebody has beautiful skin. Open

50:06

up any advertisement for a skin care product and

50:09

you'll see a model with beautiful skin. Beautiful

50:11

skin, clear skin, skin that

50:14

is not encumbered by acne

50:17

or other issues and

50:21

I don't even know what words to say

50:23

because I'm not knowledgeable enough. But clear and

50:25

beautiful skin, healthy complexion, these are markers of

50:27

good health. If you see a sick person,

50:29

if you see somebody that has boils or

50:31

a rash or pustules of

50:34

some kind or acne or

50:36

white skin or a wand

50:38

complexion or greasiness or

50:41

sliminess or something like that, these are

50:43

expressions of sickness. This is the way

50:45

that sick people look. The beauty of

50:47

someone's skin is related to health and

50:50

most of it has to come

50:52

from inside. If someone is

50:54

constantly covering up, women are

50:56

prone to this, someone is constantly covering up her

50:58

skin, make sure you get a chance to see

51:01

your skin au naturale rather than constantly cover it

51:03

with beauty products that may be concealing some expression

51:06

of sickness. If you are, let's say you're

51:08

dealing with a sick and ailing actor or

51:12

public person, maybe someone has been sick, a

51:14

politician is sick and you've got to go

51:16

on television to show

51:19

how strong

51:22

and competent he is, he's going to be spending a lot

51:24

of time in front of the makeup artist before being put

51:26

on TV. Makeup can be used

51:28

to hide things and you should be filtering

51:31

and saying, is this person physically beautiful? Have

51:33

physical attraction. Similarly,

51:35

the way that somebody moves is an

51:38

indication of health. Somebody who

51:40

is athletic, athleticism is

51:42

related and correlated to health and

51:46

balanced movement, strong muscles, strong

51:48

bones, functional joints, coordination. Athletes,

51:53

generally are athletes because they're healthy

51:55

and so you can screen for

51:57

health based upon athleticism. and

52:01

expression of athleticism. Back

52:04

to family history, you

52:06

should also think about

52:08

the longevity that somebody has

52:10

related to family history. I

52:13

always came from a long-lived parents

52:15

and that wasn't until I was older, I started

52:17

doing financial counseling and I had clients

52:19

who told me they didn't expect to live past 60. And

52:23

I never understood it because all my ancestors died

52:25

at 100 or at least in mid to late

52:27

90s. So the idea in my

52:29

mind is always, okay, I'm gonna live to 100, it's

52:31

just how old we are. And I met people and

52:34

I understood, wait a second, this

52:37

person, this was

52:39

not me saying somehow, well, you're

52:41

gonna die soon. This is an

52:43

unbidden, unprompted expression

52:46

to a man's financial planner that,

52:48

yeah, I'm probably not gonna live past

52:50

60 because in my family, we all

52:53

die in our 50s and 60s. Think

52:55

about the difference in wealth and

52:58

expectations of life, of marrying somebody

53:01

whose family history would indicate that

53:03

this person is unlikely to live

53:05

past 60 as compared

53:07

to someone who's likely to live to 100. Think

53:10

about the extra 20 or 30 decades of earning that

53:14

perhaps a man who's likely to live to 100 has or

53:16

for somebody who's likely to live to 50. Think

53:19

about your position as a wife who

53:22

is marrying this man and

53:24

think about him saying, oh, I'm not gonna live past 60,

53:26

so I'm gonna retire at 45 and

53:29

I'm gonna start spending money because after all, I wanna spend

53:31

money. And he's gonna die at 60 and you

53:33

might be a woman coming in likely to

53:35

die at 90, statistically speaking, when

53:37

you're gonna live a lot longer than men. So how

53:40

do you plan for that financially as compared to

53:42

a husband who expects to die at 100 and

53:45

he's gonna work and earn income until he's, say, 80

53:48

and then he's gonna retire for 10 or 15, 20 years and

53:52

just the amount of money earned in a

53:54

lifetime is enormous and also the long-term thinking

53:57

that someone can have when he or she

53:59

is invested. say, an extra decade of his life

54:01

at an early age, to have a high earning

54:03

ability knowing that he has plenty of time to

54:05

earn it out. Think about

54:07

your wife dying at 50 years

54:10

old, and now all of a sudden what do you do

54:12

as a man? Are you going to

54:14

go and marry someone else? Are you going to be single

54:16

for the rest of your life? That's really hard as compared

54:18

to growing old with the wife of your youth and not

54:20

having to worry about that and think about that. So

54:23

longevity of family history is something to think

54:25

about and understand what it is. And

54:28

to both of these though, we shouldn't just focus on

54:30

what is inherited because things that

54:33

are inherited can be overcome. So

54:35

think about the propensity that your

54:37

proposed marriage candidate has to correct

54:39

health weaknesses. All right, well

54:42

my parents all died of heart attacks, but is this

54:44

the kind of guy who is likely to say, well

54:46

my parents all died of heart attacks so I'm just

54:48

going to never see a cardiologist,

54:51

or is this the kind of guy who says my parents

54:53

all died of heart attacks so I'm going to be seeing

54:55

a cardiologist every six months? You understand

54:57

the point that just because you may have

54:59

gotten a bad genetic inheritance

55:02

from your family

55:04

doesn't mean that you're stuck with

55:06

that bad genetic inheritance for life.

55:08

Is this person someone who is

55:10

eating differently, exercising differently to develop

55:12

an athletic ability to develop these

55:14

things? This is a person who's

55:17

interested in topics that are related

55:19

to health and longevity. No

55:22

individual factor that I'm talking

55:24

about should be seen as

55:26

necessarily disqualifying. There are

55:28

only a few factors that I would say

55:30

if one of my children came to me

55:32

and said, hey dad, I'm considering this person

55:34

as a husband or a wife, what

55:37

do you think? There are only a few basic

55:39

factors that I would say absolutely not. On

55:42

the other hand, most of these are

55:44

kind of a mushy, gooey, let's think

55:46

about this and let's analyze, all right,

55:48

here's a negative factor. The

55:51

positive factor, this is highly correlated to success,

55:53

this is highly correlated to failure. Let's

55:56

dig into these factors on a deeper level in

55:59

order to... understand how to respond to them.

56:02

And then each for each factor, you

56:04

look for the response. So okay, well

56:06

this girl, you know, she's

56:08

not the most beautiful, and

56:11

the reason for her beauty is ABC, but

56:14

you know what, she's adapted to that,

56:16

and she's figured out how to dress

56:19

in a way that really enhances her

56:21

beauty, and she has really dialed in

56:23

on a lifestyle that leads to this

56:25

being her incredibly

56:27

robust health. And man, she's

56:30

more, she's healthier than anyone I know,

56:32

even if she's not the

56:34

most beautiful. And that kind

56:36

of girl would probably be much more attractive

56:38

than the girl who's just quote unquote naturally

56:40

beautiful, never worked for it, never

56:43

tried for it, just automatically received it,

56:45

but yet shows no interest in maintaining

56:47

her health, stuffing her face with bad

56:49

food all the time, not

56:52

enhancing what basic characteristics she has, because

56:54

we know that in 20 years, the

56:57

direction that that girl is on is gonna be very

57:00

different than the direction that the girl who

57:02

didn't have the natural advantages

57:04

and had to work to develop

57:07

her advantages. And so we're

57:09

looking to see, does this person have a

57:11

propensity to correct health weaknesses? Does

57:13

this person have an interest in topics related to

57:16

health and longevity? But you need to screen for

57:18

health, because health is a big, big deal. Similarly,

57:21

big genetic trait to look for is going

57:23

to be intelligence. I think you need to

57:25

seek a spouse who has

57:28

a strong basis for

57:30

intelligence, a strong genetic basis

57:33

for intelligence, and with

57:35

someone with whom you share a

57:37

similar level of intelligence.

57:40

I have a hard time being, with

57:43

the idea even, of being married

57:46

to somebody who is not my

57:48

equal in terms of intelligence and

57:50

intellectual ability. That

57:52

would be very

57:55

unfulfilling. And

57:57

I think that people dramatically underestimate

57:59

this. Now, I don't

58:01

know how to solve basically the long-term

58:03

cultural problem of homogamy in terms of

58:06

separation among our classes. I don't know

58:08

how to solve that. All

58:10

I know is that when you're going into marriage,

58:12

you want to be with somebody who is your

58:14

intellectual equal. You want to be with somebody that

58:17

you respect. You don't want to marry somebody who

58:20

is dumb and can't understand you. This

58:23

is highly correlated with earning

58:27

potential, long-term career

58:29

prospects, the ability to

58:31

engage in wise financial decision

58:33

making. It's highly correlated

58:35

with all

58:38

of these things and with

58:40

just long-term success. If

58:43

you are an intelligent man or

58:45

intelligent woman, you should be

58:47

looking to marry an intelligent man or an

58:49

intelligent woman. That will

58:52

make everything easier. I

58:55

have a hard time knowing

58:57

how I don't interact very

59:00

much with people of low intelligence.

59:04

Most of our societies result

59:07

in the fact that most of us

59:09

don't interact with people of differing intelligence

59:11

from us. Because we

59:14

kind of get funneled into schools, we get funneled

59:16

into colleges, we get funneled into jobs and professions

59:18

that are good equal for us. Unless

59:21

you have a business or the kind

59:23

of profession that enables you to interact

59:25

with people of differing

59:27

intellectual ability, you just

59:29

spend your time with people who are like you. We

59:31

all do. People who can understand what

59:34

you have to talk about because after all, one

59:36

of the basics of good human

59:38

relationships is that you enjoy spending time with people who

59:40

like to talk about the kind of things you like

59:42

to talk about. I

59:44

just didn't ever go out of my

59:46

way. I never spent much time with people who

59:48

were not very smart. As

59:51

I got older, I realized this accounts for

59:53

a lot of the frustration that you have.

59:55

You try to explain something and I generally

59:57

expect that if someone's going to ask you

1:00:00

explain something to me, I get one

1:00:02

time and I better understand it and

1:00:04

I take the same thing

1:00:06

out of the way. If I'm going to take my

1:00:08

time to explain something to you, I'm going to explain

1:00:10

it one time and you need to get it. Well,

1:00:12

people who are not very smart don't

1:00:14

generally function that way. They need

1:00:16

something to be explained

1:00:18

multiple times. That's enormously frustrating for

1:00:20

me and it wasn't, I

1:00:23

don't know when it was, but I just,

1:00:25

my eyes were open a number of years

1:00:27

ago and I realized, wait a second, Joshua.

1:00:29

Sometimes you're judging people for character deficiencies and

1:00:32

in reality, that's an entirely wrong judgment. Just

1:00:35

understand that not all people have

1:00:37

the same basic ability and

1:00:39

we need to respect that and understand that.

1:00:42

And what happens is that we do a

1:00:45

pretty decent job of this from the

1:00:47

physical perspective. If we see someone

1:00:49

is old or infirm or

1:00:53

handicapped in some physical way, then we automatically adapt

1:00:55

and adjust to that person. I'm going to walk

1:00:57

a little slower, I'm going to offer you my

1:01:00

arm, I'm going to do something to adapt. And

1:01:02

we do it with

1:01:04

proper respect. We don't look down on

1:01:06

somebody because this person has a differing

1:01:08

physical capacity than I do. We don't

1:01:11

look down on them, we just naturally

1:01:13

adapt to one another. And it's going

1:01:16

to result in, our

1:01:19

lives are going to result

1:01:21

in segregation in some contexts.

1:01:24

If somebody is physically handicapped sitting in a

1:01:26

wheelchair, then he's going to be sitting on

1:01:28

the side of the sports field while those

1:01:30

who are not physically handicapped are playing on

1:01:33

the sports field. But that doesn't mean that

1:01:35

there's not a place for that person in

1:01:37

society. We're going to respect

1:01:39

and appreciate that person, we're going to celebrate

1:01:41

him for what he can do, for the

1:01:43

things that he can contribute. One

1:01:45

of the great problems that we're facing in our society

1:01:47

though is we don't know how to do

1:01:50

that with intellectual ability. We're sorting

1:01:52

people And segregating people based upon

1:01:54

intellectual ability, but we don't know how to

1:01:56

identify it, we don't know how to talk

1:01:58

about it, we don't know. How to

1:02:00

esteemed people for the ontological value

1:02:02

that is not based upon intelligence

1:02:05

while simultaneously segregating people first for

1:02:07

intelligence? I don't have any solution

1:02:09

to. That's all I know is

1:02:11

it's is. It matters. So how

1:02:13

do you screen for intelligence? Well,

1:02:15

I think academic ability. Is.

1:02:17

The most obvious useful scream that

1:02:20

we have for that academic ability

1:02:22

and academic achievement as a useful

1:02:24

proxy for I Q C, one

1:02:26

understand what kind of grades is

1:02:28

the person, what kind of grades

1:02:30

to some the you're interested in

1:02:33

marrying get when they were young,

1:02:35

and how far does this person's

1:02:37

academic education go now. If.

1:02:39

The result of educational attainment is

1:02:42

high. Let's say that you are

1:02:44

highly educated. You have a master's

1:02:46

degree, a Phd, a college degree

1:02:48

of some kind, then almost certainly

1:02:50

you're going to be attracted to

1:02:52

people who are also highly educated.

1:02:54

If you are younger and let's

1:02:57

say you're twenty years old and

1:02:59

you are, and you are, ah,

1:03:01

as trying to assess somebody. You

1:03:03

can't assess somebody based upon whether

1:03:05

or not this person has a

1:03:07

a a Phd. Obviously, twenty years.

1:03:09

Old so then you your filter

1:03:12

is going to be based upon

1:03:14

greats. What kind of grades does

1:03:17

somebody gets when. when young.

1:03:20

People. Who do well in school are

1:03:22

likely to do well in school

1:03:24

and. Doing well

1:03:26

in school is a useful and

1:03:29

productive proxy that other people can

1:03:31

use to measure of intelligence. The

1:03:33

The The The the components of

1:03:35

intelligence that relate to academic ability.

1:03:38

At least I Q is not

1:03:40

the only important component of intelligence,

1:03:42

and if you dig into the

1:03:44

I Q debates, you can see

1:03:47

that's it seems like a useful

1:03:49

metric that. he

1:03:51

is able to be measured but not a

1:03:53

complete metrics and so hopefully in a decade

1:03:55

or a couple decades will know how to

1:03:58

deal with that but for now You

1:04:00

should be generally attracted to somebody who gets

1:04:02

grades kind of like you do and

1:04:05

does well in school and that

1:04:07

should be a component of That

1:04:10

you use to filter prospective

1:04:12

marriage candidates by now

1:04:14

in a moment. I'm going to talk about the heritability

1:04:16

of intelligence one

1:04:18

of the Challenges though is we need

1:04:21

to be careful. I think

1:04:23

that your basic filter here should be The

1:04:26

great how well does somebody do in

1:04:28

school the filter should not

1:04:31

necessarily be how many advanced

1:04:33

degrees? Does a person have

1:04:36

because there may be a negative

1:04:38

effect to somebody having a lot of

1:04:40

advanced degrees? Remember earlier I tried

1:04:42

to make the distinction. I want to put in

1:04:44

your mind. There's a difference between marrying well and reproducing

1:04:47

and Marrying

1:04:51

well, you could have two academics,

1:04:53

right? P8 to

1:04:55

2 PhD holders that come together

1:04:57

and they both have just this

1:04:59

passionate academic career and He

1:05:02

studies the advanced I

1:05:05

don't know cosmology and she studies

1:05:07

advanced biological science and they can

1:05:10

have the happiest most fulfilling marriage

1:05:12

in the history of mankind Statistically

1:05:17

they probably aren't going to reproduce very well They're

1:05:19

probably not going to have children if they do

1:05:21

have children. They're probably not going to have many

1:05:23

children There's going to

1:05:25

be some challenge here and the challenge

1:05:27

is that in our

1:05:30

current relatively antenatal age higher

1:05:33

levels of educational Achievement

1:05:36

don't always correlate to having

1:05:38

more children Because

1:05:40

of the investment into attaining

1:05:42

higher levels of achievement This

1:05:45

is different for men and for women,

1:05:47

but I think educational achievement and income

1:05:49

need to be measured What

1:05:52

we know is men who earn

1:05:54

higher incomes the higher a man's

1:05:56

income goes the more children He

1:05:58

tends To have. Women:

1:06:00

Who earn higher income? the higher

1:06:03

her income goes, the fewer children

1:06:05

she tends to have. That's not

1:06:07

true when it's related to well.

1:06:09

So as I understand the data,

1:06:12

women who are wealthy or who

1:06:14

earn income informs other than wages,

1:06:16

they tend to have more children

1:06:18

or but it's women who earn

1:06:20

a lot of money, don't tend

1:06:23

to have I in in wages,

1:06:25

don't tend to have very many

1:06:27

children. This can be a real

1:06:29

challenge. Imagine. That you are a man

1:06:32

and you're trying to filter for a

1:06:34

woman and you want to have a

1:06:36

happy marriage or of where you have

1:06:38

good compatibility between you and you also

1:06:40

want to have five children. Statistically,

1:06:45

If you marry a woman who is

1:06:47

very invested into her academic career and

1:06:49

she's pursuing a Phd and she's gonna

1:06:51

go and get a job she's not

1:06:54

gonna have many children. Quite

1:06:56

simply, she's gonna run at a

1:06:58

time to have children. So unless

1:07:00

she is developing some kind of

1:07:02

creative. As it is, sorry

1:07:05

she didn't run out of time to

1:07:07

have children as he probably is gonna

1:07:09

be so devoted to her career. the

1:07:12

she's just not that interested in having

1:07:14

children. So unless we could figure out

1:07:16

how to develop a new model for

1:07:18

young women that allows them to maximize

1:07:21

their educational accomplishments and career prospects while

1:07:23

also allowing them to have children when

1:07:25

they are young and have their. Children.

1:07:28

Sit around their career, then. we

1:07:30

need to be really careful here

1:07:32

at of what you're actually filtering

1:07:34

for because you marry a girl

1:07:36

because he's got a Phd and

1:07:39

a great career or that's wonderful.

1:07:41

Says probably going to be phenomenally

1:07:43

intelligent, hard working, have enormous amounts

1:07:45

of grit perseverance. Those are great

1:07:47

traits that you would love your

1:07:49

children to inherit. and

1:07:51

you're probably not going to have

1:07:53

many children so if we can

1:07:55

filter in figure out how to

1:07:57

help her to have children and

1:07:59

acts those traits in the future, that's

1:08:02

one of the things that we need to filter for. So

1:08:06

let's talk about transmission. Your

1:08:08

proxy, especially if you're a man, can't

1:08:11

just be educational attainment. It

1:08:14

has to be something prior

1:08:16

to that, which is going to be grades, and

1:08:18

I'm just going to say educational potential. Let's

1:08:21

talk just for a moment about the

1:08:23

transmission of intelligence to the next generation.

1:08:25

Back to coming apart by Charles

1:08:28

Murray from his

1:08:30

section on homogamy. This section

1:08:32

is entitled, Transmission of Cognitive Abilities to the Next

1:08:34

Generation. Watch the total solar

1:08:37

eclipse at Seneca resorts and casinos.

