WCI #340: Choosing To Thrive With Stacy Taniguchi

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Their money since 2011. This is White Coat Investor podcast 340 choosing to thrive with Stacy Taniguchi at some point in our financial lives, it will be time to buy a home. A physician mortgage can be a good vehicle for a young doctor who's just out of school and has a more effective place to use their money than on a big down payment. These loans allow doctors to secure a mortgage with fewer restrictions and a lower down payment than a conventional mortgage. But if you're further advanced in your career or deeper into your journey to financial freedom, buying a home with a conventional mortgage and then later on potentially refinancing that loan to a better rate with a shorter timeframe could be a great move. Wherever you are in your financial journey, make sure you use the mortgage that will be most financially beneficial for you. Hop over to our recommended tab to learn more about all of your mortgage and refinancing options@whitecoatinvestor.com mortgage. You can do this and the White Coat Investor can help welcome back to the podcast. I'm recording this the 1st of November. Hope you had a happy Halloween. I know we did. There was a great deal of candy and fun with friends and neighbors last night, so we're all recovering today, but hopefully we can still put together a decent podcast for you. Our quote of the day today comes from Jonathan Clements said trying to beat the market isn't just a risky endeavor that will almost certainly end in failure. It's also unnecessary and arguably an astonishing waste of money and time. Love that quote and I appreciate you guys and what you do. A lot of you are out there doing hard things. I had a shift yesterday and you know, it's amazing some of the things we're asked to do as docs, some of you are in other professions. It's pretty wild sometimes to see how the other half lives and to try to assist them in their lives. And sometimes you don't give very many thank yous for that. So if no one's thanked you today, let me be the first. By the way, if you would like to come to the conference, this is WCICON24 and it's the first week of February. First week of February is when this takes place. It's in Orlando, Florida. It works out great to be combined with the trip to Disney World or other theme parks in the weekend before or the weekend after this trip, but it's fantastic. Bring your family, bring your partner, whatever. We've got a special bonus though, if you Register before the 16th. Register before the 16th and you also get the world's greatest swag bag. So if you register after that, we don't have time to print the books and cannot get you a swag bag, at least not in its usual glorious form. So if you want to come to the conference, it will be best if you sign up by no later than midnight on November 16th. You can do that@wcievents.com I think if you've been listening to the podcast regularly, you kind of know about this conference. It's a fantastic conference. You'll learn about finances, but you're also gonna learn about wellness. And the best part about it is we knock off at 4 o' clock every day and go do actual wellness activities together. So it might be the only conference you've ever been to where you're there with multiple specialties, multiple professions, and you're actually having a ton of fun and not just sitting through presentations. In fact, the presentations are all gonna go home with you. So we encourage you to spend your time at the conference doing things that are going to increase your wellness. Networking, talking and meeting with other people and knowing that the content will go home with you. We'd love for you to attend the classes and most people do attend at least some classes while they're there. And you can get CME credit for it as well as dental CE credit. And so you can use your CME money to pay for this sort of a thing. You can write it off if you're self employed and we encourage you to come. It's a great conference. I love meeting you all there. It energizes me for the next year of work here at the White Coat. And but if you want to register wcievents.com, do it before November 16th, you also get a swag bag. All right, we are bringing back a guest that we have had on the podcast before. He's actually spoken at wcicon last year, but let's get him on the line and talk with him about the importance of thriving in our lives, as well as some opportunities you have to help teach you how to do that. I'm excited to have Dr. Stacy Taniguchi back on the White Coat Investor podcast. Welcome back, Stacey.

Hey, thank you for having me.

For those who don't know, Stacy was one of our keynote speakers at a recent WC icon. He speaks on the topic of choosing to thrive and creating your ideal life. And also runs a company, helps run a company called Beta Experiences that we're going to be talking a little bit about later in the podcast today. But Stacy, tell for those who don't know you, how did you get interested in all of this stuff?

Well, it kind of extends back to my early days of just trying to kind of figure out, you know, what am I going to do with my life. So back as a teenager, just trying to understand, you know, what, what's life going to be like kind of in my future. And there were several experiences that really piqued my interest. One, one of the early ones was catching an article in the old Life magazine that some of your audience members may remember, weekly pictorial magazine that had an individual who had created a list of things he wanted to do in his life. And that just got my interest to create my own list of things that I wanted to do in my life. But I think the real understanding of what I was really trying to do was making sure that I would live a life that was a life of thriving and a life of hope and always having the eyes to look for opportunities to go and do certain things. And that kind of extended into my professional career as a university professor and as a researcher trying to understand what makes meaningful life available.

So at some point along the way, you decided to create your own list. Tell us a little bit about that.

That's correct. So that started when really I was kind of a teenager and just kind of thinking, you know, what are, what are some of the highlight points that most people might have in their life? Like, I want to graduate from high school, I want to go to college, I want to get a degree. So a lot of that was pretty straightforward that most of your audience members probably have thought about as accomplishments that they're looking forward to and have probably done. The other thing would be what were some of the kind of the dream things that I wanted to do. There were places I wanted to go I wanted to see, for example, Mont Blanc and the Chamonix Elks, French Alps. I wanted to see the Taj Mahal in India. I wanted to go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reefs. Some of those were like, at the time, that's way out there. But what I found was as I started creating some of these things, you become very aware that there are opportunities to do that. The question is, do you take advantage of the opportunity? And I know most people, myself included, I'm very good at making excuses of why, you know, I can't do that right now. Or, you know, whatever the reason is, I have found myself doing exactly the opposite because I know it's on my list that what I want to do is I want to accomplish that or I want to do it or I want to see it, because I may never have this opportunity again. So I find myself making less and less excuses and finding more and more reasons why to go and do that. And then by doing that, other doors of opportunities come about, and I find myself thriving in life. I'm really excited about what the next day holds.

Now, you've been adamant that this is not a bucket list, that it's a thriving. What do you see as the difference?

So, as your audience members probably are very familiar with is the bucket list is the things that you want to kind of create and make sure that you can hopefully do those before you die. The famous movie with Jack Nicholson is, you know, the whole idea is that he and his roommate are dying, and so they better go out and live it up. That, for me, has kind of a morbid connotation. And my idea is, you know, you're here to live. You're. You're really here to make the most of the life that you've got here on this earth. So for me, the thrive list is really a list to live, to go out and do it now, not necessarily wait till your twilight years and then start figuring out, well, you know, what haven't I done? So those are the things I want to do. And it's. It's pretty interesting because I am adamant that I don't want to use the word bucket list. And I was kind of in a doctor's office the other day, just in a large waiting room, and I saw two women on the other side, and they were talking about what they were planning to do for the summer. And one lady said, I have decided I'm going to take a train ride across the United States. And the lady says, wow, what made you think that? And she says, well, that's always been on my thrive list. And it shocked me because she didn't say bucket list, which is something I always hear. I don't know where she got that from, but I was excited that she sees it as a list to help her to live a thriving.

You know, after listening to your talk at the conference, I put together my own thrive list, you know, and this is things that I'd wanted to do earlier in life and had already accomplished, things I still want to do. I'm about two thirds of the way through mine, Stacy.

Oh, good for you.

But the big challenge I'm having is to limit it to 100. I'm over 100.

Well, remember, the number of things on that list doesn't matter. In fact, in my presentation, I've told people, you know, it starts with one and then it can go on forever and ever. My list ended up being 100 things, but I'm actually thinking about adding more things. And some of the things that I've been adding are because my wife shares similar aspirations. So we're thinking, well, let's go do that together.

You know, one of the things makes me a little bit scared to add things to it is that one of your rules was you could never take something off the list once you put it on there. Why is that rule important?

Well, if you remember, the list isn't just stuff that just pops into your head and then you just put it down. The idea is you have to know your values. You know, what's most important to you. Things that are basically non negotiable in your life, things that you would cross the ladder over the crevasse for. And when you start to think about those kinds of things, it kind of gives a kind of a different meaning to what you're going to put on that list. So I want people to be a little bit thoughtful for this. If it's something that really goes against your core values, those are probably not things that are going to help you to thrive. In fact, it might even have the possibility of making your life not very good. You're going to find yourself enduring that particular moment or section of your life. So what I have found, this is just from personal experience. Whatever I had put on that list when I was 18 years old, I found myself still very interested to check it off when I was 50, because I hadn't, you know, it had taken me that long to find that opportunity. But when that opportunity came, I was interested in doing it. And I'll give you an example. I. One of the things on my list is that I wanted to fly a glider plane. And that was back when I was very interested in flying and, and those types of things. And you know, to have the opportunity to go fly a glider plane just didn't come up very often for me. In fact, it never did until I was just driving near my home here in Utah and there's an airport out nearby that I guess that's where all the glider pilots are. And I saw a sign that I'd never seen before that says, you want to learn how to fly a glider. And I thought, okay, I think I was on my way to go skiing is what I was doing. And then I thought about that. Oh, wait a minute, that's on my list. So that, that would have been easy for me to just keep driving and go ski for the day. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to drive into the airport and inquire. So I did. And that ended up resulting in me taking some lessons. And I have already had my pilot's license, so I didn't have to do a whole, you know, like a whole long list of things. I was kind of like pre qualified. So after 10 hours of getting trained, I was flying a glider.

And all it cost you is one missed ski day.

Yeah, right. So it's just opportunities that you find. And it really does. It doesn't matter how old you are. I've had people in their 80s come up to me and say, you know what, Stacy, I'm old. I don't know, should I make a list? And my answer is, absolutely, make a list. Start with one.

You know, we talk about values and how to determine what you really value. You alluded to a part of your presentation at the conference, Crossing the Ladder. And some people may not understand what you're referring to there, but in this presentation, Stacy played a video of one of these ladders. You know, it's like three ladders strapped together crossing a bottomless crevasse in the Khumbu ice field on Mount Everest and basically asked, what would you cross the ladder for? And there's a few people in the crowd like me, that are like, I'd cross it just across it, you know, whereas other people are like, there's no way I'd go across that ladder. And then you tell an ex, you know, a hypothetical that your child's on the other side of that ladder and about to fall into the crevasse. Would you cross the ladder then? And now, all of a sudden, everybody would. So thus, that's one of the things they value. What would they cross the ladder for? But how do people, you know, what do you tell people? And they're like, how do we determine what we value? What, how do you set up your values? How do you know what your values are? What should our values be? How does someone do all that?

And that's a very typical question that, you know, if I'm just talking to someone about it and I can't give them the visual of crossing these ladders over a cavass, it's really difficult the ladder metaphor is really a tool to try to help people to sit down and think about that image of the three ladders lashed together, trying to cross this stepping rung from rung to rung, and knowing that it's a high risk activity, but what would make you risk it all to obtain whatever it is that's on the other side of the crevasse? People begin to realize money may not be enough. Of course the amount might make a difference. And if you kind of reword what it is, some people may not cross it for a million dollars because they realize they could die trying to get it. But if you reward it to say, would you cross it for financial security, all of a sudden that changes the image. And people now start, really, if they're not committed to cross it, right then and there they stop and think, is that worth me trying to get across? The other issue is there's really, we're talking about, there can be different kinds of values that I don't talk about in the presentation, but I think people begin to understand it. There's a difference of what you would cross the ladder for versus how you cross the ladder. And so I also talk about in the presentation that not only do you have to identify what matters to you most by using the crevasse ladder metaphor, but you also have to prioritize what those values are and what kind of values they are. And even though I don't go into that, it's kind of a follow up question that I typically get a lot from audience members is, well, if I have to prioritize my values, how do I do that? And I tell them, well, the first thing you have to do is you have to distinguish between what I call value determinations, the things you would cross the ladder for versus value attributes, how you cross the ladder. And once you do that, then we have a process that we do in our workshops to help people to distinguish those two categories. Because understanding those two categories then begins to help you prioritize what values become more important than others. And, and that's something that they have to actually do at some point soon after they identify their values. You don't wait until the moment to make that judgment because typically by then it's too late. Emotions, situational things begin to take over and your mind gets cloudy. Many times people make the wrong choice because they're not thinking clearly because of what, what circumstances. So yeah, the ladder and the crevasse is really a tool to help you determine what are your core values.

I like one of the questions you ask, would you live your life over and over again? And by creating a thrive list, it allows you to outline a life that you would be willing to live over and over and over again for eternity. You know, kind of a conscious living. You're living life the way you want to live life, rather than just as your circumstances dictate. Why is that question so powerful for people?

