Jason Buck Is An Intentional Investor

How much do you hate risk, and how much did it have to break you before it earned your revile?

Jason Buck could have been a pro athlete. Maybe not a top league superstar pro, but he could have gotten paid for sweating. Coming out of high school he was recognized as one of the top 100 or so soccer players in the country, but, as he found out, there’s a big difference between the top 100 and the top 50, and it mostly includes getting a call-up to play for the National Team. He didn’t get that call.

It’s funny how you have to run into a ceiling to know it’s there. How, if you’re honest about it, you understand the rules of that threshold. You learn different lessons when you’re right at the line and understanding who crosses it.

Ultimately he was OK with it. He got into a good enough school, still on a soccer scholarship, but then he didn’t like the coach, didn’t like his business major, and ended up studying comparative religions and working in kitchens. New lines, new decisions about which to cross and which to walk away from.

Somewhere in this phase, he started to internalize his disdain for clear beginning, middle, end narratives. The ceilings, with their mix of luck and skill for crossing, and how unabashedly people would misrepresent the stories around them, it all started to bother him.

It’s obvious why people want a straight-line explanation. But.

If the narratives aren’t going to be properly explained by the narrators anyway, where can a person look for what explains them?

Risk.

The variance of living life along the pathless path, from “I thought this seemed like an OK idea” to “Oh crap, I need to try something new again don’t I….” None of it’s a straight line. You just bump into barriers until you accidentally realize you’re on the other side or you deliberately strategize how to sneak across those enemy lines.

Risk isn’t just the game, it’s how you play it.

He took a tip from his Turkish employer and, despite his fairly intense introversion, young Jason went to Istanbul to sell rugs on the street to tourists. He never finished college. He was a failure, but also strangely in line with the approach to life his bohemian + Buddhist dad regularly took.

After the stint in Turkey, Jason came back to the states and took the latent knowledge of real estate sales that he’d picked up from his capitalist + Catholic mom, and started driving a local developer with mobility issues to work every day. He “just wanted to pick his brain.” He ended up excavating it.

Risk on. Because -

A few years later, he was pretty well off. Life was good. When he asked his real estate developer peers why stuff was getting so weird in 2006/2007, they told him “Don’t worry, this time is different.”

And they were wrong. And then, he wasn’t well off anymore. Risk off. Ceiling smack down #4,080. And it was time to start over again from balance sheet scratch with little more than personal wisdom points.

“How can I not do THAT again?”

The Mutiny Funds, the Cockroach Strategy, the whole ethic—you might think you know it, but you probably don’t know half the mess of where it comes from.

The sports. The mixtapes. The international rug selling. The domestic real estate rug pulling. The reality of a one-part Slumdog Millionaire back-story combined with another part Snoop Dogg gazzilion-ear vibe-fest.

If you’re a builder, creator, or philosopher of all things life, and you’re here so we already know you are, spend some time with Jason Buck and I, right here on The Intentional Investor, only on Epsilon Theory.

This conversation will alter the way you think about narratives, risk, and finance as a whole: