What's on Your Mind: Supplements & Puerto Rico

Guests:
Ram Ahluwalia & Justin Guilder
Date:
01/26/2024

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Episode Description

Justin and Ram discuss what supplements they take, and reflection on the trip to Puerto Rico (longevity, lifestyle, tax).

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey, Justin, how are you? We got a new hat. I haven't seen this one before. Hey, Ram. I don't know if I've still kept the streak alive, but I think that I have not repeated a hat yet. That was my follow up. They're all distinct. And there are at least a dozen of these. So We're going to see how deep the well, the hat reservoir goes.

The well goes deeper than a dozen, but I'm getting into the territory of hats I don't necessarily keep in the top rotation. It's appropriate this time of year to wear that specific hat. To wear the San Francisco Giants hat? That's football season, right? So this is baseball. That tells you what I know about sports.

See? Yeah, exactly. No, I was actually trying to figure out what hat to wear. Sometimes I tie it to a meaningful connection to the conversation if possible. They're not all, [00:01:00] it's not available for all types of conversations, but I do have a pretty deep well of hats. This has forced me.

Force is the wrong word. This has motivated me to buy extra hats. When I'm looking at a hat, I'm like now I can keep the new hat every what's on your mind Friday going. I might have to bring a book with me for every Friday and just show here's the book of the week. There you go. We know from behind you that you have a lot.

More than enough books to get through. I hope my kids just pick these off the shelf, when they're teenagers and I can influence them. So you know what's so funny is I saw somebody say something on do we call it X or do we call it Twitter now? I prefer Twitter, X more and more. I still call it Twitter, but I think I'm getting, coming around to the idea of calling it X.

Anyway, I saw on Twitter, A pretty interesting idea. Kids are older than yours. Kids [00:02:00] are older than mine, though my kids are getting close there. They're 9 and 12. The father essentially said he would pay his kids 20 bucks or 40 bucks or some nominal amount when they wanted a little bit of money if they read one of his kind of like business related leadership self help books and then gave him a quick overview of what they learned from it.

The second one, I like that component, John Stewart's middle father. Raised in very much the same way except there's no compensation, but he'd have his son, John Stuart Mill, who's an incredible economist, founder of utilitarianism and he'd go on a walk and say tell me what you read and J.

S. Mill accomplished quite a lot. I would like that. I like that stuff, but I don't know if the compensation does much because the motivation isn't intrinsic. It's just getting through it to get the cash. And you hope that the intrinsic motivation catches. I guess it depends on whether you're going for [00:03:00] building up their intrinsic motivation or whether you're trying to build up their knowledge set.

So if they read the book and they do internalize something and actually say, write down, hey, this is what I learned from it. And they don't just go to ChatGPT and say, Hey, ChatGPT, what could you learn from this book? You'd still have value gained. You're going to give your kid the 20 bucks anyway, or 40 bucks.

Oh, I see. So it's a substitute mechanism versus, because you're going to give 20 bucks, 40 bucks when they go to the shopping somewhere, so I see what you're saying. I'm investing for myself. I'm not sure the principles are in action here. This person may not give money. Otherwise, there may be some slightly different Kind of structure in place.

So I was talking to you the other day, where their daughter, who I think turned eight or something, and said, hey dad, what do you do? Who said that? Was that you just and your son? I'm trying to remember who, like someone had this conversation, and I said that's really, and they said, Oh, [00:04:00] I remember who it was, one of our friends in Puerto Rico, we just got back from and he said, Oh, let me tell you what I do.

And they had a really, interesting one hour conversation and then he introduced her to the business and, she wanted to learn more. And I don't know if it led to a book reading per se, but that natural curiosity and cultivating that, I think was, I think it's a good approach. I talk to my kids a lot about that.

Sometimes if I'm driving in the car and I have to do a conference call, I'll ask them to not do, not say anything, but listen in. They don't have it all the time. It's not like I'm taking calls while I'm driving around with my kids. But if it happens, originally I used to put in AirPods or something so that they didn't have to hear it and they could do their own thing.

I And I was talking to somebody and they said why not let your kids listen in and hear what you do and think about it. And I thought, [00:05:00] it's not a bad, it's not a bad idea. I'd love to take my kids on a business trip or a conference with me. That'd be wonderful and have them just sit in and, Learn from all that.

I think it's an incredible education. Especially in this remote world, you don't really take your kid to work if you work at home. The kids, you took your work home. Exactly. I welcome that. So what are we discussing? We've got, what, we, the Puerto Rico trip with supplements is a special topic also?

Yeah, I was going to say, let's let's talk a little bit about Puerto Rico. How'd you like it? You hadn't been there in a while. I like the convenience. You're there on a short direct flight and the theme is incredible, especially in Dorado, Puerto Rico, where you've got all these expats that have moved there to take advantage of a better tax treatment.