I think it's a very insightful question. I borrowed the question from Frederick Nietzsche's idea. He calls it the eternal reoccurrence of the same. But the idea is to really try to get the understanding yourself and for others to understand where you're coming from. Many people will immediately look at that question and they reflect on their past because that's what they have as a reference point. And it's very easy by looking at your past, that if you've had bad moments in your life, you've had traumatic experiences. I could easily see why people might answer the question, no, I would not want to live my life over again. It's been tough, it's been hard. I don't want to do those things again. But I try to encourage people to change the frame of reference, change their mental map around that question by looking to your future, which you can control. And the idea is not so much that you live your life over and over again because you enjoyed it so much, but it's really about living your life over and over again so that you can take the experiences that you've had and look for those opportunities to teach people and help people live a life to thrive that you've planned out from this point on. Because compared to what my past was like, my future is going to be one in which I will have more control. I will look for those opportunities and I will have experiences. Some may be good, some may be bad, but the majority of them are going to be positive to help me grow and that you can help other people grow. I know a lot of people probably look at the question and think, I'm going to do this over and over again because I had such a good time. What I try to teach people in workshops and later is now really the purpose of the question is for you to be able to come back to this life for future generations, to be able to teach them. You know, the message of choose to thrive. Don't just endure your life. It is something that you can choose to decide how you live your life. And I think most people would rather thrive in their life than endure it.

I've talked a little bit about this in some of my writing. And it's not just about the big things, about checking off one of the things on your list of 50 or 100 or 200 things on your thrive list, but also the day to day I've told people, actually write down what your life looks like, you know, how many hours a week you're spending doing this, how many hours a week you're spending doing that, and then write down what your ideal life would look like in that same respect and then try to make positive changes in your life. This is the classic Venn diagram. To maximize the overlap between those two circles and to create this ideal life, you know, in your day to day life, not just, you know, to have these, you know, super experiences that you have at times during your life. How can this idea of thriving be applied to our, you know, regular day to day lives?

Well, I think one of the things that's really important for your audience members to understand is a colleague of mine at Beta Experiences and also a university professor has done a lot of research around this concept called the myths of happiness. And we have this sense that really how we want to live our life is we really want to find happiness. The only problem is people tend to look for happiness in the wrong places. And in some cases like you're talking about, if they're recording things in their day to day life. For example, for many people doing their job, you know, and looking for opportunities to discover something that could be beneficial or to help a patient recover from some serious illness or injury, those are all important things. But the question becomes, is that going to lead to your happiness? And what I try to tell people is, are you really searching for happiness or are you searching for something? I call, and this comes from another colleague of mine called inner peace. And there is a difference because happiness has this problem of being confused with things like pleasure, wealth, power, in some cases, notoriety, influence. And what you begin to find is in your day to day life, something that I think could be added into what you're proposing to, to your groups are, are they leading to inner peace or are they leading to one of these other things? And the question is, it's okay if they're going, you know, if it's going towards wealth or it's going towards pleasure, whatever, but in the end, are these the things that you value? Are these the things that you would cross the ladder for? And if they are, then you're pursuing and you should be thriving. But if they're not, then just make sure that it's placed in its proper perspective in your daily life. So I'll just give you a quick example. Is most of your day just solely dedicated to your job to the point where you neglect your family members? And if the answer is yes, because it's one of the things I value, then my question is then where does your family compare to your job and your value of financial security? Does it trump your family? Because if it doesn't, then you have to take a minute to take a look at your Venn diagram and see if your family values can become a bigger part of the overlap rather than the job. And so it's things like that that we talk about and choose to thrive to try to help people to understand that. Don't confuse the myths of happiness as the replacement for inner peace. Because I think in reality, I think most people are searching for inner peace, not necessarily for just happiness, as we typically think about it as wealth, power, things like that.