1:08:39

Join us on Monday, April 8th

1:08:41

for events filled with food, drinks,

1:08:43

DJs, viewing glasses, and more. Family

1:08:46

friendly at Seneca Niagara and Seneca

1:08:48

Allegheny. 21 and up

1:08:50

at Seneca Buffalo Creek. The first 200

1:08:53

guests at each property receive a commemorative

1:08:55

t-shirt. Book your overnight stay now so

1:08:57

you don't miss it. Get all the

1:09:00

details at senecacasinos.com. Seneca

1:09:02

resorts and casinos. Nothing else

1:09:04

comes close. Another

1:09:06

consequence of increased educational and cognitive

1:09:08

homogamy is the increased tenacity of

1:09:11

the elite in maintaining its status

1:09:13

across generations. The adage,

1:09:15

shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in

1:09:17

three generations, grew out of an

1:09:19

observed reality. If the children

1:09:21

and grandchildren are only average in their own

1:09:24

abilities, money from a Fortune 1 in the

1:09:26

first generation won't keep them at the top

1:09:28

of the heap. When the

1:09:30

parents are passing cognitive ability along with

1:09:32

the money, the staying power of the

1:09:35

elite across generations increases.

1:09:38

Specific numbers can be attached to such statements.

1:09:41

The stability of the average IQs for

1:09:43

different levels of educational attainment over time

1:09:45

means that we can predict the average

1:09:47

IQs of children of parents with different

1:09:49

combinations of education. And we

1:09:51

can also predict where the next generation of the smartest

1:09:53

children is going to come from. On

1:09:56

average, children are neither as smart nor as

1:09:58

dumb as their parents. They are closer

1:10:00

to the middle. This tendency is

1:10:03

called regression to the mean. It

1:10:05

exists independently of genes. Regression

1:10:07

to the mean is a function of

1:10:09

the empirically observed statistical relationships between the

1:10:12

tested IQs of parents and children. Given

1:10:15

the parameters in a previous note, the

1:10:17

expected value of the IQ of a

1:10:19

grown-up offspring is 40% toward the population

1:10:21

mean from the parents' midpoint IQ. Suppose

1:10:24

we have four white couples with the same level

1:10:26

of education. Plugging in the average IQs for those

1:10:29

levels of education as given in a previous

1:10:31

table, I add a fifth couple who

1:10:33

both have degrees from elite colleges with a midpoint

1:10:35

IQ of Here

1:10:38

is what we can expect as mean IQs of the

1:10:40

children of these couples. We

1:10:42

have the parents' educations and the expected IQ

1:10:44

of the child. If the

1:10:46

parents' educational level is that they are two

1:10:48

high school dropouts, the expected IQ of the

1:10:50

child is 94. If

1:10:53

parents' education is two high school diplomas, the

1:10:56

expected IQ of the child is 101. If

1:11:00

parents have two college degrees and no more, the

1:11:02

expected IQ of the child is 109. If

1:11:05

the parents' education is two graduate degrees, the expected

1:11:07

IQ of the child is 116. And

1:11:11

then if the parents' IQ education

1:11:13

is two degrees from

1:11:15

an elite college, the expected IQ of the child

1:11:18

is 121. These

1:11:21

represent important differences in the resources that members

1:11:24

of the next generation take to the preservation

1:11:26

of their legacy. Consider

1:11:28

first a college graduate who marries a high

1:11:30

school graduate, each with the average cognitive ability

1:11:32

for their educational level, 113 and 99 respectively.

1:11:36

Their expected midpoint IQ is 106. Suppose

1:11:40

they built a small business, been highly successful, and

1:11:42

leave $5 million to their son. If

1:11:45

their son has the expected IQ of a little less than 105,

1:11:47

he will have only about a 50% chance

1:11:50

of completing college, even assuming that he tries to

1:11:53

go to college. Maybe he

1:11:55

inherited extraordinary energy and determination from his

1:11:57

parents, which would help, but those qualities

1:11:59

regressive. to the mean as well. Shirt

1:12:02

sleeves to shirt sleeves in three-generation is a

1:12:04

likely scenario for the progeny of that successful

1:12:06

example. Compare that situation with

1:12:08

the one facing the son of two parents

1:12:10

who both graduated from elite schools. If

1:12:13

he has exactly the expected IQ of 121, he has more

1:12:15

than an 80% chance of getting a

1:12:18

degree if he goes to college. These

1:12:20

percentages are not a matter of statistical theory. They

1:12:22

are based on the empirical experience of both the

1:12:25

1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal

1:12:29

Survey of Youth. If

1:12:32

you had an IQ of 105 or one

1:12:34

of 121 and entered college, those are the

1:12:36

probabilities that you ever got a degree. In

1:12:39

addition to those differing chances of graduation, our

1:12:41

qualitative difference is between young people with IQs

1:12:43

of 105 and 121. First,

1:12:47

the reasons that someone with an IQ

1:12:49

of 105 doesn't finish college probably includes

1:12:52

serious academic difficulties with the work, whereas

1:12:54

the reasons a person with an IQ

1:12:56

of 121 doesn't

1:12:58

finish college almost certainly involve

1:13:00

motivation or self-discipline. No

1:13:02

one with an IQ of 121 has to drop

1:13:05

out of college because he can't pass the courses.

1:13:07

Second, there is a qualitative difference in

1:13:09

the range of occupations open to those

1:13:12

two young persons. The one

1:13:14

with an accurately measured IQ of 105

1:13:17

cannot expect to be successful in

1:13:19

any of the prestigious professions that are

1:13:21

screened for IQ by their educational requirements,

1:13:24

for example, medicine, law, engineering, and

1:13:26

academia. It is unlikely

1:13:28

that he can even complete those educational requirements.

1:13:31

Someone with an accurately measured IQ of

1:13:33

121 can succeed in any of them

1:13:35

if his mathematical and verbal talents are both

1:13:38

strong or succeed in the ones geared to

1:13:40

his talents if there is an imbalance between

1:13:42

mathematical and verbal ability. Now,

1:13:44

think in terms of an entire cohort

1:13:47

of children. Where

1:13:49

will the next generation of children with exceptional

1:13:51

cognitive ability come from? For

1:13:53

purposes of illustration, let's say that

1:13:55

exceptionally high cognitive ability means the

1:13:57

top five centiles of the next

1:13:59

generation of white children. More

1:14:01

than a quarter of their parents may be expected to have

1:14:03

a midpoint IQ of more than 125. Another

1:14:07

quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ

1:14:09

of 117 to 125. The

1:14:12

third quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of

1:14:14

108 to 117. That

1:14:17

leaves one quarter who will be the children of

1:14:20

parents with midpoint parental IQ of less than 108.

1:14:23

Only about 14% of that top five

1:14:25

centiles of children are expected to come,

1:14:27

on the entire bottom half of the

1:14:30

distribution of white parents. Therein

1:14:32

lies the explanation for that startling

1:14:34

statistic I reported earlier about SAT

1:14:37

scores. In 2010, 87% of the students with

1:14:41

700 plus scores in critical reading or

1:14:43

mathematics had a parent with a college

1:14:45

degree, and 57% had

1:14:48

a parent with a graduate degree. Those

1:14:50

percentages could have been predicted pretty closely

1:14:52

just by knowing the facts about the

1:14:54

IQs associated with different educational levels and

1:14:57

the correlation between parental and child IQ.

