• Does technology create a more difficult environment, or does it just expose something that has always been happening?
• Is it harder to be a kid today than when we were growing up and how do we address the new challenges?
• What is the most important thing we can give our kids to shield them from the outside world?
• What can we do as parents to ensure developing healthy, happy and productive kids who are excited about life and not scared to death?

Everyone knows that our educational system is in trouble, this is not a secret.

Falling standardized test scores, lower literacy rates, children not being able to do simple math or construct paragraphs with correct sentence structure, are just the tip of the iceberg.

It was announced earlier this week that Finland, as an attempt to fundamentally disrupt a failing system, is going to end all subjects in school.

Unfortunately, this is not a radical, bold new move, it is exactly along the same lines of thinking that has been making education worse and worse.

The problem with education is not a the people (in fact teachers and administration have never cared more about their students than today), it's not a subject problem (well it kind of is, but at a deeper level), it's a core philosophical problem.

Until and unless children are taught in a way that is congruent with the way the human brain works, we will always have the same educational problems.

The purpose of this podcast is to discuss why removing 'all subjects' is a bad idea and how to make education better.

• Why knowledge is important to you and your children's life and why you can't make actual learning important enough.
• Why our modern educational system is in trouble and what we can do to fix it. HINT: The issue has nothing to do with the people in the system - teachers are some of the most caring people on the planet the problem with the system is, imagine that, philosophical.
• Why removing subjects from school is a huge step in the wrong direction. Removing structure from school is not a radical new way of thinking, it's more of the same way of thinking that's already ruined education.
• What you can do at home to help your child.

The often repeated mantra at Life By Design Inc. is "we don't guess, we test."

At the heart of this statement is the message to not only rely on subjectivity to determine your quality of health (or most other important things in your life).

People with no previous subjective indicators for heart disease, die daily from heart attacks. This means one day they felt great and the next...

Do you see the problem with using how we feel as the main criteria for whether we are moving towards health or away from it?

This is where bio-markers come in.

What is a bio-marker? It's an objective measurement of the physiological processes that occur in the body.

The great news is many of these bio-markers can be used to predict our chances of living a long life.

In today's episode we discuss some of the best ones and what you can do to boost your longevity.

What we covered:

• The ONE mistake not to make when using bio-markers to determine the quality of your health.
• A marker far better than total cholesterol to grade your cardiovascular risk and for women, to judge your chance of dying from anything!
• Details about an important mineral you need but are likely deficient in. Your lack could shorten your lifespan but it doesn't need to...it's super easy to fix.
• How your omega fat profile can dictate the health of your cell walls and what that means for a long healthy life.
• Tale of the tape. What your waist circumference should be in order to maximize your chances of wearing those pants for a really long time.
• A metric with MAJOR ramifications if you don't keep it in check (and of course how to do that). 

• Are unmet expectations really the silent marriage killer or could it be something else? 
• Why marriage and relationships, especially when children are involved, do not strengthen you, they expose you. The sure-fire way to make sure you're not caught with your pants down when the tide goes out.
• How and why self-awareness and rational selfishness are the keys to setting expectations and communicating them in a way that will help you feel empowered. 
• Why marriage should be treated as a business deal and not privy to over the top emotions and unrealistic regulations.