You know, a large part of our audience is frankly already wealthy, and most of the rest will soon or eventually become wealthy. And I think when people become wealthy, they start to realize that money is no longer the limiting factor in our lives, that the scarce resource really is time. And all of us only have a limited amount of time. We don't necessarily know how much time that is, but it's limited for all of us. And I've been, you know, spending a lot of time thinking about the seasons of life, that there are seasons of life in which some activities can be done and other activities can't. The classic example, of course, is when you're in your 30s and you have young kids. Well, you know, you can read them a book before they go to sleep, but by the time you're in your 40s and your kids are teenagers, they're not interested anymore. And you reading a book to them before they go to bed, you have missed that experience. If you did not have it in your 30s, it is gone to you forever. It's a little bit like backpacking Europe. This is kind of an experience people do in their twenties. When you're in your forties or fifties, backpacking Europe isn't so fun anymore. When you go to Europe, you want to travel very differently. And so how do you make sure as you work through your thrive list that you're doing it appropriately in the appropriate seasons of life? Do you have to plan kind of the order in which you do the things on your list?

I would say there is a little bit of that, but I wouldn't worry about it. When you're Making the list. And life just seems to have these opportunities. For example, this past spring, I took a group of people to hike to Everest base camp in Nepal. And that's a 12 day, pretty strenuous hike. You're hiking over almost 50 miles one way and gaining almost 9,000ft of elevation gain. And as you're hiking, you know, you, you find yourself that you've got this group that's kind of a mixed group of younger people who can run up and down the trail, taking pictures here and there and whatever. And then you have old people like myself who is just putting one step in front of the other and just trying to, you know, in a way, make it to the next destination. But what I find is when those things are on people's list. I had an older gentleman that was in our group. This was something so important to him that even though he was older, he definitely had trained and prepared himself for it when the opportunity came. He specifically was very interested in going because he had heard I was going and I was older than he was. So he figured, well, if Stacy can go, I can go. And he kept asking me, you know, how do you train? What do you do? And those types of things. And he found out it opened up other doors for him. He was kind of thinking he was starting to get into the twilight years of his life. And to be honest, yes, we are getting, you know, he and I were getting into twilight years of life, but it didn't mean that that's the end of it. And so he was more of, I wouldn't say he was a couch potato, but he wasn't a regular person to go out taking walks in the day. But this created an opportunity for him to focus on, if I'm going to do this trip, I've got to get out and I've got to take a walk every day with a backpack on, start getting my legs in shape. And he told me afterwards that what he found was this opened up doors of things that he still had on his list, that he kind of thought he was going to just have to let those go. That he now realized, I can do that. I just need to focus, that if I, you know, if I want to make that happen, I'm going to have to spend a little time preparing for it. And that even though I'm older and I still, I've got creaky knees and I've had, you know, a couple of surgeries to help me feel better or whatever, it's still an opportunity. I think that's what the list helps you to do. And remember the object of the list is not that you have to complete everything on. That's not the objective. The objective is that these are reminders of the things that you would like to see as waypoints on your journey through this thriving life.

That's a good segue. Let's talk a little bit about your company beta experiences. Now White Coat Investor is partnering with beta experiences and let's talk a little bit about what that company does. What exactly are these companies experiences that you put together for people?

So we are a group of people who really come from an academic background. But we, my partners and I, we've all been outdoors people. We've all been guides actually. And we enjoy being in the outdoors and doing fun things in the outdoors. Some of them are very challenging, but they're very rewarding. And we wanted to find a way to meld our academic background with kind of our enjoyment of being in the outdoors and share that with people. So we are a consulting company specifically we help a variety of audiences. We do executive leadership training types of things, but we also work with families. We work with families trying to help them build their legacy. We use the example of the three legged stool. If your family is the seat of the stool, one of the legs is financial planning, which you're very involved with. And a lot of people take the time to do that. They have a retirement fund, they have some idea of how they're going to retire. A second leg is what we call kind of like wills and trusts. The passing on of what you have, the hard assets that you might have. And a lot of people will have wills and trusts put in place. But like any three legged stool, it can't stand unless there's a third leg. And that third leg is what we call a legacy plan. A plan that what do you stand for? What are your values that you want to pass on to your future generations and to help them to feel like what they're going to inherit from the other two legs are going to be done in a way that's going to be what we call multi generational wealth. So that's another aspect of what we do, is we help people figure out that third leg. We also help people with retirement transitions. You're the CEO of your company and all of a sudden now you're working for a company where probably your significant other is the CEO. How do you start learning how to make that adjustment? And we help people with a thrive sense of life. So what we've done is we've taken our academic content and we embed it in what we call multi sensory experiences. We take you out to do things like we might take you mountain biking, we might do short hikes, we might do overnight hikes. We, we might do river rafting, we do canyoneering, we do climbing, we do UTV riding, things like that. We've even done things like tours in the city. We go to a city and we'll go and visit certain sites. But everything that we do is specifically designed to help teach the content that our clients are interested in learning, help them with pain points or just to be better educated. So we're not the type of consulting company that you would hire to come into a classroom to teach. We take you into an environment that for most people is very different and novel. And we combine doing fun things with content related.