1:15:00

They could have been predicted without making any

1:15:02

theoretical assumptions about the roles of nature and

1:15:04

nurture in transmitting cognitive ability and

1:15:07

without knowing anything about the family incomes

1:15:09

of those SAT test takers, how many

1:15:11

test preparation courses their children took, whether

1:15:13

they went to private schools or how

1:15:15

ingenious the educational toys in the household

1:15:17

were when they were toddlers. In

1:15:20

an age when the majority of

1:15:22

parents in the top five centiles

1:15:24

of cognitive ability worked as farmers,

1:15:26

shopkeepers, blue collar workers, and housewives,

1:15:28

a situation that necessarily prevailed a

1:15:31

century ago given the occupational and

1:15:33

educational distributions during the early 1900s,

1:15:36

these relationships between the cognitive ability

1:15:38

of parents and children had no

1:15:40

ominous implications. Today, when the

1:15:42

exceptionally qualified have been so efficiently drawn into

1:15:44

the ranks of the upper middle class and

1:15:47

where they are so often married to people with the

1:15:49

same ability and background, they do. In

1:15:52

fact, the implications are even more ominous than

1:15:54

I just described because none of the numbers

1:15:56

I used to illustrate the transmission of cognitive

1:15:58

ability to the next generation. Incorporated

1:16:00

the effects of the increased educational

1:16:02

homogamy of recent decades. In

1:16:05

any case, the bottom line is not subject

1:16:07

to refutation. Highly disproportionate numbers

1:16:09

of exceptionally able children in the next

1:16:11

generation will come from parents in the

1:16:14

upper middle class, and more specifically from

1:16:16

parents who are already part of the

1:16:18

broad elite. I

1:16:20

want you to understand that intelligence

1:16:23

is inherited. And

1:16:25

so you want to marry the

1:16:27

most intelligent person that you can. And

1:16:30

there's a strong, because you want your children

1:16:32

to be smart, because intelligence makes everything easier

1:16:34

in life. And you want

1:16:36

your children to be, and so

1:16:41

you want to marry the most intelligent person that you're

1:16:43

able to. And if you want your

1:16:45

wealth to continue through the generations, and

1:16:48

you want to break that shirt sleeve to

1:16:50

shirt sleeves problem, you clearly see that you

1:16:52

need to account for intelligence. And so you

1:16:54

want to marry the kind of person who

1:16:57

is intelligent, as best you're able to

1:17:00

attract. And so here's

1:17:03

my message, loud and clear. Let me pause for

1:17:05

just a moment so you listen. Men,

1:17:11

your future wife who

1:17:14

is intelligent is almost

1:17:16

certainly going to be enrolled in

1:17:19

college. Right

1:17:21

now we have an enormous social

1:17:23

problem brewing. It's already here. The

1:17:26

big, there's many problems.

1:17:28

I don't know how to solve, by the way, I don't

1:17:31

know how to solve the social issues just described in what

1:17:33

I have read. All I know is that

1:17:35

for you as an individual, if you want to

1:17:37

be wealthy, you want to marry a wealthy,

1:17:39

excuse me, if you want to be wealthy, you want

1:17:41

to marry an intelligent spouse, and

1:17:43

you want your children to be intelligent. I don't

1:17:45

know how to solve the social mixing problem. We'll figure

1:17:47

out some solutions to it. I don't have any today.

1:17:50

What I know is that you need to marry somebody

1:17:52

who is smart. But men, right

1:17:55

now, girls

1:17:57

and women are going to college at a rate that's

1:17:59

$1.5 billion. that is, I think it's like

1:18:01

two-thirds female and one-third male.

1:18:06

There is a strong movement

1:18:08

of men to go away

1:18:10

from college. Some

1:18:12

of these reasons are valid.

1:18:15

Some of these reasons are less valid. College

1:18:19

probably has been broadly oversold

1:18:21

to many people. The

1:18:25

financial impact of college has resulted in more

1:18:27

people going to college than should go to

1:18:29

college. I

1:18:32

don't know how to solve all these issues, but

1:18:36

men are facing, and men and young

1:18:38

women, this is a problem, sorry, it's both, men and

1:18:40

women are facing enormous problems. A lot

1:18:42

of men right now are

1:18:44

bitter about how many women have

1:18:47

been funneled into the college pipeline.

1:18:50

Women are handed constant

1:18:52

and never-ending encouragement in

1:18:54

our society that men

1:18:56

never receive. And the

1:18:59

underperformance of men in the current age is

1:19:01

something that we've gotta take seriously if we're

1:19:03

going to save our civilization. Women

1:19:07

receive constant affirmation and

1:19:09

men receive almost

1:19:12

constant confrontation. The

1:19:15

school environment, starting in elementary school,

1:19:17

is mostly toxic to men. It's

1:19:22

very highly favored in favor of

1:19:24

women. Everything in

1:19:26

our society is structured around you

1:19:29

go girl, you go girl, and

1:19:31

almost all of it is anti-male.

1:19:34

As the father of four sons, I pay a lot

1:19:36

of attention to this. I

1:19:39

don't know how to solve all of those things,

1:19:41

and I don't wanna necessarily go down

1:19:43

the rabbit trail of trying to figure out today

1:19:45

what's right and what's wrong. Maybe

1:19:48

everything was wrong with our

1:19:50

previous civilization. Maybe our

1:19:53

previous civilization was just cruel

1:19:55

to women and froze

1:19:57

them out of everything and imposed enormous ceilings

1:19:59

on them. them maybe. But

1:20:02

in the wake of feminism, we've

1:20:04

become very anti-male and our boys

1:20:07

are failing to thrive. One

1:20:09

expression of that is that many of them

1:20:11

are not going to college. And

1:20:14

so maybe it was a bad

1:20:16

thing that 80% – that 100% of

1:20:18

previous college attendees were men and then it was 80%.

1:20:21

Maybe that was a bad thing and it

1:20:24

had to be corrected. But what we're currently

1:20:26

seeing in the current data is that 50%

1:20:28

isn't working. So now it's gone lopsided in

1:20:30

the other direction. And what is happening as

1:20:32

a result of this? Well,

1:20:34

women are generally desiring to have

1:20:36

a relationship with men who

1:20:39

are their equal or superior. Women

1:20:42

tend to be more hypergamous than men are.