And these are very accomplished people from all walks of life. They are hedge fund managers, they are Early Bitcoin, ETHE investors, there are executives that [00:06:00] have run leading insurance companies. We had a dinner, it was over subscribed, we had an extra table, and at the ritz at the end, we put them all there.

Like a 120 percent attendance rate. And we had a best ideas dinner there, where everyone went around the room and shared their best investment idea or their best longevity tip. It was great. I liked the vibe very much. I think I intend to go back quarterly. Really good group. It's like a, it's like a village.

It's Dorado of I guess 700 plus or minus families, pretty much everyone knows each other. And the quality of life there is excellent. When you're on the Ritz residences, it's like not a single blade of grass that's off. And I, people play a lot of golf, they're into fitness.

The quality of food is just like exceptional. The coffee is exceptional. It's a good, good quality of life. What were your impressions? Yeah, I was impressed. I thought that it's, it takes a lot to move your family anywhere, right? [00:07:00] So it takes a lot to move your family to a new city, to a new state, to a new country.

And for the people who have decided to move to Puerto Rico, they're certainly incentivized by the tax benefits of Puerto Rico. By design, right? Puerto Rico is trying to incentivize people to move there and it's working. I'd say that I was impressed by the caliber of people. Not that I expected anything less, but the density of high caliber people.

Made you realize that it would be easy to move there and know that you could have a community, which I think is always the challenge when you move anywhere new. It's like, how do you build and develop a community? And because it's a relatively small, we'll call it expat, obviously Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, but it is [00:08:00] slightly different than other regions of the U.

S. It does have an expat feel, and I thought it was wonderful, and Having spoken to a number of people, it was a lot of young families because they indicated it was harder if you were a single person to move to Puerto Rico. And it was harder if you have older kids that are more established in school, in their relationships, maybe high school age.

Pulling them out of school to relocate to Puerto Rico, not as easy. Thank you, bud. A lot of people that had younger kids or who had their kids in Puerto Rico were there. For families who have, children zero to ten, Yeah, maybe even a little older. It seemed like there were a lot of U. S. citizens, Puerto Rican residents who have moved there for tax benefits, and they have a really strong community, which is a [00:09:00] tremendous asset to even things like longevity and mental health, right?

Having a good community, and they all really knew that they needed to be there for one another. I agree. I think it's the next generation West Palm Beach. We'll see that 20 years from now, you're going to look back and I think that's what is Dorado in Puerto Rico now. Yeah, and it's gorgeous, right?

Island life is it's wonderful. I've, I grew up in South Florida, so I appreciate the warm weather, and I did The feeling of sunshine and 80 degrees in the winter, you get used to that. Yeah, no, it was good. I came back to some slush and I was like, Oh man, Puerto Rico is nice. It was really nice.

Talk a little bit about the longevity and the health and wellness in Puerto Rico, because I was also struck by The focus that everybody has there. And I think one thing that was really interesting having lived in different climates that [00:10:00] people who live in warm climates appreciate is that you have a different pressure to maintain a physique because you're going to be the In a pool or on the beach, 12 months out of the year versus three months out of the year or four months.

And it does have an interesting psychological effect. And that was talked about by numerous people. There's a social reinforcement mechanism to look good. And people are generally in very good shape. Everyone we met there, they're in good shape. Everyone's got their trainer and good diet. And the other part is, They are incredibly knowledgeable about supplements and medicine and treatments and you and I are on top of this stuff and we, I learned a few things, I was like, wow, I've never heard about that one.

And so they trade these ideas with one another to eke out more health, Ben. That's right. Yeah. [00:11:00] It was really interesting because they. This is a small group of people that have achieved pretty significant success financially in their life. So they have an opportunity, and they have the means to think about these things and invest in it.

So it makes sense, but it was very eye opening to hear the way they thought about, spoke about, and critically examined their health. Yeah, the distribution of wealth, I would say, at that dinner was like 50 million, 100 million, billion. I that's the level of the kind of wealth and Relatively young, highly accomplished, driven, young families that want to disinherit the IRS, which we're going to help them with.

Justin owns that mission. Yeah, that's exactly right. It was really motivating. I agree. They are young. So they all were around our age, some a little bit younger, some a little bit older. It's very motivating to [00:12:00] see that number of people who have achieved that much success at that age. Absolutely. So supplements.

These are one of the things that we were talking about in medicine. I think we're going to trade like what supplements, we take on a daily basis. I should probably take a lot more than I do, but I have half a dozen, I think. All right. You want to start us off? You want me to start? I'll start with one.

So I I take choline every day, alpha GPC. So when I did my 23andMe genetics, so I underproduced the level of choline I required. Choline's a precursor to key neurotransmitters. So it helps with memory formation reasoning. And it's present in eggs. In fact, moms that are expecting that take 4 eggs have their kids perform at a higher standard high test score than moms that take [00:13:00] no eggs.

It's linearly dose dependent. 4 eggs better than 3, better than 2. So I take choline. Every day.