Now just give people a sense of what this really looks like. Let's talk about, you've got a couple of trips already on the books for next year. These are already full trips, but let's talk about each of them and kind of what the people going through these experiences are going to experience. The first one, I think is an Alaska trip next summer. And the second one is another trip to Nepal in the fall. Can we talk about each of those individually and what they look like for the people?

Sure. So our Alaska trip, we try to customize it as much as we can to the interests of the people who are planning to go. But primarily it's based around having a variety of experiences so that they have a taste of Alaska as well. Because if you're going to go to Alaska, you know, you want to get a sense of what Alaska is like. So we do, for example, a sea kayaking activity. And this one is actually an overnight one. You'll camp on an island or on a beach somewhere, but you're going to paddle around. Sea kayaking is very different from whitewater kayaking. This is not like you're going to be flipping over all the time. These, these are long, big, stable kayaks. But what we're going to do is we're going to go up and see tidal glaciers that are calving into the ocean. We're going to see sea life that might be swimming around, whales or seals or sea lions and a lot of seabirds even have an opportunity to do some fishing. Then we also, because fish fishing is a big part of what people like to do in Alaska, we take people salmon fishing so they have that experience. The number one tourist attraction in Alaska is Denali, Formerly known as Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. So we'll fly people in so that they can see the mountain up close and personal from a plane. Then we land on a glacier so they have an opportunity to be on a glacier. And if we land close enough to one of those crevasses, we'll actually set up a type of like ladder crossing. So what they saw in the presentation on a slide and video, they actually now have the chance of like, would you cross it? You stand over edge of a crevasse, you know, would you be willing to do this? It's a whole different perspective. We'll do some short hikes and we'll kind of just get this sense of what we call south central Alaska. That's our focus, where Anchorage happens to be, and just get a flavor of life in Alaska, last frontier. But embedded in that is we're teaching some of the concepts about choose to thrive and helping people to understand things. Like we, we do a short segment about mindfulness. So we, we take people up into the mountains just outside of Anchorage, it's not very far away, up in the Chugach Mountains. And then we, we talk a little bit about the place, we talk a little bit about mindfulness. And then I have people actually go, walk off into the tundra by themselves and they just find a place where they can be alone and they practice mindfulness. It's, it's a very different experience than me just telling you how to do mindfulness in a classroom. And you're in this beautiful valley surrounded by these mountains and you get a chance to do a little bit of meditating. We'll do stuff about like when we're fishing, you know, where we talk a lot about the ecology of the river, what the fish are doing, and really understanding that salmon fishing is more than just throwing your line out there with a hook on it, hoping that a fish is going to grab it and eat it. Especially when you realize a lot of the salmon don't feed freshwater river. So we talk a little bit about what's happening there and they have to be thinking about that process. And like I said, you know, when we're on the glacier, we talk a little bit about the metaphor of the glacier or the corvass and the latter. So there's content built into the experience. And then of course, my forte is to tell stories, tell stories about, you know, my experiences of being in the place where they're at. Kind of get people to understand that this is a pretty cool place. This isn't just the Alaska that the tourist groups see. There's stories and history, science behind some of this stuff.

So what are the specifics on something like that? I mean, how long would a trip last approximately? What's the range of cost for something like that? Can you go by yourself or is it usual to bring another person or a few people with you? Can you talk a little bit about some of those specifics?