1:20:44

They want to marry a man who is

1:20:46

in a better station in life than they

1:20:48

are – someone who's more successful, more sophisticated,

1:20:51

more intelligent, more accomplished. Whereas men don't have

1:20:53

the same preference. Men want to marry a

1:20:55

woman who makes them feel good, who gives

1:20:57

them peace in their life, who complements them,

1:21:00

gives skills and things like that. Men don't

1:21:02

go around wanting to marry women who are

1:21:04

their superiors and who are better than them

1:21:06

on some metric. It causes men to

1:21:08

be frustrated and feel frustrated

1:21:11

with their lives. So what

1:21:14

is happening though is that so many

1:21:16

women now are not able to find

1:21:18

what they perceive to be high-quality marriage

1:21:21

candidates. And so they're all competing desperately

1:21:23

for this tiny cohort of college-age men.

1:21:26

Most of them are having polygynous

1:21:28

relationships with men, whether they know

1:21:30

it or not. If you look

1:21:32

at the data, it's clearly polygynous

1:21:34

relationships and in many cases they

1:21:36

know it. And the

1:21:40

extent of this is that they're not marrying. And so

1:21:42

then those men that are in college are

1:21:44

often – I don't

1:21:46

want to go beyond what I can prove from the data. So

1:21:49

I just – rather than saying anymore,

1:21:51

it's a real problem. So

1:21:54

for men, just recognize though that

1:21:56

in this basically birth-to-college pipeline that

1:21:59

most – girls grow up in.

1:22:02

If you are going to marry an intelligent woman,

1:22:05

it's almost unthinkable to see why

1:22:07

she wouldn't have a college degree

1:22:09

or be enrolled in college. Our

1:22:12

culture is pushing, pushing, pushing

1:22:15

girls and young women to college at enormous

1:22:17

rates. It supports them left, right,

1:22:19

and center. It encourages them that you

1:22:21

have to do this. You have to

1:22:23

do this. It pours money into them,

1:22:25

pours all kinds of special advantageous programs

1:22:28

for them. And so

1:22:30

as a man, there's a decent chance that

1:22:32

if you're a young man, you're pretty annoyed

1:22:34

about that because you didn't get

1:22:36

any of that. Nobody pushed you in that direction. You

1:22:39

didn't get any of the money. You didn't get any

1:22:41

of the support. You didn't get any of the extra

1:22:43

tutoring. Whatever. Suck it up. Life's

1:22:45

not fair. The point is that if

1:22:47

you're going to marry an intelligent woman, she's almost

1:22:49

certainly going to be in college. In

1:22:52

order for her not to be in

1:22:54

college or not to have a college

1:22:56

degree of some kind, she would have

1:22:58

to be incredibly iconoclastic, incredibly

1:23:02

anti-trend, etc. And that's just not

1:23:04

a normal female trait. It's

1:23:07

believable to

1:23:09

think that a very highly educated, highly

1:23:11

qualified, intelligent woman could find a man

1:23:13

who just was so smart that he

1:23:16

saw the stupidity of the college sorting

1:23:18

mechanism. And he went out and he

1:23:20

started, he's a high school dropout, but

1:23:22

he started five businesses and he's got

1:23:25

ten million dollars in net worth by

1:23:27

the time he's 21 years

1:23:29

old and she could pick him, target

1:23:31

him, attract him, seduce him, marry him,

1:23:34

boom. That's entirely believable because

1:23:36

we know that happens significantly. There

1:23:38

are a lot of men who

1:23:41

do that. Men are much more

1:23:43

likely to be that kind of

1:23:45

anti-authoritarian kind of guy. It

1:23:48

doesn't work the other way. And so if

1:23:50

you're a man and you're looking for a

1:23:53

wife, almost certainly the best place to be

1:23:55

looking is on a college

1:23:57

campus. If you are remotely close in age,

1:24:00

to the kinds of women that you would find in

1:24:02

a college campus. And I

1:24:05

find this discussion incredibly funny and

1:24:07

ironic. I believe that what

1:24:10

I've described, though I have used more words than

1:24:12

I would like, is absolutely

1:24:14

logically true. But

1:24:16

I find it ironic because years ago, not

1:24:18

only would I have made fun of, when

1:24:21

I was in college, I would have made fun of the

1:24:23

idea that a useful reason to go to college is to

1:24:25

find a wife or a husband.

1:24:27

We all made fun of it because it was the

1:24:29

MRS degree. And so men made

1:24:31

fun of women for going to college to

1:24:33

meet a husband. I never make

1:24:36

fun of anyone today who has a strategy to

1:24:38

land a husband or a wife. I never make

1:24:40

fun of them because I've seen how those

1:24:42

girls who have a strategy to land a

1:24:44

husband, they get married and I wish them all the

1:24:47

best. So I don't make fun of anybody today for

1:24:49

having a strategy to attract a

1:24:51

high quality spouse. What I find

1:24:53

ironic and funny is that I

1:24:57

now think that the tables have turned, that

1:24:59

the women who go to college are gonna

1:25:01

have a hard time finding a husband in

1:25:04

many cases. And that

1:25:06

now going to college is going

1:25:09

to be a reliable, a

1:25:12

good reason for going to college is

1:25:15

to find a great wife. And

1:25:18

that going to college is going to

1:25:20

be a more reliable way for a

1:25:22

motivated young man who wants a wife

1:25:24

to find and attract and find filter

1:25:26

and attract her than

1:25:29

many other types

1:25:32

of strategies. And so I've counseled

1:25:34

this repeatedly to young men who are of college age.

1:25:37

If you are intelligent, for most

1:25:39

intelligent people, academics are pretty easy.

1:25:42

The only reason academics are not easy is because you get

1:25:44

tired of them. So take a break or two, but if

1:25:46

you're 25 years old and

1:25:48

you've got a bachelor's degree, go get a

1:25:50

master's degree, because you're going to find it

1:25:53

easier to be in contact with a lot

1:25:55

of young women candidates

1:26:00

for marriage because

1:26:02

that's where they're all been sorted into and

1:26:05

it's a perfectly reasonable valid

1:26:07

strategy that people don't appreciate

1:26:09

to the degree that they

1:26:12

ought to appreciate. Now

1:26:14

for young women who are in college I

1:26:16

would say that I think there's probably still a

1:26:19

competitive strategy that if you're trying to attract a

1:26:21

man that you meet in college I think

1:26:24

that there are competitive

1:26:27

strategies that you could employ

1:26:29

to express femininity

1:26:32

that would help you to attract a man especially

1:26:35

a man who is likely to be a good

1:26:37

husband. One of the ironic

1:26:39

things about the feminist revolution is

1:26:42

that what today we refer to as

1:26:44

feminism I think could equally be called

1:26:46

masculineism. What I mean is

1:26:48

simply that almost every trait that you'll

1:26:50

hear a feminist talking about about

1:26:53

wanting to encourage and young girls and women

1:26:56

is actually a trait

1:26:58

that men traditionally have and

1:27:00

it's not that feminists want

1:27:02

to be more feminine and

1:27:04

express their womanness to a

1:27:06

stronger degree. On the

1:27:09

contrary feminists want to be less feminine

1:27:11

and express their inner masculinity

1:27:13

to a stronger degree and

1:27:16

so most feminist women

1:27:19

tend to wind up looking and sounding

1:27:21

a lot like men than like women.