Okay, so typically, because like you said, time is a very rare commodity amongst a lot of people, we limit the trips pretty much to like a one week type of experience in Alaska. It's not worth going to Alaska just for just a couple of days. So we'll spend probably. Our trips are usually around six to 10 days. It just depends on what people want. The cost is usually, you know, we cover everything except for you're getting to Anchorage, Alaska, that's on your own. But you know, we're looking probably around the 5, 5, six thousand dollar range because you're doing all these activities and we supply pretty much all the equipment and meals and that type of thing. And then of course you're getting a lot of the content delivery and guides that type of thing. Transportation. We, we have done trips where just individuals from different places around the world come and join in and those work out pretty well. But we also have people that come as friends or as family members. And obviously that is a good way to already know that you've got somebody that you're being close to. And you know, we've even done groups where a corporate group, like a management group or a C suite wants to do something around the content that we're delivering and they're feeling like doing something in a novel area would just be an enticing way to get people to jump on board and go. So we've had a variety of different kinds of clients and they all work because it's really the experience of being where you are doing the activities and then having content delivery that helps you to learn more about living to fly.

So what would a Nepal trip look like?

So the Nepal trip is a little bit more of a commitment for time. Typically it's, it's a 16 day trip in Nepal, but you need to add at least probably two days of travel if you're coming from the United States on the front end and on the back end because you're literally on the other side of the world. You fly into Kathmandu. We, we spend about a day in Kathmandu. I don't like to spend more than a day because I, I don't want anybody eating Something that they shouldn't have eaten, and then they get sick before the trip. And we're pretty controlling about that, where we, you know, we usually try to eat together and places. But we'll spend one day in Kathmandu, and I do a tour of Kathmandu so that you can kind of see the flavor of this developing country. And it's beautiful. You get a taste of the fact that there's two major religions that literally live side by side. The world, I think, right now could learn a lot from the Nepalese. You know, you've got the Hindus and you have the Buddhists, and they. They're not in conflict with each other. Even though their religions are very based on different things, they coexist very easily. Then we take a. A flight, a helicopter flight from Kathmandu into the mountains. And we'll be at a place where you're at 9,000ft in the mountains. And that's where we start. And we hike to different villages in the Kumbu Valley. And it's the only valley that leads to the south side of Mount Everest. It's this place where the climbers have to hike when they're going to go climb the mountain. And we stay in tea houses. We're not camping, not intense or anything. We stay in these tea houses that are like lodges, eat our meals there. And we slowly acclimatize because we're going to go from 9,000ft all the way up to 18,000ft where the base camp is at. And then one thing that we do, because we have connections, we'll go into the base camp. People who are trekking typically don't have permission to go into the base camp. You can kind of go up to the edge of the base camp and kind of look at what you can see from there. I have connections with climbing expeditions that we will take you into the base camp. And we've made arrangements to have lunch with a climbing team if they're not on the mountain. Time. But we'll definitely talk to some of the leaders and base camp managers. And then you're right at the base of the Khumbu Icefall. Like, I take people and we go touch the ice. We can't go into the icefall because of the dangers and things, but you can go up and touch the ice of the icefall and you get to see the culture and people, of course, the magnificent mountains. I used to think Alaska had the most beautiful mountains. Himalayas, just very different and much more spectacular because the foothills is as high as the now. And then, of course, you see Everest and there's a small little peak that we climb to hike. And we do an early morning hike from that peak. If the weather is clear, like it has been for several times that I've done it, you will see four 8,000 meter peaks. So four of the highest 14 mountains in the world. Yeah. And then we hike back and what I integrate with it is choose to thrive. And we talk a little bit about leadership and fitness, things like that. Because I use the 1996 tragedy on Everest. Most people remember it if they. They follow stuff like this. It was called Into Thin Air, which was a book written by John Krakow about the 11 people who died on Mount Everest in one evening. There was a lot of questions about the leadership of those expeditions. So we use that as kind of the backdrop of studying leadership skills and decision making, critical thinking. So every trip that we do is more than just a tourist visit because there's a lot of tourist vendors out there that you can do those kinds of things. Ours is specifically designed to deliver content. Awesome.

All right, well, thanks for sharing the specifics about those. If you are interested in doing a trip like this, I want you to sign up@whitecoatinvestor.com Thrive T H R I V E and it'll get you on a list that when this becomes available, you know, there's no guarantee that the dates are going to work out for you or whatever, but when this becomes available, we'll send you an email and give you the opportunity to sign up for one of these trips. Now these are obviously, you know, small trips with limited numbers of people. You know, typical trips got a minimum of about six, maximum of 12 to 15. So it's a small group. And for that reason, that's why these two trips Stacy just described for next year are already full.

Right.