1:27:24

I think the a good strategy for

1:27:26

young women who are fighting

1:27:28

finding themselves in environments where they're fighting for

1:27:31

a small pool of men to employ is

1:27:34

reject feminism and lean

1:27:36

into femininity. So

1:27:38

reject trying to be like a

1:27:40

man and instead embrace being truly

1:27:43

feminine and I think that

1:27:45

this kind of expression of femininity is

1:27:47

your magic formula

1:27:49

to attract

1:27:52

a very high quality man because you will

1:27:54

wind up creating for him the kind of

1:27:57

environment that he is likely to be a

1:27:59

good husband. really resonate with regardless of

1:28:01

whether he can explain it or not.

1:28:05

And this doesn't in any degree

1:28:07

mean that you have to sacrifice

1:28:10

your intellectual ability, your academic

1:28:12

ability, those

1:28:15

kinds of things. Those things are important

1:28:17

and a smart man wants to marry

1:28:19

a smart woman. But

1:28:21

putting it crudely to make the point so

1:28:23

that it will stick in your mind. Assume

1:28:27

that you are a

1:28:29

20-year-old young lady and you're

1:28:31

in college and you

1:28:33

want to attract a

1:28:37

really high quality husband. Let's

1:28:39

assume that your plan is to become a

1:28:41

medical doctor or to get

1:28:43

a PhD in neuroscience. What

1:28:46

I'm trying to demonstrate is that you're

1:28:48

a woman of ambition, you're a woman

1:28:50

of ability and

1:28:53

you have high ambitions for your

1:28:55

intellect, for your career, things like

1:28:57

that. If

1:29:00

you dye your hair blue, if you chop

1:29:02

all your hair off, dye your hair blue

1:29:04

and go parading around in the streets at

1:29:07

the next political march holding

1:29:09

a cardboard sign, the

1:29:11

chances of your being single five years from

1:29:13

now are very, very high. On

1:29:16

the other hand, if you grow your

1:29:18

hair long, put on a cute sun

1:29:20

dress and learn how to cook amazing

1:29:22

food, the chances of your being married

1:29:24

to a doctor five years from now

1:29:26

are very, very high. There

1:29:29

is no difference whatsoever in

1:29:32

your fundamental academic

1:29:35

ability, career ambition, intelligence. There's

1:29:37

no difference as to how

1:29:39

serious a man will

1:29:41

take you and respect you. A

1:29:44

high quality husband is likely to

1:29:46

appreciate and respect your intelligence.

1:29:48

He's looking for those things. But

1:29:51

there is an enormous difference in

1:29:53

your attractiveness based upon how you

1:29:56

express your femininity. So

1:29:58

please, if you care about... this

1:30:00

stuff. Don't be a

1:30:02

feminist. Be feminine. And men

1:30:06

are not looking for weak, stupid

1:30:10

women who

1:30:12

just happen to be hot. Men are looking

1:30:14

for strong, the kind of man that you

1:30:16

want to be married to, are looking for

1:30:18

strong, confident, intelligent

1:30:21

women who

1:30:23

are women. I

1:30:26

hope that helps someone who's younger. Consider

1:30:29

that college is an important strategy.

1:30:33

So far, genetic traits that we have to

1:30:35

look for. I've talked about good health and

1:30:37

longevity. I've talked about intelligence. I'm going to

1:30:39

move a little faster because these other ones

1:30:41

are important but they're more obvious and they're

1:30:43

less easily measured. We don't necessarily have as

1:30:46

much data. The next trait I think

1:30:48

you want to look for that is probably genetic is

1:30:51

the trait of resilience or what today we

1:30:53

would probably call grit. Grit

1:30:55

is a characteristic that we resonate

1:30:59

with. We know it's important and

1:31:01

it's a characteristic that's increasingly

1:31:04

being measured in the social science. It

1:31:07

seems to be at least

1:31:09

somewhat genetic. Marrying

1:31:12

someone who is resilient and

1:31:14

expresses strong stick-to-it-iveness

1:31:17

or strong grit means

1:31:21

that you would be married to somebody who

1:31:23

is able to overcome the challenges that life

1:31:25

is going to throw at you. All

1:31:28

of us face enormous setbacks

1:31:31

and our ability to persevere

1:31:33

through tough times is

1:31:35

usually the key that leads to long-term

1:31:38

success. If you study millionaires,

1:31:40

what you see is that it's very common

1:31:42

for millionaires to go bankrupt at least a

1:31:44

couple of times on their pathway to success.

1:31:46

It's very common for people to be

1:31:48

laid off from work, very common for

1:31:51

people to lose their businesses, to lose

1:31:53

their livelihoods. Many successful people face these

1:31:55

things. The difference between somebody though

1:31:57

who becomes a millionaire or a multimillionaire has

1:32:00

much more to do with his ability to

1:32:02

dust off the failure and get up and

1:32:04

keep going. A guy who goes bankrupt and

1:32:06

rolls over and sits in the corner and

1:32:08

sucks his thumb or says, I'm depressed. I

1:32:10

can't go on with my life just because

1:32:13

I'm so depressed and sits around and whines

1:32:15

about his condition in life is not

1:32:17

likely to be wealthy. But the guy who dust

1:32:19

himself off says, that sucked. I don't want to

1:32:21

do that again and goes after it again as

1:32:23

the guy who's likely to be wealthy. What you

1:32:25

see as you get older is you see that

1:32:28

so much of long-term success in anything, in learning,

1:32:30

in academics, in business

1:32:33

success, in marriage, in everything in life has

1:32:35

more to do with your ability to get

1:32:37

knocked down and get up and try again

1:32:40

than it does to do with the actual impact

1:32:42

of getting knocked down or what it says

1:32:44

about you. Everyone gets knocked down. And

1:32:46

so grit seems to be from what I can

1:32:48

figure out to be at least somewhat genetic. I

1:32:51

read one paper and let me just read you

1:32:53

the initial abstract from it just

1:32:55

so you get an idea that there's some people that are trying

1:32:58

to understand

1:33:02

this and find academic evidence

1:33:05

for the

1:33:07

heritability or non-heritability of a trait

1:33:09

like grit. I'm

1:33:13

reading here from a British publication. The

1:33:16

paper is called True Grit

1:33:18

and Genetics, Predicting Academic Achievement

1:33:21

from Personality by Four Authors,

1:33:23

Rimfield, Kovas, Dale, and Plumbin.