You can only take so many people. But if you would be interested in being able to sign up for these trips, go to whitecoatinvestor.com thrive and there's a form there you can sign up. And there's no commitment, but we'll let you know when they become available and give you the opportunity to sign up and go on one of these trips and have an incredible experience while learning, while having this experiential learning and help you learn how to thrive. All right, Stacy, our time is getting short. What have we not talked about that people ought to know?

Well, I think I would also like to suggest that you visit our website, which is betaexp.com B-E-T-A e x p.com we're trying to work very closely with White Coats investors to be a service to your clients and to do things together. We offer the services that I had mentioned to you earlier about leadership training, kind of legacy planning, those kinds of things that I think you will find goes very much hand in hand with the financial advisement that your group, your company is doing. But we'd like to just make sure that people, if your idea of learning is more than just sitting in a classroom and you're thinking, you know, this experience, we call it experiential learning, then hopefully we're, you know, we're available to give you at least some ideas of what we're doing. We have a lot of people that are very much into what we call experience design. So they're very knowledgeable about how to journey, map out specific kinds of experiences so that, you know, we end up with the result, you know, that people are seeking. But yeah, we're out there and we're having fun though, because we obviously get to go out and do these things with people. It's just, you know, you're from Alaska, Jim. You can just imagine for a first time visitor, be able to fly and land on a glacier, to go salmon fishing, to go sea kayaking and watch tidal glaciers, cabin the ocean. That's pretty spectacular. And to be honest, a lot of first time visitors to Alaska typically don't get that. They might get one or two of these, but we put it all together in about a six day trip.

Pretty awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Taniguchi, for coming and talking about this. For the rest of you, choose to thrive, learn to thrive, and plan to thrive. And this experience can help you to do that again. Whitecoatinvestor.com thrive. That's how you sign up. So you know when these things are happening. You can learn more about what they can do at beta experiences@betaexp.com all right, thanks again, Stacy.

Thank you, Jim.

All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Stacy. Stacy's an incredible person. I didn't mention this during the podcast.

Podcast.

Stacy is somebody I've known since I was a kid. He was a neighbor, he was a high school teacher, he was a boy Scout leader. He was my guide when I climbed an alley when I was 17. Somebody I've kept in touch with throughout our lives. Shortly after I graduated from high school, he left his high school teaching career, went and got a PhD and been teaching college ever since, and now is running this experiential learning company. So really an incredible person. Who really, really has lived a life just like he teaches you to do. But if you ever have the opportunity to go on a trip with Stacy, it's something else and not an opportunity to be missed. At some point in our financial lives, it will be time to buy a home. A physician mortgage can be a good vehicle for a young doctor who's just out of school and has a more effective place to use their money than on a big down payment. These loans allow doctors to secure a mortgage with fewer restrictions and a lower down payment than a conventional mortgage mortgage. But if you're further advanced in your career or deeper into your journey to financial freedom, buying a home with a conventional mortgage and then later on potentially refinancing that loan to a better rate with a shorter timeframe could be a great move. Wherever you are in your financial journey, make sure you use the mortgage that will be most financially beneficial for you. Hop over to our recommended tab to learn more about all of your mortgage and refinancing options@whitecoatinvestor.com mortgage. You can do this and the White Coat Investor can help. Don't forget Swag bag deadline the 16th. If you sign up by midnight for WCICON 24, you get a swag bag. Why not get the swag bag? It's great. You can get some books in it, get some other cool stuff. And it's just a nice bonus for signing up a little bit earlier for the conference. Thank you to those of you who tell other people about this podcast about the website that's truly the way we grow the money most is through word of mouth. You are a trusted source for your trainees, for those who are training you, for your colleagues. Telling them about White Coat Investor really does make a big difference. We appreciate it when you do that. Thanks. For those who are leaving us five star reviews for the podcast that helps spread the word to people who listen to podcasts but don't know about the White Coat Investor. A recent one came in from scnicknane1233 and said, Excellent. Best personal finance podcast there is. Listening to this for six months is probably going to be worth millions over the course of my career. Thanks for making this outstanding podcast five stars. Well, thank you for that great review. All right, come to the end of our podcast once more. Don't worry, we're not going to quit this week. There's going to be another one next week, so stay tuned. Till then, keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll See you next time on the White Coat Investor Podcast. The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.