1:33:26

Here's the abstract. Grit, perseverance

1:33:28

and passion for long-term goals has

1:33:30

been shown to be a significant

1:33:33

predictor of academic success, even after

1:33:35

controlling for other personality factors. Here,

1:33:38

for the first time, we use

1:33:40

a UK representative sample and a

1:33:42

genetically sensitive design to unpack the

1:33:44

etiology of grit and its prediction

1:33:46

of academic achievement in comparison to

1:33:48

well-established personality traits. For 4,642

1:33:50

16-year-olds, 2,321

1:33:54

twin pairs, we use the

1:33:56

Grit S scale, Perseverance of

1:33:58

Effort and Consistency. of interest,

1:34:00

along with the big five personality

1:34:02

traits, to predict scores on the

1:34:05

general certificate of secondary education, GCSE

1:34:07

exams, which are administered UK-wide at

1:34:09

the end of compulsory education. Twin

1:34:12

analyses of grit perseverance yielded a

1:34:14

heritability estimate of 37%, 20% for

1:34:16

consistency of

1:34:20

interest, and no evidence for

1:34:22

shared environmental influence. I repeat,

1:34:24

heritability estimate of 37% and

1:34:27

no evidence for shared environmental influence.

1:34:30

Personality, primarily conscientiousness, predicts

1:34:32

about 6% of

1:34:34

the variance in GCSE scores, but grit

1:34:36

adds little to this prediction. Moreover,

1:34:39

multivariate twin analyses showed that

1:34:41

roughly two-thirds of the GCSE

1:34:44

prediction is mediated genetically. Grit

1:34:46

perseverance of effort and big five

1:34:49

conscientiousness are, to a large extent,

1:34:51

the same trait, both phenotypically, R

1:34:53

equals 0.53, and genetically, genetic correlation

1:34:55

equals 0.86. We

1:34:57

conclude that the etiology of grit

1:34:59

is highly similar to other personality

1:35:02

traits, not only in showing substantial

1:35:04

genetic influence, but also in showing

1:35:06

no influence of shared environmental factors.

1:35:09

Personality significantly predicts academic achievement,

1:35:11

but grit adds little, phenotypically

1:35:13

or genetically, to the prediction

1:35:16

of academic achievement beyond traditional

1:35:18

personality factors, especially conscientiousness. So

1:35:21

you see that, basically, there is, grit

1:35:24

seems to be at least somewhat heritable.

1:35:27

So I think that, more importantly, this

1:35:29

is something that we know makes a difference. So you're

1:35:31

going to marry. You're going to, again, use my example.

1:35:33

You're going to marry a man who flunks out of

1:35:35

school. Do

1:35:39

you want that man to get up and keep going, or do you want

1:35:41

him to curl up in the corner and suck his thumb? And

1:35:44

if you're a man, think of what your wife wants. Let's

1:35:47

say that you're a man and you're marrying a

1:35:49

woman, and she gets a demotion at work. Do

1:35:52

you want her to curl up and wine and

1:35:54

cry into her bottle of wine about how hard

1:35:56

life is and how it's so entirely unfair, or

1:35:58

do you want her to say, all right, well,

1:36:00

I'll have to work harder next time. Lack

1:36:03

of grit is just flat on annoying. If

1:36:05

nothing else, you don't want to live with somebody who does

1:36:08

this. And remember that you're going to

1:36:10

be facing the challenge of supporting

1:36:13

this person emotionally. And

1:36:15

so one of the most valuable aspects that

1:36:17

we get from marriage is emotional support. If,

1:36:20

if I face a difficulty in

1:36:22

my life, I want to be

1:36:25

able to go home and cry on

1:36:27

my wife's shoulder and for her to

1:36:30

let me cry for a few minutes. And then the next

1:36:32

day say, all right, get out there. I believe in you.

1:36:35

And yet she can only do that so many

1:36:38

times. It's fine for me to go and have

1:36:40

a good cry one time. But

1:36:42

if I turn into a blubbering mess and I

1:36:44

do that a second time and a third time

1:36:46

and a fifth time, it's going to be tough

1:36:48

for her to continue that. Similarly, as a husband,

1:36:50

if my wife faces difficulties, I'm going to be

1:36:52

there for her. I'm going to be there to

1:36:54

support her. I'm going to be there to build

1:36:56

her up and hold her while she cries and

1:36:58

say, it's okay, girl, let it go. But

1:37:01

on the second day, all right, I'm going to do

1:37:03

it. But on the third day, come on, suck it

1:37:05

up. Life is tough. And so that's going to be

1:37:08

super, super annoying if you're an achiever. And

1:37:11

so these elements, this expression of grit, I

1:37:13

think gets at what we're, what we're looking

1:37:15

for is that we need to, we want

1:37:17

to be married to somebody who's not going to just drag

1:37:21

us down all the time into an emotional

1:37:23

morass. And once you're married, now

1:37:25

you got to figure out how to build this

1:37:27

person up and marrying somebody who's emotionally handicapped and

1:37:29

can't deal with setbacks in life is no formula

1:37:31

for a happy life. So on

1:37:33

what basis would you judge the grit

1:37:35

that somebody is displaying in his or

1:37:37

her life? I don't have as

1:37:40

useful or as convenient of a proxy as, as

1:37:42

I do for the previous

1:37:45

one. So for health, we can

1:37:47

use beauty and attractiveness and athletic

1:37:49

ability as pretty decent markers for

1:37:52

health, especially if you bring in

1:37:54

family history and longevity of parents

1:37:56

and grandparents as well. For

1:37:58

intelligence, we can use. academic

1:38:00

ability and grades in academia

1:38:02

as a pretty decent proxy

1:38:04

for intelligence. How do you

1:38:07

judge grit? I

1:38:09

don't have a decent of a proxy. So what I'm

1:38:11

going to do is I'm going to read to you

1:38:13

a list of basically characteristics

1:38:15

that are associated with grit. And

1:38:18

I think these are things that you want to

1:38:20

look for. So first, persistence in the face of

1:38:23

challenges. You want to ask

1:38:25

yourself, does this person that I'm interested

1:38:27

in marrying demonstrate? Has he or she

1:38:29

demonstrated persistence in the face

1:38:31

of challenges? Does

1:38:34

this person demonstrate consistency

1:38:36

and commitment, perseverance

1:38:38

and pursuit of passion, resilience

1:38:41

and adversity, the

1:38:43

ability to delay gratification, effortful

1:38:47

engagement, goal

1:38:49

clarity and direction, seeking

1:38:52

and embracing challenges, adaptability

1:38:54

and learning from failure and then

1:38:56

long-term drive towards achievement and success?

1:39:00

All of these are components of grit.

1:39:02